On the eve of the Great War I sat one evening in the reading room of the Hotel Erbprinz in classic Weimar. I had spent ten happy days in Thuringia, and had visited with deep interest a little village near Erfurt, where one of my forbears was born. I had seen Jena, from whose historic university this paternal ancestor had gone as a missionary to North America in the middle of the eighteenth century. This simple-minded German pietist had cherished the apparent delusion that even the uncivilized Indians of the American wilderness might be taught--the Bernhardis and Treitschkes to the contrary notwithstanding--that to increase the political power of a nation by the deliberate and highly systematized destruction of its neighbors was not the truest political ideal, even of an Indian tribe. This missionary had gone most fittingly to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where its enlightened founder had already given a demonstration of the truth that a treaty of peace, even though not formally expressed in a "scrap of paper," might be kept by white men and so-called savages with scrupulous fidelity for at least three quarters of a century, for even the cynical Voltaire said in sincerest admiration that the compact between William Penn and the Indians was the only treaty which was never reduced to parchment, nor ratified by an oath and yet was never broken. When Penn, the great apostle of peace, died in England, a disappointed, ruined, and heart-broken man, and the news reached the Indians in their wigwams along the banks of the Delaware, they had for him, whom they called the "white Truth Teller" so deep a sense of gratitude that they sent to his widow a sympathetic gift of valuable skins, in memory of the "man of unbroken friendship and inviolate treaties." These reflections in a time of broken friendships and violated treaties are not calculated to fill the man of the twentieth century with any justifiable pride. My mind, however, as I spent the quiet evening in the historic inn of Thackeray's Pumpernickel, did not revert to these far distant associations but was full of other thoughts suggested by the most interesting section of Germany, through which it had been my privilege to pass. I had visited Eisenach and reverentially stood within the room where the great master of music, John Sebastian Bach, had first seen the light of day, and as I saw the walls that he loved and which are forever hallowed because they once sheltered this divine genius, the question occurred to me whether he may not have done more for Germany with his immortal harmonies, which are the foundation of all modern music, than all the Treitschkes, and Bernhardis, with their gospel of racial hatred, pseudo-patriotism, and imperial aggrandizement.