bestowal of the Red Eagle or by the call to a chair at Berlin, and many a waverer seems to have been won over by a few condescending remarks from the Kaiser. Men formerly renowned for their independence now spoke the words they were expected to speak, and devoted their carefully trained intellects to discovering and proclaiming reasons for idolizing a régime which they had once abhorred. The deliberate perversion of the German universities by the Kaiser dealt a blow to the honor and scientific prestige of German professors from which they cannot soon recover. Posterity will judge them as it judges the Inquisitors who did the bidding of Philip II. On which the heavier blame, the corrupter, or those who eagerly allowed themselves to be corrupted?

Only one element in Germany, the Socialists, threatened for a brief time to accept no reconciliation with the Imperial Despotism. Their chief prophet, Marx, it should never be forgotten, had been obliged years earlier to seek shelter for his life and freedom for his utter

ances in England — England, hated by German Junkers and war-maniacs, not to mention Bismarck, the colossal Junker, and William II, the son of an English mother. Bismarck first tried persecution on the Socialists, and passed laws against them not less frightful than those which the Spanish Torquemada enforced against heretics; but when he saw the Socialists thrive under persecution, he adopted other tactics. He turned the flank of the Socialist movement by introducing a system which made Socialism dependent on the State. So the last organ which might possibly have served for whatever minority in Germany cherished Democratic or at least non-despotic ideals, was mitred into the despotic machine. Army and Navy, the Court, the far-reaching commercial and industrial interests, the banks, the press, the Church, the teachers and professors, the subsidized steamship lines, the railways, the Krupp factories, the Socialists, worked together as co-ordinate if not co-equal parts of the State.

In theory this State was an abstraction existing "above Society or the individual" Germany, the Fatherland of all Germans, the ideal to which every German should consecrate himself; and the world will long marvel at the cunning by which the small Ring, which invented and worked this stupendous machine, caused the various parts of it to believe that they were each serving an ideal, when they were really serving that Ring. The real State was no abstraction: it was the Kaiser, the military clique, the Junker aristocracy, and their counterparts in other German provinces.

The German nation, obedient to the point of servility, seldom questioned what it was ordered to believe. If a few centrifugal persons ventured to criticize, they were quickly jailed. But the millions accepted their lot more than gladly, because they were convinced that the German Empire surpassed all others, and that the Germans - that is, themselves - were superior to any other race, past or present.

A spindle is but a spindle, though it work in the largest mill in the world; but the most insignificant German seemed to swell with the largeness of the entire German Empire. Selfconceit is an attribute of children and savages, in whom naïveté somewhat softens its repulsiveness. We are inclined to see only humor when a child or a Polynesian, out of his narrow experience, speaks boastfully. Men of genius, and especially men who imagined without sufficient warrant that they had genius, have also often been puffed up with selfesteem: but even among them the old fashion has changed, and they usually simulate modesty though they have it not. In a period like the Renaissance, when individualism ran riot and collapsed in hysteria, egotistic vanity flourished naked and unabashed.

One sign of a civilized nature, however, is self-knowledge; and self-knowledge teaches either an individual or a State that there are other individuals and other States, very different, it may be, but possessing qualities as

excellent as those of their rivals. Difference does not necessarily imply inferiority; nor is self-reverence to be confounded with conceit. We should love our country and should be prepared to sacrifice our lives at the call of patriotism; but never should this love mislead us into thinking that ours is the only country, or the best. True patriotism is rather a passion like that which we feel for our family and friends, and no more depends on geographic or economic externals than the love of a child for its mother depends upon her beauty or her wealth.

Self-esteem has been so salient a characteristic of the Teutons, and especially of the Prussians, since the earliest times, that we may assume it to be innate in them. Perhaps it was sharpened when as Barbarians they swarmed into the civilization of the Roman Empire. They had no great cities, no marble temples, no Senate houses, no towering and luxurious baths; and so they pretended to scorn them, and to magnify their own barbaric dwellings