Most shrewd and cunning, the plotters of the Potsdam gang. They knew how to feed the fires of envy and avarice in the German people. Every few weeks they placed new material in the hands of every German at home and abroad. They reminded each poor peasant and foreign colonist that he was a superman, and that by day and by night he was to prepare for the time when he would become the head of all the people of the town or industry with which he was related. Poor Germans in foreign countries dreamed their dreams of the time when they would be appointed by the Kaiser and Foreign Minister to take charge of the village in Mexico, the mine in Chile, or when they would be the tax collector in some distant province. We know now, from letters that have been found, that the German soldiers in France carried in their pockets a description by the German historian Curtius of the triumphal procession along the Appian Way, when the Roman conquerors came home loaded with loot. These skillful German plotters printed at the bottom of Curtius's description the statement that each German soldier must look forward to a similar return from London, Paris and Brussels to march through the streets of Munich and Berlin. What a dream was this German dream! What treasures were to be brought into Berlin! What marbles and bronzes of Rodin stolen from Paris! At last Berlin was to own beautiful paintings, for the treasures of the Louvre were to be the Kaiser's. Never was there such a dream dreamed by peasants who soon were to become princes and kings and patricians. The German had exchanged the rye bread of 1913 for the "fog bank" of 1918; had given up German beer to grasp only empty, breaking bubbles. But it was a great dream while it lasted. In pursuance of his hope he sacrificed three million German boys, left dead in the fields of Flanders and France. He sent home four million German cripples. He filled the land with vast armies of widows and orphans. It could not have been otherwise. There has never been, and never will be, but one world city--Rome; and there has never been but one world-emperor--Caesar Augustus. There is to be one universal kingdom--and that is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of love, justice, peace and good-will. The German has been pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp. A world-kingdom will come, but no Kaiser will rule over that empire of love. In that world-parliament all the races shall be represented as equals; then the earth that has long been a battle-field shall become an Eden garden, where all are patriots towards the world-kingdom, and scholars towards the intellect, and self-sufficing towards the family, and obedient towards their God. 3. German Superiority a Myth That Has Exploded Several years before the great war began a Dutch humorist wrote a play on German megalomania. He portrayed a German schoolroom in Prussia. Thirty or forty embryonic Prussians are at the desks and a Prussian schoolmaster is in the chair.