thin
was about to expand or burst. A vessel which is large and
comfortable for its contents was resisting pressure from without. The
French were saying, What if we should lose? And the Germans were
saying, What if we should not win all that we are entitled to? Germany
had been thinking of a mightier to-morrow and England of a to-
morrow as good as to-day. Germany looked forward to a fortune to
be won at thirty; England considered the safeguarding of her fortune
at fifty.

It is not professions that count so much as the thing that works out
from the nature of a situation and the contemporaneous bent of a
people. The Englishman thought of his defence as keeping what he
already had; the German was defending what he considered that he
was entitled to. If he could make more of Calais than the French, then
Calais ought to be his. A nation, with the "closed in" culture of the
French on one side and the enormous, unwieldy mass of Russia on
the other, convinced of its superiority and its ability to beat either foe,
thought that it was the friend of peace because it had withheld the
blow. When the striking time came, it struck hard and forced the
battle on enemy soil, which proved, to its logic, that it was only
receiving payment of a debt owed it by destiny.

Bred to win, confident that the German system was the right system
of life, it could imagine the German Michael as the missionary of the
system, converting the Philistine with machine-guns. Confidence, the
confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has
overflowed, the confidence of all classes in the realization of the long-
promised day of the "place in the sun" for the immense population
drilled in the system, was the keynote. They knew that they could lick
the other fellow and went at him from the start as if they expected to
lick him, with a diligence which made the most of their training and
preparation.

When I asked for a room with a bath in a leading Berlin hotel, the
clerk at the desk said, "I will see, sir." He ran his eye up and down the
list methodically before he added: "Yes, we have a good room on the
second floor." Afterwards, I learned that all except the first and
second floors of the hotel were closed. The small dining-room only
was open, and every effort was made to make the small dining-room
appear normal.

He was an efficient clerk; the buttons who opened the room door, a
goose-stepping, alert sprout of German militarism, exhibiting