Retiring, as I must soon do from my somewhat Satanic activity, from "going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it," I can claim, like my ill-reputed exemplar, to have encountered some patient Jobs, servants of the Lord, but more who were impatient, yet not the less the Lord's servants, and the outward semblance of these I try to present. My pictures have to some extent been exhibited before, in the _Atlantic Monthly_, the New York _Evening Post_, and the Boston _Transcript_, and I am indebted to the courtesy of the publishers of these periodicals for permission to utilise them here. I am emboldened by the favour they met to present them again to the public, retouched, and expanded. I attempt no elaborate characterisation of men, or history of events or exposition of philosophies. My films are snap-shots, caught from the curbstone, from the gallery of an assembly, in a scholar's study, or by the light of a camp-fire. I have ventured to address my reader as friend might talk to a friend, with the freedom of familiar intercourse, and I hope that the reader may not be conscious of any undue intrusion of the showman as the figures and scenes appear. Go, little book, with this setting forth of what you are and aim to do. J.K.H. MINNEAPOLIS, October, 4, 1912. CONTENTS CHAPTER I STATESMEN OF OUR CRITICAL PERIOD "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." Millard Fillmore. Abraham Lincoln at Church. Stephen A. Douglas. Daniel Webster. William H. Seward. Edward Everett. Robert C. Winthrop. Charles Sumner. John A. Andrew. CHAPTER II SOLDIERS I HAVE MET U.S. Grant. Philip H. Sheridan. George G. Meade. W.T. Sherman. Jacob D. Cox. N.P. Banks. B.F. Butler. John Pope. Henry W. Slocum. O.O. Howard. Rufus Saxton. James H. Wilson. T.W. Sherman. Horatio G. Wright. Isaac I. Stevens. Harvard Soldiers. W.F. Bartlett. Charles R. Lowell. Francis C. Barlow. CHAPTER III HORACE MANN AND ANTIOCH COLLEGE Horace Mann. "The New Wrinkle at Sweetbrier." Dramatics in the Schools of Germany, of France, of England, at Antioch College. CHAPTER IV THE GIANT IN THE SPIKED HELMET Prussia in 1870. Militarism in the Schools, in the Universities, in the Home, in the Sepulchre. The Hohenzollern Lineage. CHAPTER V A STUDENT'S EXPERIENCE IN THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. The Emperor Frederick. Wilhelm II. Francis Joseph of Austria. King Ludwig of Bavaria. Munich in War-time. A Deserted Switzerland. France in Arms. Paris on the Verge of the Siege. CHAPTER VI AMERICAN HISTORIANS George Bancroft. Justin Winsor. John Fiske. CHAPTER VII ENGLISH AND GERMAN HISTORIANS Sir Richard Garnett. S.R. Gardiner. E.A. Freeman. Goldwin Smith. James Bryce. The House of Commons. Lord Randolph Churchill and W.E. Gladstone as Makers of History. Von Treitschke. Ernst Curtius. Leopold von Ranke. Theodor Mommsen. Lepsius. Hermann Grimm. CHAPTER VIII POETS AND PROPHETS