This belief is quite erroneous. Nietzsche, who poked bitter fun at the clumsiness and stupidity of his countrymen, who cracked jokes over the musicians and philosophers most dear to the German heart, and who, before all else, repudiated Prussianism lock, stock, and barrel, was certainly not a writer likely to appeal to the Kaiser or to any of the makers of modern Germany. The reader cannot fail to be impressed by the striking fact that the "professors" who have written in support of German development have one and all disclaimed any connection with Nietzsche or his teachings. The thinker who is really responsible, even more so than Treitschke, for Germany's attempt to burst her confines and to increase her possessions, is a man of a very different order. A year or two ago there appeared the English translation of a book by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century." This was a book dealing generally, in so far as a connected thread ran through it, with racial problems, and the author's admiration for the Teutonic race was expressed without limits. Chamberlain came of English stock, but he developed German sympathies, lived in Germany, and wrote in German. For the Aryans, gradually turned into the Teutons and modern Germans, Chamberlain claimed all the virtues of mankind; and his net was spread wide. The Founder of the Christian Church was of Teutonic stock, according to the teachings of the Chamberlain school; and so was Dante. The Latin races, on the contrary, were held to be decadent--it was only a matter of time before they would have to disappear and make way for the strong, virile race from the North. This book created a profound impression at the time of its publication in Germany--and in German, although the author had been an Englishman. It was read widely in Court circles, by the "professors," and by military men. It was brought to the notice of the Kaiser, who ordered several hundred copies to be sent to him. These--the number was said to be as many as eight or nine hundred--were distributed, by the Imperial command, to heads of schools, burgomasters, and the like, throughout the length and breadth of the German Empire. To the views of the Chamberlain school Nietzsche was unalterably opposed; and his choicest fulminations were directed against the group of thinkers who wrote with unstinted admiration of the Teutonic race. To use his own expression, the victories of 1870-1871 had given the Germans an inflated conception of their own importance in the world, and the material wealth that accrued to them during the next two decades ruined completely the old German philosophy and culture which had been the pride and hope of such men as Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, and Schopenhauer.