Frederic the Great practised it without scruple or shame. It was he who, having given Maria Theresa profuse assurances of help should her title to the Habsburg throne ever be questioned by any other State, got together a powerful army as secretly as he could, invaded her territory, and precipitated a sanguinary European war. Yet he had guaranteed the integrity of the Austrian Empire. What were his motives? He himself has avowed them openly: “ambition, interest, and a yearning to move people to talk about me were the mainsprings of my action.” And this wanton war was made without any formal declaration, without any quarrel, without any grievance. He was soon joined by other Powers, with whom he entered into binding engagements. But as soon as he was able to conclude an advantageous peace with the Austrian Empress, he abandoned his allies and signed a treaty. This document, like the former one, he soon afterwards treated as a mere scrap of paper, and again attacked the Austrian Empire. And this was the man who wrote a laboured refutation of the pernicious teachings of Machiavelli, under the title of “Anti-Machiavel”! Now, Frederic the Great is the latter-day Germans’ ideal of a monarch. His infamous practices were the concrete nucleus around which the subversive Pan-Germanic doctrines of to-day gathered and hardened into the political creed of a race. What the Hohenzollerns did for Prussia, Prussia under the same Hohenzollerns has effected for Germany, where not merely the Kaiser and his Government, or the officials, or the officers of the army and navy, or the professors and the journalists, but the clergy, the socialists, nay, all thinking classes of the population, are infected with the virus of the fell Prussian disease which threatens the old-world civilization with decomposition. To this danger humanity cannot afford to be either indifferent or lenient. It may and will be extremely difficult to extirpate the malady, but the Powers now arrayed against aggressive and subversive Teutonism should see to it that the nations affected shall be made powerless to spread it.