pring at the throat of Europe that
she has made. The Servian assassination has nothing to do with it,
save that it accidentally struck the hour. Months and years before
that, Germany was crouching for her spring. In one respect the war she
has incubated is the old assault of Xerxes, of Alexander, of Napoleon,
of every one who has been visited by the dangerous dream of world
conquest. Only, never before has the dream been taught to a people on
such a scale, not merely because of the vast modern apparatus, but
much more because no subjects of any despot have ever been so
politically docile and credulous as the Germans.

In another respect this war resembles strikingly our own and the
French Revolution. All three were prepared and fomented by books, by
teachings from books. The American brain seized hold of certain
doctrines and generalizations of Locke, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui and
Beccaria concerning the rights of man and the consent of the governed.
The French brain nourished and inspired itself with some theorems of
the encyclopedists and of Rousseau about man's natural innocence and
the social contract. The Teutonic brain assimilated some diplomatic
and philosophic precepts laid down by Machiavelli, Nietzsche and
Treitschke. Indeed, Fichte, during the Winter of 1807-08, at the
University of Berlin, made an address to the German people which may
be accounted the first famous academic harbinger and source of the
present Teutonic state of mind. Here the parallel stops. With America
and France, war made way for independence, liberty and freedom,
political and moral; Germany would establish everywhere her absolute
military despotism. We shall reach in due course the full statement of
her creed; we are not ready for it yet.

VII

Often of late I have thought of those twenty-one locomotives moving
along the bank of the Rhine. They were a symbol. They stood for the
House of Hohenzollern; they carried Caesar and all his fortunes, which
had begun long before locomotives were invented. July 19, 1870, is one
of the dates that does not remain of the same size, but grows, has not
done growing yet, will be one of History's enormous dates before it is
done growing. The heavier descendants of those locomotives have been
lugging to France a larger destruction, and more hideous, than their
ancestors dragged there; but this new freight belongs to the same
haul, forms part of one vast organic materialistic growth, and
spiritual