Kirtley had thought a great deal about this and talked almost fluently.
"I'll tell you," and the old correspondent, bent forward toward him earnestly, glad that he had a young, receptive mind opened out toward him. "I'll tell you. It's simply the Hohenzollern in his mad and unconcealed pride about ruling the universe. He is in every German home like this, driving each individual to work the best, to make the most of himself and of herself, and without loss of time. He makes them understand that it's for the great German race—that they may become the potent force everywhere—leaders of mankind as he has taught them they deserve to be. It is for the benefit of their more and more deserving nation. But it is first and foremost for himself and his family. He has a burning, itching desire to reign everywhere. He is not a normal man physically and is unbalanced by a monumental vanity—arrogance—egotism.
"When your Frau is so busily sewing, she is sewing for her household, it is true, but she is consciously and unconsciously sewing for Wilhelm. When your Fräulein goes out to her etching lesson, she is aware of being of the magnificent German people, and shares a part of the national ambition to excel. It's this that we haven't got in America and can't well have under our system. But it's this unified, disciplined zeal that enables two or three ordinary Germans to do what it takes four ordinary Yankees to do. Clad in armor and with a glistening sword in hand, Germania ought to scare men, and they are not taking the warning.
"But, Kirtley, it scares me. I feel—see—something awful coming. In the universal German hate, the national boundary stops any flow outward of sympathy, good faith, equity. All peoples outside are human insects whom it is proper for the Teuton to tread on if he can, crush the life out of, because they are in his pathway to glory."
Kirtley, who had stared at his new friend in this solemnity, turned a serious face toward the clawlike branches of his linden in its gauntness of late autumn-tide. This meaning of the animus that was impelling his odd and yet so normal German household, he began to see, was substantiated by a score of acts and attitudes in its daily life. He scarcely deemed it proper to tell of them.
Besides, he did not want to fire up Anderson who already was so unsettled, so comfortless, on the subject. But Kirtley was reasoning out how this animus gave a solidity, a solidarity, to the German household—a satisfied contentment—because it was working toward a definite racial goal. Any such incentive was almost absent in the American family.
"And so," wound up Anderson with epigrams, "the years will be left humanity to weep these days of insouciance and neglect. You can see that Germany is a man-made nation. It is not the kind God or Nature would make. God must have turned His face when the Teuton species was manufactured. Germany is like a man-made hot air register. When it isn't throwing up hot air, it is throwing up cold air. It is always throwing up."
To change the somewhat painful theme, Kirtley soon began:
"I don't see any sports—such as we know them—in Germany. How do they get along without them?" Like all Yankee college men he was alert on these lines.
"No sports in Deutschland. Go out on the Dresden golf links of a morning and you'll find hardly a German soul playing. It's the same in Vienna—the same in Berlin. They have links because it's the fashion in England. The Germans ape everything. Go out on the highway to Berlin or Vienna or any of the great roads and you will seldom meet any Germans touring in their motors for pleasure. Only Americans—English. The Germans are spoiling little time by such matters. They are busy—busy working for their Empire—busy like moles boring away to undermine the earth—busy drilling with arms.