Watchdog is an unremunerative
investment. He has "eaten his master out of house and home," and by the
same token, he imagines that he himself is now the master.

* * * * *

By this time, the gentle but astute reader has observed that this is no
common "Dog Story," but a parable of the times we live in; and that the
real name of the Land of the Sleepless (but unremunerative) Watchdog is
indeed Europe.

And because of the noisy and costly futility of the whole system in his own
and other countries, Professor Ottfried Nippold of Frankfort-on-the-Main,
has made a special study of the Watchdogs of Germany.

The good people of the Fatherland some forty years ago were drawn into a
great struggle with their neighbors beyond the Rhine. To divert his
subjects' attention from their ills at home, the Emperor of France wagered
his Rhine provinces against those of Prussia, in the game of War. The
Emperor lost, and the King of Prussia took the stakes: for in those days
it was a divine right of Kings to deal in flesh and blood.

The play is finished, the board is cleared, Alsace and Lorraine were added
to Germany, and the mistake is irretrievable. A fact accomplished cannot
be blotted out. But hopeless as it all is, there are watchdogs who, on
moonlight nights, call across the Vosges for revenge--for honor, for War,
War, War. And the German watchdogs cry War, War, War. The word sounds the
same in all languages. The watchdogs bark, but the battle will never
begin.

It is Professor Nippold's purpose, in his little book _Der Deutsche
Chauvinismus_, to show that the clamor is not all on one side. The
watchdogs of the Paris Boulevards are noisy enough, but those of Berlin
are just the same. And as these are not all of Germany, so the others are
not all of France. A great, thrifty, honest, earnest, cultured nation does
not find its voice in the noises of the street. On the other hand,
Germany, industrious, learned, profound and brave, is busy with her own
affairs. She would harm no one, but mind her own business. But she is
entangled in mediaeval fashions. She has her own band of watchdogs, as
noisy, as futile, as unthinkingly clamorous as ever were those of France.
The "Sleepless Watchdog" in France is known as a Chauvinist, in England as
a Jingo, in Prussia as a Pangermanist. They all bay at the same moon, are
excited over the same fancies; they hear nothing, see nothing but one
another. All alike live