man people at the time yelled their
approval of deliberate dastardly murder.

"Te Deum" has been always the favourite psalm sung in cathedrals
for all Christian conquerors, but neither psalms nor the paid
pastor's praises of the Emperor will satisfy the German people,
who have made awful sacrifices for intangible victories.

CHAPTER XXV

THE ERRORS OF EFFICIENT GERMANY

The Yankee finding himself, like Mark Twain's hero, suddenly
transported back to King Arthur's Court is landed in a surprising
and unknown world. But one of King Arthur's knights brought to
life at the court of the present German Emperor aside from steam,
electricity, gun powder, telegraph and telephones would find the
system as despotic as in the days when the enchanter, Merlin,
wove his spells and the sword Excalibur appeared from the depths
of the magic lake. But while the system is as royal and as
despotic as in King Arthur's day, while the king and his military
nobles look down on the merchants and the toilers and the plain
people, no knights ride forth intent upon good deeds, to protect
the poor or avenge the wrongs of the innocent.

It was the cold realists of the General Staff who battered down
the defences of Belgium and the forts of France, destroyed the
monuments of art and levied a tax of sixty million francs a month
upon a little country deprived of its means to produce wealth,
took the food from the inhabitants, shipped the machinery and raw
material into Germany, deported the men and insulted the women
and drove whole populations from their homes to work as slaves
for the conquerors.

But while they can plan military successes in the first rush of
assault on the chessboard of Europe they have failed to
understand other nations--failed even to learn the lessons of
history. They did not know that in every land, in every walk of
life, there are men who will "reject a bribe and who will die for
an idea."

Imagine a German Staff officer reporting in Berlin that over a
hundred thousand Alsatians were armed and organised and that they
threatened, unless certain proposed legislation uniting them, for
example, with Baden, was withdrawn, to resist forcibly any
attempt to incorporate them in that Grand Duchy. Would not this
look to a German officer like real revolution and nothing else?
And when, in addition, there came news of the landing of arms for
the Nationalists in Ireland and of the organisation of the
Nationalist army, the