want to be an official, and refused to be one. Any attempt, by quoting my father’s examples, to arouse love or keen¬ ness for that calling only had the contrary effect. I hated and was bored by the idea of having to sit tied to an office, of not being master of my own time, of spending the whole of my life filling up forms.
Now, when I review the effect on myself of all those years, I see two facts which stand out most con¬ spicuously : (i) I became a Nationalist, and (ii) I learned to grasp and understand history in its true sense.
The old Austria was a State of many nationalities.
In comparatively early youth I had an opportunity of taking part in a struggle of nationality in the old Austria. We had a school society, and expressed our sentiments with cornflowers and the black-red-gold colours, and there was cheering, and we sang “Deutchland über Alles” in preference to the Austrian Kaiserlied\ in spite of warning and punishments. Thus the youth were being educated politically at an age when a member of a so-called national State usually knows little about his nationality except its language. Even then I obviously could not be counted amongst the lukewarm. I soon became a fanatical German Nationalist—not, however, the same thing as con¬ ceived by that Party to-day.
This development progressed very rapidly in me, so that by the time I was fifteen I had understood the difference between dynastic “patriotism” and popular “nationalism” ; I knew far more about the latter.
Did not we boys already know that this Austrian State had and could have no love for us Germans ?
Our historical knowledge of the methods of the House of Habsburg was corroborated by what we saw every day. In the North and the South the