other races they could rain showers of bursting lyddite on the unsuspecting, and after that the will of the Kaiser and God would be respected. The firm would prosper. It is not the first time that conceit and Kultur have hitched their wagon to infinity. It is the old scheme of Nero and Caligula—-the ancient dream of the pneumatic prince. He can rule a great nation, but first he must fool it. First he must induce his people to part with their common sense and take some preferred—a dangerous quality of preferred. This he can do in a generation by the systematic use of hot air.

"You may think that this endangered the national morals, but do not be hasty. The morals were being looked after.

"Every school, every pulpit, every newspaper, every book, became a pumping-station for hot air impregnated with the new morals. Poets, philosophers, orators, teachers, statesmen, romancers, were summoned to the pumps: Rivers of beer and wine flowed into the national abdomen and were converted into mental and moral flatulency.

"For thirty years Germany had been on a steady dream diet. Every school, every pulpit, every newspaper, every book, became a pumping-station for hot air impregnated with the new morals. Poets, philosophers, orators, teachers, states' men, romancers, were summoned to the pumps.

"Morning hate with its coffee and prayers, its hourly self-contentment with its toil, its evening superiority with its beer and frankfurters. History was falsified, philosophy bribed, religion coerced and corrupted, conscience silenced—at first by sophistry, then by the iron hand. Hot air was blowing from all sides. It was no gentle breeze. It was a simoom, a tornado. No one could stand before it—not even a sturdy Liebknecht or an unsullied Harden.

"Germany was inebriated with a sense of its mental grandeur and moral pulchritude. Now moral pulchritude is like a forest flower. It can not stand the fierce glare of publicity; you can not handle it as you would handle sausages and dye and fertilizer. Observe how the German military party is advertising its moral pulchritude—one hundred per cent, pure, blue ribbon, spurlos versenkt, honest-to-God morality!—the kind that made hell famous.

"I don't blame than at all. How would any one know that they had it if they did not advertise it?

"It is easy to accept the hot-air treatment for common sense—easy even for sober-minded men. The cocaine habit is not more swiftly acquired and brings a like sense of comfort and exhilaration. Slowly the Germans yielded to its sweet inducement. They began to believe that they were supermen—the chosen people; they thanked God that they were not like other men. Their first crime was that of grabbing everything in the heaven of holy promise. It would appear that those clever Prussians had arranged with St. Peter for all the reserved seats—nothing but standing room left Heaven was to be a place exclusively for the lovers of frankfurters and sauerkraut and Limburger cheese.

"God was altogether their God. Of course! Was He not a member of the firm of Hohenzollern & Krupp? And, being so, other races were a bore and an embarrassment. Would He not gladly be rid of them? Certainly. Other races were God's enemies, and therefore German enemies. So it became the right and duty of the Germans to reach out and possess the earth and its fulness. The day had arrived. There was nothing in the world but Germans and enemies and loot.

"Their great leader, in their name, had claimed a swinish monopoly of God's favor. His was not the contention of James the First, that all true kings enjoy divine-right—oh, not at all! Bill had grown rather husky and had got his feet in the trough, and was going to crowd the others out of it. He was the one and only. And as he crowded, he began to pray, and his prayers came out of lips which had confessed robbery and violated good faith and inspired deeds of inhuman frightfulness. His prayers were therefore nothing more nor less than hot air aimed at the ear of the Almighty and carrying with them the flavor of the swine-yard. In all this Church and people stood by him. It would seem that the devil had taken both unto a high mountain and showed them the kingdoms of the earth and their glory, and that they had yielded to his blandishments.

"Now the thing that has happened to the criminal is this. In one way or another, he loses his common sense. He ceases to see things in their just relations and proportions. The difference between right and wrong dwindles and disappears from his vision. He convinces himself that he has a right to at least a part of the property of other people. Often he acquires a comic sense of righteousness.

"I have lately been in the devastated regions of northern France. I have seen whole cities of no strategic value which the German armies had destroyed by dynamite before leaving them to a silence like that of the grave—the slow-wrought walls of old cathedrals and public buildings tumbled into hopeless ruin; the châteaux, the villas, the little houses of the poor, shaken into heaps of moldering rubbish. And I see in it a sign of that greater devastation which covers the land of William II—the devastation of the spirit of the German people; for where is that moral grandeur of which Heine and Goethe and Schiller and Luther were the far-heard compelling voices? I tell you it has all been leveled into heaps of moldering rubbish—a thousand times more melancholy than any in France.

"Behold the common sense of Germany become the sense that is common only among criminals! The sooner we recognize that, the better. They are really burglars in this great house of God we inhabit, seeking to rob it of its best possessions—Hindenburglars! In this war we must give them the consideration due a burglar, and only that. We must hit them how and where we may. We are bound by no nice regard for fair play. We must kill the burglar or the burglar will kill us.

"When I went away to the battle-front, a friend said to me:

"'Try to learn how this incredible thing came about and why it continues. That is what every one wishes to know.'

"Well, hot air was the cause of it. Now why does it continue? My answer is, bone-head—mostly plumed bone-head.

"Think of those diplomats who were twenty years in Germany and yet knew nothing of what was going on around them and of its implications! You say that they did know, and that they warned their peoples? Well, then, you may shift the bone-heads on to other shoulders. Think of the diplomatic failures that have followed!

"I bow my head to the people of England and to the incomparable valor of her armies and fleets. My friendly criticism is aimed at the one and only point in which she could be said to resemble Germany, viz., in a certain limited encouragement of supermen.

"Now, if the last three years have taught us anything, it is this: the superman is going to be unsupered. Considering the high cost of up-keep and continuous adulation, he does not pay. He is in the nature of a needless tax upon human life and security. His mistakes, even, to use no harsher word, have slaughtered more human beings than there are in the world. The born gentleman and professional aristocrat, with a hot-air