ord Chief Justice of
Europe." He was the strongest man in Christendom; and he had confirmed
and consecrated the Crescent. And when he had consecrated it a few hill
tribes had risen and trampled it like mire. One or two other things
about the same time, less important in themselves, struck in the
Prussian's ear the same new note of warning and doubt. He sought to
obtain a small advantage on the north-west coast of Africa; and England
seemed to show a certain strange stiffness in insisting on its
abandonment. In the councils over Morocco, England agreed with France
with what did not seem altogether an accidental agreement. But we shall
not be wrong if we put the crucial point of the German surprise and
anger at the attack from the Balkans and the fall of Adrianople. Not
only did it menace the key of Asia and the whole Eastern dream of German
commerce; not only did it offer the picture of one army trained by
France and victorious, and another army trained by Germany and beaten.
There was more than the material victory of the Creusot over 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