ok
beneath his surface eulogies of murder and lust for some esoteric
meaning that may possibly underlie them? Can it be a mere coincidence
that, in the first war which Germany has waged since Nietzsche entered
upon his apostolate of ruthlessness, the German armies should have
been animated, to all appearance, by a literal interpretation of his
"beast of prey" ideal?

As for Bernhardi, whom some German writers profess never to have heard
of until we began to talk about him in England, one can only say that
he is an ex-member of the Great General Staff, and is probably a
pretty faithful interpreter of the ideas prevalent in that not
un-influential organization. Moreover, his "Germany and the Next War,"
which appeared in the spring of 1912, ran through five editions at 6
marks before that year was out, and was then republished in a cheap
and somewhat condensed popular edition under the title of "Our
Future." Reviewing this edition, _Die Post_ says that, in its original
form, the book "was received with the most serious attention in
political and especially in military circles," and adds that this
cheaper reprint "_must_ now become a book for the people."

It is an error, however, to suppose that a writer's importance is to
be measured solely by the influence he can be shown to have exerted. A
book or pamphlet may have had little or no active influence, and may
yet be a very illuminating symptom of the national frame of mind.
Every book must be an effect before it can become a cause. That
Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Bernhardi have been very efficient causes I
see no reason to doubt; but at any rate they are immensely significant
effects of the psychological conditions of which I am here gathering
up some random evidences.

It was a more difficult question to decide whether the lucubrations of
Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain came within my scope. Yet I had
little hesitation in including him. The fact that he is by birth an
Englishman does not make him any the less a characteristic and
recognized mouthpiece of the new-German spirit. It may be objected
that he caricatures it, that he is more German than the Germans. That,
in the first place, is impossible; in the second place, while we have
many evidences that Germans, from the Kaiser downward, set a high
value on Herr Chamberlain's writings, we hear little or nothing of any
protest against them as misrepresentations of "Deutschtum." Shall I be
suspected of a quaint perver