we find him disguised as a postillion, cowering abjectly behind the door of a carriage whilst the French people whom he had crammed with glory for a quarter of a century were seeking to tear him limb from limb.  His success had made him the enemy of every country except France:  his failure made him the enemy of the human race.  And that was why Europe rose up finally and smashed him, although the English Government which profited by that operation oppressed the English people for thirty years afterwards more sordidly than Napoleon would have oppressed them, and its Allies replaced him on the throne of France by an effete tyrant not worthy to unlace his shoe latchet.  Nothing can finally redeem Militarism.  When even genius itself takes that path its end is still destruction.  When mere uppishness takes it the end is not changed, though it may be reached more precipitately and disastrously.

The Kaiser.

Prussia has talked of that path for many years as the one down which its destiny leads it.  Its ruler, with the kid gloves he called mailed fists and the high class tailoring he called shining armour, did much of the talking, though he is in practice a most peaceful teetotaller, as many men with their imaginations full of the romance of war are.  He had a hereditary craze for playing at soldiers; and he was and is a naive suburban snob, as the son of The Englishwoman would naturally be, talking about “the Hohenzollerns” exactly as my father’s people in Dublin used to talk about “the Shaws.”  His stage walk, familiar through the cinematograph, is the delight of romantic boys, and betrays his own boyish love of the Paradeschritt.  It is frightful to think of the powers which Europe, in its own snobbery, left in the hands of this Peter Pan; and appalling as the results of that criminal levity have been, yet, being by no means free from his romantic follies myself, I do not feel harshly toward Peter, who, after all, kept the peace for over twenty-six years.  In the end his talk and his games of soldiers in preparation for a toy conquest of the world frightened his neighbours into a league against him; and that league has now caught him in just such a trap as his strategists were laying for his neighbours.  We please ourselves by pretending that he did not try to extricate himself, and forced the war on us; but that is not true.  When he realized his peril he tried hard enough; but when he saw that it was no use he accepted the situation and dashed at his enemies with an infatuate courage not unworthy of the Hohenzollern tradition.  Blinded as he was by the false ideals of his class, it was the best he could do; for there is always a chance for a brave and resolute warrior, even when his back is not to the wall but to the Russians.