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enough to satisfy the tastes of some of its more voluble critics. Inorder to hate it they feel bound to import into it evils it does notpossess. This is silly. Because in this deformed and exaggeratedshape it is not nearly so frightful because it does not exist. If I findmyself in a wilderness I can be intelligently afraid of lions and tigersand reptiles as they are. The man who comes to me with the alarmabout approaching man-eating cats and boa constrictors and whodescribes them to me as they are will fill me with a reasoned fear andinduce me to take measures for safety. But the wild-eyed alarmistwho rushes up with descriptions of dragons with flames pouringfrom their nostrils, swallowing two and three men at a gulp, will notexcite me at all. I will not believe that such beasts will come uponme. I am afraid of such a beast as fascism just as it is because I knowit can exist, that it flourishes not only in some distant jungle butseems to be at home in almost any kind of woods and climate andmay actually put in an appearance here. I fear it because I know itmay arise in America, taking on the coloration of the Americanjungle. Let us see, therefore, if we can isolate the real elements offascism in Germany as a preliminary to searching for them in ourown midst.II' Resetting the SceneTHERE IS a generally held assumption that the German people havealways lived under a highly centralized, autocratic government onlythinly veneered with parliamentary forms and that therefore theywere singularly open to the designs of a fascist regime.As a matter of history it is a fact that the two peoples of Europewho resisted longest any attempt to bring them under a central,unitary government were Italy and Germany. Many years agoDr. Edward Preissig called attention to the fact that Germans, oneof the most numerous racial groups in Europe, "remained for centuriesthe most divided nation of Europe." 1 More recently twoPolitical Institutions of the Old World, by E