“I could not sleep,” he wrote, “on account of this man and his talk and the streak of hatred in his talk.  He distressed me not because he seemed exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary.  I realized that he was more human than I was, and that only killing and killing could come out of such humanity.  I thought of the great ugly guns I had seen, and of the still greater guns he had talked about, and how gloatingly he thought of the destruction they could do.  I felt as I used to feel about that infernal stallion that had killed a man with its teeth and feet, a despairing fear, a sense of monstrosity in life.  And this creature who had so disturbed me was only a beastly snuffy little man in an ill-fitting frock-coat, who laid his knife and fork by their tips on the edge of his plate, and picked his teeth with gusto and breathed into my face as he talked to me.  The commonest of representative men.  I went about that Westphalian country after that, with the conviction that headless, soulless, blood-drinking metal monsters were breeding all about me.  I felt that science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest of black dragons.  They were crouching here and away there in France and England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks are hooded. . . .  And I had never thought very much about them before, and there they were, waiting until some human fool like that frock-coated thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a million, saw fit to call them out to action.  Just out of hatred and nationalism and faction. . . .”

Then came a queer fancy.

“Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see it more and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for the happiness of life.  It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an enormous plot of the rebel metals against sensation.  That is why in particular half-living people seem to love these things.  La Ferriere was a fastness of the kind of tyranny that passes out of human experience, the tyranny of the strong man over men.  Essen comes, the new thing, the tyranny of the strong machine. . . .

“Science is either slave or master.  These people—­I mean the German people and militarist people generally—­have no real mastery over the scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ride.  The monster of steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe captive.  It has persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they must follow the logic of its path.  Whither? . . .  Only kingship will ever master that beast of steel which has got loose into the world.  Nothing but the sense of unconquerable kingship in us all will ever dare withstand it. . . .  Men must be kingly aristocrats—­ it isn’t may be now, it is must be—­or, these confederated metals, these things of chemistry and metallurgy, these explosives and mechanisms, will trample the blood and life out of our race into mere red-streaked froth and filth. . . .”