f those who read it, in spite of its unsound
capitalist economics, its parade of quotations from books which the
author had either not read or not understood, its affectation of
algebraic formulas, and its general attempt to disguise a masterpiece
of propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily scientific
treatise of the sort that used to impose on people in 1860, when any
book that pretended to be scientific was accepted as a Bible. In those
days Darwin and Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church; and
nobody would listen to religion, poetry or rhetoric; so that even
Socialism had to call itself "scientific," and predict the date of the
revolution, as if it were a comet, by calculations founded on "historic
laws."

To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideous
blasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any word
of mine; the very Revisionists themselves found that the scandal of my
heresy damaged them more than my support aided them; and I found myself
an outcast from German Social-Democracy at the moment when, thanks to
Trebitsch, the German bourgeoisie and nobility began to smile on me,
seduced by the pleasure of playing with fire, and perhaps by Agnes
Sorma's acting as Candida.

Thus you may see that when a German, by becoming a Social-Democrat,
throws off all the bonds of convention, and stands free from all
allegiance to established religion, law, order, patriotism, and
learning, he promptly uses his freedom to put on a headier set of
chains; expels anti-militarists with the blood-thirstiest martial
anti-foreign ardor; and gives the Kaiser reason to thank heaven that he
was born in the comparative freedom and Laodicean tolerance of Kingship,
and not in the Calvinistic bigotry and pedantry of Marxism.

Why, then, you may ask, do I say that I am bound to Germany by the ties
that hold my nature most strongly? Very simply because I should have
perished of despair in my youth but for the world created for me by that
great German dynasty which began with Bach and will perhaps not end with
Richard Strauss. Do not suppose for a moment that I learnt my art from
English men of letters. True, they showed me how to handle English
words; but if I had known no more than that, my works would never
have crossed the Channel. My masters were the masters of a universal
language: they were, to go from summit to summit, Bach, Handel, Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Had the