Not France. France had no dream of empire, no genius for empire; she was content to stay at home. She preferred making things with her hands to making them with machines. She let her people think what they would, say what they would. France had every fault of that futile, impossible thing men called democracy. Certainly not France. He saw it clearly, finally, as a thing writ on the walls of heaven. The destiny of Germany was to rule the earth. It was right and inevitable that she should do it because she was superior. It was part of her greatness that she saw her destiny, did not shrink from it, dared openly to prepare for it, to educate her people for it. Her daring thrilled Otto to the very soul. He read Treitschke finally. Her text book. He saw in it a notice to the earth that her master was here, to prepare to receive him. It was an open notice to England, to France, to make way. The conqueror was coming. He did not come in the night. He taught in the open of his approach--marshaled his armies in the open--built his ships in the open. Otto began to feel an overwhelming contempt for the rest of Europe--that it should not understand what was writ so large before its eyes, that it should touch shoulders with a nation that for years had carried in its heart so wondrous and magnificent an ambition, that had so consistently and frankly prepared to make it real. Time they were put in their place--particularly the two, France and England, that called themselves the best the world has done so far. They were at the end of their string. His conversion was no half-hearted affair. Like alien converts the world over, he outdid the Germans in the ardor of his faith, in his contempt of opposition, and he felt all this without an instant of waning in loyalty to his own country. As a matter of fact the relations of the United States never entered his mind. The United States had nothing to do with this. Germany had no thought of her. Germany admitted our claim to the Western Hemisphere so far as Otto's experience went. Germany in South America, Germany in Mexico--of that he saw and knew nothing. His whole mind was aflame with the discovery he had made. It seemed to him like a return to the age of heroes, when men walked grandly and rose to place by great deeds of valor alone. He had come back to the United States in 1912, but two years were not long enough even to dim the great conception he had caught. Indeed, everything in the country threw into higher relief the superiority of German methods and justified her faith in her destiny.