Well, it is easy to stir a mob.  One knows how easily one is moved oneself by the cheapest emotions, by something that catches one on the sentimental side, on that side of one that through all the years has still stayed clinging to one’s mother’s knee.  We’ve often talked of this, you and I, little mother.  You know the sort of thing, and have got that side yourself,—­even you, you dear objective one.  The three things up to now that have got me most on that side, got me on the very raw of it—­I’ll tell you now, now that I can’t see your amused eyes looking at me with that little quizzical questioning in them—­the three things that have broken my heart each time I’ve come across them and made me only want to sob and sob, are when Kurwenal, mortally wounded, crawls blindly to Tristan’s side and says, “Schilt mich nicht dass der Treue auch mitkommt” and Siegfried’s dying “Brunnhild, heilige Braut,” and Tannhauser’s dying “Heilige Elisabeth, bitte fur mich.”  All three German things, you see.  All morbid things.  Most of the sentimentality seems to have come from Germany, an essentially brutal place.  But of course sentimentality is really diluted morbidness, and therefore first cousin to cruelty.  And I have a real and healthy dislike for that Tannhauser opera.

But seeing how the best of us—­which is you—­have these little hidden swamps of emotionalness, you can imagine the effect of the Kaiser yesterday at such a moment in their lives on a people whose swamps are carefully cultivated by their politicians.  Even I, rebellious and hostile to the whole attitude, sure that the real motives beneath all this are base, and constitutionally unable to care about Kaisers, was thrilled.  Thrilled by him, I mean.  Oh, there was enough to thrill one legitimately and tragically about the poor people, so eager to offer themselves, their souls and bodies, to be an unreasonable sacrifice and satisfaction for the Hohenzollerns.  His speech was wonderfully suited to the occasion.  Of course it would be.  If he were not able to prepare it himself his officials would have seen to it that some properly eloquent person did it for him; but Kloster says he speaks really well on cheap, popular lines.  All the great reverberating words were in it, the old big words ambitious and greedy rulers have conjured with since time began,—­God, Duty, Country, Hearth and Home, Wives, Little Ones, God again—­lots of God.

Perhaps you’ll see the speech in the papers.  What you won’t see is that enormous crowd, struck quiet, struck into religious awe, crying quietly, men and women like little children gathered to the feet of, positively, a heavenly Father.  “Go to your homes,” he said, dismissing them at the end with uplifted hand,—­“go to your homes, and pray.”