amiliar vermilion and play the intellectual clown.

It was either courage of an extraordinary but unenviable character or
else crass stupidity that led Bernhardi to submit to the civilization
of the present day such a debasing gospel, for if his brain had not
been hopelessly obfuscated by his Pan-Germanic imperialism, he would
have seen that not only would this philosophy do his country
infinitely more harm than a whole park of artillery but would
inevitably carry his memory down to a wondering posterity, like
Machiavelli, detestable but, unlike Machiavelli, ridiculous.

Machiavelli gave to his _Prince_ a literary finish that placed his
treatise among the classics, while Bernhardi has gained recognition
chiefly because his book is a moral anachronism.

One concrete illustration from Bernhardi clearly shows that the
sentences above quoted are truly representative of his philosophy,
and not unfair excerpts. In explaining that it is the duty of every
nation to increase its power and territory without regard for the
rights of others, he alludes to the fact that England committed the
"_unpardonable blunder_ from her point of view of not supporting the
Southern States in the American War of Secession," and thus forever
severing in twain the American Republic. In this striking illustration
of applied Bernhardiism, there is no suggestion as to the moral side
of such intervention. Nothing is said with respect to the moral
question of slavery, or of the obligations of England to a friendly
Power. Nothing as to how the best hopes of humanity would have been
shattered if the American Republic--that "pillar of cloud by day and
pillar of fire by night" to struggling humanity--had been brought to
cureless ruin. All these considerations are completely disregarded,
and all Bernhardi can see in the situation, as it presented itself to
England in 1861, was its opportunity, by a cowardly stab in the back,
to remove forever from its path a great and growing nation.

Poor Bernhardi! He thought to serve his royal master. He has simply
damned him. As Machiavelli, as the eulogist of the Medicis, simply
emphasized their moral nudity, so Bernhardi has shown the world the
inner significance of this crude revival of Caesarism.

CHAPTER II

THE RECORD IN THE CASE

All morally sane men in this twentieth century are agreed that
war abstractly is an evil thing,--perhaps the greatest of all
indecencies,--and that while it may be one of t