neo-Darwinism that guides their policy is only a combination of the ideas he denounced in the works of such men as Hume, Bentham, Comte, and Darwin himself, mixed with a sentimental egoism that he abominated above everything else. IV There is, of course, some reason for believing that Carlyle's ideas resemble those of which the German policy is the expression, but there is none if we look beyond his superficial meaning. One reason for branding him as an advocate of German practices is his exaltation of Frederick the Great. Frederick began his first war by seizing Silesia, very much as Wilhelm II began the present war by seizing Belgium. As Carlyle justified the seizing of Silesia, many people cannot see why that does not warrant the conclusion that he would also justify the seizure of Belgium. Such people, however, forget that the Prussia of 1740 was not even the Prussia of 1914, to say nothing of the German Empire or the Teutonic Alliance. Carlyle would detect in Prussia a change in spirit, but even if this cannot be established, there is certainly no parallel between Frederick's seizure of Silesia and Germany's attack on Belgium. In 1740, Prussia was one of the small countries of Europe. Its population was about half that of Belgium in 1914, and its political importance was not much greater. It was situated between militaristic France and imperialistic Austria; and its immediate neighbors: Saxony, Bavaria, Poland, and the Scandinavian kingdoms, were ready at any moment to profit by its misfortunes. Prussia's seizure of Silesia was, therefore, very much as if Belgium, learning in advance of Germany's plan of invasion, had seized German territory adjacent to its frontiers, and used it as a buffer to defend itself. It was the case of a small state preserving itself from the aggressions of a big neighbor aiming at world dominion. The methods employed may not have been technically legal, but they were justified; therefore Carlyle endorsed them. He believed that Frederick, cynic and materialist though he admits him to have been, nevertheless proved himself the valiant defender of his country's right to self government. He also regarded Frederick as the man who did most in the eighteenth century to preserve Europe from being dominated by a lawless imperialism. The rulers of Austria, because of their almost uninterrupted possession of the office of Holy Roman Emperor, openly aimed at universal dominion, and never lost an opportunity of trying to realize it by force of intrigue. France, too, was striving for the domination of Europe, and Russia was just becoming conspicuous for the brutality and unscrupulousness of its political methods quite as much as for the vastness of the power it had suddenly developed. When these facts are considered, Frederick's action must be admitted to have been, if not in the interests of democracy, at least in support of the principle of self-determination for which the Allies