Life goes marching on, who shall claim the laurel wreath that time cannot wither? So many, still living or recently dead, have postured so well that it is hard to say what will be left when they have been discounted at the Bank of Posterity. Politicians, writers, men of science, highly prized by their fellows ... what living court is cool enough to judge them? Who shall say whether Rodin will remain upon a pedestal, or whether he will fall to a rank as low as that of Lord Leighton? Likewise, Dr Ehrlich saw the furrow he ploughed crossed by other furrows; it may be that the turbulent, inquisitive mind of Mr Edison may have developed only fascinating applications, and not have, as we think, set new frontiers to the field of scientific thought. Those are men difficult to fix, as are also men such as Lord Kitchener and Henry James, because they are too close to us as persons to be seen entirely, and yet too far for us to imagine the diagrams of their personalities. We are closer to some others, to people such as Mr Thomas Hardy, even though he stopped in full flight and gathered himself together only to produce the _Dynasts_ in a medium which is not quite the one he was born to. We are fairly close, too, to Mr Anatole France, to his gaiety, his malignancy, his penetration without excessive pity. Mr Anatole France is one of the great doubtfuls of our period, like the Kaiser and Mr Roosevelt. Like both, he has something of the colossal, and like both he suggests that there were, or may be, taller giants. For as one reads Mr Anatole France, as he leads one by the hand through Ausonian glades, the shadow of Voltaire haunts one wearing a smile secure and vinegary. Likewise, when we consider the Kaiser, where depth has been transmuted into area, where responsibility to his own pride borders upon mania, appraisal is difficult. The Kaiser, judging him from his speeches and his deeds, appears to have carried the commonplace to a pitch where it attains distinction. He has become as general as an encyclopaedia; he is able to embrace in a single brain theocracy and local government, official art and zoology; he has carried respect for the family to the limit of patriarchal barbarity ... one loses all sense of proportion and ceases to know whether he is colossal or monstrous. In many ways one discovers brotherhood in people like Cecil Rhodes, the Kaiser, and Mr Roosevelt. All three are warriors in a modern Ring, and all three suggest displacement from their proper period, for I imagine the Kaiser better as a Frederick Barbarossa, Cecil Rhodes as an all-powerful Warren Hastings, and Mr Roosevelt as a roaring Elizabethan sailor, born to discover and ravage some new kind of Spanish Main.