Napoleon Hill

ican history), and through other forms of impressive teaching, the immortality of Washington and Lincoln is planted in the minds of the young and in that way kept alive. The three great organized forces through which social heredity operates are: The schools, the churches and the public press. 14 Any ideal that has the active co-operation of these three forces may, during the brief period of one generation, be forced upon the minds of the young so effectively that they cannot resist it. In 1914 the world awoke one morning to find itself aflame with warfare on a scale previously unheard of, and the outstanding feature of importance of that world-wide calamity was the highly organized German armies. For more than three years these armies gained ground so rapidly that world domination by Germany seemed certain. The German military machine operated with efficiency such as had never before been demonstrated in warfare. With kultur as her avowed ideal, modern Germany swept the opposing armies before her as though they were leaderless, despite the fact that the allied forces outnumbered her own on every front. The capacity for sacrifice in the German soldiers, in support of the ideal of kultur, was the outstanding surprise of the war; and that capacity was largely the result of the work of two men. Through the German educational system, which they controlled, the psychology which carried the world into war in 1914 was created in the definite form of kultur. These men were Adalbert Falk, Prussian Minister of Education until 1 879, and the German Emperor William II. 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. Kultur, as a national ideal, was fixed in the minds of the young of Germany, beginning first in the elementary schools and extending on up through the high schools and universities. The teachers and professors were forced to 15 implant the ideal of kultur in the minds of the students, and out of this teaching, in a single generation, grew the capacity for sacrifice of the individual for the interest of the nation which surprised the modern world. As Benjamin Kidd so well stated the case: 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 burea