"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