ole time that one had a
picture of ancient civilization before one. The wreaths of flowers,
these swaggering figures with their trophies of war, this gay crowd,
distributing food and drink, these young girls with their crowns, is it
not all exactly the manner in which the people of the Stone Age or the
savages of to-day would feast their heroes? Cannot one understand in
this that at the beginning of civilization war was the highest object
in state and society, an opportunity of enrichment by booty, and a
festival for youth? Nowadays we ought to have got far enough to see in
war only a weary fulfilling of duty, a barbarous waste of labor, of
which we are inwardly ashamed; and we should keep away from this noisy
festival as from the execution of a criminal, which may be necessary,
but is painful to witness. The progress from barbarism to civilization
is frightfully slow."

"It is true; we are still carrying ancient barbarism round our necks,
and without a great deal of rubbing you will easily find the primitive
savage under the skin of our dear contemporaries who are able to
construe Latin beautifully. And these are not the only gloomy thoughts
which this spectacle gives me. Look there! over yonder at the other end
of the street they are unveiling a monument to Friedrich Wilhelm III.,
and the festival of victory is spoiled by homage paid to a despot who
during twenty-seven years never redeemed his pledge to give the people
a constitution. I am forty-eight years old, and yet I have not
forgotten my youthful ideas. My generation looked forward to a united
as well as to a free Germany, and hoped that unity would not come out
of a war, but rather from the freewill of the German people. It is now
with us through other means, but I fear not better ones. The
aristocracy and the Church will assert themselves again, and the
military system will lay its iron hand over the life of the whole
nation. People say already that it is the officer and not the
schoolmaster who has made Germany great. These changes put my thoughts
in a ferment. One has yet to see whether such a society of officers can
produce a people, and if its thinkers and teachers could not lead it to
a richer cultivation, and its poets to a higher ideal of duty. I am
afraid, my friend, that the higher souls in our new empire will not
find this an easy time."

"And yet you left your dreaming in India to come home to discomfort,"
said Wilhelm.

"My longing for Germany