Hohenzollern, the Godful, is the head and front of the whole push.

"There are two kinds of superiority—real and assumed. Real superiority is largely unconscious of itself. It can never be inherited—there's the important fact about it. You will recall that there are only three cases on record of a great father begetting a great son. The son is apt to have a sense of inherited superiority. It destroys everything worth while in him.

"Of all the defects that flesh is heir to, a sense of inherited superiority is the most deplorable. It is worse than insanity or idiocy or curvature of the spine. There are millions of acres of land in Europe occupied by nothing but a sense of inherited superiority; there are millions of hands and intellects in Europe occupied by nothing but a sense of inherited superiority, while billions of wealth have been devoted to its service and embellishment. A man who has even a small amount of it needs a force of porters and footmen to help him tote it around, and a guard to keep watch for fear that some one will grab his superiority and run off with it when his back is turned.

"A full equipment of inherited superiority, decorated with a title, a special dialect, a lot of old armor and university junk, stuck out so that there wasn't room for more than one outfit in a township. Most of the bloodshed has been caused by the blunders or the hoggishness of inherited superiority. It is the nursing bottle of insanity and the Mellin's Food of crime.

"Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First was one of the world's greatest consumers of hot air; enough to put him into business with the Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation.

"There are two kinds of sense in men—common and preferred, plain and fancy. The common has become the great asset of mankind; the preferred its great liability. Our forefathers had large holdings of the common, certain kings and their favorites of the preferred. The preferred represented an immense bulk of inherited superiority and an alleged pipe line leading from the king's throne to Paradise, and connected with the fount of every blessing by the best religious plumbers. It always drew dividends, whether the common got anything or not. The preferred holders ran the plant and insisted that they held a first mortgage on it. When they tried to foreclose with military power to back them, some of our forefathers got out.

"We, their sons, are now crossing the seas to take up that ancient issue between sense common and preferred and to determine the rights of each. We are fighting for the foundations of Democracy—the dictates of common sense.

"For the sake of saving time, I hope you will grant me license to resort to the economy of slang. A man might do worse these days. There is one great destroyer of common sense. It is hot air. I remember how scared of it the Yankees used to be. They were most economical with their praise. I never heard a word of it in my youth. It came to me after some travel now and then—never to my face. They knew the deadly power of it—those Yankees.

"Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First was one of the world's' great consumers of hot air. He and his family and friends took all that Great Britain could produce—never, I am glad to say, a large amount, but enough to put James into business with the Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation. It was comparatively modest, but it was enough to outrage the common sense of the English. After all, divine partnerships were not for the land of Fielding and Smollett and Swift and Dickens and Thackeray. Too much humor there. Too much liberty of the tongue and pen. Too great a gift for ridicule. Where there is ridicule there can be no self-appointed counselors of God, and handmade halos of divinity find their way to the garbage heap.

"Now, if we are to have sound common sense, we must have humor, and if we are to have humor we must have liberty. There can be no crowned or mitered knave, no sacred, fawning idiot, who is immune from ridicule; no little tin deities who can safely slash you with a sword unless you give them the whole of the sidewalk. Humor would take care of them; not the exuberance that is born in the wine-press or the beer-vat—humor is no by-product of the brewery—-but the merriment that comes when common sense has been vindicated by ridicule.

"Solemnity is often wedded to Conceit, and their children have committed all the crimes on record. You may always look for the devil in the neighborhood of some solemn and conceited ass who has inherited power and who, like the one that Balaam rode, speaks for the Almighty. So, when the devil came back, he steered for the most solemn and perfect ass on the face of the earth—Bill Hohenzollern.

"In his soul the devil began to destroy the common sense of a race with the atmosphere of hell—hot air. We have seen its effect. It inflates the intellect. It produces the pneumatic, rubber brain—the brain that keeps its friends busy with the pump of adulation; the brain stretched to hold its conceit, out of which we can hear the hot air leaking in streams of boastfulness. The divine afflatus of an emperor is apt to make as much disturbance as a leaky steam-pipe. When the pumpers cease because they are weary, it becomes irritated. Then all hands to the pumps again. Soon there is no illusion of grandeur too absurd to be real, no indictment of idiotic presumption which it is unwilling to admit.

"By and by it breaks into the realm of the infinite and hastens to the succor of God, for, to the pneumatic brain, God is slow and old-fashioned. Thereafter it infests the heavenly throne and seeks to turn it into a plant for the manufacture of improved morals, and, so as to insure their popularity, every agent for these morals is to carry a sword and a gun and a license to use them. The alleged improvement consists in taking all the nots out of the ten commandments. Nots are irritating to certain people who have plans for murder, rape, arson, and piracy.

"Hohenzollern and Krupp had taken the Lord into partnership and begun to give Him lessons in efficiency. Moreover, they were not to be free lessons. The lessons were to be paid for, but they were willing to give Him easy terms, for which they were to show Him how to hasten the slow process of evolution. Evolution was hindered and delayed by sentiment and emotion.

"Sentiment and emotion were a needless inheritance. Hohenzollern and Krupp proposed to cut them out of life and abolish tears. Tears consumed the time and strength of the people. They were factors of inefficiency. What was the use of crying over spilled milk and dead people? Tears were in the nature of a luxury. The poor could not afford them. Life was not going to be lived any longer—it was to be conducted. It was to be a kind of a hurried Cook's tour. Nobody would have to think or feel. All that would be attended to by the proper official. Life was to be reduced to a merciless iron plan like that of the beehive—the most perfect example of efficiency in nature, with its two purposes of storage and race perpetuation.

"No one ever saw a bee shedding tears or worrying about the murder of a drone.

"The ideal of Germany was to be that of the insect. To the bee there is nothing in the world but bees, enemies, and the nectar in flowers; to the German there was to be nothing in the world but Germans, enemies, and loot With no wall of pity and sentiment between them and