"Oh, don't I?" exclaimed the Herr Leutnant, holding up his glass of Kümmel. That was his way of being revenged upon the country where he had lived many happy years. At Oxford, whither the munificence of Rhodes brought him, his sensuous mind had delighted in the apparently opposed but really identical studies of philosophy and philology. Following the example of his tutor at Leipzig, he had often neglected classrooms in his studies in English, and gone into the slums of great towns and on the dock-sides of London and Liverpool for idioms. And he got them. "Oh, don't I?" he exclaimed, laughing, and added: "I go the whole hog, my friend." And only that subtle under-twang, that strong humming of the vocal chords in his vowels remained to detect him. He was addicted to saying that he had discovered the secret of the English power, which was, he announced, their mongrel origin. "A nation of mongrels who think of nothing but thoroughbred horses and dogs," he had described them to Evanthia, who could not possibly gauge the accuracy of the sentence. Just now, as he set down his glass, he added that he went "the whole hog, my friend, as your graceful English expresses it." And then, in reply to Mr. Marsh's shocked comment, he said: "Why? It would be of no advantage to desire the extinction of any white race. This affair is only a family squabble. But it is a symptom. You may be watching now the first convulsions of the disease by which Europe will die. Europe is dying. The war, the war is only a superficial disturbance. The trouble is deeper than the mud of Flanders, my friend. Europe is dying because her inspiration, her ideals, are gone. That is what I mean when I say Europe will die. The old fidelities are departing. And when they are all dead, and Europe is a vast cesspool of republicans engaged in mutual extermination, what will happen then, do you think?" "Why do you talk that mad stuff here?" grunted one of the guests, a quiet middle-aged person with a monocle. He spoke in German, and Lietherthal answered quickly: "What difference, Oscar? They don't believe me." "What will happen, I ask you?" he continued in a vibrating tone. "When we have destroyed ourselves, and the survivors of our civilization are creeping feebly about the country, going back little by little to the agricultural age, the yellow men from Asia and the blacks from Africa will come pouring into Europe. Millions of them. They will infest the skeletons of our civilizations like swarms of black and yellow maggots in the sepulchres of kings. And in the end humanity will cease to exist. Civilization will be dead but there will be nobody to bury her," he concluded, smiling. "Europe will be full of the odours of her dissolution."