THE WORLD WAR IN my excitable youth nothing had worried me so much as having been born in a time when it was evident that the only people who had temples erected in their honour were the merchants and State officials. The waves of political events appeared to have calmed down to such an extent that the future seemed really to belong to “peaceful competition between nations’’, i.e., quiet mutual swindling stopping short of violent methods. The various States began showing favour to enterprises, which cut the ground from under each other, stole each other’s customers and contracts, and sought to take advantage of each other in every possible way, the whole scene being staged with a din as harm¬ less as it was noisy. This development appeared not only to be permanent, but it seemed—with universal approval—to be going to re-model the world at one blow as a single vast warehouse, under Jewish bosses, in the vestibules of which busts of the craftiest pro¬ fiteers and the least go-ahead officials would be stored to all eternity.
Why could I not have been born a hundred years earlier ? Somewhere about the time of the War of Liberation, when a man was still worth something, quite apart from “business” ?
When the news of the murder of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand reached Munich (I was in the house at the time and only heard vaguely how it all happened), my first fear was that the bullets were per¬ haps those of the pistols of German students who, being exasperated by the favour which the Heir Presumptive perpetually showed to the Slavs, desired to free the German nation from their domestic enemy. I could quickly imagine what the result of that would be : a fresh wave of persecution, which would now be “explained and justified” before the whole world. But when immediately afterwards I heard the names of the