ic. "The Germans will never cross the French frontier this time. This is not 1870."
"Won't they, and isn't it?" replied the Doctor sharply.
"They never can get by Verdun and Belfort."
"Never said they could," remarked the Doctor, with a tone as near to a sneer as a good-natured host can allow himself. "But they'll invade fast enough. I know what I am talking about."
"You don't mean to tell me," said the Critic, "that a nation like Germany--I'm talking now about the people, the country that has been the hot bed of Socialism,--will stand for a war of invasion?"
That started the Doctor off. He flayed the theorists, the people who reasoned with their emotions and not their brains, the mob that looked at externals, and never saw the fires beneath, the throng that was unable to understand anything outside its own horizon, the mass that pretended to read the history of the world, and because it changed its clothes imagined that it had changed its spirit.
"Why, I've lived in
