to the wall and that now was the moment to redouble
effort to capture still more trade and reduce the rest of the world
to an acknowledged state of submission.

CHAPTER II

DEUTSCHLAND UEBER ALLES

Thus the Germans, in 1913, felt how supreme their country was or was
speedily becoming. Not only their newspapers but their educators,
their pastors and, more than all, their military and political
leaders told them that a place above the rest of mankind had been
reached. The pride, the assurance, pervading the land was the stiff
and hardy efflorescence of this universal conclusion. And the
Teutons had earned and therefore merited it all, for no one,
nothing, scarcely even Nature, had lent a helping hand.

German women knew they were the best housekeepers, wives, mothers,
dressers, dancers. Never had they been so to the fore. Never had
they had so much money to spend for clothes. Never had they
promenaded so proudly to martial music or waltzed so perspiringly
with the fashion-plate officers whom they adored.

The children were paragons of diligence and promise. In their school
books and college text books everything German was lauded in the
superlative; everything foreign was decried as inferior,
undesirable. Nearly every human discovery, invention, improvement,
was somehow traced to a Teuton origin. Even characteristic German
vices were held to be better than many virtues in other lands.

The young person grew up to believe that the Rhine was the finest of
rivers, the mountains of the Fatherland were the most celebrated in
song and story, its lakes the most picturesque, its soil the best
tilled. He was properly stuffed with the indomitable conviction, the
aggressive obsession, that the fittest civilization _must_ prevail.

And the army! Always the army--that bulwark, that invincible force!
Hundreds of thousands of civilians apparently regretted they were
not back in the barracks, following the noblest of occupations as
soldiers for the supreme War Lord. The army represented admitted
perfection. Foreign observers were united in naively attesting its
impeccableness. It was ready to the last shoe button, to the last
twist of its waxed mustache. But ready for what? Few outside of
Germany appeared to think of asking. The army was taken to be simply
Teuton life and of no more ulterior significance than the national
beer.

The admission was also general at home and abroad that the German
Government was the most f