German ships! I wish the whole fleet of those dirty dogs could be
sunk to the bottom."

There was nothing neutral or blind-eyed about George Harley. He had
followed all the moves that had forced the war upon the nations
whose spineless and inefficient governments had so long been playing
the policy of the ostrich. He had nothing but detestation for the
vile and ruthless methods of the German war party and nation and
nothing but contempt for the allied politicians who had made such
methods possible. He had followed the course of the war with pain,
anguish and bated breath, thrilling at the supreme bravery of the
Belgians and the French, and the First Hundred Thousand, thanking
God for the miracle that saved Paris from desecration, and paying
honest tribute to the giant effort of the British to wipe out the
stain of a scandalous and criminal unpreparedness. He had squirmed
with humiliation at the attempts of the little, dreadful clever
people of his own country,--professors, parsons, pacifists and pro-
Germans,--to prove that it was the duty of the United States to
stand aloof and unmoved in the face of a menace which affected
herself in no less a degree than it affected the nations then
fighting for their lives, and had watched with increasing alarm the
fatuous complacency of Congress which continued to deceive itself
into believing that a great stretch of mere water rendered the
country immune from taking its honest part in its own war. "Oh, my
God," he had said in his heart, as all clear-sighted Americans had
been saying, "has commercialism eaten into our very vitals? Has the
good red blood of the early pioneers turned to water? Are we without
the nerve any longer to read the writing on the wall?" And the only
times that his national pride had been able to raise its head
beneath the weight of shame and foreboding were those when he passed