The German seemed to take the same attitude towards history, with this one qualification--that he was prepared to tolerate, to a certain extent, the history of his own nation. In his blind agony he saw a certain use in the study of the development of Germanic thought, but recognised none in the lessons conveyed by the history of other nations. German antiquities had some sort of value to him because they were German, not because they were antiquities. Like the Futurist, he felt that he “stood upon the summit of the world”; he believed that he had the right to make new laws, to upset accustomed habits; he would not be bound by the old traditions of which the growth is recorded by history. Confident in the freedom and maniacal strength which he derived from his destruction of tradition, he bounded forward, to use the words of the Manifesto, “scratching the air with hooked fingers, and sniffing at the academy doors the odour of the rotting minds within; warming his hands at the fire made by the burning of the old books; while injustice, strong and healthy, burst forth radiantly in his eyes.” Like the Futurist, the militant German hated the restrictions placed upon him by calm, sedate history; he detested the admonitions of accumulated experience; and, regarding himself as superman, he wished to be rid of all records, documentary or material, which tended to pull his thoughts down from the untrodden paths of his high attainment to the unchanging plains of the world. Just as in warfare he brushed aside every restraint which experience and custom had placed upon all military actions, and stopped his ears to the voice of history which counselled moderation, so in regard to the treatment of art treasures he adopted a policy of deliberate destructiveness based on the argument that the world’s art, the world’s history, the world’s accumulations of experience, the world’s very soul, was as nothing compared with Germany’s needs of the moment. “Come, good incendiaries with your charred fingers,” he cried, in the words of the Futurist Manifesto, “set fire to the shelves of the libraries! Flood the museums, that the glorious canvases may drift hopelessly away! Destroy the venerable cities!” So might Germany, untrammelled by obsolete codes, reign supreme over a new earth.