"World, choose between thy life and poetry; if serious measures are not taken, civilization is done for. Thou must not hesitate. From tomorrow on begins the new era. Poetry will exist no longer, the lyres too heavy for old inspirations will be broken. The poets will be massacred." * * * During the night, life went on just as usual in all the cities of the globe. The article, telegraphed everywhere, had been published in the special editions of the local newspapers and snatched up by the hungry public. The people all sided with Tograth. Ring-leaders descended into the streets and, mingling with the aroused mobs, excited them further. But most governments held sittings that very night and passed legislation which provoked an indescribable enthusiasm. France, Italy, Spain and Portugal decreed that all poets established on their territory should be imprisoned at once pending the determination of their lot. Foreign poets who were absent and sought to re-enter the country risked being condemned to death. It was cabled that the United States of America had decided to electrocute any man who avowed his profession to be that of poetry. It was telegraphed that in Germany also a decree had been passed ordering all poets in verse or prose found on the imperial territory to be incarcerated until further orders. In fact, all of the States on earth, even those who possessed nothing but meager little bards lacking in all lyricism took measures against the very name of poetry. Only England and Russia were exceptions. The laws went into effect at once. All poets who were found on French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese territory were arrested on the following day, while the literary magazines appeared all garbed in black, lamenting the new terror. Dispatches toward noon told how Aristenetius Southwest, the great Negro poet of Haiti, had been cut into pieces and devoured by an infuriated populace of negroes and mulattoes. At Cologne, the Kaiserglocke had sounded all night and in the morning Herr Professor Doktor Stimmung, author of a medieval epic in forty-eight cantos, having gone out to take the train for Hanover, was set upon by a troop of fanatics who beat him with sticks, crying: "Death to the poet!" He took refuge in the cathedral and remained locked in there with a few beadles, by the excited population of Drikkes, Hanses, and Marizibills. These last particularly, were beside themselves with rage, invoking the Virgin, Saint Ursula and the Three Royal Magi in _platdeutsch._ Their paternosters and pious oaths were interspersed with admirably vile insults to the professor-poet, who owed his reputation chiefly to the unisexuality of his morals. His head to the ground, he was nearly dying of fear under the big wooden statue of Saint Christopher. He heard the sounds of masons walling up all the gates of the cathedral and resigned himself to die of hunger.