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 preferring to kill itself!  No other nation has this blot on it.

“Yes,” he said, nodding in agreement with the expression on my face, “yes, we are mad.  It is in this reign that we’ve gone mad, mad with the obsession to get at all costs and by any means to the top of the world.  We must outstrip; outstrip at whatever cost of happiness and life.  We must be better trained, more efficient, quicker at grabbing than other nations, and it is the children who must do it for us.  Our future rests on their brains.  And if they fail, if they can’t stand the strain, we break them.  They’re of no future use.  Let them go.  Who cares if they kill themselves?  So many fewer inefficients, that’s all.  The State considers that they are better dead.”