“Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First was one of the world's' great consumers of hot air. He and his family and friends took all that Great Britain could produce—never, I am glad to say, a large amount, but enough to put James into business with the Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation. It was comparatively modest, but it was enough to outrage the common sense of the English. After all, divine partnerships were not for the land of Fielding and Smollett and Swift and Dickens and Thackeray. Too much humor there. Too much liberty of the tongue and pen. Too great a gift for ridicule. Where there is ridicule there can be no self-appointed counselors of God, and handmade halos of divinity find their way to the garbage heap.
“Now, if we are to have sound common sense, we must have humor, and if we are to have humor we must have liberty. There can be no crowned or mitered knave, no sacred, fawning idiot, who is immune from ridicule; no little tin deities who can safely slash you with a sword unless you give them the whole of the sidewalk. Humor would take care of them; not the exuberance that is born in the wine-press or the beer-vat—humor is no by-product of the brewery—-but the merriment that comes when common sense has been vindicated by ridicule.
“Solemnity is often wedded to Conceit, and their children have committed all the crimes on record. You may always look for the devil in the neighborhood of some solemn and conceited ass who has inherited power and who, like the one that Balaam rode, speaks for the Almighty. So, when the devil came back, he steered for the most solemn and perfect ass on the face of the earth—Bill Hohenzollern.
“In his soul the devil began to destroy the common sense of a race with the atmosphere of hell—hot air. We have seen its effect. It inflates the intellect. It produces the pneumatic, rubber brain—the brain that keeps its friends busy with the pump of adulation; the brain stretched to hold its conceit, out of which we can hear the hot air leaking in streams of boastfulness. The divine afflatus of an emperor is apt to make as much disturbance as a leaky steam-pipe. When the pumpers cease because they are weary, it becomes irritated. Then all hands to the pumps again. Soon there is no illusion of grandeur too absurd to be real, no indictment of idiotic presumption which it is unwilling to admit.
“By and by it breaks into the realm of the infinite and hastens to the succor of God, for, to the pneumatic brain, God is slow and old-fashioned. Thereafter it infests the heavenly throne and seeks to turn it into a plant for the manufacture of improved morals, and, so as to insure their popularity, every agent for these morals is to carry a sword and a gun and a license to use them. The alleged improvement consists in taking all the nots out of the ten commandments. Nots are irritating to certain people who have plans for murder, rape, arson, and piracy.
“Hohenzollern and Krupp had taken the Lord into partnership and begun to give Him lessons in efficiency. Moreover, they were not to be free lessons. The lessons were to be paid for, but they were willing to give Him easy terms, for which they were to show Him how to hasten the slow process of evolution. Evolution was hindered and delayed by sentiment and emotion.
“Sentiment and emotion were a needless inheritance. Hohenzollern and Krupp proposed to cut them out of life and abolish tears. Tears consumed the time and strength of the people. They were factors of inefficiency. What was the use of crying over spilled milk and dead people? Tears were in the nature of a luxury. The poor could not afford them. Life was not going to be lived any longer—it was to be conducted. It was to be a kind of a hurried Cook's tour. Nobody would have to think or feel. All that would be attended to by the proper official. Life was to be reduced to a merciless iron plan like that of the beehive—the most perfect example of efficiency in nature, with its two purposes of storage and race perpetuation.
“No one ever saw a bee shedding tears or worrying about the murder of a drone.
“The ideal of Germany was to be that of the insect. To the bee there is nothing in the world but bees, enemies, and the nectar in flowers; to the German there was to be nothing in the world but Germans, enemies, and loot With no wall of pity and sentiment between them and other races they could rain showers of bursting lyddite on the unsuspecting, and after that the will of the Kaiser and God would be respected. The firm would prosper. It is not the first time that conceit and Kultur have hitched their wagon to infinity. It is the old scheme of Nero and Caligula—-the ancient dream of the pneumatic prince. He can rule a great nation, but first he must fool it. First he must induce his people to part with their common sense and take some preferred—a dangerous quality of preferred. This he can do in a generation by the systematic use of hot air.
“You may think that this endangered the national morals, but do not be hasty. The morals were being looked after.