so. His freedom from fear of all kinds had
about it a sort of solid unconsciousness and even innocence. This
homogeneous quality in it has been admirably seized and summed up by Mr.
Belloc in a tribute of great truth and power. "His courage was heroic,
native, positive and equal: always at the highest potentiality of
courage. He never in his life checked an action or a word from a
consideration of personal caution, and that is more than can be said of
any other man of his time." After the more or less nominal fine,
however, his moral victory was proved in the one way in which a military
victory can ever be proved. It is the successful general who continues
his own plan of campaign. Whether a battle be ticketed in the history
books as lost or won, the test is which side can continue to strike. He
continued to strike, and to strike harder than ever, up to the very
moment of that yet greater experience which changed all such military
symbols into military facts. A man with instincts unspoiled and in that
sense almost untouched, he would have always answered quite naturally to
the autochthonous appeal of patriotism; but it is again characteristic
of him that he desired, in his own phrase, to "rationalize patriotism,"
which he did upon the principles of Rousseau, that contractual theory
which, in these pages, he connects with the great name of Jefferson. But
things even deeper than patriotism impelled him against Prussianism. His
enemy was the barbarian when he enslaves, as something more hellish
even than the barbarian when he slays. His was the spiritual instinct by
which Prussian order was worse than Prussian anarchy; and nothing was so
inhuman as an inhuman humanitarianism. If you had asked him for what he
fought and died amid the wasted fields of France and Flanders, he might
very probably have answered that it was to save the world from German
social reforms.

This note, necessarily so broken and bemused, must reach its useless
end. I have said nothing of numberless things that should be remembered
at the mention of his name; of his books, which were great pamphlets and
may yet be permanent pamphlets; of his journalistic exposures of other
evils besides the Marconi, exposures that have made a new political
atmosphere in the very election that is stirring around us; of his visit
to America, which initiated him into an international friendship which
is the foundation of this book. Least of all can I write of him apart
f