prepare confidently for the future? How can he plan long ahead as we
do? I have always read that this is the reason things are so steady
and stable in Germany and so uncertain and wabbling in America. This
uncertainty hanging over a republic unsettles its population. You
have panics, lynchings, graft. We are free of such scourges. Our
Government is always the same unit and to be relied on. If new
policies are begun, it is there to carry them through to their
logical end, even if it takes a generation or longer. You have
always new statesmen with new ideas. We no sooner learn to know of
one of your politicians than he is dropped and we must read about
another in control. How does that make for any well-considered and
thoroughly demonstrated plans? Would it not be the natural result
that the German people are completely contented and the American
people are always discontented?"

Rudolph's excited pronouncements ran along a different line,
interchanged with voluminous whiffs of tobacco.

"Under our Government, Herr Kirtley, the German flag is seen in all
parts of the globe. And wherever it is seen, it is respected,
feared. Who ever sees the American flag? Even _I_ don't know what it
looks like. It is not feared. It is only noticed out of voluntary
courtesy. And a nation can't be really great without an army like
ours. The army is the spine of the country. It makes a country a
vertebrate. What would even Germany be without its army? Almost
nothing. The army consolidates, trains, disciplines. It gives us
health, good constitutions, industrious habits, exactness. It makes
a nation superior because it fortifies human effort. In the constant
changing of our regiments about to different sections of the Empire,
our soldiers come to be well acquainted everywhere. They make
friends and are at home in every direction. They learn to realize
how great we are and this strengthens the German feeling and makes
all parts of the nation one.

"Of course we have the only first-class army. All our General Staff
has to do any day is to say the word and, as I have so often said,
our army can go out and defeat the world. Our navy will soon be in a
position to destroy England's. We are getting her trade routes, her
mail routes. Our goods are now selling everywhere. It is not only
because they are the best and the cheapest, but because our army and
our navy stand behind them to _make_ people know what is best for
them. Every little German box