"'I for one know (and have you, and Pericles, and Joan of Arc, and Napoleon, and so many others not told me the same thing when we used to meet, at the wish of Joan, at Rheims Cathedral?), I for one know what these little ones do not even dream of, so infatuated are they with the power of Reason and Science and similar machinery, namely, that our force to forefeel things of the future is far greater, at least in some of us, than our capacity to analyse or comprehend things of the present or the past. Our whole being is not so much an upshot of the past as a projection of the future. Hence the astounding assurance with which all of us now assembled in Olympus felt in advance what later on we actually did carry out. I should have discovered America had it never existed; as I actually discovered it thinking that I discovered the eastern side of Asia.' "I very well see," said Cæsar, "what you mean. The English have no forefeeling of things to come. They do not note that their whole situation in historic space has in the last generation completely changed, and that therefore their old method of expectativeness, which lived mainly on the blunders of other nations, has become quite obsolete. They are where we were after Zama, after the end of the Second Punic War, or the end of the third century B.C., as they say. So they are at the end of their second Hundred Years' War with France. But while we distinctly felt that after the Carthaginians, whom we had defeated, we were inevitably compelled to reduce the Macedonians, and not shrinking from our heavy task we did defeat them, though with tremendous effort; the English do shrink from doing what the uncommon sense of the future as well as the common sense of the present but too clearly tell them to do. "The blunder of France and Spain which was the chief ally of England in former times, I mean, the blunder of these great nations in making war on England only at times when they had four to ten other wars on hand; that capital blunder the dominating Power of this moment will never commit. "Germany will not embroil herself in any Continental war while fighting England. This is indisputable. "For the first time in modern times England will be at grips with a first-class Continental Power which is in a position to concentrate all her strength on England. This completely novel situation requires completely novel methods of meeting it. Yet, the average Englishman is quite unaware of all that. What ruined mighty Macedon? Not the lack of a powerful army, since our oldest generals, such as Æmilius Paulus, trembled at the thunderlike onslaught of the famous Macedonian _phalanx_, or infantry. But instead of joining the Carthaginians full-heartedly while we smarted under the scourge of Hannibal, they misread the whole situation and waited, and waited, until--we were able to concentrate upon them, even to incorporate the best Greek forces in our armies, and the end was disaster for Macedon.