act and how to think, his commonest acts done, and very gestures made,
according to rule. Yet they, too, had their ideals. I remember in 1871,
the year after the Franco-German War, meeting a party of Germans who
were unveiling a tablet by the Pasterze Glacier in memory of a comrade
fallen in the war--Karl Hoffman, a pioneer of mountaineering in the
Glockner district--and hearing their impassioned speeches. The mountains
of Austrian Tyrol were to them "die Alpen seines Vaterlandes," and the
song with the refrain, "Lieb Vaterland muss grösser sein" echoed from
the rocks, "My beloved Fatherland must be greater"; may not this be the
expression of a noble patriotism? But it so easily turns to "my country
must have more, must take more," and becomes the very watchword of
greed. "Deutschland über Alles" might perhaps mean first to the German
"My country before everything to me." _Corruptio optimi pessima_, it
easily becomes "Germany over all,"--the country which dominates an
inferior world and is thus the condensed motto of supreme insolence.
"Insolence breeds the tyrant," and the doom the ancient poet prophesies
is the divine ordinance to be fulfilled by the action of man.
"Insolence, swollen with vain thought, mounts to the highest place, and
is hurled down to the doom decreed."

Insolence seems the nearest equivalent for the Greek word [Greek:
hybris], which implies much more. Some translate it "pride." It is a
sense of superiority, greater strength, higher culture, leading to a
claim to dominate the minds and the lives, the destinies, of others, and
then in its arrogant self-assertion to override all laws and all
restraints imposed by justice. It is the exact opposite of the Christian
precept: "Let each esteem other better than himself." This, like some
other Christian precepts, may never have been meant to express the whole
truth, but only that side which men are naturally apt to neglect. It was
hardly necessary to insist that men should defend themselves against