The scene should not be painted in too high colors--colors too fixed. To the careless observer it doubtless appeared little different from the annual flowering forth of the German race in its short summer season. Always at that time were the open gardens lively, the roses blooming with the crude, dense hues that the Teutons like, and all the folk pursuing their busy tasks and vigorous pleasures with a sort of goose-step alacrity.
But the closer, more sensitive onlooker felt something more in 1913--something widely organized, unified, puissant, imperial indeed, such as, he may have imagined, had not existed since the days of the great emperors in Rome. What the Germans told all comers was that they had the best of governments, and that no nation had been so thoroughly, soundly and extensively prosperous.
For each citizen read in his daily paper of successful and growing Teuton activities in the most distant parts of the earth--in ports, regions and among peoples whose names he had never heard before and could not pronounce. At breakfast his capacious paunch and his wife's fat, flowing bosom expanded with pride in hearing of some new far-off passenger route carrying the flag, of the Made in Germany brand sweeping the markets of the world, and perhaps of the Kaiser's safe return to his palace, bronzed with the cast of health and strength. Never had investments brought the German such high rates. Never had speculation been so rife and withal so uniformly profitable.
As for industry, Deutschland was a colossal beehive. If Frederick the Great started the beehive, William the Second was increasing its size to unbelievable proportions. Insignificant villages everywhere contained millions of dollars' worth of machinery, manufacturing goods of untold value. Not an ounce of energy, not a second of time, seemed to be lost in the Empire. Every German was a busy cog fitted precisely into the whole national plant.
It was as if the Teuton knew that other races must soon stand with their backs to the wall and that now was the moment to redouble effort to capture still more trade and reduce the rest of the world to an acknowledged state of submission.
Thus the Germans, in 1913, felt how supreme their country was or was speedily becoming. Not only their newspapers but their educators, their pastors and, more than all, their military and political leaders told them that a place above the rest of mankind had been reached. The pride, the assurance, pervading the land was the stiff and hardy efflorescence of this universal conclusion. And the Teutons had earned and therefore merited it all, for no one, nothing, scarcely even Nature, had lent a helping hand.