g Through? Can there be any doubt of the ultimate issue
between them?

There are stories that sound pleasantly true to me about General
Joffre's ambitions after the war. He is tired; then he will be very
tired. He will, he declares, spend his first free summer in making a
tour of the waterways of France in a barge. So I hope it may be. One
imagines him as sitting quietly on the crumpled remains of the last
and tawdriest of Imperial traditions, with a fishing line in the placid
water and a large buff umbrella overhead, the good ordinary man who does
whatever is given to him to do--as well as he can. The power that has
taken the great effigy of German imperialism by the throat is something
very composite and complex, but if we personify it at all it is
something more like General Joffre than any other single human figure I
can think of or imagine.

If I were to set a frontispiece to a book about this War I would make
General Joffre the frontispiece.

4

As we swung back along the dusty road to Paris at a pace of fifty
miles an hour and upwards, driven by a helmeted driver with an aquiline
profile fit to go upon a coin, whose merits were a little flawed by a
childish and dangerous ambition to run over every cat he saw upon the
road, I talked to de Tessin about this big blue-coated figure of Joffre,
which is not so much a figure as a great generalisation of certain
hitherto rather obscured French qualities, and of the impression he had
made upon me. And from that I went on to talk about the Super Man, for
this encounter had suddenly crystallised out a set of realisations that
had been for some time latent in my mind.

How much of what follows I said to de Tessin at the time I do not
clearly remember, but this is what I had in mind.

The idea of the superman is an idea that has been developed by various
people ignorant of biology and unaccustomed to biological ways of
thinking. It is an obvious idea that follows in the course of half an
hour or so upon one's realisation of the significance of Darwinism. If
man has evolved from something different, he must now be evolving onward
into something sur-human. The species in the future will be different
from the species of the past. So far at least our Nietzsches and Shaws
and so on went right.

But being ignorant of the elementary biological proposition that
modification of a species means really a secular change in its average,
they jumped to a conclusion--to which the