We walked on for some time without saying a word. The idea never occurred to him that these wholesale judgments could possibly shock or pain me, for he was one of those happy men, common in Germany, endowed with a veritable talent for frankness. He continued his terrible strides, and after a while he exclaimed gaily: “Anyhow, you don’t bring enough children into the world to be socialists. Our ideas can germinate only in dense crowds, where there is hardly standing room, where people lack air and space, breed without restriction, and have nothing to lose! Your _Einzweikindersystem_[4] condemns you to be nothing but bourgeois, and poor bourgeois at that!” I made no answer. What answer was possible? He knew my ideas. He had been one of those who introduced my _Ecoutes_ into Germany. Besides, it gave him so much pleasure to believe in our decadence, to be convinced that Germany, as far as democracy was concerned, was henceforward without peer in the world. Indeed it is true, all these “young men of the left” were ardent believers in Germany’s mission. But to justify this mission they did not, like the cynical pangermanists, appeal to the _Faustrecht_, the right of the stronger; they did not speak of bloody conquests. Perhaps they thought of them, but such brutalities (which the German mind, even when finely tempered, accepts with little reluctance) remained hidden in the background, within the domain of possibilities, among the lesser evils and contingencies—profane delights which a platonic lover hardly dares to envisage even in his secret dreams. Idealists of the Michelet type, quaffing the austere wines of Kant and Fichte (recently unsealed and served round at the universities by the new masters), they made an exclusive claim to the moral heritage of ’89, of which we, they said, had ceased to be the heirs. Were not they the youthful neophytes of the democratic faith which the degenerate French had lost? Had they not passionately espoused the modern world, whose uncertain dawn had first ventured to shine on Paris, that slight and foolish city, but whose full noon was now to illumine the strong and loyal (_treu und fest_) town of Berlin, the guardian of the Rhine? Yes, _finis Galliæ_! It was theirs to lead the great caravan of the universe towards the new justice. It was their part, the part of these good Teutons, with their virgin spirit and their new blood, to direct in future the affairs of the human race. _Gesta Dei per Germanos!_ * * * * *