France made her mistakes, but before the war she had begun to correct and cancel them. The gradual return to fair play from the midnight bigotry of Combes to the policy of appeasement of M. Briand, and the execution of that policy by M. Poincaré was very marked in all its stages. And in the measure in which that correction of old mistakes and tyrannies is made, not only in France but under every other Allied Flag, will the coming victory repay the blood that is buying it. But that German Catholics should have held up their country before the world as a shining model, and France as an abandoned and degenerate nation, is a thing intelligible only to those who know the vanity and self-exaltation of the modern German. While they were thus fabling, who really spoke for Germany in the ear of the world? These are the Germans. Schopenhauer with his scientific pessimism, truer indeed and nobler than any light philosophy of pleasure, but profoundly anti-Christian. Treitschke, who taught that the State is above all moral laws. A line of theologians from Strauss to Harnack and his contemporaries, who claimed to have shredded into mere rags of myth the historical beginning of the Christian faith and fold. Nietzsche, who “transcended morality” for the individual as Treitschke had done for the State, and preached pride, pleasure and domination as the cardinal virtues. Nietzsche who wrote-- “They have said to you: Happy are the peaceful! but I say to you: Happy are the warriors, for they shall be called not the sons of Jehovah, but the sons of Odin, who is greater than Jehovah!” Who else stood for German thought? Haeckel, whose _Riddle of the Universe_ carried its vulgar “omniscience” of materialism in sixpenny editions all round the world. And the Catholic spokesmen of such a people cried out to Heaven against the country of Coppée and de Mun, of Bazin, Barrès, Bourget, Ferdinand Brunetière and all the noblest voices of our time. One trivial touch is worth adding to the picture. The Catholic Committee of Action in France has established a fact, which, indeed, was already known, namely, that great numbers of the obscene books which disgrace some bookstalls in Paris are normally printed in French in Budapest, Vienna and certain German cities.