The interesting question which now arises is what attitude these powerful leaders, who feared, distrusted and warned against the Kaiser’s policy for more than a decade, are going to take toward that ill-advised monarch when the once rapidly rising edifice of German commercial and political domination which they had done so much to rear, finally comes down, as come it must, in ruins. Most, if not all, of the men I have alluded to or quoted were already rowing in the Kaiser’s war-galley when the explosion they had so long foreseen and dreaded rent Europe in twain and left them only the dust of their past achievements and less than the ashes of their hopes and dreams. Doubtless they have strained obediently if sullenly at their oars (I have read glowing accounts in the German papers of what several of them have done); but surely not without _arrière pensée_, not without thoughts of how differently things might have gone if even an amiable nonentity had been their ruler instead of an imperial adventurer. The fact that, even in the present development of events, Germany’s future, both immediate and remote, looms far darker than even the most prescient or pessimistic of those who followed so mistrustfully the bellicose gesturings of ‘The Mailed Fist’ could have well anticipated, must bode a state of feeling against the man who is responsible for it all that augurs ominously for the lone figure at the helm of the German ship of state when it becomes a case of _sauve qui peut_ in the final wreck. When this day comes—how different a one will it be from ‘_Der Tag_’ to which the hoodwinked German so long has lifted his glass!—‘I told you so’ will be the mildest of the reproaches that will be launched at the wrecker from the lips of the men whose task it will be to salvage the foundered ship as best they may. Cut off by the pall of the more imminent war clouds, we on the outside have as yet had little chance to gauge the force of the storm that is gathering to break upon Germany from within. Whether the breaking of that storm will precede and accelerate the coming of peace, or whether the coming of peace will precede and accelerate the breaking of the storm, it is still too early to say. But break it must, sooner or later, and when this hour arrives I feel that I know enough of the temper of the men who distrusted and hated the Kaiser before the war to be safe in saying, that whatever of his just deserts he may have escaped receiving at the hands of the Allies he will stand every chance of having meted out to him at the hands of his own outraged people. _THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: AT ALL COSTS._ BY BOYD CABLE.