Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/38

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DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY

lated with universal compulsory schooling, inaugurated in Prussia two generations before the English Education Act of 1870; the University of Berlin, with a brilliant professoriate, was established as sister to the Great General Staff. Thus knowledge in Prussia was no longer pursued mainly for its own sake, but as a means to an end, and that end was the success of a State which had experienced bitter disaster. It was a Camp-State, moreover, in the midst of a plain, without the natural bulwarks of a Spain, a France, or a Britain. The end determines the means, and since the Prussian end was military strength, based of necessity on stark discipline, the means were inevitably materialistic. Judged from the standpoint of Berlin, it was a wonderful thing to have impressed Kultur, or Strategical mentality, on the educated class of a whole people, but from the standpoint of civilisation at large it was a fatal momentum to have given to a nation—fatal, that is to say, in the long run, either to civilisation or that nation.

We have had for a byword in these times the German war map. It may be questioned, however, whether most people in Britain and America have fully realised the part played by the map in German education during the