Page:The four horsemen of the Apocalypse - (Los cuatro jinetes de Apocalipsis) (IA cu31924014386738).djvu/151

 countries, implanted law and the rule of justice. The French of the Revolution and the Empire justified their invasions on the plea that they wished to liberate mankind and spread abroad new ideas. Even the Spaniards of the sixteenth century, when battling with half of Europe for religious unity and the extermination of heresy, were working toward their ideals obscure and perhaps erroneous, but disinterested.

All the nations of history had been struggling for something which they had considered generous and above their own interests. Germany alone, according to this professor, was trying to impose itself upon the world in the name of racial superiority—a superiority that nobody had recognized, that she was arrogating to herself, coating her affirmations with a varnish of false science.

"Until now wars have been carried on by the soldiery," continued Hartrott. "That which is now going to begin will be waged by a combination of soldiers and professors. In its preparation the University has taken as much part as the military staff. German science, leader of all sciences, is united forever with what the Latin revolutionists disdainfully term militarism. Force, mistress of the world, is what creates right, that which our truly unique civilization imposes. Our armies are the representatives of our culture, and in a few weeks we shall free the world from its decadence, completely rejuvenating it."

The vision of the immense future of his race was leading him on to expose himself with lyrical enthusiasm. William I, Bismarck, all the heroes of past victories, inspired his veneration, but he spoke of them as dying gods whose hour had passed. They were glorious ancestors of modest pretensions who had confined their activities to enlarging the frontiers, and to establishing the unity of the Empire, afterwards opposing themselves