"Don't you think, Herr Kirtley, it stands to reason that our reigning family, which is admitted to be honest and has practiced ruling for centuries, knows better how to govern a race than the always new and untried persons who keep taking the reins of government in a democracy? The Americans can never tell far ahead who is to rule. There are changes all the time. How can the citizen prepare confidently for the future? How can he plan long ahead as we do? I have always read that this is the reason things are so steady and stable in Germany and so uncertain and wabbling in America. This uncertainty hanging over a republic unsettles its population. You have panics, lynchings, graft. We are free of such scourges. Our Government is always the same unit and to be relied on. If new policies are begun, it is there to carry them through to their logical end, even if it takes a generation or longer. You have always new statesmen with new ideas. We no sooner learn to know of one of your politicians than he is dropped and we must read about another in control. How does that make for any well-considered and thoroughly demonstrated plans? Would it not be the natural result that the German people are completely contented and the American people are always discontented?" Rudolph's excited pronouncements ran along a different line, interchanged with voluminous whiffs of tobacco. "Under our Government, Herr Kirtley, the German flag is seen in all parts of the globe. And wherever it is seen, it is respected, feared. Who ever sees the American flag? Even _I_ don't know what it looks like. It is not feared. It is only noticed out of voluntary courtesy. And a nation can't be really great without an army like ours. The army is the spine of the country. It makes a country a vertebrate. What would even Germany be without its army? Almost nothing. The army consolidates, trains, disciplines. It gives us health, good constitutions, industrious habits, exactness. It makes a nation superior because it fortifies human effort. In the constant changing of our regiments about to different sections of the Empire, our soldiers come to be well acquainted everywhere. They make friends and are at home in every direction. They learn to realize how great we are and this strengthens the German feeling and makes all parts of the nation one.