politics--namely, systematic depreciation of the foreigner. Von
Bernhardi does not assume that France is played out or that England is
effete. He is too well read in military history not to realize that to
belittle the strength or malign the character of an enemy is one of
the most fruitful causes of disaster.

Altogether we could not have a better guide to the study of the
present international situation from the purely German point of view,
nor could we find another book which gives us more undisguisedly the
"mentality," the prejudices and prejudgments and opinions of the
ruling classes. And it is a characteristically German trait that no
less than one-third of the work should be given to the philosophy and
ethics of the subject. General von Bernhardi surveys the field from
the vantage-ground of first principles, and his book is a convincing
proof of a truth which we have expressed elsewhere that in Prussia war
is not looked upon as an accident, but as a law of nature; and not
only as a law of nature, but as the law of man, or if not as the law
of man, certainly as the law of the "German superman." It is not
enough to say that war has been the national industry of Prussia. It
forms an essential part of the philosophy of life, the _Weltanschauung_
of every patriotic Prussian. Bernhardi believes in the morality, one
might almost say in the sanctity, of war. To him war is not a
necessary evil, but, on the contrary, the source of every moral good.
To him it is pacificism which is an immoral doctrine, because it is
the doctrine of the materialist, who believes that enjoyment is the
chief end of life. It is the militarist who is the true idealist
because he assumes that humanity can only achieve its mission through
struggle and strife, through sacrifice and heroism. It is true that
Bernhardi ignores the greatest of Prussian philosophers, whose
immortal plea in favour of perpetual peace is dismissed as the work of
his dotage. But if he dismisses Kant, he adduces instead a formidable
array of thinkers and poets in support of his militarist thesis;
Schiller and Goethe, Hegel and Heraclitus, in turn are summoned as
authorities. Even the Gospels are distorted to convey a militarist
meaning, for the author quotes them to remind us that it is the
warlike and not the meek that shall inherit the earth. But Bernhardi's
chief authorities are the historian of the super-race, the Anglophobe
Treitschke, and the philosopher of the superm