reparable for no better
reason than that the Mayor's brother or the Dean's uncle-in-law was a
builder in search of a "restoration" job. If Rheims cathedral were taken
from the Church to-morrow and given to an English or French joint stock
company, everything transportable in it would presently be sold to
American collectors, and the site cleared and let out in building sites.
That is the way to make it "pay" commercially.

*The Fate of The Glory Drunkard.*

But our problem is how to make Commercialism itself bankrupt. We must
beat Germany, not because the Militarist hallucination and our
irresolution forced Germany to make this war, so desperate for her, at a
moment so unfavourable to herself, but because she has made herself the
exponent and champion in the modern world of the doctrine that military
force is the basis and foundation of national greatness, and military
conquest the method by which the nation of the highest culture can
impose that culture on its neighbors. Now the reason I have permitted
myself to call General Von Bernhardi a madman is that he lays down quite
accurately the conditions of this military supremacy without perceiving
that what he is achieving is a _reductio ad absurdum_. For he declares
as a theorist what Napoleon found in practice, that you can maintain the
Militarist hold over the imaginations of the people only by feeding them
with continual glory. You must go from success to success; the moment
you fail you are lost; for you have staked everything on your power to
conquer, for the sake of which the people have submitted to your tyranny
and endured the sufferings and paid the cost your military operations
entailed. Napoleon conquered and conquered and conquered; and yet, when
he had won more battles than the maddest Prussian can ever hope for, he
had to go on fighting just as if he had never won anything at all. After
exhausting the possible he had to attempt the impossible and go to
Moscow. He failed; and from that moment he had better have been a
Philadelphia Quaker than a victor of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena and
Wagrarn. Within a short breathing time after that morning when he stood
outside Leipsic, whistling _Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre_ whilst his
flying army gasped its last in the river or fled under a hail of bullets
from enemies commanded by generals without a tenth of his ability or
prestige, we find him disguised as a postillion, cowering abjectly
behind the door of a carriag