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THE PASSING OF THE SUPERMAN.

The greatest of all wars has so far thrown up no supremely great Personality. We have got rid of what Mr. Wells, with one of his irradiating flashes of insight and description, calls the Effigy: the great, caracoling, threatening, overbearing figure that looms so large in the foreground of all the wars and conquests of the past. Always when you turn back to these things the interest centers dramatically round an individual. The Man has so overshadowed the Event that most often we have forgotten the latter and remember only the former. It is of Rameses or Sesostris, Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar, Attila, Charlemagne Genghis Khan, Charles XII, Peter the Great we think rather than of the kingdoms they devoured, the empires they founded or destroyed, the hosts they led to the slaughter. History flattens out before many minds a rather dull, level expanse, like the plain of Thebes with the Colossi towering above it to catch the sunbeams. It is the big man who often gives his name to the epoch: the age of Augustus, the age of Mohammed, the Napoleonic period, the Bismarckian era, and so forth.

But this marvelous stretch of time through which we are passing will not, it seems, be known as the Age of Anybody. We have no Effigy really worth a show-case in the historic museum, though several of the nations engaged have made some well-intentioned efforts to create one. We have felt somehow that we "want a hero," like Byron when he started upon "Don Juan." The research after this object of desire has not been conspicuously successful. The Germans do their best with Hindenburg: but it is surmised that the strategy and battle-schemes are really worked out

by Ludendorf and other useful subordinates, and that Hindenburg himself may be only a clumsy wooden image "made in Germany" to order and scale. In France there was at first some disposition to cast Joffre for the part; but that modest, methodical, painstaking, and unimaginative commander is not of the stuff whereof effigies are made, and he showed an absolute disinclination to appear in this role. Among ourselves a conscientious endeavor was made for a time to find what we wanted in Kitchener, the strong, silent man, the organizer of victory. But, alas! the Dardanelles Report is out; and whatever may be said of that inconvenient, and inconveniently timed, document, it must be acknowledged that it makes sad havoc with the Kitchener legend. Our Superman fades before our eyes, and leaves us instead with the likeness of a most patriotic, self-confident, hardworking, high-minded gentleman, overburdened by a task of unparalleled difficulty.

And the Effigy-Statesman is apparently as obsolete as the EffigyWarrior. In this department, too, we move among the mediocrities: and here also we are in contrast with the past. The massive political personage, who awed the listening senate to obey, roused the multitude to fevered passion, and played his subtle game with potentates and powers like pieces on the chessboard, as he swept resplendent through the historic page-he likewise has disappeared. We look in vain for the Cromwell, the Lincoln, the Cavour, the Chatham, even the Choiseul or the Alberoni, of the Great War. Instead, we have had to be content with Mr. Asquith, Viscount Grey, M. Briand, Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, Baron Sonnino, M.

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