rmany; it may be, it must
be a regenerate France."

Truly it has been a regenerate France that, with firm resolve and calm
courage, has suffered and withstood invasion, far different from the
France which in 1870 went to war with light heart, excited and
unprepared, anticipating easy victory. War shattered the Empire and the
true soul of France was found.

Well might the "Song before Sunrise" again greet the purified France:--

Who is this that rises red with wounds and splendid.
All her breast and brow made beautiful with scars?

May we soon be able to add the conclusion!--

In her eyes the light and fire of long pain ended,
In her lips a song as of the morning stars.

The prophecy in both parts was fulfilled. Germany did indeed become
united, united not only by closer political ties between all its
divisions, but united in its aims and in its methods, conscious of union
and of strength, marvellous in its power of organisation, fitting each
member into his special position in the consolidated state, and moulding
him for the place he was to occupy; drilled from earliest youth how to
act and how to think, his commonest acts done, and very gestures made,
according to rule. Yet they, too, had their ideals. I remember in 1871,
the year after the Franco-German War, meeting a party of Germans who
were unveiling a tablet by the Pasterze Glacier in memory of a comrade
fallen in the war--Karl Hoffman, a pioneer of mountaineering in the
Glockner district--and hearing their impassioned speeches. The mountains
of Austrian Tyrol were to them "die Alpen seines Vaterlandes," and the
song with the refrain, "Lieb Vaterland muss groesser sein" echoed from
the rocks, "My beloved Fatherland must be greater"; may not this be the
expression of a noble patriotism? But it so easily turns to "my country
must have more, must take more," and becomes the very watchword of
greed. "Deutschland ueber Alles" might perhaps mean first to the German
"My country before everything to me." _Corruptio optimi pessima_, it
easily becomes "Germany over all,"--the country which dominates an
inferior world and is thus the condensed motto of supreme insolence.
"Insolence breeds the tyrant," and the doom the ancient poet prophesies
is the divine ordinance to be fulfilled by the action of man.
"Insolence, swollen with vain thought, mounts to the highest place, and
is hurled down to the doom decreed."

Insolence seems the nearest equivalent fo