she thinks greatest, Lessing, is a joke. Even Goethe, the nation's one great man in the higher realms of thought, even in the picture drawn by his adoring Eckermann, is not seldom a figure to excite a smile. And at the bottom of it all was the greatest stock of sentimentality that any people has ever had to carry.

All this sentimentality had full sweep regarding the State. When national unity was attained after such long and painful yearning, it made the empire the object of almost idolatrous worship. This passion was stimulated by her vaporing philosophers no less than by her wonderfully increasing commerce. The feeling rapidly grew that their empire was the empire of the world, and their culture the culture. As the empire had become an object of worship, the duty of spreading its Kultur was soon made by the same vaporing philosophers an article of religion.

And all this was backed up by plain simple greed. The evidence is everywhere that the honest Germans of 1870 have been turned by their rapid accumulation of wealth into a "nation of sharpers".

Of course from all this conceit and greed has grown envy, and Germany's hatred of the only neighbor who is stronger, wiser and, hardest of all, a better gentleman, has grown into madness.

Worst of all for her, with the growth of all these destructive passions, her army, which was wisely formed to prevent France's revanche, had grown into one fit for large and sudden aggression, and her navy was not far behind it, and both were the nursery of a military caste longing for conquest.

Moreover, she had fewer centuries than any other civilized nation, between her and the ingrained barbaric lust of conquest. Barring Russia's mistake of not realizing the quality of Japan, the impulse to war of attempted conquest of equals, seemed pretty well outlived in Europe, before it broke out through Germany's ignorant and in

sane conceit, rotten philosophy, greed and envy. All these mad passions have destroyed Germany's reasoning powers, not to speak of her conscience. She could use them only to support her own desires. After flinging her ultimatums to Russia on the East and France on the West, and marching across Belgium to attack her, she holds herself to be the party attacked. One of her gelehrte said to us, of the Belgian infamy: "What else could we do?" He was a simple kindly old man, and we restrained the impulse to answer: Stand by your agreement and take the consequences. When she is arraigned for the Lusitania murders, she answers: "We put your children to an easy death, while you were trying to kill ours by starvation": she showed herself unable to realize that she gave the Lusitania children no chance of escape, while hers could escape through her surrender, and that starvation to effect that is a weapon sanctioned through the whole history of international law; she babbles of wanting the freedom of the seas, while before she threw her position into the cauldron of this war, she was commercially mistress of them, and could be again if she would behave herself; she claims the right to use a weapon in contravention of all law because it is a new weapon; and while we write, her pal and pupil Austria caps the climax by saying that we can be safe by keeping out of their war zone, ignoring our very contention that they had no right to establish one.

Here then is the mad and bloody giant raging against law and civilization. Long before he was ready to strike, he was training for supporters the only other barbarians left in Europe, and with them he has gathered (saving the rest of misled Germany) the worst of the ragtag and bobtail. Look again at the names BORUSSIANS! HAPSBURGS! HUNS! TURKS! a barbarian invasion.

Can civilization permit such a gang to endure? They cannot be reasoned with: they must be rendered incapable of farther harm.

What is our relation to the fearful task? They have broken our laws (for the law of nations is our law) murdered our people, ignored our remonstrances, and disregarded their promises to us. They now presume to dictate the course of our travel and commerce to a degree forbidden by international law, and to cap it all comes the story of their intrigues against us throughout Latin America. But our direct relations are not the only ones that concern us. When they were ravishing women and killing men and children in Belgium, we stood by without a word, and the well-meaning theorist at the head of our affairs, in his new and trying position, told us that as it was none of our war, we were not to express opinions or even think thoughts. He has had some practical experience since then, and grown able to express, frequently, a somewhat different order of views, though whether he is able to act upon them is, at this writing, yet to be seen. He will probably, so well as he is able, carry out our will, and our united will seems to be to stop this infamy.

Will this be the last barbarian invasion? Since this review started out in 1914 by permitting a contributor to declare that there could be no European war, we have not tried the rôle of prophet. But do not the flags from the upper end of Fifth Avenue to the lower end of Broadway seem to promise the republic of United Germany, the Hapsburgs' thralled peoples freed, the Hun with no leader but the Magyar, the Turk back in the Asia which spewed him onto Europe, and the federation of all free nations for defence against barbarism, and the peace of the world? To experienced diplomats this vision often appears

Too bright or good

For human nature's daily food,

one of those unrealizable dreams for which so many good men, never so many as now, are wasting their labors

and often their reason the dreams which are the stock-in-trade of charlatans and demagogues, and the dissipation of which was the main motive for founding this humble organ, and fated it to be "unpopular." And certainly the most optimistic of us may well feel misgiving on reflecting that our original thirteen states, with our common language and traditions and aspirations, could not get together with less than two constitutions, or keep together without the greatest war then known. But Canada has held together with two languages, though with the mighty cement of the British Empire, and Switzerland, of her own motion, has held together with three. The polyglot Austrian Empire of course doesn't count: for it has been held together by chains.

The nations are already united to a degree that we do not always realize, by modern communication and commerce. Is it extravagant to say that economically they are one, and that it only remains to organize a unity already existing?

Most hopeful is the enormous increase in men's disposition for peace. By the nations of long civilization war is despised and hated. It is no longer a matter of glory or pomp and circumstance. England's thin red line is a thing of the past, and even Germany fights in sober colors. The duel has gone within the memory of men now living: in the present writer's youth the window of every dealer in fire-arms displayed a pair of dueling pistols. No end of international quarrels have been settled by judicial procedure, and an international court of arbitration already exists with a local habitation and a name. The need of putting behind it the force required behind all law is felt and yearned for by nations already having enough of that force. The dream will have to be realized, as our dream of Union was, by trial and error; and while many wise men do not dare expect it, most good men are ready to work for it, and with a burning faith that the barbarian invasion now upon us shall be the last.

THE LEGEND OF GERMAN EFFICIENCY

OF

I

F all tidy Continental peoples the Germans are most conspicuous for their neatness. This quality can be seen in large cities, forest floors and river beds; but it reaches its acme in the home of the Hausfrau. After a while, however, admiration of her becomes tempered by the discovery of a peculiarity: her neatness is not a means but an end. Her Moloch, Ordnung, devours all the comforts, quietudes, privacies and pleasant little irregularities that make home sweet. She is nevertheless admired; and even that land of male domination has paid her a fitting tribute. Wherever a suitable site offers itself, the statue of a colossal woman has been erected. Superficially, she resembles Brynhild or Thusnelda. But many travellers, on closer examination, have recognized the modern Hausfrau, terrible in helmet and breastplate, and with a spear to quell domestic mutinies. She is Germania, mighty Goddess of Efficiency.

II

If to have an end in view, and to cultivate the proper means and bring them to a sharp focus upon that end, be efficient, then the Prussians have long been an efficient people. Able organizers, like Frederick the Great, left their impress on a nation of serfs. No other aptitude than an extreme docility to paternalistic government is needed to account for that Prussian team work which is considered one of the highest achievements of Kultur. How far it is from being the free gift of native talent can be seen in the obstinacy with which Prussian statecraft distrusts all the forms of democratic communalism, and