Glory and honour never accompany the creed of selfish Materialism, which is the “Kultur” of Germany. What a miserable man was he who wrote down in cold blood these words: “I condemn Christianity. To me it is the greatest of all possible corruptions. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one immortal shame and blemish in the human race!” This was Nietzsche--poor, sickly, egoist, Nietzsche! He died mad--yet he was the “guide, philosopher, and friend” of modern Germany! How has his teaching worked? Let the slaughtered thousands of his countrymen on the battlefields reply. And let us take heed that we in our turn be not infected by the poisonous breathings of such insanity! Our nation--our Imperial Britain--has been dangerously far along the road to similar madness--let us hope devoutly that we have been pulled up in time! But--“we have done those things which we ought not to have done”--as, for example, we have thrown the sneer of “Jingoism!” contemptuously in the face of many an honest patriot--and now we are loud in our expressions of wrath and astonishment at the “want of patriotism” displayed by certain tribes of working men who “strike” for more pay, indifferent to the country’s needs! What have these working men been taught for the last twenty years? Why, that Money is the only god, and Self the only master! When we reproach them for unpatriotic conduct, we should reproach ourselves still more for the encouragement and applause we have systematically given to every new or revived doctrine of selfishness and materialism that ever infected the world with its sickly symptoms of decay. Patriotism is a mental and spiritual attitude--as heroism is--as love and faith are. Such things cannot be taught; they are the result of ennobling influences brought to bear on life and its environment. Considering how little our educational system holds of such subtle and delicate training, we have reason to be proud of the splendid response of our men throughout the Empire to the call of “King and Country,” and of the real national “grit” which in every Briton underlies his surface show of levity and indifference.