The second, as unholy and unrighteous as the first, was praiseworthy, was militarism, in which the rulers of the nation sought to make the profession of the soldier universal, with the deliberate and cold-blooded purpose of conquering the rest of the world, as Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar and Napoleon had planned before. Germany had in view also the creation of a navy which could overcome England's, so she might rule the world on both land and sea. But for the heroism and self-sacrifice of the little kingdom of Belgium, with only eight millions of people, they would have succeeded.
We saw many idle soldiers lying on the grassy parapets of their forts smoking, while near them women dressed in rags carried dirt in wheelbarrows to form additional parapets. Nannie instinctively foresaw the future. She even then denounced those people as barbarous and inhuman, and for the rest of her life she hated bitterly German militarism.
In England we found the people divided into numerous classes, royalty, nobility, gentlemen, tradespeople, and common people. Many of these latter, for want of the ambition and self-reliance necessary to bring about success, had become sordid and drunken.
There were hundreds of street cars in Paris and its environs broad-mindedly labeled "American Railway," but hardly one in England.
In Manchester (then a larger city than New York), an apparently intelligent Scotch policeman, recognizing me as an American, proudly pointed to a brand new street car with one horse, and remarked, "I suppose you don't have anything like that in America?" When I replied that every city in the United States having twenty thousand population had a street car system, he evidently regarded me as a sort of American Baron Munchausen.
The upper classes relied upon their control of the sea by the largest navy in the world, indirectly to extort taxes from their millions of subjects in their vast possessions, governed without their consent. Suppressing ambition for democracy and restraining maritime commerce of other nations, is perhaps not as cruel and barbarous as the intended control of the world by Germany, but is quite as unrighteous and has been and still is detrimental to the progress and advancement of weaker peoples.
Of all countries we visited, Switzerland seemed to possess the best free democratic government and the people were the happiest. They looked you in the face with a cheerful smile wherever you met them and were content with their condition, as they have been for over three hundred years.
The difference between Europeans and Americans we found to be marked. For instance, on one of the Lake Geneva passenger steamers from Vevey to Geneva we found a thousand passengers, composed about equally of Americans, English, French, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians. While talking to a well-dressed American of perhaps twenty-five years of age, a band of about thirty Italians appeared on the upper deck, where most of the passengers were assembled.
Most of the passengers, especially the English, would not speak to each other without a formal introduction, so social greetings were few. When the band had played a few minutes, this American took off his hat and placed a handkerchief over it and carried it through the crowd, remarking, "Something for the band, please." He approached every passenger on deck. Europeans stared, astonished at the action of this man from the "Woolly West," but Americans smiled encouragement. He obtained probably the largest contribution the leader had ever received. He proceeded to the band and every man and woman was gazing at him in perfect silence when he turned over the handkerchief to the leader, until some American clapped and every American joined in. We were all proud of our countryman.