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The Kaiser's crusading appeals are not hypocritical or consciously insincere: they are simply many centuries out of date a grotesque medley of medieval romanticism and royal megalomania.
The next stop was Lake City, a name illustrative of Californian megalomania; for the lake, long since gone dry, was merely an artificial reservoir to supply a neighboring mine, and the city was a collection of half a dozen buildings including a store and a hotel.
The substance of that wrongness of act and relation which constitutes "sin" is the separation of the individual spirit from the whole; the ridiculous megalomania which makes each man the centre of his universe. Hence comes the turning inwards and condensation of his energies and desires, till they do indeed form a "lump"; a hard, tight core about which all the currents of his existence swirl.
Maeterlinck in his “Life of the Bee” has an eloquent and profound chapter on the “Spirit of the Hive.” In the domestic and international policy of the Prussian State, in the Hohenzollern dynastic tradition, we discover such a collective spirit, the “Spirit of the Prussian Hive,” the evil spirit of war mania and megalomania, the treachery, the brutality, the greed, and, above all, the predatory instinct dignified into the name of Real Politik.
He saw the prisoner alone for half an hour. He has formed the opinion that there is no indication of insanity about him. He thinks the prisoner knows the difference between right and wrong. The person suffering from megalomania often imagines he is a king, divinely inspired, has the world at his feet supreme egotism in fact. It is one of the complications of paralytic insanity.
But the insolence and the megalomania of modern Germany made this difficult. German writers were busily and openly explaining the fate marked out for all the other powers. France was to be so crushed that she would 'never again be able to stand in our path. The bloated and unconsolidated empire of Britain was to be shattered. The Russian barbarians were to be thrust back into Asia.
The first inevitable outcome of the German race heresy has been to stimulate the belief in the supremacy of the Teuton and to transform the natural conceit of patriotism into an odious megalomania.
For it is argued that, vanity being at the bottom of it all, and the Emperor finding he is unable to gain the premature immortality he thirsts for by peaceful prodigies, his restless nervous irritability may degenerate into recklessness, and then his megalomania may blind him to the dangers he and, above all, poor blood-soaken Germany may encounter on the war-path ." Kaiser William possesses more power of self-restraint than this passage indicates; for, though he has spread a warlike enthusiasm through his people, he has also restrained it until there arrived a fit opportunity for its exercise.
I break out into this declaration not because of a lurking tendency to megalomania, but, on the contrary, as a man who has no very notable illusions about himself. I follow the instinct of vain-glory and humility natural to all mankind.
It was not only, as we are too ready at the first glance to believe, the megalomania of an autocrat drunk with vanity, the gross vanity of some brainless buffoon; it was not the warlike impulses, the blind infatuation and egoism of a feudal caste; it was not even the impatient and deliberately fanned envy and covetousness of a too prolific race close-cramped on a dreary and ungrateful soil: it was none of these that let loose the hateful war.
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