eously stupid, which is the very opposite to being
fresh and young.

'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of
nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of blood
and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man. Indeed, that
is what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who ever became great. I
looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost froggish face, with projecting
eyes and a thick moustache to hide a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing but
Germany, Germany emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class
in Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to ideas;
his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a bumpkin's elaborate
cunning. And he was the most influential man in the world, in the whole
world, no man ever left so deep a mark on it, because everywhere there
were gross men to resonate to the heavy notes he emitted. He trampled on
ten thousand lovely things, and a kind of malice in these louts made
it pleasant to them to see him trample. No--he was no child; the dull,
national aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness. Childhood is
promise. He was survival.

'All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education, art,
happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the clatter of
his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool's "blood and iron"
passed all round the earth. Until the atomic bombs burnt our way to
freedom again. . . .'

'One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,' said one of
the young men.

'From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a hundred
thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but war.'

'Were there no sane men in those days,' asked the young man, 'to stand
against that idolatry?'

'In a state of despair,' said Edith Haydon.

'He is so far off--and there are men alive still who were alive when
Bismarck died!' . . . said the young man....

Section 5

'And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,' said Karenin, following
his own thoughts. 'You see, men belong to their own age; we stand upon
a common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground. I met
a pleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great-grandfather was a
cannibal. It chanced he had a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the
two were marvellously alike. One felt that a little juggling with time
and either might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a
stupid age who