ree from graft and the most thorough. In
Germany the kings and princes were paid homage as models of wisdom
and virtue, and the Kaiser was believed to be walking with God, hand
in hand, palm to palm. In token of the mystic union between Emperor
and people, Hohenzollern monuments were seen rising in all parts of
the Empire in greater quantity, amid greater thanksgivings. These
_Denkmals_ were growing huger, more thunderous in appearance, and
served the double purpose of keeping the populace in a state of
admiring, unquestioning awe and expressing fulminating Bewares! to
other races. In every home, factory, retail shop, public place, was
the Kaiser's picture, with his trellised mustache, and his devout
eyes cast with a chummy comradeship up to heaven.

All the foregoing explanations accounted in part for a glorious
increase in noise among a people that does everything loudly. The
national noisiness was harmonized somewhat by innumerable bands and
orchestras. Public balls seemed to have become the order of the
night, and the famous forests by day were filled by echoes of the
horns of the bloody chase--the _cors de chasse_ of the legendary
Roland and knights of the Nibelungen. Humble civilians grew fonder
of the habit of donning their military or hunting uniforms and big
marching boots, and sticking cock's feathers in their hats at rakish
angles, recalling the war of 1870 or reviving dreams of the sporting
Tyrol. They drank daily more pints of beer and swallowed the
hot-headed Rhine wines as if thus renewing their blood in that of
their fiery ancestors. Meals mounted to seven or eight a day, for it
was proper to gorge themselves like the human gods they were. Even
the most servile took on a conscious air of being of a regal
species.

In this wise, the German, like Cain, the competent iron-worker, was
treading the earth with resounding footsteps. Over his bullneck and
under his spiked hat he had naturally come to look upon himself as a
super-being. While the American watched ball games, the Englishman
played golf and the Frenchman wrote to his loved one, the Teuton was
keeping himself hardened for war, and toiling like the systematic
beaver in up-building national industries that were so swiftly
dominating all others. To say the least, this intense people were
strenuously perfecting an intensive and powerful civilization such
as never had been seen.

So--as Gard Kirtley was finding and yet failing to explain to
himself-