This question was raised quite openly and definitely not only in American literature after the Spanish American War, and in English literature after the Boer War, at the very end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; not only has German literature, which always 'jealously' watches 'British imperialism,' systematically given its appraisal of this fact, but it has been raised in French bourgeois literature in terms as wide and as clear as are possible from the bourgeois point of view.