_The Supreme Court of Civilization does exist._ It consists of cosmopolitan men in every country, who put aside racial and national prejudices and determine the right and wrong of every issue between nations by that slowly forming system of international morality which is the conscience of mankind. To a certain class of German statesmen and philosophers this Court of Public Opinion is a visionary abstraction. A group of distinguished German soldiers, professors, statesmen, and even doctors of divinity, pretending to speak in behalf of the German nation, have consciously or unconsciously attempted to revive in the twentieth century the cynical political morality of the sixteenth. As Symonds, the historian of the Renaissance, says in his _Age of the Despots_, Machiavelli was the first in modern times to formulate a theory of government in which the interests of the ruler are alone regarded, which assumes a separation between statecraft and morality, which recognizes force and fraud among the legitimate means of attaining high political ends, which makes success alone the test of conduct and which presupposes the corruption, baseness, and venality of mankind at large. Even the age of Cesare Borgia revolted against this philosophy and the name of Machiavelli became a byword. "Am I a Machiavel?" says the host in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, and the implication of this question indirectly manifests the revolt of the seventeenth century against the sinister philosophy of the great Florentine. Nothing can be more amazing than that not only leading militarists of Germany but many of its foremost philosophers and teachers have become so intoxicated with the dream of Pan-Germanism that in the utmost sincerity they have espoused and with a certain pride proclaimed the vicious principles of Machiavelli in all their moral nudity. There is an emotional and mystical element in the advanced German thinker, which makes him capable of accepting in full sincerity intellectual and moral absurdities of which the more robust common sense of other nations would be incapable. The advanced German doctrinaire is the "wisest fool in Christendom." The depth of his learning is generally in the inverse ratio to the shallowness of his common sense.