The next afternoon found me descending the great avenue of chestnuts, white then with blossoms, that leads from the Belvedere into the city of Weimar. The period was that between two sittings of the National Assembly in this temporary capital of the new German _Volksreich_, and the last residence of Goethe, had sunk again into its normal state—that of a leisurely, dignified, old provincial town, more engrossed with its local cares than with problems of world-wide significance. Self-seeking “representatives of the people,” frock-tailed bureaucrats, scurrying correspondents from the four comers of the earth and the flocks of hangers-on which these unavoidable appendages of modern society inevitably bring in their train, had all fled Berlinward. Weimar had been restored to her own simple people, except that one of her squares swarmed with the Jews of Leipzig, who had set up here their booths for an annual fair and awakened all the surrounding echoes with their strident bargainings. The waiter who served me in a hotel which the fleeing Assembly had left forlorn and gloomy was a veteran _Feldwebel_ and a radical Socialist. The combination gave his point of view curious twists. He raged fiercely against the lack of discipline of the new German army of volunteers. The damage they had done to billets they had recently abandoned he pictured to me with tears in his watery eyes. Did I imagine the men who served under _him_ had ever dared commit such depredations? Could I believe for an instant that _his_ soldiers had ever passed an officer without saluting him? _Ausgeschlossen!_ He would have felled the entire company, like cattle in a slaughter-house! Yet in the same breath he gave vent to Utopian theories that implied a human perfection fit for thrumming harps on the golden stairs of the dreary after-world of the theologians. Man in the mass, he asserted, was orderly and obedient, ready to make his desires subservient to the welfare of society. It was only the few evil spirits in each gathering who stirred up the rest to deeds of communal misfortune. The mass of workmen wished only to pursue their labors in peace; but the evil spirits forced them to strike. Soldiers, even the volunteer soldiers of the new order of things that was breaking upon the world, wished nothing so much as to be real soldiers; but they were led astray by the fiends in human form among them. These latter must be segregated and destroyed, root and branch. I broke in upon his dreams to ask if he could not, perhaps, round up a pair of eggs somewhere.