Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/197

Rh of them, imported, and the vaunted German Technical Education was merely a form of organisation. The whole system was based on a clear understanding of the Reality of the Going Concern—Organised Man-power.

But the Going Concern is a relentless fact, for the first political attribute of the animal Man is hunger. In the ten years before the War Germany was growing at the rate of a million souls a year—the difference between deaths and births. That meant that the productive Going Concern must not only be maintained, but that its 'going' must be constantly accelerated. In the course of forty years the hunger of Germany for markets had become one of the most terrible realities of the world. The fact that the commercial treaty with Russia would come up for renewal in 1916 was probably not unconnected with the forcing of the War; Germany required, at all costs, a subject Slavdom to grow food for her and to buy her wares.

The men who, at Berlin, pulled the lever in 1914, and set free the dammed-up flood of German man-power, have a responsibility which has been analysed and fixed, so far as our information yet goes, with keen research by the unfortunate generation which has had to fight the fearful duel. But before History