“Her love of money, her materialism—­these are her great dangers,” he said.  “I do not like to contemplate, and I ask my friends here—­” he turned slowly round on his heels and back again—­“whether they would like to contemplate a day when the sun of the British Empire, that Empire which, after all, has upheld the cause of religion with faithfulness and persistence for so long, shall be seen at last descending, to rise no more, in an engulfing ocean of over-indulged appetites.”

“Ja,” I said; and then perceiving it was the wrong word, hastily amended in English, “I mean nein.”

He looked at me for a moment more carefully.  Then deciding that all was well he went on.

“England,” he said, “is our natural ally.  She is of the same blood, the same faith, and the same colour.  Behold the other races of the world, and they are either partly, chiefly, or altogether black.  The blonde races are, like the dawn, destined to drive away the darkness.  They must stand together shoulder to shoulder in any discord that may, in the future, gash the harmony of the world.”

“Ja,” I said, as one who should, at the conclusion of a Psalm, be saying Selah.

“We live in serious times,” he said.  “They may easily become more serious.  Round us stand the Latins and the Slavs, armed to the teeth, bursting with envy of our goods, of our proud calm, and watching for the moment when they can fall upon us with criminal and murderous intent.  Is it not so, my Fraulein?”

“Ja” said I, forced to agree because of my unfortunate emptiness of German.

The only thing I could have reeled off at him was the Psalm I had learnt, and I did long to, because it was the one asking why the heathen so furiously rage together; but you see, little mother, though I longed to I couldn’t have followed it up, and having fired it off I’d have sat there defenceless while he annihilated me.

But I don’t know what they all mean by this constant talk of envious nations crouching ready to spring at them.  They talk and talk about it, and their papers write and write about it, till they inflame each other into a fever of pugnaciousness.  I’ve never been anywhere in the least like it in my life.  In England people talked of a thousand things, and hardly ever of war.  When we were in Italy, and that time in Paris, we hardly heard it mentioned.  Directly my train got into Germany at Goch coming from Flushing, and Germans began to get in, there in the very train this everlasting talk of war and the enviousness of other nations began, and it has never left off since.  The Archduke’s murder didn’t start it; it was going on weeks before that, when first I came.  It has been going on, Kloster says, growing in clamour, for years, ever since the present Kaiser succeeded to the throne.  Kloster says the nation thinks it feels all this, but it is merely being stage-managed by the group of men at the top, headed by S. M. So well stage-managed is it, so carefully taught by such slow degrees, that it is absolutely convinced it has arrived at its opinions and judgments by itself.  I wonder if these people are mad.  Is it possible for a whole nation to go mad at once?  It is they who seem to have the enviousness, to be torn with desire to get what isn’t theirs.