often of late i have thought of those twenty-one locomotives moving along the bank of the rhine. they were a symbol. they stood for the house of hohenzollern; they carried cæsar and all his fortunes, which had begun long before locomotives were invented. july 19, 1870, is one of the dates that does not remain of the same size, but grows, has not done growing yet, will be one of history's enormous dates before it is done growing. the heavier descendants of those locomotives have been lugging to france a larger destruction, and more hideous, than their ancestors dragged there; but this new freight belongs to the same haul, forms part of one vast organic materialistic growth, and spiritual eclipse, of which 1870 and 1914 are important parts, but by no means the whole.

woven with it is the struggle of nations for the possession of their own soul. consider 1870 in this light: through that war france took her soul out of the custody of an emperor and handed it to the people; through the same war germany placed her soul in the hands of an emperor. defeated france, rid of her bonapartes; victorious germany, shackled to her hohenzollern! in the light of forty-five years how those two opposite actions gleam with significance, and how in the same light the two words defeat and victory grow lambent with shifting import! unless our democratic faith be vain, france walked forward then, and germany backward. but this did not seem so last june.