bring it nearer and to make it
more certain. To these jaundiced eyes all seemed yellow, when the
yellowness lay only in themselves. Our army, our navy, our colonies, all
were equally rotten. "Old England, old, indeed, and corrupt, rotten
through and through." One blow and the vast sham would fly to pieces,
and from those pieces the victor could choose his reward. Listen to
Prof. Treitschke, a man who, above all others, has been the evil genius
of his country, and has done most to push it toward this abyss: "A thing
that is wholly a sham," he cried, in allusion to our empire, "cannot, in
this universe of ours, endure forever. It may endure for a day, but its
doom is certain." Were ever words more true when applied to the narrow
bureaucracy and swaggering Junkerdom of Prussia, the most artificial and
ossified sham that ever our days have seen? See which will crack first,
our democracy or this, now that both have been plunged into the furnace
together. The day of God's testing has come, and we shall see which can
best abide it.

*The Blame Not England's.*

I have tried to show that we are in no way to blame for the hostility
which has grown up between us. So far as it had any solid cause at all
it has arisen from fixed factors, which could no more be changed by us
than the geographical position which has laid us right across their exit
to the oceans of the world. That this deeply rooted national sentiment,
which forever regarded us as the Carthage to which they were destined to
play the part of Rome, would, sooner or later, have brought about war
between us, is, in my opinion, beyond all doubt. But it was planned to
come at the moment which was least favorable for Britain. "Even English
attempts at a rapprochement must not blind us to the real situation,"
says Bernhardi. "We may, at most, use them to delay the necessary and
inevitable war until we may fairly imagine we have some prospect of
success." A more shameless sentence was never penned, and one stands
marveling which is the more grotesque--the cynicism of the sentiment or
the folly which gave such a warning to the victim. For be it remembered
that Bernhardi's words are to be taken very seriously, for they are not
the ravings of some Pan-German monomaniac, but the considered views of
the foremost military writer of Germany, one who is in touch with those
inner circles whose opinions are the springs of national policy. "Our
last and greatest reckoning is to be wit