There has been considerable nervousness of late among rulers of nations as to the soundness of their existing barrages. For the most part, however, they have concerned themselves with internal dangers--with watching propagandists of the socialist persuasion--with keeping these under a kind of benevolent police supervision, and in removing ostentatiously from time to time the more glaring of their alleged grievances. This procedure has been quite as noticeable in the case of autocracies, as in countries which enjoy popular institutions. Treitschke and Bernhardi--even Nietzsche himself--valued themselves far more highly as builders-up than as pullers-down. It is always so with your inspired inaugurators of change. It was so with Rousseau and those other writers, whose thoughts, fermenting for a generation in the minds of Frenchmen, brought about the Revolution. The intellectuals of the eighteenth century, like those of the nineteenth, aimed at getting rid of a great accumulation of insanitary rubbish. But this was only a troublesome preliminary, to be hurried through with as quickly as possible, in order that the much greater {134} work of construction might proceed upon the cleared site. Treitschke made a hole in the German dam when he cut an ancient commonplace in two, and tore out the one half of it. Nietzsche turned the hole into a much vaster cavity by pulling out the other half. Bernhardi and the pedantocracy worked lustily at the business, with the result that a great part of the sticks, stones, and mud of tradition are now dancing, rumbling, and boiling famously in the flood. Whether they have injured our dam as well as their own, we are hardly as yet in a position to judge. The profounder spirit of Nietzsche realised clearly enough the absurdity of supposing that the conflicting beliefs and aspirations of mankind could all be settled and squared in a few bustling decades--that the contradictions, paradoxes, and antinomies of national existence could be written off with a few bold strokes of the sword, and the world started off on the road to perfection, like a brisk debtor who has purged his insolvency in the Bankruptcy Court. But the enthusiasm of Treitschke and Bernhardi made them blind to these considerations. Had not the formula been discovered, which would overcome every obstacle--that stroke of genius, the famous bisection of the commonplace? For private conduct, the Sermon on the Mount; for high statecraft, Machiavelli's _Prince_! Was ever anything simpler, except perhaps the way of Columbus with the egg?