Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/89

Christianity and War ; to open our newspapers, and find column after column of quotation from it; to pick up our magazines, and discover that all the critics were busy discussing it. That book was published in 1911, and the world (outside of Germany which took its text to heart) remained "more than usual calm." Its forcible and closely knit argument is defined and condensed in one pregnant sentence: "The notion that a weak nation has the same right to live as a powerful nation is a presumptuous encroachment on the natural law of development."

This is something different from the suavities of peace-day orators. It is also vastly different from the sentiments so gently expressed by General von Bernhardi in his more recent volume, dictated by German diplomacy, and designed as a tract for the United States and other neutral nations. Soothing syrup is not sweeter than this second book; but its laboured explanations, its 73