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 never ceased to drum into the popular understanding and the flame of victory rising to the sky will be the signal for it to boil over.1

A vivid portrait of a Nazi? Emphatically so, and yet, though thirty years have past since it was first written, we can easily discern, in the character of the German of that remote period, every single trait which characterized the German madmen of today. Yesterday they may have been called Pan-Germans; today Nazis; tomorrow perhaps Supergerman. Time cannot change the infernal breed, whatever its label. Time merely enlarges the field in which the German can, with ever-increasing intensity and thoroughness, practice those monstrous acts which his fevered, war-intoxicated brain dictates, and his vile instincts and barbaric, savage soul prompts. If today the urge of his war-soul can prompt the German to murder innocent hostages imagine, if you can, how that same soul will express itself through the thousandfold-more-fanatic German of tomorrow?

To most people the fantastic "progress" of the Nazi has seemed as meteoric and unexpected as an unheralded bolt of lightning suddenly discharged from the heavens. Others hold tenaciously, with dangerous deception, to the opinion that the Nazi came into power only as a result of the German-termed "inequities" of the Versailles —25—