SAGACITY suggested that he should leave it untouched.  “It was no work of his; he was not answerable for its existence.  It had its political advantages for his own country.”

But he would not hear of such a course.  There was a canker in the body politic, requiring to be cut out; and he cut it out:  though the patient roared, the wound bled, and the operator was abused by friend and foe.

“Why so rough and precipitate?” again SAGACITY interposed, “though the right were on your side?  Why not temporize, persuade, even threaten, before coming to blows?”

“Yes,” was the reply, “and see the evil strengthen while you look on.”

SAGACITY defended her advice on larger grounds; and here too he was at issue with her.  Hohenstiel-Schwangau had a passion for fighting.  She would fight for anything, or for nothing, merely to show that she knew how.  Give her a year’s peace after any war, and she was once more ready for the fray.  Prince Hohenstiel and SAGACITY both agreed that this evil temper must be destroyed; but SAGACITY advised him to undermine—­Prince Hohenstiel chose to combat it.

SAGACITY said, “Here is an interval of peace.  Prolong it, make it delightful; but do so under cover of intending to cut it short.  If you would induce a fierce mountain tribe to come down from its fortress and settle in the plain, you do not bid it destroy the fortress.  You bid it enjoy life in the city, and remember that it runs no risk in doing so, because it has its fortress to fall back upon at the first hint of danger.  And the time will come when it can hear with equanimity that the fortress has gone to ruin, and that fighting is no longer in fashion.  The mountain tribe will have learned to love the fatness of the valley, while thinking of those mother ribs of its mountain fastness which are ever waiting to prop up its life.  Just so put a wooden sword into the hand of the Hohenstieler, and let him brag of war, learning meanwhile the value of peace.”

“Not so,” the Prince replied; “my people shall not be cheated into virtue.  Truth is the one good thing.  I will tell them the truth.  I will tell them that war, for war’s sake, is damnable; that glory at its best is shame, since its image is a gilded bubble which a resolute hand might prick, but the breath of a foolish multitude buoys up beyond its reach.”  “And what,” he asked, “is the glory, what the greatness, which this foolish nation seeks?  That of making every other small; not that of holding its place among others which are themselves great.  Shall such a thing be possible as that the nation which earth loves best—­a people so aspiring, so endowed; so magnetic in its attraction for its fellow-men—­shall think its primacy endangered because another selects a ruler it has not patronized, or chooses to sell steel untaxed?”

“But this does not mean that Hohenstiel is to relinquish the power of war.  The aggressiveness which is damnable in herself is to be condemned in others, and to be punished in them.  Therefore, for the sake of Austria who sins, of Italy who suffers, of Hohenstiel-Schwangau who has a duty to perform, the war which SAGACITY deprecates must be waged, and Austria smitten till Italy is free.”