‘That,’ he replied,’ will grow clear when we come to a right understanding of the baleful motive which inspired these men.  I have already said that I was not long in discovering it.  There was only one possible method of doing so—­and that was, by all means, by any means, to find out some condition or other common to every one of the victims before death.  It is true that I was unable to do this in some few cases, but where I failed, I was convinced that my failure was due to the insufficiency of the evidence at my disposal, rather than to the actual absence of the condition.  Now, let us take almost any two cases you will, and seek for this common condition:  let us take, for example, the first two that attracted the attention of the world—­the poor woman of the slums of Berlin, and the celebrated man of science.  Separated by as wide an interval as they are, we shall yet find, if we look closely, in each case the same pathetic tokens of the still uneliminated striae of our poor humanity.  The woman is not an old woman, for she has a “small young” family, which, had she lived, might have been increased:  notwithstanding which, she has suffered from hemiplegia, “partial paralysis.”  The professor, too, has had not one, but two, large families, and an “army of grand-children”:  but note well the startling, the hideous fact, that every one of his children is dead! The crude grave has gaped before the cock to suck in every one of those shrunk forms, so indigent of vital impulse, so pauper of civism, lust, so draughty, so vague, so lean—­but not before they have had time to dower with the ah and wo of their infirmity a whole wretched “army of grand-children.”  And yet this man of wisdom is on the point, in his old age, of marrying once again, of producing for the good of his race still more of this poor human stuff.  You see the lurid significance, the point of resemblance,—­you see it?  And, O heaven, is it not too sad?  For me, I tell you, the whole business has a tragic pitifulness too deep for words.  But this brings me to the discussion of a large matter.  It would, for instance, be interesting to me to hear what you, a modern European, saturated with all the notions of your little day, what you consider the supreme, the all-important question for the nations of Europe at this moment.  Am I far wrong in assuming that you would rattle off half a dozen of the moot points agitating rival factions in your own land, select one of them, and call that “the question of the hour”?  I wish I could see as you see; I wish to God I did not see deeper.  In order to lead you to my point, what, let me ask you, what precisely was it that ruined the old nations—­that brought, say Rome, to her knees at last?  Centralisation, you say, top-heavy imperialism, dilettante pessimism, the love of luxury.  At bottom, believe me, it was not one of these high-sounding things—­it was simply War; the sum total of the battles of centuries.