At the risk of being absurd, and with the certainty of pushing an illustration beyond its legitimate limits, I am venturing to typify this substitution by the one man whom the civilized world has most closely associated with military ideals, the present Emperor of Germany. We may certainly believe that the German Emperor is a conscientious man, who means to do his duty to all his subjects; that he regards himself, not only as general and chief of the army, but also as the fostering father of the humble people. Let us imagine the quite impossible thing that for ten years he does not review any troops, does not attend any parades, does not wear a uniform, nor hear the clang of the sword as he walks, but that during these ten years he lives with the peasants “who drive the painful plow,” that he constantly converses with them, and subjects himself to their alternating hopes and fears as to the result of the harvest, at best so inadequate for supplying their wants and for paying their taxes. Let us imagine that the German Emperor during these halcyon years, in addition to the companionship of the humble, reads only the folk-lore, the minor poetry and the plaintive songs in which German literature is so rich, until he comes to see each man of the field as he daily goes forth to his toil “with a soldier tied to his back,” exhausted by the double strain of his burden and his work. Let us imagine this Emperor going through some such profound moral change as befell Count Tolstoy when he quitted his military service in the Caucasus and lived with the peasants on his estate, with this difference that, instead of feeling directly responsible for a village of humble folk, he should come to feel responsible for all the toilers of the “Fatherland” and for the international results of the German army. Let us imagine that in his self-surrender to the humblest of his people, there would gradually grow up in his subconsciousness, forces more ideal than any which had possessed him before; that his interests and thoughts would gradually shift from war and the manœuvres and extensions of the army, to the unceasing toil, the permanent patience, which lie at the bottom of all national existence; that the life of the common people, which is so infinite in its moral suggestiveness, would open up to him new moral regions, would stir new energies within him, until there would take place one of those strange alterations in personality of which hundreds of examples are recorded. Under a glow of generous indignation, magnanimity, loyalty to his people, a passion of self-surrender to his new ideals, we can imagine that the imperial temperament would waste no time in pinings and regret, but that, his energies being enlisted in an overmastering desire to free the people from the burden of the army, he would drive vigorously in the direction of his new ideals. It is impossible to imagine him “passive” under this conversion to the newer ideals of peace.