"Of course we have the only first-class army. All our General Staff has to do any day is to say the word and, as I have so often said, our army can go out and defeat the world. Our navy will soon be in a position to destroy England's. We are getting her trade routes, her mail routes. Our goods are now selling everywhere. It is not only because they are the best and the cheapest, but because our army and our navy stand behind them to _make_ people know what is best for them. Every little German box of goods has a big gun behind it. Of course we don't need to use the gun--_yet_--because people are crying for our manufactures all over the world. If we had occupied your big and half-developed country in your place, we would have long ago been the only great State. There would have been no others. We would have annihilated them if they were not willing to become German provinces." Rudi took a long pull at his cigarette, with his elbows outspread like the haughty wings of the Prussian eagles of war. Emitting a long streamer of smoke, he summed up the whole thing in a nutshell with a derisory--Pouf! Kirtley was inwardly fired up with resentment. Then he had to smother a laugh. This exhibition of the family taken off its guard was more instructive than volumes of discussion he might read about the true German attitude toward America--toward everyone. Were these but Goths with the German skins scratched off a little? He kept thinking of Anderson--how it furnished the pure evidence of what the latter was despairing of before deaf ears! Gard's respect, his sympathy, for the old man, jumped up with patriotic fervor. He marveled at first how the good Buchers had been primed with this knowledge, these comparisons. Then he realized that the editorials and other articles in the Dresden journals, whose lengthy, heavy, pounding sentences confused with an obtuse, inverted syntax he was reading at Anderson's suggestion, accounted for these venomous conceptions and prejudices. "So it is our duty to hate," broke in the Herr once more, with croaks and grunts now behind his long porcelain pipe which roved down over his stomach, a green tassel dangling at the end. "We give our children beatings to educate them, don't we? So we have the best education. We must give the world a beating to improve it." The Frau all the while could hardly restrain herself. "You know what we in Germany call Americans? We call them pigs--yes, _pigs_. America is like a big pig pen where everybody is wallowing over everybody for money--just for money." "And Germany," added her elder son, "is just waiting till the United States gets money enough, then we go in with our _navy_ and our _army_ and take it all."