Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/102

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MILITARISM

The zealous fostering of the "church" spirit, which was explicitly demanded as a special aim of military education in a resolution submitted to the budget commission of the Reichstag in the month of February, 1892, and then voted down (without prejudice, by the way), is another method of the kind to complete the work of military oppression and enslavement.

Military instruction and ecclesiastical influence are at one and the same time methods of kind persuasion and compulsion, but the latter mostly only in a carefully veiled form of application.

The most attractive bait that is employed to make up and fill the important standing formations of the army is the system of reëngagement of men whose time has expired, who are given a chance to earn premiums as non-commissioned officers[1] and are promised employment in the civil


    flict of nationalities greatly contributes to aggravate the situation.

  1. This premium system, with a maximum of 1000 marks, was introduced for the whole of Germany in 1891, after having been in existence before that time in Saxony and Württemberg and after having had a forerunner in the empire in the "non-recurrent extra-pay." It is also met with elsewhere; in France, however, where the amounts are much higher (up