hegemony of the world.  This aspiration transfigured, possessed, fanaticized them.  Teutondom became to them what Islam is to Mohammedans of every race, even when they shake off religion.  They eschewed no means, however iniquitous, that seemed to lead to the goal.  They ceased to be human in order to force Europe to become German.  Offering up the elementary principles of morality on the altar of patriotism, they staked their all upon the single venture of the war.  It was as the throw of a gambler playing for his soul with the Evil One.  Yet the faith of these materialists waxed heroic withal, like their self-sacrifice.  And in the fiery ardor of their enthusiasm, hard concrete facts were dissolved and set floating as illusions in the ambient mist.  Their wishes became thoughts and their fears were dispelled as fancies.  They beheld only what they yearned for, and when at last they dropped from the dizzy height of their castles in cloudland their whole world, era, and ideal was shattered.  Unavailing remorse, impotent rage, spiritual and intense physical exhaustion completed their demoralization.  The more harried and reckless among them became frenzied.  Turning first against their rulers, then against one another, they finally started upon a work of wanton destruction relieved by no creative idea.  It was at this time-point that they endeavored to join hands with their tumultuous Eastern neighbors, and that the one word “Bolshevism” connoted the revolutionary wave that swept over some of the Slav and German lands.  But only for a moment.  One may safely assert, as a general proposition, that the same undertaking, if the Germans and the Russians set their hands to it, becomes forthwith two separate enterprises, so different are the conceptions and methods of these two peoples.  Bolshevism was almost emptied of its contents by the Germans, and little left of it but the empty shell.

Comparisons between the orgasms of collective madness which accompanied the Russian welter, on the one hand, and the French Revolution, on the other, are unfruitful and often misleading.  It is true that at the outset those spasms of delirium were in both cases violent reactions against abuses grown well-nigh unbearable.  It is also a fact that the revolutionists derived their preterhuman force from historic events which had either denuded those abuses of their secular protection or inspired their victims with wonder-working faith in their power to sweep them away.  But after this initial stage the likeness vanishes.  The French Revolution, which extinguished feudalism as a system and the nobility as a privileged class, speedily ceased to be a mere dissolvent.  In its latter phases it assumed a constructive character.  Incidentally it created much that was helpful in substance if not beautiful in form, and from the beginning it adopted a positive doctrine as old as Christianity, but new in its application to the political sphere.  Thus, although it uprooted quantities of wheat together with