Magnus Schwantje spoke very plainly at a meeting of the Schopenhauer Society at Düsseldorf in June, 1915. He allows that the state has a right to wage a war of defence, but _not to force anyone to serve in the army_. Schopenhauer, he tells us, “esteems sympathy with all that lives and suffers more highly than love for the Fatherland.... During a war a noble man desires such an issue as may be most beneficial to the whole world.... With all our readiness to recognise the merit of patriotic self-denial, we, the admirers of Schopenhauer, have to warn our compatriots, especially during a war, of the danger of patriotism degenerating into injustice, or even hatred and malicious joy at the misfortune of other nations.... Not one of the European peoples can be suppressed without heavy loss to the whole world, and not one has the right to force its special character on the others.” (_International Review_, September, 1915.) WAR LITERATURE. It is the elderly gentlemen on both sides who exude vitriol. It is a pity that they are so much in evidence. But even some of them retain their sanity. The following is from the _Cambridge Magazine_ of May 15, 1915: Those who, at the beginning of the war, were induced by the Press to wonder whether any elderly German professor had retained his mental equilibrium will now be disposed to wonder whether the proportion of serious cases is after all larger there than here. At any rate the Schopenhauer Society is a very important learned body, and Prof. Deussen, of Kiel, is one of the most distinguished of German scholars. And this is how he writes in the fourth year book of the Schopenhauer Society—apparently in terms of contempt for a loquacious minority (the translation is taken from the April number of the _Open Court_, and the italics are ours, especially the concluding shot at the Lady Patriot): “‘Not to my contemporaries,’ says Schopenhauer, ‘not to my countrymen, but to humanity do I commit my work which is now completed, in the confidence that it will not be without value to the race. Science, and more than every other science, philosophy is international.’ ... Foolish, very foolish, therefore is the conduct of _certain German professors_ who have renounced their foreign honours and titles. And what shall we say of a member of our society who demanded that citizens of those states which are at war with us should be excluded from the Schopenhauer Society, and who, when it was pointed out that our foreign members certainly condemned this infamous war as much as we Germans, protested that she could not belong to an association in which Frenchmen, Englishmen and Russians took part, and announced her withdrawal from our society, indeed, even published her brave resolution in the columns of a local paper in her provincial town. _We shall not shed any tears_ for her having gone.”[71]