Excerpt from The Cause and Meaning of This WarNotwithstanding Germany's official protestations that her great army and navy were designed only for her defense, many years ago and shortly after her war with France, the professors in her universities and the teachers in her schools, in books and in lectures to their classes, carried on a course of instruction which amounted to this: That throughout all the lower animal kingdom the weaker gave way and were exterminated to make room for the stronger and better; that this was equally true of mankind; that the history of man showed the extinction of numberless tribes and races and peo ples, and that this struggle for supremacy must go on; that the German mind and the German character were the highest in the world, and that it was the right and duty of Germany to impress these upon the world by subjugating, and if necessary exterminating, the inferior peoples. The pulpits voiced the same doctrine, thus: The German people is always right, because it is the German people Germany is the future of humanity; The downfall of Germanism would be the downfall of humanity.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.