easoning. They have to make a more closely woven net in
which instinct and idea, cost what it may, combine to form a stouter
tissue. They thus achieve monstrous _chefs-d'oeuvre_. Give an
intellectual any ideal and any evil passion and he will always succeed
in harmonizing the twain. The love of God and the love of mankind have
been invoked in order to burn, kill, and pillage. The fraternity of 1793
was sister to the Holy Guillotine. We have in our time seen Churchmen
seeking and finding in the Gospels the justification of Banking and of
War. Since the outbreak of the war a clergyman of Wuertemberg established
the fact that _neither Christ nor John the Baptist nor the apostles
desired to suppress militarism_.[23] A clever intellectual is a conjuror
in ideas. "_Nothing in my hands--nothing up my sleeves._" The great
trick is to extract from any given idea its precise contrary--war from
the Sermon on the Mount, or, like Professor Ostwald, the military
dictatorship of the Kaiser from the dream of an intellectual
internationalism. For such conjurors these things are but child's play.

Let us expose them, by examining the words of this Dr. Ostwald, who has
appeared during the last few months as the Baptist of the Gospel of the
spiked helmet.

Here is the Idol to begin with--_Kultur (made in Germany), with a
capital K "rectiligne et de quatre pointes, comme un chevel de frise,"_
as Miguel de Unamuno wrote to me. All around are little gods, the
children of its loins: _Kulturstaat_, _Kulturbund_, _Kulturimperium_....

_"I am now" (it is the voice of Ostwald[24]) "going to explain to you
the great secret of Germany. We, or rather the Germanic race, have
discovered the factor of Organization. Other peoples still live under
the regime of individualism while we are under that of Organization. The
stage of Organization is a more advanced stage of civilization."_

It is surely clear that, like those missionaries who, in order to carry
the Christian faith to heathen peoples, secure the co-operation of a
squadron and a landing party which straightway establish in the
idolatrous country commercial stores protected by a ring of cannon,
German intelligence cannot without selfishness keep her treasures to
herself. She is obliged to share them.

"_Germany wishes to organize Europe, for Europe has hitherto not been
organized. With us everything tends to elicit from each individual the
maximal output in the direction most favorable for soc