ver known there. For
the first time chambermaids often drank champagne and wore on their
heads lop-sided creations of expensive millinery with confident
awkwardness--creations which they said came from Paris. The chimney
sweeps had high hats and smoked good tobacco which they may have
thought came from London. For the imported was the high water mark
of plenty in Germany as always elsewhere, though she claimed to make
the best goods.

The scene should not be painted in too high colors--colors too
fixed. To the careless observer it doubtless appeared little
different from the annual flowering forth of the German race in
its short summer season. Always at that time were the open gardens
lively, the roses blooming with the crude, dense hues that the
Teutons like, and all the folk pursuing their busy tasks and
vigorous pleasures with a sort of goose-step alacrity.

But the closer, more sensitive onlooker felt something more in
1913--something widely organized, unified, puissant, imperial
indeed, such as, he may have imagined, had not existed since the
days of the great emperors in Rome. What the Germans told all comers
was that they had the best of governments, and that no nation had
been so thoroughly, soundly and extensively prosperous.

For each citizen read in his daily paper of successful and growing
Teuton activities in the most distant parts of the earth--in ports,
regions and among peoples whose names he had never heard before and
could not pronounce. At breakfast his capacious paunch and his
wife's fat, flowing bosom expanded with pride in hearing of some new
far-off passenger route carrying the flag, of the Made in Germany
brand sweeping the markets of the world, and perhaps of the Kaiser's
safe return to his palace, bronzed with the cast of health and
strength. Never had investments brought the German such high
rates. Never had speculation been so rife and withal so uniformly
profitable.

As for industry, Deutschland was a colossal beehive. If Frederick
the Great started the beehive, William the Second was increasing its
size to unbelievable proportions. Insignificant villages everywhere
contained millions of dollars' worth of machinery, manufacturing
goods of untold value. Not an ounce of energy, not a second of time,
seemed to be lost in the Empire. Every German was a busy cog fitted
precisely into the whole national plant.

It was as if the Teuton knew that other races must soon stand with
their backs