66 No one on this side of the water fully knows or realizes what the League and the Covenant actually contains. The thing to do is to adopt the Covenant, Treaty and all, and fight the other difficulties out afterwards. Other newspapers that express their disappointment at the President's generalizations are not so willing to accept the Treaty on trust. The New York Sun," a consistent and vigorous critic of the President's course in Paris, and particularly of the League of Nations, notes "with pleasure the absence from the President's remarks of that tone of defiance, of uncompromising demand for acquiescence in his personal views, which has characterized some of his previous utterances;" but it describes the speech as what "might have been expected from an impassioned revivalist, and not from a statesman and practical legislator discussing an American question in the American Capitol." The "Sun" adds that " Mr. Wilson's address is conceived throughout precisely as if he had been sent abroad by his country to bring about that revolution in the world's system of government which has been his individual idea, his self-determined purpose, and his self-appointed task." Supporters of the President and earnest advocates of the League may resent some of the comment upon the President's speech, as opponents of the League resent some of the comments upon the League's critics in the Senate. No one, however, can very well resent a piece of such good-humored comment as Don Marquis makes in his "colyum," the "Sun Dial," in the New York " Evening Sun." He has some verses about the President's speech and its reception in the Senate, based on the President's question concerning the League, "Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?" It is a series of four stanzas, ach followed by a chorus. The chorus after the first stanza represents the President as saying: "O sign my League! O sign my League! Then "wicked Cabot Lodge" replies for the bold and bad Senate, and this is is version of the chorus: "I will not sign! I will not sign! The I will not sign! I will not sign! for I will not sign! I will not sign! Appearing to many as an appeal to sentimentalism rather than to reason, a skillful employment of the art of rhetoric to enlist the idealism of the American people on behalf of the Covenant without any encumbrances of fact, the President's speech is almost everywhere praised as a piece of English. Thus the Chicago Daily Tribune" refers to "the spell of his eloquence," and declares that his address" is especially moving with reference to that clean and valorous achievement with which our soldiers and sailors thrilled our National heart.” But the same journal is also impressed with the tendency of Mr. Wilson to use "liberal poetic license," and thus comments upon the President's preceding speech in New York: Mr. Wilson's latest remarks must be taken purely as poetry.... Let us quote: "It This homesickness] was still more softened by the pride that I had in discovering that America had at last convinced the world of her true character. I was welcome because they had seen with their own eyes what America had done for the world. They had deemed her selfish. They had deemed her devoted to material interests. And they had seen her boys come across the water with a vision even more beautiful than that which they conceived when they had entertained dreams of liberty and peace." If the President is about to try to sing the American people into a dreamland of that sort, sane men must indeed combat him promptly and vigorously. The Wisconsin "State Journal" comments upon the Chicago "Tribune's" remarks by saying of the New York speech: As poetry it is poor enough, but as a statement of what most of the American Army and Nation believed they were fighting for it comes "much closer" to literal truth than anything we recall in the Chicago "Tribune's war editorial matter. Most defenders of the President, like the Wisconsin "State Journal," follow the principle that the best defense is an offensive. Thus the Louisville "CourierJournal" speaks of the "twaddle and cant in the Senate; and the Atlanta "Constitution" defends the League by defends the League by calling its opponents in the Senate "recalcitrants, political buzzards, and partisan mountebanks," and attributes criticism of it to partisan motives by saying: There is opposition to it in the United States Senate, and it will continue as long as it can harass the President and the Democratic Administration or disturb the political sentiment of the country. The New York "World," which among has been the most consistent newspapers and vigorous defender of the President's policies, so that it has sometimes been called the mouthpiece of the Administration, describes the President's address to the Senate as a "call to duty." It says: Mr. Wilson has never been more felicitous in any of his public utterances than he was yesterday when he explained the stupendous difficulties with which the Paris Conference had been compelled to grapple in rebuilding the peace of the world, and the reasons why it had been found imperative to make the League of Nations the keystone of the structure... ... The President's address is more than a plea for the Treaty and the League. It is a call to duty no less imperative than that which he made to Congress The "World" in another editorial likens the opposition to the Versailles Treaty to the opposition, as described by Hamilton, to the Jay Treaty; and denounces still later the Republicans in the Senate by ascribing to them a trivial purpose, saying: Some of the opposition Senators seem to think that "reservations" is a blessed word like Mesopotamia, and that it makes no difference in particular what the reservations are, provided the Senate asserts its power and tinkers the Treaty. The New York "Sun" is not at all troubled by the argument that any reservations may require the sending of the Treaty back to the Peace Conference. There is a good deal of doubt in the minds of critics of the Treaty whether that would be necessary; but the "Sun," saying that the conviction strengthens day by day that after reservations are added the Covenant will go before the Peace Conference again, exclaims: All the better if it does. What the American people know they are going to do and are not going to do after the Treaty ratifying and the League tinkering are over should also be unmistakably clear to all the world now as well as later. If reservations are made, the New . York "Tribune," which advocates ratification with reservations, believes that other nations will not object. speech some newspapers take the occasion In commenting upon the President's of the Treaty, and particularly of the to explain in their own terms the nature League. Thus, in commending the Presi dent's speech, the Grand Rapids "News declares of the Covenant of the League of Nations that "it is a big, vital, throbbing, momentous instrument, fearfully powerful for good or for evil, pregnant with hopes." And then more specifically adds: Throughout its long history Europe has known only force.... Force, and force only, can dominate the people over there now. And it is force in the supreme that is latent in the League of Nations. ... existence to the founder of the "World," Joseph Pulitzer. Its remarks might apply to the political discussion of other subjects as well as to that of the League and of the Treaty. The "Post-Dispatch" says: Although some of the leaders of the opposition are moved by unworthy motives, it would be a gross blunder to assume that all doubts and fears are based upon unworthy motives. There are thousands who have genuine doubts and fears and who do not understand. Sincere doubters must be handled with sympathy and courtesy. Sincere ques tions must be answered with friendly reasoning. We believe that a great, an overwhelming, majority of the people want the League, but in this crisis, when peace and prosperity and even civilization hang in the balance, no arrogant mistakes should be made. Let the opposition do the blundering. A WONDERFUL DINNER A distinguished and influential citizen of New York who desires that his name shall not be mentioned has given us, at our request, the following account of a recent after-the-war experience. In these days when all thoughtful Americans are anxious and troubled about the vast and complicated problems, political, economic, and human, that have arisen out of the war, such an experience as here related strengthens the hope and stirs the reasonable optimism with which every one of us must enter upon the task of reconstruction.-THE EDITORS. WAS honored by an invitation to shoulders had descended the extraordi at in varied I dinner lately. My hats were the offi-marily difficult task of making soldiers of laid my line life and in a good many cers and men of a company of infantry of a famous New York regiment lately demobilized. It was not a charitable affair. After a long service overseas the company's fund had something left over, and so the company voted itself a farewell dinner in a large New York hotel. Officers and men came on time to the rendezvous and almost at the appointed hour we sat down. Some were in uniform, more in mufti. There were two other civilians present besides myself. One of these had lost his son, killed in action, a lieutenant in the company; the other had devoted his energies to keeping together during the war wives, parents, and friends of the boys who had gone overseas. My son had captained the company during the days of its fiercest fighting in the Argonne, and had turned over his command when severely wounded. I was an outsider, of course, yet long residence in New York and an intimate knowledge of its East Side had given me more than a fair knowledge of the material of which this band of men was composed. Men demobilized in New York scatter quickly, and it said much for the strength of the new tie that a common cause and a common danger had created that over one hundred men of that company and all of its officers that remained alive gathered round the table for their farewell to each other that night. As I looked down the long table something of the wonder of that gathering, something of its immense significance, came to me. As the evening passed (we met at 7:30 and did not separate until after midnight) this feeling deepened. Less than two years before I had seen these very men taken almost without notice or warning out of the great city's life of which they were a part. Raw and most unwarlike were they then, many of them understanding little of the great world movement that was laying such violent hands on their bodies and their souls; some of them not wanting to understand it, only going to Camp Upton because they had to go. Some were American in name only, some were not even American in name, and many of them could not speak English. The officers on whose young company ' them were most of them Plattsburg men. They brought little military experience to their task, it is true, but, in my judgment, they had brought something more than that. Generally speaking, they were men of some culture. Good schools and universities had given them some knowledge of men, and very many of them had already won a moderate success in the profession of life. Our hastily raised Army had, of necessity, to be a democratic army. The iron discipline of an army taking years to train could not be given it. It might be lacking in many things that the professional soldier considers indispensable. But three things it had to have if it was to win at all-a fighting spirit, confidence in itself, and belief in its good cause. Could volunteer Plattsburg men do this great work for drafted New York? Could they infuse into thousands of men who had to have even the word of command translated to them these three great essential things that should spell victory for the cause of mankind on the long-contested battlefields of France and Flanders? I spent some unforgetable days shortly after we declared war with Colonel Wolf, Commandant at Plattsburg. I saw and had the high honor of speaking to the two most wonderful bodies of young men any man ever faced in this country. I felt their spirit, I realized their mighty power. I knew then that America could draw from her sons officers capable of training and inspiring in peace and leading in war her democratic millions of drafted men. This was Colonel Wolf's conviction, and he was right. But let me get back to our dinner. The last gathering of men who had trained, toiled, suffered, died, and conquered together, army dicipline for them was now over, many were already back in civilian life, but few were in uniform, and every man there might say his say; and say it they did, not officers only, but non-coms. and buck privates. They had a right good dinner, and plenty of tobacco and light beer were on hand. The bars were down, and it was time for joke and story and song. As the evening grew later, my amazement grew. Many a dinner had I been lands-college dinners, racing dinners, club dinners, dinners of all sorts. If at such gatherings here and there a man drank too much and showed it or told a questionable story, if now and then there was noisy talk, no one resented it, no one was surprised. But here at this company dinner of disbanded soldiers there was nothing of the sort. I speak the simple truth, amazing as it is. Not one vulgar story (and scores of most ex cellent stories were told). Not one unkind story, though there were plentiful jokes on men by officers and on officers by men. I I had thought that such things might be, but as I sat there and tried to realize what was passing before me I found it hard to keep the tears from my eyes. was seeing the actuality of human brotherhood, born and grown to power and high efficiency, finding its fine selfhood in unselfish service for men. The hour was growing late. Officers had praised men and men had chaffed, and praised their officers and each other. There had been wit a plenty, and the brave fellows left under the sod in France had not been forgotten. Some had to go far that night. The company had to do what it had never done in France-break up. A big fellow who had not spoken dur ing the evening raised himself up at the foot of the table. He leaned on his crutches, for he had lost a leg at the hip, and one side of his face was still covered with plaster. "I've got to get back to the hospital,' said he, "but before I go I want to say something. When I was drafted and went to Upton, I could not say one word of English and I was only twenty-five per cent American. I have lost a leg and part of my face, and my people say I have lost a lot, but I do not say so. I have gained a lot. I am glad I went to the war. I am one hundred per cent American now." And so came to an end a wonderful evening. The boys themselves could not realize how wonderful it was, but to me it seemed the greatest dinner I had ever attended in my life. There are new tasks awaiting us, new and great problems to solve, but surely a loving God has given to us a new power and a new unity with which to meet and conquer them. Of this I felt sure as I went to my hotel that night. 元 JUST FIRE OF LIFE BY HAROLD TROWBRIDGE PULSIFER Let us sit here, side by side You, who say, 66 The flame has died;" I, who burn eternally. Let us reason out the way And the road that we must tread. It is still too soon to say, Still too soon while you and I Dream of deathless dreams and know And on earth, all things that grow. Look, your hand is close to mine So I sat here, close to you, On that day the vision came And the world that once we knew I have kept the vision clear Child and woman, wistful-eyed, If you cannot bear to smile, You, who say, "The flame has died;" Weep, and let the cleansing rain JOYCE KILMER, POET AND PATRIOT UST one year ago this July, Sergeant Joyce Kilmer was shot through the brain as he pressed ahead of his regiment, the "Fighting Sixty-Ninth," of New York, to locate German machine guns hidden in a copse beside the river Ourcq. His act won him, posthumously, the Croix de Guerre. But it won his compatriots a far greater thing-a concrete symbol of all that efficient, practical idealism which is perhaps the dearest dream of our democracy. The memory of this young poet-patriot of our latter days fathers one more legend to set beside the bright records of Rupert Brooke, of John McCrea or Charles Péguy, a legend which Americans are proud to own and will be slow to forget. One wondered at the time if that keen sense of personal loss among the greatest variety of people-scattered youths who I had known him at college, newspaper men who were in the habit of borrowing tobacco at his office in the New York "Times," priests, soldiers who had fought at his side, as well as the men and women who count in literature on both of the Atlantic-could prove the perma nent, lasting judgment. For, after all, this young heroic figure had not yet reached his thirty-second birthday, and the world was struggling through one of the most momentous years in its entire history. But it has lasted. It has endured through all the stupendous issues of life and death and war and peace and reconstruction. For Joyce Kilmer was not, as sometimes happens, a poet in spite of his life, nor even a poet for whose life any excuse had to be made. He never wished, in fact, nor was able to separate his life from his poetry. That is why when the hour of national hazard fell he saw with so uncompromising a clearness the one sun-smitten path: "It is wrong for a poet BY KATHERINE BRÉGY AUTHOR OF THE POETS' CHANTRY," ETC. see." to be listening to elevated trains when there are screaming shells to hear, and to be sleeping soft in a bed when there's a cot in a dugout awaiting him and the bright face of danger to dream about and Perhaps, also, that is why the passing of this American singer is now soberly reckoned among the great losses to literature of a war which in all the older countries was so inevitably fatal to the young, eager spirits of art. For our own country it was emphatically the greatest literary loss suffered in that brief crusade overseas. Before those ten stressful months with our Expeditionary Forces, Joyce Kilmer had proved himself, not merely one of the foremost lyrists and most versatile newspapermen of the United States, but also a man who was helping to define the highest ideals of Americanism. He was of those who asked much of life; and, as usual, life was quick to return the compliment. Born in New Brunswick, December 6, 1886, of a family claiming English, Irish, and Scotch descent, and still, in the words of his literary executor, boasting "a Colonial Dame on both sides," Joyce lived through most phases of contemporary American thought, adding a few distinctly contributory phases of his own. He had, of course, his young romance a quite idyllic one, which culminated in his marriage to Miss Aline Murray, a stepdaughter of Dr. Henry Mills Alden, as soon as he was graduated from Columbia University. The matter of a career which then imperiously faced him he took less as a battle to be fought than as a game to be won-a vastly interesting, delightfully intricate game, to be played always with sportsmanlike rules and usually with sportsmanlike raillery. Joyce he was always that, and that only, to his friends-was not timid of experiments. By the time he was twenty-five he had exercised his versatilities as a Latin master, a maker of dictionaries, a poet of love's blossomy summer, a lay reader in the Episcopal Church, a hot and talkative Socialist, an all-round newspaper man, and a rather superior and sophisticated literary æsthete. and From the year 1912 he began to find himself-not that so blithely responsive a nature as his could ever be described as really "settled." At this time he joined the staff of the New York "Times began that series of brilliant reviews and interviews which quickly revealed to American readers a new man of letters. The next spring brought one of the great sorrows of Joyce Kilmer's life, when the touch of infantile paralysis blighted the body of his little much-loved daughter, Rose. A few months later he laid forcible claim to what proved one of his most permanent joys. For it was then that he entered, with all of a convert's zeal but none of a convert's crudity, that old, old Catholic Church-so mystical at once and so practical!-to which he ever after gave a young and proud allegiance. "If what I write nowadays is considered poetry," he declared in one of his last letters written from France, "then I became a poet in November, 1913." That is to say, he became then the greatest American representative of that little band of "modern mediævalists" which on the other side of the Atlantic included the Chestertons, Hilaire Belloc, and a group of younger singers-all sworn to recapture something of the robust faith, the fine fervor, and heroic folly of Merrie England. But he was much more than this. Popular judgment has singled out Kilmer as a poet of the ideal realities of life, and popular judgment has been, in the main, right. The ideal realities were his goal; and he showed the most astonishing verve in tracking them into unexpected corners. He celebrated (upon a wager!) the hidden glories of the deli catessen shop. He immortalized the sleepy and apologetic commuter. He found the pathos of "The House With Nobody In It," the proud poetry of "The Snow Man in the Yard," the tender and humorous poignancy of Dave Lilly's bibulous ghost swinging his shadowy line after phantom trout. All these colloquial notes he struck with enormous felicity-and consequent popularity. He had, in fact, the most ideal reasons for keeping close to the great humble, loving heart, not merely of America, but of the whole world. He wanted to show forth the glory of the simple, universal things which he had found after no little trying out of the more complex and exotic things. Myriads of poets had sung the praise of childhood, but here was one who had the courage to sing the praise of marriage and of home, the joys of daily work and daily faith in God and man. For a while, indeed, Joyce became almost radical in his ferocious conservatism. 66 But every one who knew his essays or his inimitable conversation must have been aware that here was a critic of broad knowledge and exuberant humor. He was far less easily satisfied than were his readers, and not at all content to remain, as many of them would have had him, merely a "familiar " or domestic laureate. Perhaps the first hint of that larger immortality in store for the young Kilmer was the title poem of his volume called "Trees," published in 1914. That sunny and singing lyric achieved the distinction of being almost universally memorized, and it is already accepted as one of the classics of American poetry. There were other things to warn the elect that here was a new aspirant for the Siege Perilous of high poetry-arrestingly fine things, like that vision in a brief Christmas poem which pictured the clouds rocked with song "As if the sky were turning bird." Over and above this, it became suddenly evident that into the much-abused field of religious poetry Joyce Kilmer was bringing an inspired passion and-actually!-originality. A new, or rather a very ancient and almost forgotten, fragrance hung about his half-playful, halfserious songs of the star-crowned Virgin, of St. Michael, "the thorn on the rosebush of God," and of St. Valentine, whom he celebrated in a most ingenious bit of vers libre. He sang ballads, too, with the tender familiarity of the Middle Age jongleur about them, and the wistful brotherhood of our modern age. Here is a fragment from that deliciously naïve "Gates and Doors:" "There was a gentle hostler The night Our Lady came. So let the gate swing open To you across the snow." Joyce Kilmer was a good worker, a good player, and a good fighter at times, but his sympathy was-for a manphenomenal. He hated scarcely anything in the world except respectable hypocrites and those decadent rhymesters," so mildly, delicately vile," who, in his opinion, brought poetry into disrepute among honest men. For the rest he was the kindest of critics, lavish, even sumptuous of praise wherever he detected real poetic sincerity. His office at the "Times" was crowded with literary aspirants, both old and his desk stacked with letters young, seeking advice or encouragement. "No poet has any right in the world to knock the work of another poet who is honest," he once declared. And this sympathy, this broad and human idealism, was foreordained to spring up like a flame at the call of an outraged world. Joyce saw something of the war at first hand when in the autumn of 1914 he went to England to bring his mother safely back to the States. But it was probably not until after the Lusitania tragedy-which he commemorated in his haunting poem, "The White Ships and the Red" that the call became personal and not to be gainsaid. There was a gasp of surprise in literary circles when, almost immediately after the United States declared war in the spring of 1917, Joyce Kilmer began drilling with the Seventh Regiment of New York. But when a few months later he had himself transferred to the 165th Infantry (the old Sixty-ninth of New York) and sailed for France as a private because he was unwilling to lose precious time studying to be "an officer in charge of conscripts," surprise was swallowed up in the heroic and wholly Kilmerian rightness of the thing. It was not that he was a headlong enthusiast, quick on the trigger, not counting the cost. He had small opinion of "blind courage" and had just told a group of college boys that "only an enlightened man and only a good man can be brave." Over and above this he was an enormously efficient person-he had to be with that young, quickly growing family in the Larchmont home!-and at this time he was easily doing three men's work. But it was his strength, and not less his good fortune, that the business of life never drove the dream from his heart. He loved the fighting saints and the fighting poets, and years earlier he had sung the praise of that divine and healing "Folly" which our modern world was said to have forgotten: 66 "Lord, crush our knowledge utterly And make us humble, simple men, So when America started upon the supreme crusade of the twentieth century, Joyce Kilmer was willing to pay any price to claim his part in winning it. Being, as we have said, a practical ideal ist, he saw no other way but to resign his editorial work, cancel his lecture engage ments, leave his last book of poems in press, and bid farewell to his wife, to the little children (Kenton, Deborah, Michael, and Christopher), and to the friends he knew so well how to love. It was one of the finest examples in American letters of what Henry Arthur Jones once called "the madness which keeps the world alive." All Joyce Kilmer's life was a pressing toward the deeper seas, the more distant horizons, and in France he had but one goal-the front. He frustrated every effort of the regimental authorities to keep him in the reasonably safe, although far from bomb-proof, duties of the statis tical department, finally getting himself transferred to the intelligence section, which, as he declared, was "the most fas cinating work possible." As he was on dangerous work possible, and eventually, duty, it was also the most of course, the work which cost his life. When he left New York, he had natu rally expected to keep on writing from promised a history of his own regiment. time to time, and among other things had 66 observation But he soon became too absorbed and shaken by the new life to think of this. He was not interested any more in writ ing, he wrote to his friend "Bob" Holexpression of something beautiful." And liday, "except in so far as writing is the the poems among which he now lived were mostly "unwritten and undiscussed." But out of the crowded drama of his daily life there came at least four works of art. One of them was that tender and dramatic sketch of a night's billet in the home Ireland." The other three were poemsof a French peasant woman called "Holy poems of the moment, with the poignancy of heart-beats through them, yet all poems which seem likely to fulfill the soldier's wish that he might write about the great war only such things as people would want to read " a century after it is over." Placed beside the sublimated "bluff," home, these verses are an inexhaustible the careful cheerfulness, of his letters commentary upon the real Joyce Kilmer. He lived through the cold and hunger, the almost inevitable touch of pneumonia, the long marches of that first winter of our troops in France and out of it allcame that "Prayer of a Soldier," which has the indomitable sweetness and sim lo plicity of an early Christian martyr: My shoulders ache beneath my pack (Lie easier, Cross, upon His back). I march with feet that burn and smart (Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart). Men shout at me who may not speak (They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek). Lord, thou didst suffer more for me Then he went on duty in a dugout, memory diers were suddenly killed by the explo- Upon his will he binds a radiant chain, believing. The verses of many a young British soldier recently at the frontLieutenant Nichols and his friends Siegried Sassoon and "Bobby" Graves, for instance-have shown how hard. But Joyce Kilmer kept unshaken and unshakable that bright "sanity" and "faith" which he was always praising in the brave French people around him. He believed in very might and deed that he and the men fighting at his side were peacemakers— that " by new and bloody paths "the world was coming again "upon the old road to paradise." Up this steep road he himself charged in the vanguard. He did not lose, but gave, his life. der COST ་ ། THE HERMIT OF AMERONGEN BY VICENTE BLASCO-IBÁÑEZ AUTHOR OF THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE," "THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL," ETC. EUROPE has been so absorbed in the problems of peace that she has forgotten the chief offender of the war. ert The fugitive Kaiser lives tranquilly in a castle in Holland, and only now and then do the newspapers mention this sorry personage, whom we may style" the hermit of Amerongen." One can understand how those who have seen the war from a distance and know its horrors only by hearsay are not greatly interested in the fate of the most sinister figure of the war. But we who have seen his work close at hand, the greatest mass of atrocities since the ravages of Attila, cannot quietly endure seeing the deviser and executor of these crimes live like a middle-class gentleman spending his summer in the country, suffering no other punishment than his own rage at the loss of his huge, absurd power and at his shameful flight. I have a right to speak of this man with complete liberty. I never believed in him. I always feared that his theatrical poses and his pedantries, the result of superficial learning, would wind up in a tragic fashion for the world. Twenty Tyears ago, when so many gullible persons were hailing him as the superman, I had the honor to be arrested and prosecuted in Spain (at the instigation of the German Ambassador, no doubt) for an article in which I compared him to Nero. Since then I have spoken of him in a similar vein in several of my novels. My ideas have changed somewhat since then, and I must ask Nero's pardon for having compared him with William II. Nero confined himself to burning a few sections of just one city, and besides he knew how to die. Almost as irritating as the atrocities of the war is the boundless admiration which just six years ago the general public felt for this chatterbox, so devoted to speechmaking, to toasts, and to sermons, who participated with godlike self-sufficiency For thirty years he paraded before the world as the perfect man of war, directing maneuvers that made old strategists smile discreetly, terrifying the world with his ominous frown and his bragging, And when the decisive moment arrived his generals passed him about from one to another like a ball; nobody wanted him near, for fear of his absurd counsels and his wild projects that amounted to orders. Moreover, his army was a heritage; Moltke and Roon had given it to itage; Moltke and Roon had given it to him; he had only enlarged and perfected him; he had only enlarged and perfected it, like a young capitalist who rounds out the fortune his father and grandfather began as poor men. But the navy was his creation. There is no disputing that. It was he who exclaimed," Germany's future lies upon the water." No doubt he had numerous collaborators of more ability than he, but we will pay no attention to this. Let us grant that he was able to squeeze the second greatest fleet of the world out of his country in a few years. He deserves to have his paternity recognized, for the creator is worthy of his work. In its future writings history will be at a loss to know which was more cowardly and which ended in a more shameful manner, the German fleet or the sovereign_who created it. Throughout the war the huge German ships stayed hidden in port, protected by nets and mines, like an ostrich that buries its head in the sand to avoid seeing its dangers. And finally they surrendered without the least struggle, with a lack of dignity that offended the professional pride of the Allied sailors intrusted with taking them prisoners. The only active part of this navy of William II's was the submarine, against unarmed or careless boats, killing with certainty and without danger, like an assassin who lies in wait for a victim that he knows cannot return the attack. "But there is his work of peace," some say. "The development of the commerce, industry, and education that has taken place in Germany during his reign.' I recognize this, too, as an indisputable fact. But it is one more plagiarism of this dilettante who has spent his life imitating others, and then presenting his imitations as pure German discoveries. The only thing original and sincere about him is his medieval personality, his romantic mystic mentality which makes him consider himself the favorite child of the heavens. God, according to him, is interested only in the prosperity of the Hohenzollern family, and in that of Germany by consequence of her having the honor to be ruled by them. All his words and his acts have been in accord with this belief. There could be no simpler conception of humanity than his: all the world subject to Germany is "the salt of the earth;" Germany subject to the Junkers and the innumerable princelings, and above this haughty, proud nobility himself as Sovereign Lord. Warrior and Christian like Lohengrin, bloody and religious like the ancient tribal heads, in his philosophic moments he gave vent to the most inexplicable incoherencies. We will pass over his evangelical exhortation to the troops that went |