the Krupp gun.  It was also the victory of the peasant’s field over the Krupp factory.  By this time there was in the North German brain an awful inversion of all the legends and heroic lives that the human race has loved.  Prussia hated romance.  Chivalry was not a thing she neglected; it was a thing that tormented her as any bully is tormented by an unanswered challenge.  That weird process was completed of which I have spoken on an earlier page, whereby the soul of this strange people was everywhere on the side of the dragon against the knight, of the giant against the hero.  Anything unexpected—­the forlorn hopes, the eleventh-hour inspirations, by which the weak can elude the strong, and which take the hearts of happier men like trumpets—­filled the Prussian with a cold fury, as of a frustrated fate.  The Prussian felt as a Chicago pork butcher would feel if the pigs not only refused to pass through his machine, but turned into romantic wild boars, raging and rending, calling for the old hunting of princes and fit to be the crests of kings.

The Prussian saw these things and his mind was made up.  He was silent; but he laboured:  laboured for three long years without intermission at the making of a military machine that should cut out of the world for ever such romantic accident or random adventure; a machine that should cure the human pigs for ever of any illusion that they had wings.  That he did so plot and prepare for an attack that should come from him, anticipating and overwhelming any resistance, is now, even in the documents he has himself published, a fact of common sense.  Suppose a man sells all his lands except a small yard containing a well; suppose in the division of the effects of an old friend he particularly asks for his razors; suppose when a corded trunk is sent him he sends back the trunk, but keeps the cord.  And then suppose we hear that a rival of his has been lassoed with a rope, his throat then cut, apparently with a razor, and his body hidden in a well, we do not call in Sherlock Holmes to project a preliminary suspicion about the guilty party.  In the discussions held by the Prussian Government with Lord Haldane and Sir Edward Grey we can now see quite as plainly the meaning of the things that were granted and the things that were withheld, the things that would have satisfied the Prussian plotter and the things that did not satisfy him.  The German Chancellor refused an English promise not to be aggressive and asked instead for an English promise to be neutral.  There is no meaning in the distinction, except in the mind of an aggressor.  Germany proposed a pacific arrangement which forbade England to form a fighting alliance with France, but permitted Germany to retain her old fighting alliance with Austria.  When the hour of war came she used Austria, used the old fighting alliance and tried to use the new idea of English neutrality.  That is to say, she used the rope, the razor, and the well.