bonds which bind mankind, who straightway tie
them again to be more firmly enthralled. Of every
liberator men make a master. Every ideal which
ought to liberate is transformed into a clumsy idol.
The history of humanity is the history of Idols and
of their successive reigns; and as humanity grows
older the power of the Idol seems to wax greater
and more destructive.

At first the divinities were of wood, of stone, or
of metal. Those at any rate were not proof against
the axe or against fire. Others followed that no
material force could reach, for they were graven
in the invisible mind. Yet all aspired to material
dominion, and to secure for them that dominion
the peoples of the world have poured out their best
blood: Idols of religions and of nationality: the
Idol of liberty whose reign was established in Eu-
rope by the armies of the sans-culotte at the point
of the bayonet. The masters have changed, the
slaves are still the same. Our century has made
the acquaintance of two new species. The Idol of
Race, at first the outcome of noble ideas, became
in the laboratories of spectacled savants the Moloch
which Germany herself hurled against France in
1870 and which her enemies now wish to use against
the Germany of today. The latest on the scene is

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