reason or record; a potential infinity of excuses.  If the English had been on the German side, the German professors would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved the Teutons.  As the English are on the other side, the German professors will say that these Teutons were not sufficiently evolved.  Or they will say that they were just sufficiently evolved to show that they were not Teutons.  Probably they will say both.  But the truth is that all that they call evolution should rather be called evasion.  They tell us they are opening windows of enlightenment and doors of progress.  The truth is that they are breaking up the whole house of the human intellect, that they may abscond in any direction.  There is an ominous and almost monstrous parallel between the position of their over-rated philosophers and of their comparatively under-rated soldiers.  For what their professors call roads of progress are really routes of escape.

LETTERS TO AN OLD GARIBALDIAN

Italy, twice hast thou spoken; and time is athirst
for the third. 
                             —­Swinburne.

My Dear ------

It is a long time since we met; and I fear these letters may never reach you.  But in these violent times I remember with a curious vividness how you brandished a paintbrush about your easel when I was a boy; and how it thrilled me to think that you had so brandished a bayonet against the Teutons—­I hope with the same precision and happy results.  Round about that period, the very pigments seemed to have some sort of picturesque connection with your national story.  There seemed to be something gorgeous and terrible about Venetian Red; and something quite catastrophic about Burnt Sienna.  But somehow or other, when I saw in the street yesterday the colours on your flag, it reminded me of the colours on your palette.

You need not fear that I shall try to entangle you or your countrymen in the matters which it is for Italians alone to decide.  You know the perils of either course much better than I do.  Italy, most assuredly, has no need to prove her courage.  She has risked everything in standing out that she could risk by coming in.  The proclamations and press of Germany make it plain that the Germans have risen to a height of sensibility hardly to be distinguished from madness.  Supposing the nightmare of a Prussian victory, they will revenge themselves on things more remote than the Triple Alliance.  There was a promise of peace between them and Belgium; there was none between them and England.  The promise to Belgium they broke.  The promise of England they invented.  It is called the Treaty of Teutonism.  No one ever heard of it in this country; but it seems well known in academic circles in Germany.  It seems to be something, connected with the colour of one’s hair.  But I repeat that I am not concerned to interfere with your decision, save in so far as I may provide some materials for it by describing our own.