fter three years those
German spiritual forces, those perverted German ideals, remain the
most formidable obstacle in our path. We may continue to destroy the
German armies by the slow process of attrition, and we may continue to
sacrifice the flower of our youth until the process is completed. We
may trust to our superiority in money-power and in man-power, but
unless we also break the moral power of German ideals, unless we
exorcise the spell which possesses the German mind, unless we triumph
in the spiritual contest as well as in the battle of tanks and
howitzers, unless we overthrow the idols which successive generations
of great teachers and preachers have imposed on a susceptible,
receptive, and docile people, there will be no early settlement, nor,
however long belated, can there ever be a lasting peace.

The foregoing remarks may justify the following attempt to interpret
and to make intelligible, even to the most inattentive reader, the
creed of one of the most powerful of those teachers and preachers who
have taken such mysterious and uncanny possession of the soul of the
German nation. Before 1914 none except a few initiated had ever heard
of Treitschke. Since 1914 he has become a household name and a name of
evil import. But to the immense majority of readers that name, however
familiar and ominous, remains an empty name. _Nomen flatus vocis._ And
even those to whom the name conveys something more definite do not
trouble about its meaning. With that strange disbelief in the power of
ideas which is one of our lamentable weaknesses, and which even the
war has not been able to cure, even yet we have not brought ourselves
to take seriously those terrible theories which have burnt themselves
into the Teutonic imagination. And so indifferent have we remained to
doctrines so far-reaching and so deadly that the recent publication of
an excellent English translation of Treitschke's "German History," one
of the masterpieces of historical literature, has had to be suspended
for the incredible reason that there was no British public to read
it.

On approaching the study of Treitschke's works, we are at once
impressed by the inexorable logic of his political and moral creed.
There is, perhaps, no other instance of a system so splendidly
consistent in its principles. We are told that the great French
naturalist, Cuvier, was able to reconstruct the whole anatomy of an
animal merely through examining the structure of a to