er," said the King. "Think how popular we should be with
the rest of Europe! No English? The Germans would simply flock to us;
our hotels would be crammed; we should be turning away money at the
door."

The Prime Minister tapped wearily upon the table; all this was such
utter waste of time; and he began to think that the King was so
intending it, and was bent upon making a royal Council a constitutional
impossibility.

But in some curious magnetic way other members of the Cabinet were now
beginning to be infected. The idea tickled their national vanity; and
though it was all put in a very amateurish way, many of them saw well
enough that for war to be retained as a solution of international
problems something on these lines would have to be done for it.
Syndicalism was merely a showing of the way.

"But, your Majesty," inquired the President of the Board of Ways and
Means, "might not England retaliate by declaring a Tariff war on us?"

"She might," said the King; "but not with the Liberals still in power;
they couldn't reduce themselves to absurdity in that way. Still,
supposing our declaration of war threw the Liberals out, what could the
others do? Our trade in English goods comes to us mainly through France
or Germany; and our own return trade is chiefly limited to our native
crockery, toys, wood-carving, and needlework, supposed survivals of our
peasant industries, which, as a matter of fact, are nearly all of them
manufactured for us in Birmingham, the home of Tariff Reform. In that
matter, by the taxing of articles which are only nominally made in
Jingalo, English trade would suffer more than ours; and there might, in
consequence, come about a real revival of our native crafts (an
advantage which I had not previously thought of)--lacking our usual
supply of the bogus article we should at last become honest in our
professions and truthful in our trademarks. Let the Minister for Home
Industries make a note of it."

"The prospect your Majesty holds out is certainly alluring," replied the
minister thus appealed to; "but if war is to teach us moral lessons,
surely we ought to have moral reasons for engaging in it as well as
business ones."

"Well, if you want them, you've got them!" said the King. "If moral
reasons were to count we ought to have been at war with England any day
for the last fifty years. England has become--if she has not always
been--a center of infection to the whole of Europe. Every disastrous