the night; the poster must act as a flare in the day. The famous sentence from the Academy discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which is inscribed as a motto over the entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum--a sentence much quoted during the Victorian era, but in these latter days perhaps little regarded--may be applied to the poster equally as to more durable and delightful works: "The excellence of every art must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose." If the poster which accomplishes its purpose is indeed the most "artistic," then Germany excels in the artistic poster. It may be brutal, it may be ugly, it may even shock and repel; but there is always in the best examples, instinct in their very conception, a definite purpose which gains full expression, because the artist has been trained to limit himself to what he has to say, and to say that with all his might. The illustrations to this volume include work by several of the German poster artists, which, symptomatic of the whole, will serve to illustrate the foregoing remarks. Mention has already been made in the section dealing with British posters of the strong, rugged simplicity of Louis Oppenheim's "Hindenburg." The artist has in this most successfully imposed upon the spectator, not the bolstered-up individual of real life, but the strong, massive calm we seek for in the ideal leader, the man in whom we can place entire confidence. It is thus, in addition to being a successful poster, a piece of successful propaganda. But as its strength is in its reserve and the quiet it imposes, so in Engelhard you get passion released and surging over the onlooker with its flood of hatred. His "Nein! Niemals!" (illustration No. 43) is a powerful instance of this. It is almost impossible to look at the grasping, claw-like hands and ravenous face without a fury of hate, and a realisation of how Germany mastered her people. "Elend und Untergang folgen der Anarchie" (Misery and Destruction follow Anarchy), a poster of the German Revolution by the same artist, is another example of intense force, but this time, for all the brutality of the bestial gorilla figure, wonderfully held in reserve and simple. Bearing a curious comparison with the Czecho-Slovak posters by Preissig, published in New York during the last stages of the War, is the German War Loan poster (illustration No. 35, used also as a design for the back of the cover) by Otto Leonard, "Zereisst Englands Macht" (Rend England's Might). Wohlfeld's poster appealing for women's hair, which is reproduced as a frontispiece, and the poster of the Ludendorff Fund for those disabled by the War (illustration No. 46), show other phases of strength and reserve equally good in their way.