Imagine, then, your Herr Professor, thus fed on gross flattery, inducted into the most rigid caste system in Europe, mentally imprisoned in a language in which it is easier to say Yes! and No! together to any question than to say either separately: turn him loose on German history, give him a Kaiser and a Court audience who demand adulation, give him, further, a set of prosperous bandits like Frederick the Great and fruitful liars like Bismarck to work on, and you get Treitschke. I have looked more or less carefully through eight large volumes of his history and essays. In one sentence you find jingoism, in the next egotism. For my part, I have been unable to find much else. I gather from Dr. Max Lenz and other biographers that this renegade Saxon was at one time or other blind, deaf, and honest. Whether he was all three simultaneously, or in what permutations he worked, I do not know, and one is very far from gibing at human suffering. But when an invalid sets up as a Prophet of Bullydom, when a feeble creature, saved from collapse only by human affection, goes about to blaspheme all the intimate sanctities of civilisation, one feels justified in summoning him to the bar of his own Darwinism. Among modern nations Prussia has had the strange experience of having a Gospel of Relentless Force preached to her by invalids and degenerates. Her metaphysic has been dictated from a hospital ward. The one thing you find in Treitschke, reverberating through page after page, is the doctrine of a Chosen People. He used his learning, which was not inconsiderable, his prestige, and his influence to keep hammering into Prussia the belief that she was the chosen race, the seed of the superman, the predestined ruler of Western civilisation. He preached the ruthless supremacy of the State, and the sacrifice to military power of all humane activities. He regarded Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Luxemburg as fragments of Germany that had been temporarily broken off, and must be recovered. He taught those whom he influenced to dream of a Vandal Empire, straddled across all Europe from Dunkirk to Belgrade. Domination, domination, and again domination: that is the message of Treitschke. Were he alive he would have rejoiced blatantly at the tearing up of the “scrap of paper” which stood for nothing except the conscience of Europe and the integrity of Belgium. I understand that we are to have solemn and careful studies of his works issued in English. A great deal of his detailed historical research is probably of high value. But it would be just as well if critics realised that, for the future, when a German corrupter like Treitschke is translated, he comes not to judge, but to be judged. He preached the Gospel of the Devil, the gospel of domination, cruelty, and planned barbarism. Whatever intellectual prestige he came to acquire will no more save him than brilliancy will save Lucifer. TRADE OR HONOUR?