There once was such a man as the kindly and modest German, and through his virtues he had nearly obtained the industrial and commercial leadership of the world, when sudden wealth and power aroused in him the brute instincts that are latent in the best of us, and started him after more than can be had from industry, and can be had only by force. The brute instincts were nearer the surface in him than in those who have a recorded civilization of some seven or eight thousand years: for the poor Germans, at least the ruling branch of them, have barely as many hundred. Even Russia was Christianized four centuries before Prussia. Now it is a rare parvenu who is not conceited. Germany has camouflaged the old idea of conquest by that of spreading her Kultur to the inferior portion of mankind--to the peoples that produced Homer, Dante, Shakespear, Newton, Darwin and Spencer--as if those peoples were savages whose territory could be brought under civilization only by conquest, and as if Germany alone had civilization. And this absurd idea she backs up by a crude conception of the Law of Evolution--a conception that stops with the competition of brute forces. Coöperation, mutual help, emulation in well doing do not enter into her idea of evolution. She has thrown away her splendid success in the higher competition, and reverted to the competition of brute force,--camouflaged again by science and cunning. When a conceited parvenu goes mad, his conceit is as mad as the rest of him. When he is at the same time bellicose and bloodthirsty, he will not stop fighting as long as the conceit is in his system, and the only way to get it out is to whip it out.