Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/137

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SOME CARDINAL SINS
105

skilful pedagogue finds it impossible to solve all those problems, let alone the kind of teachers available to militarism, which must in this respect, too, be more economical than it would like to be.

The militaristic pedagogues have but a precarious subsistence. They depend entirely on the good will, on the arbitrariness of their superior, and must expect every minute to be thrown out of employment if they do not accomplish their chief task, that of forming the soldier in the image of militarism an excellent expedient to make the whole apparatus of the military hierarchy extremely pliant in the hands of the supreme command. It goes without saying that such superiors drill their men with a nervous lack of consideration, that they soon come to the point where they use force instead of persuasion and example, and that such force, owing to the absolute power which the superior has over the life and death of his subordinate who has to submit to him unconditionally, is finally applied in the shape of maltreaments. All this is a natural and, humanly speaking, necessary concatenation in which the