as the press, a despicable literary crowd and the social prestige, with which our "splendid war army" is ever being surrounded as by a halo, co-operate in a tenacious and cunning fashion. By the side of the Catholic Church militarism represents the acme of Machiavellism in the world's history and the most Machiavellian among all the Machiavellian institutions of capitalism.
The exploit of the Köpenick cobbler-captain, previously mentioned, may be regarded as a compendium of that whole militaristic art of education and its results, the most sublime of which is the veritable canonization of the officer's coat by the whole bourgeois society. In an examination, lasting six hours, to which this jail-bird subjected a sample of our army, our bureaucratic apparatus and the allegiance of the Prussian subject, all these probationers passed with such great honors that even their teachers were speechless with astonishment at that quintessence of their pedagogy. No Gessler's hat has ever found such willing submission and self-humiliation as the cap of the immor-
