TOLERANCE 923was largely the result of the work of two men. Through the German
educational system, which they controlled, the psychology that carried
the world into war in 19 14 was created in the definite form of Kultur.
These men were Adalbert Falk, Pruss ian minister of education until
1879, and the German Emperor William II.
COMMENTARY
Kultur as it is spelled and used here by Napoleon Hill was in common
usage at the time to refer to those characteristics that distinguished the
German nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: a sense
of national pride and a belief in Germany's natural superiority over other
nations and peoples, a policy of militant expansionism, a highly system-
ized social order, and the belief in the subordination of the individual to
the good of the state.The agency through which these men produced this result was
social heredity-the imposing of an ideal on the minds of the young,
under highly emotionalized conditions.
The teachers and professors were forced to implant the national
ideal of Kultur in the minds of the young of Germany, beginning
first in the elementary schools and extending on up through the high
schools and universities, and out of this teaching, in a single gener-
ation, grew a capacity for sacrifice of the individual for the interest
of the nation that surprised the modern world.
As author Benjamin Kidd so well stated it: "The aim of the state
of Germany was everywhere to orientate public opinion through
the heads of both its spiritual and temporal departments, through
the bureaucracy, through the officers of the army, through the State
direction of the press; and, last of all, through the State direction of
the entire trade and industry of the nation, so as to bring the ideal-
ism of the whole people to a conception of and to a support of the
national policy of modern Germany."