sity of national prejudice if I say that
Herr Chamberlain's war pamphlets are distinctly better reading than
the great majority of their kind? They are much more individual, much
less stereotyped and monotonous. One finds in them an occasional idea
that is not the common property of every man in the street. It is
generally (not always) a more or less crazy idea, but one hails it as
an oasis in the desert of blusterous commonplace.

The arrangement of my little jewel-heap was more difficult, if less
laborious, than the ingathering. Many of my extracts, perhaps most,
might with equal appropriateness have been ranged under any one of
three or four rubrics. Thus my classification is at best rough and, to
some extent, arbitrary. There is, however, a certain reason in the
sequence of headings. The first section, "Deutschland ueber Alles,"
represents the "badge of all the tribe"--the characteristic which lies
at the root of the whole mischief--Germany's colossal self-glorification,
self-adoration. If there is anything like it in history, it is unknown
to me. Other nations may have been as vain, but, not having the
printing-press so readily at command, they gave their vanity less
exuberant expression. Besides, they may have had a sense of humour. The
manifestations of this foible (if a thing of such tragic consequences
can be called by such a name) fall under certain sub-headings. It was
clear, for instance, that the vauntings of German Kultur must have a
compartment to themselves--likewise the assertions of a special
relation to God, the claims to the status of a Chosen People, and the
comparisons, direct and indirect, between Germany and Christ. Having
established, by means of a cloud of witnesses, the ruling passion of
the national mind, I present in the following section proofs of the
"Ambitions" in which this megalomania finds its natural utterance. In
the sections, "War-Worship," "Ruthlessness" and "Machiavelism," are
grouped evidences of the methods of force and fraud by which it was
hoped that these ambitions were to be realized. Then, in a final
section, I have assembled evidences of the inevitable corollary to
morbid self-adoration--the boundless and almost equally unprecedented
contempt and loathing for all adversaries, but especially for England.

The great majority of my quotations are taken direct from the original
sources, the references being exactly given. I was scrupulous on this
point, not only that the read