before, because he intended that we should pay his war
bills. Let him once get by England, and his sword would cut through our
fat, defenseless carcass like a knife through cheese.

A voice arrested my reverie, a voice close by in the crowd. It said,
"Well, I like the French. But I'll not cry much if England gets hers.
What's England done in this war, anyway?"

"Her fleet's keeping the Kaiser out of your front yard, for one thing,"
retorted another voice.

With assurance slightly wobbling and a touch of the nasal whine, the
first speaker protested, "Well, look what George III done to us. Bad as
any Kaiser."

"Aw, get your facts straight!" It was said with scornful force.
"Don't you know George III was a German? Don't you know it was
Hessians--they're Germans--he hired to come over here and kill Americans
and do his dirty work for him? And his Germans did the same dirty work
the Kaiser's are doing now. We've got a letter written after the battle
of Long Island by a member of our family they took prisoner there. And
they stripped him and they stole his things and they beat him down with
the butts of their guns--after he had surrendered, mind--when he was
surrendered and naked, and when he was down they beat him some more.
That's Germans for you. Only they've been getting worse while the rest
of the world's been getting better. Get your facts straight, man."

A number of us were now listening to this, and I envied the historian
his ingenious promptness--I have none--and I hoped for more of this
timely debate. But debate was over. The anti-Englishman faded to
silence. Either he was out of facts to get straight, or lacked what
is so pithily termed "come-back." The latter, I incline to think; for
come-back needs no facts, it is a self-feeder, and its entire absence
in the anti-Englishman looks as if he had been a German. Germans do
not come back when it goes against them, they bleat "Kamerad!"--or
disappear. Perhaps this man was a spy--a poor one, to be sure--yet doing
his best for his Kaiser: slinking about, peeping, listening, trying
to wedge the Allies apart, doing his little bit towards making friends
enemies, just as his breed has worked to set enmity between ourselves
and Japan, ourselves and Mexico, France and England, France and Italy,
England and Russia, between everybody and everybody else all the world
over, in the sacred name and for the sacred sake of the Kaiser. Thus has
his breed, since we occupied Coblen