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Rh by a narrow patriotism and a false racial pride, they have made themselves, or allowed themselves to be made, into a nation, and have added one more to the system of small states into which Europe is divided." With their "Freiheits-Kriegen," they cut athwart the possibility of a united Europe which Napoleon opened, and brought Europe into the blind alley where it is today. In 1870, indeed, they might have attempted what Napoleon had, but they renounced the task and compromised with democracy and "modern ideas," under the pompous pretense of founding an Empire. The Empire has absorbed the mind of Germany since, and thought and culture have suffered correspondingly. The first thing is now to be "German," to emphasize "race"—and all values and even historical facts are estimated accordingly. "German" becomes an argument, "Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles" a principle, the Germans are proclaimed as the "moral world-order" in history—standing for freedom in contrast with the imperium Romanum and for the re-establishment of morality against the eighteenth century; there is an Imperial-German way of writing history, even "a court style of history (and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed …)." The exclusive interest in questions of power, in business and trade, in "good-living" lowers the intellectual level. "Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles—I fear that was the end of German philosophy." They were once the "people of thinkers"; but the Germans of today think in