“But I have,” Frederick declared.  “I am a genuine child of the times, and I am not ashamed of it.  The greatest intellects of the day are all in a state of inner ferment.  Every individual of significance is just as divided against himself as humanity on the whole.  I refer, of course, only to the leading European races.  I embody the Pope and Luther, William II and Robespierre, Bismarck and Bebel, the spirit of the American millionaire and the enthusiasm for poverty that was the glory of St. Francis of Assisi.  I am the maddest progressive of my time and the maddest reactionary.  I despise Americanism, and yet I see in the great American world-invasion, the dominion of the exploiter, something similar to one of the biggest works that Hercules performed in the Augean stables.”

“Here’s to chaos!” cried Wilhelm.

They touched glasses.

“Yes,” said Frederick, “but only if it gives birth to a dancing heaven, or, at least, a dancing star.”

“Beware of dancing stars,” said Wilhelm, laughing and looking at Frederick significantly.

“What can a man do if his blood is on fire with that cursed poison?”

Under the influence of the champagne, the sudden confession seemed as natural to Wilhelm as to Frederick.

“‘There once was a rat in a cellar hole,’” Wilhelm quoted.

“Of course, of course,” said Frederick, “but what is to be done against it?” Then he turned the conversation to general questions again.  “Why should a man keep himself intact when he has lost his ideals?  I have made tabula rasa of my past.  I have drowned Germany in the ocean.  Is Germany really the great, strong, united Empire?  Is it not rather the booty over which God and the devil—­I was about to say the Kaiser and the Pope—­are still wrangling?  You will admit that for more than a thousand years, the unifying principle was the imperial principle.  People talk of the Thirty Years’ War as having disintegrated Germany.  I should say it was the thousand years’ war, of which the Thirty Years’ War was only the worst excess, the worst paroxysm of that plague of religious dissension with which the Germans are inoculated.  And without unity, Germany is a very queer structure.  Its owners, or its inhabitants, don’t possess it, except in a slight degree.  And the believer with the tiara at Rome tugs and tugs at it, levying extortion under the threat of destroying the entire structure; until he is actually able to buy it back with the compound interest that has been accumulating.  In that case nothing will be left but a heap of ruins.  One could shriek and tear one’s hair because the German does not see that in his basement there is an awful Bluebeard’s chamber.  And not for women alone.  He has no inkling of what an arsenal of clerical instruments of torture lie there ready for use—­clerical, because they lie ready for the infliction of horrible corporal martyrdom in the service of a bloody, fanatical, papistical belief.  Woe, when the door to the Bluebeard chamber opens.  They are continually picking at the lock.  Then we shall witness all the sanguinary horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, the degenerate slaughter-house cruelty of an inquisition.”