We have been surfeited with peace talk till we are all irritable. One hundredth part of an ounce of the same quality of peace powders that we are using internationally would, if prescribed to a happy family in this or any other land, lead to dissensions, disobedience, domestic disaster, and divorce. Mr. Carnegie will have lived long enough to see more wars and international disturbances, and more discontent born of superficial reading, than any man in history who was at the same time so closely connected with their origin. Perhaps it were better after all if our millionaires were educated!
The peace party need war just as the atheists need God, otherwise they have nothing to deny, nothing to attack. Peace is a negative thing that no one really wants, certainly not the kind of peace of which there is so much talking to-day, which is a kind of castrated patriotism. Peace is not that. Peace can never be born of such impotency. When German statesmen declare roundly that they will not discuss the question of disarmament, they are merely saying that they will not be traitors to their country. If the Emperor rattles the sabre occasionally, it is because the time has not come yet, when this German people can be allowed to forget what they have suffered from foreign conquerors, and what they must do to protect themselves from such a repetition of history.
When the final judgment is passed upon the Emperor, we must recall his deep religious feeling that he is inevitably an instrument of God; his ingrained and ineradicable method of reading history as though it were a series of the ipse dixits of kings; his complacent neglect of how the work of the world is done by patient labor; of how works of art are only born of travail and tears: his obsession by that curious psychology of kings that leads them to believe that they are somehow different, and under other laws, as though they lived in another dimension of space. In addition, he is a man of unusually rapid mental machinery, of overpowering self-confidence, of great versatility, of many advantages of training and experience, and, above all, he is unhampered. He is answerable directly to no one, to no parliament, to no minister, to no people. He is father, guardian, guide, school- master, and priest, but in no sense a servant responsible to any master save one of his own choosing.