The third man, who had kept silence up to this point, now gently butted in. It was little Phil Mitchell, of Overbrook, a University of Pennsylvania man, who had been stopped in his junior year by a financial catastrophe in the family, and had gone out to Idaho to earn his living as third assistant bookkeeper in a big mining concern. He took a few real books with him, besides those that he was to “keep.” Double entry was his business; reading, his recreation; thinking, his vocation. From all this the great war called him as with a trumpet. “Look here, you fellows,” he said quietly, “in spite of this war and all the rest of it, there are some good things in German.” “What,” they cried, “you, a fire-eater, stand up for the Kaiser and his language? Damn him!” “With all my heart,” assented Mitchell. “But the language isn't his. It existed a long while before he was born. It isn't very pretty, I'll admit. But there are lots of fine things in it. Kant and Lessing, Goethe and Schiller and Heine--they all loved liberty and made it shine out in their work. Do you mean to say that I must give them up and throw my German overboard because these modern Potsdammers have acted like brutes?” “Yes,” cried Phipps-Herrick and Rosenlaube, nodding at each other, “that's what we mean, and that's what America means. The German language must go!” “Look here,” said Phipps-Herrick, “you admit that modern education must be useful? Well, there won't be any more use for German, because we are going to shut Germany out of the international trades-union. She has betrayed the principles of the new era. We are going to boycott her.” “Won't that be rather difficult?” queried Mitchell, shaking his head. “Seventy or eighty million people--hard to shut them out of the world, eh?” “Nonsense, dear Phil,” drawled Rosenlaube; “it will be easy enough. But I don't agree with Phipps-Herrick about the reason or method. We are going to have a new era after the war. But it will not be a utilitarian age. It will be a return to beauty and form and culture--not with a 'k.' First of all, we are going to kill a great many Germans. Then we are going to Berlin to knock down all the ugly statues in the _Sieges-Allee_ and smash the parvenu German Empire. Then we shall have a new age on classic lines. People will still use French and English and Italian because there is some beauty in those languages. But nobody outside of Germany will speak or read German. It is a barbarous tongue--shapeless and hideous--used by barbarians who gobble and snort when they talk. Sorry for Kant and Goethe and Heine and all that crowd, but their time is up; they've got to go out with their beastly language!”