d Solon's remark to Croesus, "Sir, if any other come that
hath better iron than you, he will be master of all this gold"--a truly
Bismarckian proposition. Indeed, Sir Francis Bacon says explicitly "that
the principal point of greatness in any State is to have a race of
military men."

Goethe, reflecting on the wretchedness of the German people as a whole,
found no comfort in the German genius for science, literature, and art,
or only a miserable comfort which "does not make up for the proud
consciousness of belonging to a nation strong, respected, and feared."
Because Germany in his time was weak in the military sense, he could
write: "I have often felt a bitter grief at the thought of the German
people, which is so noble individually, and so wretched as a whole"; and
he longed for the day when the national spirit, kept alive and hopeful,
should be "ready to rise in all its might when the day of glory dawns."

"The day of glory" was to be the day of military power. Carlyle said of
Germany and France in November, 1870, "that noble, patient, deep, pious,
and solid Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become
Queen of the Continent, instead of vaporing, vainglorious,
gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and oversensitive France, seems to
me that hopefulest public fact that has occurred in my time." How did
Germany attain to this position of "Queen of the Continent"? By creating
and maintaining, with utmost intelligence and skill, the strongest army
in Europe--an army which within six years had been used successfully
against Denmark, Austria, and France. Germany became "Queen" by virtue
of her military power.

In the same paper Carlyle said of the French Revolution, of which he was
himself the great portrayer: "I often call that a celestial infernal
phenomenon, the most memorable in our world for a thousand years; on the
whole, a transcendent revolt against the devil and his works, (since
shams are all and sundry of the devil, and poisonous and unendurable to
man.)" Now, the French Revolution was an extraordinary outbreak of
passionate feeling and physical violence on the part of the French
Nation, both at home and abroad; and it led on to the Napoleonic wars,
which were tremendous physical struggles for mastery in Europe.

In a recent public statement two leading philosophical writers of modern
Germany, Profs. Eucken and Haeckel, denounce the "brutal national
egoism" of England, which they say "recogniz