just tasted power will not be torn away from it and will find it simple to govern by machine-guns. But the young men are not interested in the Cabinet--they drift off into discussing their schemes for the Councils. Here, too, is life--the life radiated by young men who feel that power is coming to them before youth has gone, the life reflected from middle-aged men who have broken the dull crust in which circumstance was encasing them. When this club was suppressed shortly after, Berlin could ill afford the loss of vitality. For the absence of all healthy, happy and youthful faces made it like a world of gnomes and goblins. In the case of the men this was mainly owing to the war, and in the case of the women and children to the blockade. Over a million of the fittest men had been killed, and the result was a survival of all the unfit; while the food and fuel hardships had fallen heaviest on the women and children of the towns. But there was another reason for the disappearance of all young men that had youth and manliness. Their warfare was not yet accomplished, and they had only come back from fighting the whole world on three fronts for four years to fight against each other in the streets of their capital cities. They went to war against the world for two ideals--patriotism and progress; and now these two ideals had themselves collided in civil war. Of the two German ideals, that of patriotism is the one we know best. That dull devotion and forced fervour that fights in massed formations to sentimental songs. It is a form of patriotism that does not appeal to us. To Athens Sparta is anti-pathetic. But there were fine fellows among the Spartans as well as tyrants and helots, and now that the tyrants are gone such as are left of the fine fellows have a chance of realising their Spartan ideals. Now that those trumpery tinsel tyrants, the Kaiser and his courtier generals, have retired to scribble and squabble and scuffle over dirty linen--a Valhalla of washerwomen--the men of the real Spartan breed, who carried the German arms from conquest to conquest until the catastrophe was complete, are working hard to restore ideals shattered by rout and revolution. Of the real fine fellows that I've met in Germany half were officers and men who had responded to the various appeals for home defence and who were working to revive the old Spartan tradition in the war-wearied youth. Here are two notices from the advertisement columns of the _Lokal Anzeiger_, which seem to me to contrast the real Spartan and the Junker: