If facts do not bear him out, then facts are false. Now facts are not false, and Germany is not superior in all things to every other nation on earth. She may have more guns and more soldiers than two or three of the other nations, that is a _fact_ which we gladly admit; but superiority in guns and soldiers is only superiority in guns and soldiers. It is not superiority in all things. Germany has said in effect that might is right. Well, let her prove her might, and we will then discuss the right of might. Some years before I left the earth I was stronger than most men of my acquaintance; but if I had on that ground knocked them down and taken their watches, my own superior strength might have been useless to me except to propel my six-foot body up and down a cell in the county jail. I might have taken the watches, but I could not have kept them, for my individual might would have been out-classed by the might of the society in which I dwelt. So with Germany. Most men consider themselves superior to their friends and acquaintances, and are secretly annoyed that their friends and acquaintances do not acknowledge it. But on the strength of that supposed superiority they do not generally knock their neighbors down. My assertion of my superiority to all other men and angels does not make me superior to them in anything but fatuous conceit. If a Christian Scientist with a broken leg asserts that he has not a broken leg, it does not change the fact. The strength of his assertion may work in the direction of curing the defect--granted. It often does. The conceit of Germany has called out her energy and made her material present superior to her material past; but that cannot place her “over all,” unless she convinces the world of it, and the world accepts an inferior place. Germans are not convincing advocates, because they always arouse opposition by overstating the facts in their favor, and in disputing the facts against them. So little do they understand the critical minds of the more critical races, that they try to convince by mere assertion, and so prejudice their case from the start. One service Germany will have done the world; she will have hardened it. It is a tragic service, and one that will turn against herself. Many a parent by his blind brutality has made his son a greater brute than he. Many a man by wounding a friend has been stabbed to the soul in return. The friend may be harder than before, but has he profited? Perhaps. Experience is an asset. Man grows by pain as well as by pleasure. If the brutality of Germany makes the races of Europe more vigorous, they are the gainers--not Germany. The Doctor who gives too bitter medicine is sent about his business, sometimes without his fee. There was once a “mental” scientist who declared that it was not necessary for his daughter to practice the piano; that all she needed to do was to affirm that she was a pianist, and she would be one.