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Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
England is depicted as a worn-out, old-fashioned, degenerate power, and 
the shameless champion of barbarism and international tyranny. He is 
said to have been largely responsible for the anti-British feeling which 
became so pronounced in Germany during the late years of the nineteenth 
century. The dominant tone of Treitschke’s writings, especially since the 
war of 1870, is the insolent arrogance with which he gave utterance 
to questionable statements without any reference to authorities, and 
the self-satisfied confidence he had in German Chauvinism. According 
to him, the State was the ultimate authority in all things, and the final 
appeal was not to a court of justice, but to the sword. Little notice 
was taken of his works in this country till the outbreak of the 
present war. 
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was from 1869 to 1879 
professor of classical philology in the University of Bale. For the next 
ten years he became a wandering invalid, dashing off these brilliant essays 
which have recently brought his name so prominently before the British 
public. During the last eleven years of his life he was insane, and died 
in an asylum. As an atheistic freethinker, a disbeliever in the cardinal 
virtues of Christianity, and a strong opponent of Prussian militarism, his 
philosophical teaching lacks both consistency and consecutiveness. Its 
keynote is the suppression of the weak and the poor — a doctrine which he 
seems to have imbibed from an imperfect knowledge of the Darwinian 
theory. Treitschke and Nietzsche differed widely in their political 
opinions. The former strongly upheld State supremacy, the latter 
denounced it. But yet they agreed in making the “ will to power ” then- 
dominant watchword. Both loved war, and both hated England on 
account of her wealth and colonial possessions. 
The now notorious book of General Friedrich von Bernhardi — 
Germany and the Next War — was published in the spring of 1912, and 
in the following year a supplementary volume appeared, which its trans- 
lator entitles Britain as Germany's Vassal. The views expressed in 
these volumes may be briefly summarised as follows : — ■ 
(1) War was the great civilising influence in the world, and conse- 
quently it was the duty of every State to be ready for it. 
(2) Germany, having risen superior to all other countries in science, 
literature, arts, commerce, and warlike achievements, was destined to be 
the world-Power of the future. To attain this object the German nation 
was to prepare secretly for a great European war ; and when the necessary 
military preparations were ready, they were to advance a plausible casus 
belli and break up the Triple Entente by crushing, in the first place, France, 
