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of a handful of brutal and lawless men, we need have no fear of ithere. We are never without leaders both able and corrupt. But theyare not sufficiently numerous and powerful to make very much headwayagainst the peculiar structure of our government. If thephenomenon is merely a manifestation of the paranoid mentalityof the German people then certainly we are in no danger of infectionunless we, too, are a little demented.But alas, the most terrifying aspect of the whole fascist episode isthe dark fact that most of its poisons are generated not by evil menor evil peoples, but by quite ordinary men in search of an answerto the baffling problems that beset every society. Nothing couldhave been further from the minds of most of them than the finalbrutish and obscene result. The gangster comes upon the stage onlywhen the scene has been made ready for him by his blunderingprecursors.Writers like Mr. Herbert Agar lash themselves into a luminousfever of righteousness as they survey the world. Those phenomenain social life they do not like they write down as the fruit of barbarism.And barbarism is just another name for Germany, just as thesame word turns out to be a synonym for Russia with others. ToMr. Agar the world suffers from the "German disease," which contaminatesthe earth. Germany "has remained outside the streamof Latin culture." 1One recent writer sees Germany as a "thousand-year conspiracyagainst Greco-Christian civilization" while still another, an eminentpsychiatrist, announces that the German people suffer from a paranoidcondition, that they are mildly insane, that fascism and thewar are therefore the work of crazy men who are incapable ofmaintaining a stable order. 2 The doctor thinks the problem is onefor psychiatric medicine, while still another writer 3 thinks the solutionshould be entrusted to the surgeons who, by detailing 20,000of their number, could sterilize all male Germans in one monthand all female Germans in three years. One wants to purge the dis-*A Time for Greatness, by Herbert Agar, Little, Brown, New York, 1942.'The Thousand-Year Conspiracy, by Paul Winkler, Scribner, New York, 1943. Is GermanyIncurable? by Richard M. Bricker, M.D., Lippincott, New York, 1943.^Germany Must Perish, by Theodore N. Kaufman, Argyle Press, Newark, 1941.75