atholicism and its champions, the Jesuits, with relentless hate.
Through all his writings there sounds the watchword of Voltaire, the
spiritual adviser of Frederick the Great, "Ecrasez l'infame," and the
battle-cry of Gambetta, "Le clericalisme, voila l'ennemi." Nor is he
less bitter against the Socialists. Bismarck and the Kaiser opposed
the encroachments of the Social Democracy in a succession of
anti-Socialist repressive measures. Treitschke may have disapproved of
some of the _Sozialisten Gesetze_ because they defeated their purpose.
But he shares the Kaiser's hatred against those irreconcilable enemies
of Prussian greatness. The Social Democratic theories of the
Jews--Lassalle, Marx, and Bernstein--are one of the most deadly
poisons that imperil the constitution of the German body politic.

Events have shown how little even Treitschke realized the strength of
the Prussian State and the fanaticism of German nationalism. We know
how little his dread of the black International of Catholicism and the
red International of Socialism has been justified by the servile
attitude of all the Opposition parties, and how, when the crisis came,
both Catholics and Socialists proved as Prussian as the Junkers of
Pomerania.

XIV.--THE HERESY OF IMPERIALISM.

If it be true that the citizen can only realize himself through the
national State, if the whole course of human history is essentially a
conflict of national States, and if the rich variety of civilization
is made up of the rivalry of those national States, it logically
follows that the expansion of any national State into a world empire
must necessarily be baneful. The State must, no doubt, expand, but
there is a limit to that expansion. The State must not incorporate any
alien races which it cannot assimilate. When the State is unable to
absorb heterogeneous elements and grows into a world empire, it
becomes a danger both to itself and to humanity.

Civilization has been threatened in the past by such monstrous
conglomerates of heterogeneous nations. It has been threatened by the
Spanish tyranny of Charles V. and the French tyranny of Louis XIV. and
Napoleon. It is still threatened to-day by a similar danger. Two
national States, Great Britain and Russia, have again grown into world
empires. If their ambitions were to succeed, if the greater part of
the civilized world were to become either Anglo-Saxon or Russian,
there would be an end to the diversity and the liberty o