“Lieber Gott! As if I could be anything else,” said Falbe, laughing. “We are the only nation which makes a science of experimentalism; we try everything, just as a puppy tries everything. It tries mutton bones, and match-boxes, and soap and boots; it tries to find out what its tail is for, and bites it till it hurts, on which it draws the conclusion that it is not meant to eat. Like all metaphysicians, too, and dealers in the abstract, we are intensely practical. Our passion for experimentalism is dictated by the firm object of using the knowledge we acquire. We are tremendously thorough; we waste nothing, not even time, whereas the English have an absolute genius for wasting time. Look at all your games, your sports, your athletics--I am being quite German now, and forgetting my mother, bless her!--they are merely devices for getting rid of the hours, and so not having to think. You hate thought as a nation, and we live for it. Music is thought; all art is thought; commercial prosperity is thought; soldiering is thought.” “And we are a nation of idiots?” asked Michael. “No; I didn’t say that. I should say you are a nation of sensualists. You value sensation above everything; you pursue the enjoyable. You are a nation of children who are always having a perpetual holiday. You go straying all over the world for fun, and annex it generally, so that you can have tiger-shooting in India, and lots of gold to pay for your tiger-shooting in Africa, and fur from Canada for your coats. But it’s all a game; not one man in a thousand in England has any idea of Empire.” “Oh, I think you are wrong there,” said Michael. “You believe that only because we don’t talk about it. It’s--it’s like what we agreed about Parsifal. We don’t talk about it because it is so much part of us.” Falbe sat up. “I deny it; I deny it flatly,” he said. “I know where I get my power of foolish, unthinking enjoyment from, and it’s from my English blood. I rejoice in my English blood, because you are the happiest people on the face of the earth. But you are happy because you don’t think, whereas the joy of being German is that you do think. England is lying in the shade, like us, with a cigarette and a drink--I wish I had one--and a golf ball or the world with which she has been playing her game. But Germany is sitting up all night thinking, and every morning she gives an order or two.” Michael supplied the cigarette. “Do you mean she is thinking about England’s golf ball?” asked Michael. “Why, of course she is! What else is there to think about?” “Oh, it’s impossible that there should be a European war,” said Michael, “for that is what it will mean!” “And why is a European war impossible?” demanded Falbe, lighting his cigarette. “It’s simply unthinkable!”