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when he toured this country was received and entertained with thegreatest consideration by many of the same people who now standaghast at the flowering of the dark philosophy he preached. Nor doI refer merely to men like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, theBritisher, and Gobineau, the Frenchman, and their kind. I have inmind rather some of those men whose names are uttered with thegreatest respect and even affection at the present time, some ofwhom now wear the crown of martyrdom as refugees at the handsof the present German exemplars of the folk and the elite. WalterRathenau, who was Foreign Minister in the republican cabinet in1922 and who dreamed of a new guild society or corporative state,said:Rule everywhere should be autocratic. Every government save the autocraticis powerless and incompetent. Autocracy and democracy are notantitheses which exclude each other. On the contrary, they can only becomeoperative through union. It is only upon a democratic basis that autocraticrule can and should rest; democracy is only justified when it has an autocraticsuperstructure.This is precisely what Hitler has provided Germany with—though it doesn't look so pretty when it crawls out of the doctrinaire'sstudy and takes over in the citadel of power. ThomasMann, who is now one of our most petted refugees, was one of thoseGermans who venerated Kultur with a capital K—as he put it himself.He was an admirer of Nietzsche and in a tract in 1918—Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen—he produced for his countrywhat he called an "anti-democratic polemic." In the preface to thatwork he wrote: "I record my deep conviction that the Germanpeople will never be able to love political democracy . . . thatthe much-decried authoritarian state is the form of state mostsuitable to the German people." He saw the last war as the eternalstruggle between this German Kultur with a capital K and thedemocratic intellectualism of the West for which he did not concealhis dislike. The German idea of culture, he said, "must reject andmake war upon the democratic-republican form of state as beingsomething alien to land and folk." What else has Hitler done? Hehas produced the planned society of the liberal Rathenau and has155