Prof.  Millioud examines at some length and acutely the tendencies and teachings of von Bernhardi, now familiar to American readers, sums up the work of the philosophers of minor rank and turns to Mr. Chamberlain.

With Mr. Chamberlain the thesis of vital competition, the morality of force, the judgment of history against little nations, the civilizing mission imposed upon greater Germany by its very greatness, by its economic, scientific and artistic superiority, everything tends to the glorification of the German, to his duty to govern the whole world which he feels so imperatively and which he accepts with such a noble simplicity.  His work is not easily summarized, not only because it counts 1,379 pages and two appendices, but because all is in everything, and everything in the universe is also in Mr. Chamberlain’s book.  And the German has made everything.  Not indeed the world; that he has only remade and is about to remake.  But he has a way of remaking so creative that one might say that without him the Creator Himself would be a bit embarrassed.  He has gathered to himself alone the heritage of Greece and Rome as far as it was worth anything.  From the year 1200 to the year 1800 he founded, ripened, and saved a new civilization several times over.  The mother of our sciences and our arts, Italy, is Germanic; the great architecture of the Middle Ages is Germanic; the true interpretation of Christianity, the true conception of art, the true social economy, the love of nature, the sense of individuality, the exploration of the world and of the soul, the great reawakenings of conscience, all the great flashes of thought are Germanic; everything is Germanic, except you and me, perhaps; so much the worse for me and so much the worse for you.  After this book, the success of which has been prodigious, it would truly seem that there is nothing more to say.  Germanic thought has appropriated the universe to itself.  It only remained for the German sword to complete the work.  It is drawn!

I have tried to describe the modifications, or rather the successive additions, by which the elementary themes disclosing economic, political, and military appetites in the directing class have been disguised as theories of biology, history, political economy, sociology, and morality.  It would take another study or another article to show how science was perverted to such ends.  The severity of methods, rigor in the determination of facts, precision in reasoning, prudence in generalization, serene impartiality and objectivity in verification, in a word the scientific spirit, cannot be bent to so many pleasant compromises without sacrificing a great part of its dignity and its title to respect.

This has been a singular and melancholy event for those of us who have been raised in respect for German science and in admiration for its methods, as well as for its discoveries.  Certainly, from Liebig to Roentgen and to Behring, from Kant to Wundt, Germany has counted many distinguished pioneers.  In the matter of fecund originality, however, and creative inspiration, Italy and France have always equaled, if not surpassed, her.  She has had no Marconi, no Pasteur or Poincare, no Carrel.