We must have been blind then, my companion and I--yes, and deaf too; for we diagnosed this bigotry as evidences of an egomania, probably confined to a few hundreds or a few thousands among the German-speaking peoples. In the light of what has happened since we all know that the disease affected a whole nation, and was a disease of which, as yet, the frequent upsettings of their original programme and the absolute certainty that the programme itself can never be carried out until Europe and America both are graveyards have not to any very noticeable extent served to operate as a cure. In those early, optimistic days these paranoiacs conceived of a world that should sometime be altogether Prussianised. Their vision was not bounded by the seas about their own Continent; it extended to other Continents, our own included. That dream is over and done with. What they have yet to learn--and they will only be taught it at the muzzle of guns--is that a civilisation cannot endure when it is half Prussian and half free. It is my understanding that this country, along with ten or twelve others, is now committed to the task of enforcing this lesson upon the consciousness of the only confederation of enemies to a representative form of government now left upon either hemisphere. XIV A prophet is nearly always a bore. He is apt to be tiresome when expounding his predictions, and likely to become a common nuisance should his predictions come true. Indeed, the I-told-you-so person is oftentimes a worse pest than the I-am-now-telling-you-so individual. I have no desire to assume either rôle; but here lately I have not been able to restrain my satisfaction at finding, as I believed, that two of my own private convictions are about to be justified by the accomplished fact. As a result of all that I saw and heard in the war zone, more than two years and a half ago, I made up my mind to the probable consummation of these contingencies--namely: FIRST: That, despite her earlier successes, despite all her preparedness and all her efficiency and all her valour, Germany eventually would be defeated as the Southern Confederacy was defeated--by being bled white and starved thin. SECOND: That when to Germany's rulers this prospect became certain they would with deliberate intent embroil the United States in the conflict as an avowed and declared enemy, in order that the men who drove Germany to the slaughter might save their faces before their own people, at the front and at home, by saying to them in effect: "We were strong enough to beat all Europe and all Asia; we were not strong enough to beat the supreme Power of the New World too; we, with our allies, could not withstand the combined forces of the whole earth."