The foregoing remarks may justify the following attempt to interpret and to make intelligible, even to the most inattentive reader, the creed of one of the most powerful of those teachers and preachers who have taken such mysterious and uncanny possession of the soul of the German nation. Before 1914 none except a few initiated had ever heard of Treitschke. Since 1914 he has become a household name and a name of evil import. But to the immense majority of readers that name, however familiar and ominous, remains an empty name. _Nomen flatus vocis._ And even those to whom the name conveys something more definite do not trouble about its meaning. With that strange disbelief in the power of ideas which is one of our lamentable weaknesses, and which even the war has not been able to cure, even yet we have not brought ourselves to take seriously those terrible theories which have burnt themselves into the Teutonic imagination. And so indifferent have we remained to doctrines so far-reaching and so deadly that the recent publication of an excellent English translation of Treitschke’s “German History,” one of the masterpieces of historical literature, has had to be suspended for the incredible reason that there was no British public to read it. On approaching the study of Treitschke’s works, we are at once impressed by the inexorable logic of his political and moral creed. There is, perhaps, no other instance of a system so splendidly consistent in its principles. We are told that the great French naturalist, Cuvier, was able to reconstruct the whole anatomy of an animal merely through examining the structure of a tooth or the fragment of a bone. Applying to the German historian the method which Cuvier applied to the antediluvian mastodon, we can reduce the whole complex political philosophy of Treitschke from a few fundamental principles which he follows with a single mind, and which the Prussian State has applied with an equally relentless consistency both in its internal and in its foreign policy.