“Their great leader, in their name, had claimed a swinish monopoly of God's favor. His was not the contention of James the First, that all true kings enjoy divine-right--oh, not at all! Bill had grown rather husky and had got his feet in the trough, and was going to crowd the others out of it. He was the one and only. And as he crowded, he began to pray, and his prayers came out of lips which had confessed robbery and violated good faith and inspired deeds of inhuman frightfulness. His prayers were therefore nothing more nor less than hot air aimed at the ear of the Almighty and carrying with them the flavor of the swine-yard. In all this Church and people stood by him. It would seem that the devil had taken both unto a high mountain and showed them the kingdoms of the earth and their glory, and that they had yielded to his blandishments. “Now the thing that has happened to the criminal is this. In one way or another, he loses his common sense. He ceases to see things in their just relations and proportions. The difference between right and wrong dwindles and disappears from his vision. He convinces himself that he has a right to at least a part of the property of other people. Often he acquires a comic sense of righteousness. [Illustration: 0045] “I have lately been in the devastated regions of northern France. I have seen whole cities of no strategic value which the German armies had destroyed by dynamite before leaving them to a silence like that of the grave--the slow-wrought walls of old cathedrals and public buildings tumbled into hopeless ruin; the châteaux, the villas, the little houses of the poor, shaken into heaps of moldering rubbish. And I see in it a sign of that greater devastation which covers the land of William II--the devastation of the spirit of the German people; for where is that moral grandeur of which Heine and Goethe and Schiller and Luther were the far-heard compelling voices? I tell you it has all been leveled into heaps of moldering rubbish--a thousand times more melancholy than any in France. “Behold the common sense of Germany become the sense that is common only among criminals! The sooner we recognize that, the better. They are really burglars in this great house of God we inhabit, seeking to rob it of its best possessions--Hindenburglars! In this war we must give them the consideration due a burglar, and only that. We must hit them how and where we may. We are bound by no nice regard for fair play. We must kill the burglar or the burglar will kill us. “When I went away to the battle-front, a friend said to me: “'Try to learn how this incredible thing came about and why it continues. That is what every one wishes to know.' “Well, hot air was the cause of it. Now why does it continue? My answer is, bone-head--mostly plumed bone-head.