s now, as it will go on
being till it wakes up from the nightmare dream of conquest that has
possessed it ever since the present emperor came to the throne.

"I'm sure you're saying things you oughtn't to," I said.

"Of course," he said. "One always is in Germany. Everything being
forbidden, there is nothing left but to sin. I have yet to learn that
a multiplicity of laws makes people behave. Behave, I mean, in the way
Authority wishes."

"But Kloster says you're a nation of slaves, and that the drilling you
get _does_ make you behave in the way Authority wishes."

He said it was true they were slaves, but that slaves were of two
kinds,--the completely cowed, who gave no further trouble, and the
furtive evaders, who consoled themselves for their outward conformity
to regulations by every sort of forbidden indulgence in thought and
speech. "This is the kind that only waits for an opportunity to flare
out and free itself," he said. "Mind, thinking, can't be chained up.
Authority knows this, and of all things in the world fears thought."

He talked about the Sarajevo assassinations, and said, he was afraid
they would not be settled very easily. He said Germany is
seething,--seething, he said emphatically, with desire to fight; that
it is almost impossible to have a great army at such a pitch of
perfection as the German army is now and not use it; that if a thing
like that isn't used it will fester inwardly and set up endless
internal mischief and become a danger to the very Crown that created
it. To have it hanging about idle in this ripe state, he said, is like
keeping an unexercised young horse tied up in the stable on full feed;
it would soon kick the stable to pieces, wouldn't it, he said.

"I hate armies," I said. "I hate soldiering, and all it stands for of
aggression, and cruelty, and crime on so big a scale that it's
unpunishable."

"Great God, and don't I!" He exclaimed, with infinite fervour.

He told me something that greatly horrified me. He says that children
kill themselves in Germany. They commit suicide, schoolchildren and
even younger ones, in great numbers every year. He says they're driven
to it by the sheer cruelty of the way they are overworked and made to
feel that if they are not moved up in the school at the set time they
and their parents are for ever disgraced and their whole career
blasted. Imagine the misery a wretched child must suffer before it
reaches the stage of _prefe