Stewart Chamberlain, who found a more congenial, intellectual atmosphere in Germany, and this is his great book, 'The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.' This book has been received with the utmost solemnity in the highest quarters; nowhere has it been handed over to the derision which is its only proper treatment. You remember a rather readable and rather pretentious history we had in our schooldays, full of bad ethnology about Kelts and Anglo-Saxons, called J. R. Green's 'History of the English People'; it was part of that movement of professorial barbarity, of braggart race-Imperialism and anti-Irishism, of which Froude and Freeman were leaders; it smelt of Carlyle and Germany, it helped provoke the Keltic Renascence. Well, that was evidently, the germ of Herr Chamberlain. Here----" Wilkins turned over the pages. "Here he is, in fairly good form. It is a section called 'The Turning Point,' and it's quite on all fours with Schopenhauer's 'our ancestors the Hindus.' It is part of a sketch in outline of the history of the past. 'The important thing,' he says, is to 'fix the turning-point of the history of Europe.' While he was at it he might just as well have _fixed_ the equator of the history of Europe and its sparking-plug and the position of its liver. Now, listen-- "'The awakening of the Teutonic peoples to the consciousness of their all-important vocation as the founders of a completely new civilization and culture marks the turning-point; the year 1200 can be designated the central moment of this awakening.' "Just consider that. He does not even trouble to remind us of the very considerable literature that must exist, of course, as evidence of that awakening. He just flings the statement out, knowing that his sort of follower swallows all such statements blind, and then, possibly with some qualms of doubt about what may have been happening in Spain and Italy and India and China and Japan, he goes on-- "'Scarcely any one will have the hardihood to deny that the inhabitants of Northern Europe have become the makers of the world's history. At no time have they stood alone ... others, too, have exercised influence--indeed great influence--upon the destinies of mankind, but then _always merely as opponents of the men from the north_....' "Poor Jenghiz Khan, who had founded the Mogul Empire in India just about that time, and was to lay the foundations of the Yuen dynasty, and prepare the way for the great days of the Mings, never knew how _mere_ his relations were with these marvellous 'men from the north.' The Tartars, it is true, were sacking Moscow somewhere about twelve hundred.... But let us get on to more of the recital of Teutonic glories.