This, we are told, is not to be taken literally--all is symbolism and has a meaning other than the more direct one. But the fact remains, as can be testified by the present writer from three years' residence as a university student in Germany, that the rank and file as well as the aristocracy--from laborers and small shopkeepers, petty officials, and students to Judges of the Supreme Court and university professors who have become "secret councilors" (Geheimrat)--not only in Berlin and Bonn but in Munich and Heidelberg, all have become ominously full of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest and the consequent expediency of power, not only in intellectual rivalry but in Krupps and high explosives. The Nietzsche fire may, perhaps, serve a purpose on the hearthstone of our inmost life if it be to rescue us from complacency and secure inanity, but in the form of electrically connected lyddite stores and gasoline bombs it drives those who believe in a supernation to a literal interpretation of the above widely popular philosophy. And, as demonstrated at Louvain and Rheims, it goes far to obliterate the memorials of a past which Nietzsche thought so contemptible a check upon the prowess of the "blonde Bestie" as he progressed toward--toward the superman. It was wide of the mark, therefore, to attribute that which bears the stamp "made in Germany" to England. Bernhardi and the Crown Prince with their thousands of officers and the multitudes in the ranks to whom Nietzsche has become an inspiring motive are not to be construed as English surely. Nor does the English "culture," so far as the present writer is informed, contain a superman, unless it be Bernard Shaw! English people have to import "beyond good and evil" philosophy, and as historians of thought Profs. Eucken and Haeckel must know that it has never had a foothold there. Had it been "brutal national egoism, knowing no rights of others," which motivated Britain, she would not now have gone to war--in order that she might profit finally by the inevitable exhaustion of the Continent. And having taken the clear stand she has, what but good-will and the consciousness of a just cause brought support and sacrifice from the hands and lives of her grateful peoples all over the earth? Would brutality have done it? The same question might be asked concerning France's empire from which she derives chiefly the consciousness of an extending civilization. The Claims of German Culture.