The assumption that nations and their rulers cannot be bound by the moral laws which bind individuals will not go on forever polluting the world. It also is the spawn of infidelity, and proceeds from the theory that men collectively—whether nations, hierarchies, parties, or corporations—are impersonal, abstract, and that, having no souls, they are shut out from moral concerns.

The diplomacy which seals the lips of the spokesman of a mighty nation, when he beholds a monster invade, outrage, torture, and destroy a tiny nation, is born of the Devil. It stifles chivalry; it leashes in the desire which is an instinct in the heart of every one worthy of the name of man to rush to the aid of the helpless in their distress; it strangles our common heritage of humanity, and substitutes for it a policy of selfishness, which evades responsibility for the fate of our fellow men. After Cain slew Abel, the Lord said unto Cain, "Where is Abel thy brother?" And he said, "I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?"

So ancient and of such bad eminence is the precedent which tied the official tongue of the United States when the German Cain slew Belgium! The conscience of our countrymen sent its inquiry to Washington, "Where is Belgium?" and the silence at the White House mutely echoed Cain's reply, "I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?"

CHAPTER II

REALITY OR MIRAGE?

If we could only alter the Germans after the model of the English, if we could only have less philosophy and more power of action, less theory and more practice, we might obtain a good share of redemption, without waiting for the personal majesty of a second Christ.

B

ECKERMANN, Conversations with Goethe. March 12, 1828. [Bohn Translation, p. 319.] EFORE I proceed to trace the stages by which the ancient pagan ideals revived in Prussia, and how Prussia then diffused them - a moral Prussic acid- through Germany, I wish to recall that other Germany which many men and women not yet past middle age remember with affection and now with the regret born of a tragic disillusion.

Throughout the nineteenth century Germany was one of the chief fountains from which the English-speaking world drew most largely its supplies of philosophy and erudition; and of poetry, too, because the poetry of

Germany's Golden Age, produced by Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, and by half a dozen balladists and lyric singers, came like a revelation, or new message, from Apollo to his devotees beyond the Alps and the Rhine and the Atlantic.

Coleridge, if not the earliest, was the first far-carrying voice to interpret German thought, and especially German philosophy, in England; but it was Carlyle, the mightiest of modern British advocates- persistent, indomitable, dynamic, uncompromisingly computing all deeds in terms of righteousness, with a fund of indignation and of humor unmatched among the Germans whom he introduced to English readers-Carlyle it was who raised a marvelous shrine to Goethe and to German ideals. It is hardly too much to say that for a considerable time Goethe was as the sun by which many persons lived their lives by day, and Kant was the moon by which they moved among the ultimate mysteries which enshroud man as by night. The springs of

Poesy became intermittent and then dryHeine, the latest, limpid, sparkling, swift, ironical, melodious. But Philosophy flowed in ever-swelling streams- Hegel, whose intoxicating draughts caused his disciples to see equivalence in things good and bad, black and white, life and death, interchangeable and therefore the same; and then Fichte and Schelling and Schleiermacher; then darker and darker streams, till we reach the inky pool of Schopenhauer. Let the waters be what they might, however, the thirsty world drank of them eagerly, and it came to think of Germany as the land whose people were so absorbed in philosophizing about where man came from and whither he was going, that they paid little heed to his actual present state.

Erudition also kept even pace at first with Philosophy, and then distanced it, and included it among the topics of erudite research. While the Germans discovered few first principles, they were most nimble in seizing foreign discoveries and in elaborating these through