Genseric, king of the Vandals and first Prussian Kaiser

/7T:

By Pouttney Bigetoiv

The German Emperor and His Eastern Neighbors.
1890

Paddles and Politics

A Canoe Voyage from the Black Forest to the Black Sea

Border Land of Czar and Kaiser

Studies on Both Sides of the Polish Frontier

Children of the Nations

A Study in Modern Colonization

White Man's Africa

A Study of the Different South African States Immedi-
ately after the Jameson Raid

The German Struggle for Liberty

A History, 1806-1848, in 4 Vols.
Prussian Memories

Genseric : King of the Vandals and First Prussian
Kaiser

If

GENSERIC

KING OF THE VANDALS

AND
FIRST PRUSSIAN KAISER

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BY

POULTNEY BIGELOW, M.A., F.R.G.S,

AUTHOR OF "A HISTORY OF THE GERMAN STRUGGLE FOR
LIBERTY," " PRUSSIAN MEMORIES," ETC.

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Ube Iknicfeerbocfeer press

1918

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COPYRIGHT, 1918

BY
POULTNEY BIGELOW

Second Impression

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tTbe ftnicfcerbocfeer press, Hew HJorft

So

THE AUTHOR OF

ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

". . . It is now more than a quarter of a century since I
had the privilege of meeting you on the shores of the Baltic —
the Vandal habitat. Each of your books I have read— many of
them three times — one or two so often as to have lost count.
In your pages I have found not merely the rhetorical graces that
charm the intellect, but also a spiritual appreciation of Prussian
character that no historian can afford to ignore; for nowhere
else will be found the truth presented more fearlessly or with
finer critical sense."

P. B.

INTRODUCTORY

HP HERE are no surprises for him who studies
history at its source. When, therefore, in the
summer of 1914, the whole civilised world burst
into a cry of indignation at Prussian barbarity,
it proved that the world at large was ignorant of
history or rather had been inoculated with edu-
cational serum "made in Germany." Prussia in
1914 did only what was expected of her by those
who knew her past. Unfortunately, the Ameri-
can Press, in common with that of England, has for
twenty years turned a persistently deaf ear to the
many warnings that came from over the Rhine;
and under cover of an almost universal pro-Ger-
man and Pacifistic propaganda, William II. pre-
pared a raid upon the trade-relations of the world,
unparalleled for ferocity, for vastness, and for
efficiency in diabolical details.

During the quarter of a century through which

vi Introductory

he honoured me with marks of his favour — I had
almost said his confidence — he posed as a Prince of
Peace. But this was only a mask which he
dropped so soon as he had completed the Kiel
Canal and had completed also his programme of
national expansion.

Our Pacifists did not — or would not — see the new
Prussian menace, and when those who knew sought
to point it out, every American University became
suddenly a centre of German propaganda, where
Doctors of Philosophy from Goettingen, Heidel-
berg, and Berlin, preached loudly and fervently the
gospel of a Kultur Kaiser who loved America
dearly and hated only war.

When William II. ascended the throne (1888)
he secured for me permission to use the secret
Archives, not only of the State but also of the
great General Staff. Here I gathered at first hand
materials for my History of the German Struggle
( 1 806-48) . The first volume was published in 1 896,
the year in which William threw his mask away.

He thanked me for the copy which I sent him,
but expressed disappointment, not to say anger, at
the manner in which I had pictured his resting-in-

Introductory vii

God-legendarily-glorious ancestor, Frederick Will-
iam III., who is rescued from oblivion only by
having had for a wife the saintly Queen Luise.
William II. did not like my treatment of Prussian
history, nor can I say whether he expected to find
in me an honorary historiographer to the Hohen-
zollern Court,— to praise the present war — to justify
the rape of Belgium — the murder of Edith Cavell
and Captain Fryatt, and the nameless horrors
incident to the sinking of the Lusiianial

Important is the fact that historical text-books
are, in Prussia, treated as political pamphlets ; and
that professors of the German University distort
the records in their own archives in order to glorify
the reigning dynasty.

In 1913, Germany celebrated with much en-
thusiasm the Centennial of her Liberation from
Napoleon. The present Crown Prince was made
President of the National Committee; a massive
monument of mediocre taste was dedicated at
Leipzig; and the most famous of local dramatists
was ordered to produce in Breslau a play that
should fire the Prussian heart and glorify the reign-
ing House.

viii Introductory

The play ran for two days — just long enough for
news of its character to reach Potsdam and secure
the attention of the Kaiser. Then came an order
that it be at once suppressed.

The simple German rubbed his eyes and scratched
his ears ! The. millions who had not seen it now
rushed to buy a copy; and, of course I did the
same — happening to be just then in Bavaria. No
reason had been given for the summary act of
censorship and the more the people read, the less
did they understand.

The dramatist had detailed with Wagnerian
wearisomeness the services of all the great men
who had helped in 1813 to throw off the yoke
of Napoleon. It was indeed a dreary drama and
would have been damned for that reason alone
in any other country. But I had been Imperial
guest at many patriotic plays with five acts of
flatuous prolixity; for instance, The Quitzows,
where even the military escort yawned at flattery
that would have seemed gross even in a Byzantine
court. Knowing then that mere length and dulness
could not be a blemish in Berlin eyes, I was not
long in detecting the reason for the play's with-

Introductory ix

drawal. To be sure, Germany was glorified and
German patriots were praised; but the King of
Prussia, the alleged fount ainhead of all glory and
goodness, was not even mentioned. There was
the Use majestel It was that crime that made
courtiers die suddenly in the days of Nero — the
crime of not applauding loudly enough! The
dramatist of 1913 while he dared not criticize his
Kaiser shrank from language that would make
himself ridiculous. He therefore remained silent
and, socially speaking, signed his own death
warrant.

Need I say more to explain the state of modern
Germany — the mental and spiritual transforma-
tion of a whole people through an educational pro-
cess that has no parallel in any country of modern
or ancient times? We of America and England
glory in our free schools and, when I was a boy,
Prussia also regarded her educational system as
the bulwark of national independence. But let
us be warned in time. Schools are powerful
engines for good when guided by those who
love their country, seek the truth, and develop in
the children the love of justice and liberty. But

x Introductory

when this great national force falls into the hands
of a disloyal clergy who takes orders from a foreign
potentate, it makes little difference whether he
reside on the banks of the Havel or the Tiber — the
future of our country is in peril, and the weapons
forged for the defence of liberty become instru-
ments of tyranny. Genseric lives today in
Potsdam; and in successive reincarnations he will
march his armies forth to harass the frontiers of
civilisation. It is for us to study his career; to
study the Prussian machine shops; to learn from
the enemy and thus prepare ourselves to meet his
attacks — not only today in this war of wars, but
for so long as there are vandals and Huns on the
confines of our civilisation.

P. B.

MALDEN-ON-HUDSON, N. Y.f

Shakespeare's Birthday, 1918.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PACK

I. — HABITAT OF THE VANDALS — SOME
REFLECTIONS ON THEIR ISOLATION
— GENSERIC SEEKS A PLACE IN
THE SUN i

II. — PROGRESS OF VANDALS FROM PRUSSIA
TO THE PILLARS OF HERCULES —
GENSERIC PROFESSES PEACE TO
DECEIVE HIS ENEMIES . . 9

III. — BONIFACIUS HELPS GENSERIC — His
CREDULITY — FRIENDSHIP OF ST.
AUGUSTINE — DEFEATED IN BATTLE
— FORGIVEN BY PLACIDIA — GEN-
SERIC METHODS COMPARED WITH
THOSE OF WILLIAM II. — DEATH
OF ST. AUGUSTINE ... 14

IV. — HIPPO-REGIUS INVESTED BY GEN-
SERIC— How HE WAS HELPED
BY PACIFISTS AND OTHER Dis-

LOYALS— SACK OF THE ClTY . . 25

V. — GENSERIC AND FREDERICK II. — THE
WOMEN WHOM THEY HATED — PLA-
CIDIA, HER HUSBANDS AND HER
TRAVELS — VANDAL OFFERS OF
PEACE — CARTHAGE SURPRISED AND
HELD AS THE CAPITAL OF THE
VANDAL EMPIRE . . . .31
x!

xii Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

VI. — PULCHERIA, EMPRESS OF THE EAST
— HER COURT OF PRIESTS AND
EUNUCHS — PACIFISM AND PAPACY
— GENSERIC AT CARTHAGE PLANS
THE PILLAGE OF ROME. SEA SU-
PREMACY THEN AND NOW . . 38

VII.— CAREER OF ALARIC — PILLAGE OF
GREECE AND ROME — AIDED BY
CHRISTIANS — END OF ALARIC . 44

VIII. — ATTILA AND MARTIN LUTHER AT
EISENACH — INVASION OF GAUL
BY THE HUNS — SAINTS AND SOL-
DIERS— FINAL DEFEAT OF THE
GERMANS AT CHALONS . . 52

IX. — ATTILA RETIRES AND REAPPEARS AT
AQUILEIA — HUNS AND GERMAN
KULTUR — DEATH AND FUNERAL
OF ATTILA 60

X. — GENSERIC IN MODERN GERMANY —
COLONIZATION THEN AND NOW —
BUILDING OF VANDAL NAVY — SEA
RAIDS — AND WHY THE ROMAN
EMPIRE DID so LITTLE . . 69

XI. — SACK OF ROME BY GENSERIC— Eu-
DOXIA SEIZED AND DEPORTED — ONE
OF HER DAUGHTERS MARRIED TO
THE CROWN PRINCE ... 76

XII. — GENSERIC AS AUGUSTUS — CHRISTI-
ANITY AND ITS WARRING CREEDS —

Contents xiii

CHAPTER PACK

GERMAN TRIBES BECOME ARIANS —
CONSTANTINE HEAD OF THE CHURCH 84

XIII. — RELIGIOUS WAR IN NORTH AFRICA —

SECTS AND THEIR ORIGIN THEN
AND NOW — DONATISTS — MARTYR-
DOM OF CYPRIAN — His TRIAL . 92

XIV. — PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN PROCEDURE
CONTRASTED — JOHN Huss AND HIS
FOLLOWERS— JOHN NEPOMUK . 103

XV. — WILLIAM II. AND GENSERIC AS COLO-
NISTS— METZ AND CARTHAGE — EX-
PEDITION OF MAJORIAN — DISASTER
IN CARTHAGENA — His END — ALSO
SOME THOUGHTS ON MAYOR MIT-
CHEL AND MAJORIAN . .112

XVI. — RIP VAN WINKLE AND THE SEVEN
SLEEPERS OF CHRISTENDOM —
PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN ROME —
HOLY COAT OF TREVES . .121

XVII. — GENSERIC AND EUDOXIA — HER RES-
TORATION — SOME COMMENTS ON
HER MOTHER ATHENAIS — FAILURE
OF THE SECOND GREAT ARMADA
AGAINST CARTHAGE . . .130

XVIII. — PERSECUTION BY GENSERIC— MIRA-
CLES OF ST. AUGUSTINE AND ST.
STEPHEN — IDOLATRY OF PAGANS
AND CHRISTIANS — EFFECT OF AFRI-
CAN LUXURY ON THE VANDALS . 140

xiv Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

XIX. — SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE RISE
AND FALL OF EMPIRES — RELATIVE
PROGRESS OF PAGANISM AND CHRIS-
TIANITY — MAHOMETANISM — BUD-
DHISM— HINDOOISM . . . 149

XX. — DEATH AND BURIAL OF GENSERIC —
His SON HUNRIC SUCCEEDS — POL-
ICY AND MANNER OF PERSECUTION
— DEPORTATION OF HERETICAL
BISHOPS — TORTURE OF WOMEN . 159

XXI. — BELISARIUS LANDS IN AFRICA — EN-
TERS CARTHAGE IN TRIUMPH — Is
WELCOMED AS DELIVERER — THE
VANDAL ARMY DISPERSED — THE
LAST OF THEIR KINGS KILLED —
THE USURPER A FUGITIVE . .168

XXII. — GELIMER CAPTURED AND CARRIED
TO CONSTANTINOPLE WHERE HE
ADORNS THE TRIUMPH OF BELISA-
RIUS AND is GENEROUSLY WEL-
COMED BY JUSTINIAN . .175

XXIII. — COLONIAL GENSERIC AND COLONIAL
PRUSSIA OF TODAY — SOME COM-
PARATIVE NOTES — KIAO-CHOW AND
PAPUA — END OF PRUSSIAN KAISER-
ISM IN NORTHERN AFRICA . .181

CONCLUDING CHAPTER: GENSERIC, WILLIAM

II., AND FREDERICK THE GREAT 198

PREFATORY AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

\ X 7HERE shall we dig for the treasures of his-
tory? To what sources can I refer the
young reader without compelling him to absorb
some poison of prejudice along with a refreshing
draught? German scholarship has crowded every
modern library with a portentous array of alleged
authority on every subject that can be put into
marketable shape. The German state has subsi-
dized her universities and her scholars much as she
has her steamship lines and her exporting manufac-
turers. Young students have been attracted from
every country to become acolytes in the temples of
a megalophonous Kultur whose priests are paid
agents of a propaganda little suspected outside of
the initiate. Our students who have in the past
flocked to German universities have had no means
of measuring the relative value of national scholar-
ship. The schools of France and England have

XV

xvi Prefatory and Bibliographical

done little to meet the Teuton competition — the
American B.A. has drifted for his Ph.D. to Leipzig
or Munich because it was the easiest, the cheapest t
and, so far as he knew, the surest way of achieving
an academic reputation afterwards.

Fortune, in the person of a very wise father,
enabled me to test not merely the work of my
German colleagues, but to measure it pari passu
with that of others in the same field; and while
I always bear witness to the labour and organi-
zation that make of Germany a valuable store-
house of patiently tabulated knowledge, the student
in search of inspiration as well as truth will find
more in a single chapter of Gibbon or Montes-
quieu than in a quarto of Treitschke or Dahn.
The Prussian has a capacity that is unrivalled in
French or English literature for making an interest-
ing story obscure and dull. I have learned through
many years of hard and patient study that when-
ever the same subject has been treated by a Teu-
ton scholar and by one of our race, the difference
has been akin to that of sunshine penetrating a
miasmatic vapour — and the sunshine was not of
German origin.

Prefatory and Bibliographical xvii

Therefore, if you turn to German sources for
the times of Genseric you will find that acts which
we deem savage are palliated. You will find a
gentle stream of Prussian propaganda permeating
the modern encyclopedias, not merely German
and American but English as well. You may
consult the much advertised Britannica, alleged
to be a product of English scholarship, and find to
your amazement that not only is German colour
given to many contributions but that even the
most important maps are made in Gotha. You
will look for the Nan-Schan Mountains at the
headwaters of the Hoang Ho on the borders of
Mongolia and discover that they have been
rebaptized after my quondam friend of Berlin,
Baron Richthofen!

Imperial Germany has flooded the world with
her pedagogues and pundits much as she has
honeycombed the British colonies with her com-
mercial travellers and spies. It is hard today to
find any cyclopedic work of a popular character
that does not betray some form of pro-German
plan and purpose. We respected the German
scholar of our youth because we deemed him

xviii Prefatory and Bibliographical

honest in spite of his dulness. But he is both
dull and dishonest, as we have discovered to our
cost ; and this war will have achieved some good
if we at last take steps to purge our school text-
books, our cyclopedias, and above all our histories,
from the interested assistance that we have so
largely employed because we thought it was good
and it was certainly cheap.

Therefore I refrain from adding to this little
book a bibliographic burden such as I have had
to bear in the preparation of its few pages. The
curious reader can check my statements by con-
sulting the well-known books of reference where
authorities are quoted. The British Museum has
published (1911) a valuable catalogue of the Van-
dal coins by Warwick Wroth, and here the student
may note the manner in which the Prussians of
the fifth and sixth century aped the insignia
of Imperial Rome much as did the Hohenzollern of
1871 when crowning himself Kaiser at Versailles.
There is a very detailed German biographical
dictionary in forty-seven volumes, published by
the aid of the Bavarian treasury, which collects
all that is known of notable barbarians.

Prefatory and Bibliographical xix

De Guigne's Histoire des Huns, although more
than a century old, remains today precious to
the student. It is a work that might be con-
densed and re-edited in the light of recent events
and published under the title: Les Prussiens en
Belgique !

And, finally, read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire — read him several times — note
the elevation, the purity, the directness, the music
of his well-balanced sentences ; and, above all, note
his masterly grasp of a great subject — his judicial
attitude and his most un-Prussian humour.

Read carefully a page of Gibbon and then try
to read a page of any German history ! One such
effort will suffice.

GENSERIG

CHAPTER I

Habitat of the Vandals — Some reflections on their isolation —
Genseric seeks a place in the sun

/"^ENSERIC, the first Prussian Kaiser of
Europe, was born about four centuries
after Christ in that swamp and sand district
of Brandenburg where now stands the palace of
Potsdam. History is silent on many details of
his life and we must therefore venture a guess now
and then after the manner of our scientific col-
leagues. We select Potsdam as the birthplace of
Genseric because of its strategic position between
the Baltic and the Elbe, at the centre of water-
ways admirably suited to commerce or piracy,
and therefore marked by Providence as the resi-
dence of Prussian or Vandal kings.

2 Genseric

The barbarian hordes who prowled about the
frontiers of civilised Europe in the third, fourth,
and fifth centuries differed little from their de-
scendants who, fifteen centuries later, swarmed
across the Rhine and destroyed sacred monu-
ments in France and Belgium. It is difficult to
locate in detail the dozens of tribes or nations who
occupied the great forest-clad spaces reaching
from the mouth of the Elbe along the shores of
the Baltic to the Gulf of Finland. Their names
shifted with the vicissitudes of war, famine, and
pressure of population; and the geographer who
studies Northern Germany historically is almost
as much puzzled as if seeking to explain the
mysterious disappearance of tribes and kingdoms
in Africa and on the North American continent.
But in general the Prussian Baltic, which in our
time furnishes the most docile and prolific sub-
jects of the Kaiser, was famed for corresponding
reasons in the declining days of the Roman
Empire.

Especially true was this of the Potsdam regions
where the Vandal had his habitat.

Today the name Vandal is preserved etymologi-

First Prussian Kaiser 3

cally in the language and features of the Vends
or Wends who occupy the spongy headwaters of
the river Spree and are regarded by the rich burgh-
ers of Berlin as a prolific source of wet-nurses.
These people speak the language of their Vandal
ancestors, thanks to the same sort of geographical
isolation as protected the primitive inhabitants of
Holland and the founders of the Venetian Repub-
lic in the Adriatic lagoons. The racial difference
between the Prussian or Vandal type and the
civilised type inhabiting the Rhine and Danube
basins is very marked to any one who has studied
the recruits of the German Army, when massed
at the Imperial manoeuvres. The Army Corps
of Konigsberg, Danzig, Berlin, Colberg, Stettin,
and Frankfort on the Oder are as different ethno-
logically from those raised in Cologne or Mayence,
Augsburg and Ingolstadt, as a Norwegian sailor
from a peasant of Sicily. It has been my fortune
to study at first hand the ethnological peculiarities
of every regiment in the German army from the
French and Belgian frontiers to those of Russia and
Bohemia, and however loudly the Berliner may
bellow his claims as "Wir Deutsche!" he carries

4 Genseric

in his face and manners the brand of Vandalism —
which God has done for the security of the rest
of mankind.

All this northern wilderness of sandy flatness,
sluggish waterways, and interminable pine-forests
offered but few inducements to the cultivated
traveller of that time, nor does it offer much more
today.

There was some trade between the Baltic bar-
barians and civilised Europe in Roman times,
notably amber, which was exchanged for metals
and fine cloth. The Romans knew the Prussia
of that time as we have for centuries known the
Dark Continent, from trading round its edges.
But civilised Europe learned nothing calculated
to awaken a desire for further knowledge. The
land was poor, there were no cities worth a siege,
there were no mines such as drew Phoenicians to
Cornwall. In short, Prussia represented then
little more than a vast nursery or recruiting
ground of hireling soldiers whom hunger or the
prospect of plunder drew from their Baltic habitat
to the frontiers of civilisation on the Rhine and
the Danube. We must bear in mind that the

First Prussian Kaiser 5

Romans loved luxury and were disposed to let
mercenaries do their fighting for them ; there was
usually war somewhere on the horizon much as
there has been in our time at different points
of the great British Empire. What then more
natural than that Rome should employ armies
of Goths or Huns or Vandals rather than insist
upon universal military service amongst her own
people? And for a time this method worked
fairly well because the German tribes were proud
to be in Roman pay, and gloried in victories over
rival tribes. It was indeed the perpetual discord
of the German barbarians that enabled the courts
of Rome and Constantinople to maintain their
ancient prestige through merely subsidizing one
tribe or nation against another — but such a
policy is dangerous in weak hands — as we shall
soon see.

Genseric became King of the Vandals when his
years about equalled those of his illustrious avatar
William II., that is to say, about thirty years of
age. It would be interesting to compare their
horoscopes, but unfortunately for the science of
megalomania we have but guesses to guide us

6 Genseric

here — and my guess makes the birthday of Gen-
seric January 2 7th, at the opening of the fateful
fifth century of our era.

We behold him now taking command of an
army that has for the past twenty-five years
been pushing and pillaging southward from the
spongy deserts of Northern Prussia to the banks
of the Guadalquivir in the sun-lit paradise of
Southern Spain, which he named Vandalusia in
honour of his tribe. It has taken many years,
and cost many lives — this marauding migration —
and we now see little Genseric, the bastard son
of King Gunderic, growing up in the midst of
war alarms and earning the succession to his
father's throne by manifesting the courage and
cunning of a born leader.

The Vandals did then as their successors have
done since; they sold their services wherever
they could find a purchaser; they made promises
which they kept when convenient; they pressed
on through the distracted provinces that now
are Belgium and France, and, thanks to the fact
that other German tribes were pressing at other
points of the great frontier, the year 427 found

First Prussian Kaiser 7

Genseric at the port of Tarifa, not far from the
rock of Gibraltar, gazing across at the mountains
of Morocco and meditating a move that would
fulfil the promise made to his brother Germans —
a Place in the Sun!

Is it then strange that fifteen centuries later
William II. should proclaim his right to an Afri-
can Empire reaching from the Indian Ocean to
the Atlantic — a solid central position from which
he may dominate the rest of the Dark Continent
as he now dreams of dominating civilised Europe
from Berlin. As I write, the German General
Staff is formulating plans for a strong military
state in the heart of Africa — a well-drilled native
army that may not merely secure the colonial
possessions of the Kaiser but act as a menace on
the flanks of British India and the hinterland of
both Egypt and the Cape. William II., in imita-
tion of his ancestor, Genseric, cares nothing for
colonization in the British sense. On the con-
trary, present-day Germany treats her tropical
possessions as territory to be exploited for the
benefit of the conqueror. The natives are re-
duced to a state of vassalage; and Prussian

8 Genseric

officials administer the country on most modern
and efficient principles to the end that the rail-
ways and steamships of the Kaiser earn good
dividends. The British colonies have been open
to the commerce of the world — a policy which
William II. regards as suicidal sentiment — and so
did Genseric.

CHAPTER II

Progress of Vandals from Prussia to the Pillars of Hercules —
Genseric professes peace to deceive his enemies.

I T seems inexplicable that a tribe of Vandals in
Baltic lands between the Oder and the Elbe
should in less than thirty years be at the southern-
most point of Spain. The distance is over one
thousand miles and their average progress was
about thirty-six miles per year, or three miles
for each month — a rate of speed that left abun-
dant leisure for foraging and other profitable
digressions. When he took any prisoners, they
were either massacred or sold into slavery or
incorporated as recruits, and, of course, he spared
only those best fitted for his particular work. Of
those who followed him from Potsdam, very few
could have survived the three decades of hard-
ships, and their places had to be filled. But the
history of Frederick the Great, and also that of

9

io Genseric

the famous Crusaders and the Buccaneers of
the Spanish Main, teaches us that a successful
general readily attracts new recruits from every
race and creed. Therefore it is fair to conclude
that while Genseric and Frederick the Great were
Vandals or Prussians, they commanded men se-
lected primarily for fighting qualities and loyalty
to their king.

Spain, in the days of Genseric, was nominally
a part of the Roman Empire; but so many Ger-
man tribes had crowded in upon that helpless
peninsula that they fell to fighting one another
in the interval between plundering the helpless
natives. It is my private guess that Genseric
from boyhood up had occupied his visionary
moments with planning an attack upon the warm
lands of Europe, much as William II. dreamed
of sacking Bombay and Calcutta. His father's
camp contained many who had served in the
legions of Rome, who had spied out the weak-
nesses of the enemy, and who urged a policy of
outward conciliation until such time as they were
ready to maintain a mastery of the seas and cut
off the mother country from her great supply base

First Prussian Kaiser n

in Northern Africa. Genseric, as Crown Prince,
was early initiated into this plan for world con-
quest and cultivated assiduously the arts by which
he could encourage the pacifism of his neighbours
whilst concealing his own programme of military
efficiency. He lost no occasion for proclaiming
heatedly to the envoys of neighbouring states that
Peace was his only aim — that he maintained an
army only as a means of ensuring this worthy —
not to say Christian — object !

For Genseric and his Vandals were all Christ-
ians— at least in name. It would be idle here to
discuss the dozens of creeds that went to make
up or to dismember a Church which pretended
to follow the teachings of Jesus. The German
tribes had been converted by Christians who
differed from those under the Bishop of Rome in
a minor matter. The Romanists called them-
selves Catholic and Orthodox, the Vandals called
themselves Arians, but the Papists called them
Heretics. When Genseric reached Tarifa he
found that the whole of North Africa, from the
Strait of Gibraltar to the frontiers of Egypt, a
distance about the same as from Tarifa to Rugen,

12 Genseric

was inhabited also by Christians who had this
in common with himself, that they were heretics
in the eyes of Rome. The North-African Christ-
ians were called Donatists — and once more I
deserve the reader's gratitude by resisting the
temptation of crowding these pages with names
and dates and theological disputes — all of which
must be studied by the conscientious historian,
and all of which I shall keep to myself save in
so far as the persecution of heresy amongst the
Christians of Mauretania contributed to place
the crown of Caesar on the head of a barbarian
chief, whose title was that of a bastard birth
amid the huts of a Baltic tribe.

No wonder that German scholars today honour
Genseric as the first of the great pioneers in Welt
Politik, if not Prussian Kultur. German scholars
of national biography regard him as an ornament
to their academic Valhalla. Military Germany
honours in this great Vandal of Potsdam a soldier
who would have applauded the murder of Edith
Cavell or the sinking of the Lusitania — in other
words who conducted war as a worthy ancestor
of the Hohenzollern spirit. And above all, we

First Prussian Kaiser 13

must consider him as the father of colonization
on the Prussian plan. So let us return to Tarifa
and embark with Genseric for Tangiers in the
year of our Lord 427.

CHAPTER III

Bonifacius helps Genseric — His credulity — Friendship of St.
Augustine — Defeated in battle — Forgiven by Placidia—
Genseric methods compared with those of William II —
Death of St. Augustine.

VL7ILLIAU II. in 1888 ascended the Vandal
throne and gave laws not merely to
Germany but to more than a million square miles
beyond the shores of Europe. This empire of
the tropics was undreamed of at the time of his
birth, and it would never have been his but for
his grandmother, Queen Victoria, of blessed mem-
ory, and an elderly, easy-going Lord Salisbury, who
disliked anything like dispute and who yielded
all that Germany asked rather than listen to
long and discordant representations from Berlin.
The pacifists and pro-Germans of England gave
a colonial empire to Prussia and in so doing have
earned the ingratitude not to say contempt of the
Hohenzollerns !

14

First Prussian Kaiser 15

And it was somewhat thus fifteen centuries
ago, when Genseric embarked for Morocco. In
each case the Vandals occupied Africa without
firing a shot — though their landing was the pre-
lude to years of bloodshed. Genseric received his
invitation from the Roman general commanding,
Bonifacius, to assist him against his enemies;
and the payment for this service was to be a
portion of Morocco. Genseric had but fifty thou-
sand men under his command at Tarif a, a number
inadequate for offensive invasion and too small
for maintaining himself even in Spain, save in
the presence of disunited barbarian forces. But
fortune was with him, as with many another
adventurer, and he crossed the dangerous Strait
of Gibraltar in safety, thanks to the assistance of
Spaniards who were eager to lose him, and of
Bonifacius, who hailed him as an honourable ally.

This General Bonifacius must not be confused
with the many others of that well-meaning name
—notably nine popes and a Devonshire mission-
ary, who died in the odour of sanctity after having
devoted his life to the improvement of Germany
in the eighth century. Our Boniface had courage,

1 6 Genseric

military experience, noble purposes in the admin-
istration of Rome's most important colony, and
above all a generous human sympathy that en-
deared him to his men and to even the turbulent
elements that inhabited the rich country between
the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean.
He was also a warm friend of St. Augustine,
Bishop of Hippo, and author of the famous Con-
fessions. Indeed the Roman warrior at one time
contemplated abandoning his sword for a crucifix.
The loss of a dearly beloved wife affected him so
profoundly that he was with difficulty dissuaded
from seeking the questionable consolation of a
monastery. Had he done so, however, Genseric
might never have landed at Tangiers. Bonifacius
took to himself a second wife, an Arian — which
pained the Catholic Saint almost as much as it
pleased the heretic Genseric, for Augustine, whilst
encouraging Bonifacius to remain in the army,
begged him to embrace a life of celibacy — and, if
possible, chastity. But Bonifacius has a weak side
for woman, and a respectable report credits him
with more wives than one.
Three women ruled the Roman Empire in these

First Prussian Kaiser 17

days, before the ballot box had banished god-
desses from their feminine pedestals. One was
Placidia, Regent of the West, during the minority
of her son, Valentinian III. Bonifacius had been
a loyal servant to her in times when this loyalty
meant much ; and his appointment as commander
or Viceroy in North Africa measures the esteem
in which this emotional warrior was held at the
Roman Court. But suddenly there came to him
a summons to return immediately; and by the
same courier warnings from an alleged friend
that Placidia meant to disgrace him and that he
should therefore disobey the order and maintain
himself in Africa. We are left in doubt as to the
many conflicting rumours that distracted the mind
of this honest soldier. We cannot judge him, for
we do not know the causes of his disastrous deci-
sion. It was, maybe, one of the many cases where
the Devil arrives at the moment of doubt, and when
General Bonifacius doubted, Genseric appeared.
He made fair promises; he sealed them with
oaths; he asked but a place in the sun; his little
army of fifty thousand could never do harm to
that of Rome; he wanted to be a friend of Boni-

1 8 Genseric

facius; he would protect the Roman frontier
against the wild Kabyle warriors of the hinter-
land— in short the simple-minded General be-
lieved the Prussian Genseric as he believed the
tales from the Court of Placidia. In both cases
he was cruelly deceived and his death, five years
later, was a welcome release from a life in which
he vainly sought to expiate a blunder that proved
to be worse than a crime.

And so we are not surprised that Genseric,
when once secure on African soil, should have
immediately organized a propaganda bureau, in
order to injure the cause of Rome. Like the
Kaiser of today he prepared for THE DAY when
he might safely drop the mask of friendship, tear
up his treaties as so many scraps of paper, and
march an army to the conquest of Carthage and
then Rome.

William II. did not drop his mask of Peace until
he had been seven years on the throne; com-
pleted the North Sea-Baltic Canal; purchased
the support of the Papacy in Reichstag elections,
and had so drilled his people in hatred of England,
that thenceforward a declaration of war would be

First Prussian Kaiser 19

not merely welcome to his army, but also to his
people as the call of God to a crusade for Kultur.
Genseric shared the good fortune of William II. —
all his schemes worked out as though on the field
of autumn manoeuvres. The wild tribes of the
Atlas — a splendid race of men now as then — turned
gladly to one who professed himself their friend
and who slyly insinuated that he would soon
lead them against their hereditary oppressors, the
Roman tax-gatherers and the still more oppressive
Catholic hierarchy. To the Pagans, who secretly
bided by the faith of their fathers, he held out a
prospect of religious liberty that would permit
the temples of Jupiter and Apollo once more to
be honoured. To the much persecuted Donatists
he opened the vista of a glorious vengeance when
the Bishops of the Papacy should be driven away
and their own called back from exile. In short,
between the Donatists, the Pagans of Jupiter,
the hill- tribe heathen, the ubiquitous Hebrew, and
the usual proportion of people who owed money,
or who had escaped from justice and hoped some-
thing from any change, Genseric soon dropped the
mask of friendship and, three years from landing

2o Genseric

at Tangiers, routed the credulous Bonifacius in
battle and compelled him to retire wholly from
Africa and to throw himself in suppliance at the
feet of Her Majesty Placidia.

And to her credit be it said that she forgave
the unfortunate general upon learning of the vile
manner in which his confidence had been abused
by Prussian perfidy on the one side and domestic
intrigue on the other. She liked the uxorious
Boniface and sought to alleviate his distress by
titles and posts of honour, but the loss of Africa
was complete, and there remained for the author
of this disaster nothing but an honourable death,
which he found in a fight with the man who had
sent the message by which the Prussian alone had
profited.

And how he profited! We all recall his latter-
day reincarnation, the Kaiser, landing at Tangiers
in 1906, and loudly proclaiming to the world at
large and to the Moorish rabble, in particular,
that his sword was only for their protection and
that in any case of trouble from French or English
sources they might invoke the good offices of one
more gentle and powerful even than Genseric.

First Prussian Kaiser 21

William II. made the same sort of speech in
Damascus, in Constantinople — wherever he could
hope to stir up rebellious movement against the
established rule and profit by the ensuing broils.

Indeed in this great war, the champion of
militarism and autocracy has fomented pacifism
and rebellion in every country, excepting, of course,
his own. In East Africa he granted large estates
to the Roman Church for missionary establish-
ments and at the same time marched his native
troops against those of the Boer and British under
banners on which were the emblems of the Mus-
sulman faith side by side with the Iron Cross of
Prussia. The German missionaries are to exter-
minate the English language — the Crescent is to
flatter the native black and make him think that
the Hohenzollern also has a harem.

Genseric lost no time in traversing the length
of old Mauretania — now Morocco, and the present
Algeria to the edges of modern Tunis. His main
purpose was to seize Carthage, but he first laid
siege to Hippo-Regius which was then the second
capital of North Africa; fortified physically by
the arms of Boniface and spiritually by the pre-

22 Genseric

sence of Augustine — at least, until death released
that Saint in the third month of the siege, at the
comfortable age of seventy-six, anno 430. Augus-
tine has recorded for the benefit of the credulous,
many miracles performed in his own diocese —
miracles so many that they exceed the number of
years in his life. He was, moreover, a stout be-
liever in the rack and stake as inducements to-
wards abandoning one creed for another. He
persecuted his brother Christians of the Donatist
and Arian communion with the same impartial
vigour that he applied to the conversion of the
Jews, Pagans, and nondescript natives who
harassed the southern frontiers of Northern
Africa much as the bands of Northern Europe
threatened the Roman frontiers of Rhine and
Danube. He might have done much for the true
faith had he seen fit to add one more to his list
of wonders, and melted the heart of the Vandal
or at least set a limit to his Vandalism. There
were many precedents for some such saintly out-
burst— notably the blazing Cross that led the
Legions of Constantine more than a century
before the siege of Hippo.

First Prussian Kaiser 23

But St. Augustine died without having helped
his friend Boniface to a victory or even to an
orthodox wife. The Vandal was victorious, and
so was the creed of Anus. But in a very few
centuries every Christian creed was swept away
before the God of Mahomet who rules today in
somnolent serenity from the westernmost cape of
the Dark Continent through ten thousand miles
of differing nations and tongues to the farther-
most fringes of the Dutch East India at the very
gates of the Australian continent.

And all because St. Augustine refused to perform
his seventy-seventh miracle ! However, let us not
criticize one whom the Pope of Rome has declared
so holy that we may even pray to him as to an
underling in the household of our Creator. St.
Augustine wrote thousands of treatises on theo-
logical matters; and, unfortunately for several
popes, Genseric did not destroy this manuscript.
It is curious to note that one thousand years
later, many Christians were burnt at the stake
for professing opinions which they had imbibed
from this beatified Bishop of Hippo. You have
no doubt all delighted in the Confessions of St.

24 Genseric

Augustine — a book like that of Jean Jacques
Rousseau, which preaches the importance of be-
ing virtuous after you shall have first exhausted
every pleasure associated with lying, thieving,
and the debauchery of women. The pastoral sage
of the eighteenth century was a spiritual child of
the African saint in so far as each became an
object of worship after a career that would, with
ordinary men, have ended at the gallows or the
block.

But you may read elsewhere the lives of Boniface
and Augustine — so let me hurry back to Genseric,
who is besieging Hippo-Regius and with Prussian
efficiency preparing his orders relating to the
systematic plundering of this his first colonial
prize.

CHAPTER IV

Hippo-Regius invested by Genseric — How he was helped by
Pacifists and other disloyals — Sack of the city.

ENSERIC led a victorious army of Germans,
Moors, and disaffected Christians from
Tangiers to Hippo (the present Bona) in a little
more than one year; and after the conquest of
this place, it was eight years before he could enter
Carthage (439) . If you will consult your map and
think for yourself, you will probably feel the
rough analogy between the rapid raid of the
Vandal and the astounding rapidity with which
William II. overran Belgium, Luxemburg, and
Northern France nearly fifteen centuries later.
Genseric was checked at Hippo, William II. at
the Marne. Hippo is but two hundred miles
from Carthage, but one thousand from Tangiers
—and the rapidity of Genseric's initial raid was
made possible by the same perfidious methods

25

26 Genseric

that enabled Prussian troops to menace the capital
of France in the summer of 1914. The initial
raid succeeded because Genseric had prepared
the way by means of an advance army of spies,
who spread the Gospel of Pacifism and Vandal
Kultur, and who promised that with the destruc-
tion of Rome would come an era of liberty for the
oppressed Donatists and a redistribution of land
in favour of all who helped in the holy war. And
so it happened that Genseric flew with victorious
wings one thousand miles in one or two years;
he flew fast and with flattering facility so long as
he had the co-operation of native forces; but at
Hippo-Regius he found resistance that detained
him fourteen months of wearisome siege and this
time was enough to open the eyes of many paci-
fists and former pro-Genserics.

There were Irish who in 1915 helped to intro-
duce Prussians into their country in the fond
belief that Hibernian independence could grow on
a soil fertilized by the Hun. There were Irish
whose religious and political fanaticism led them
to destroy the fairest part of Dublin for the bene-
fit of William II. But many repented as did those

First Prussian Kaiser 27

who sought to improve the Roman administration
by invoking the aid of Genseric.

Hippo finally fell, and the usual Hun procedure
disposed of the inhabitants. The soldiers were
first let loose upon the helpless civil population
as a reward for the dangers through which they
had passed; and after that the more systematic
pillage was undertaken with prudent Prussian
efficiency. Every house was emptied of its human
occupants who were camped or interned outside
the city walls. All men of military age were
speedily disposed of by the sword, unless they
proved their desire to become recruits in the
Vandal army. Young women and craftsmen
were placed in a second camp and sold off into
slavery or apportioned to the soldiers. The
third category consisted of the old people, heads
of families, those suspected of having property.
Through his spies Genseric was able in the cities
of Northern Africa to plunder with thoroughness
surpassed only by his descendants under William
II. The victims were interrogated, cross-ques-
tioned, and if the answers were not satisfactory,
tortured until news of concealed wealth was

28 Genseric

produced or symptoms of collapse. Before Gen-
seric had completed the task of reorganizing his
first important Roman conquest he had shed far
more blood by the hand of the executioner than
on any field of battle ; and the land which he had
entered as a liberator already loathed him as a
butcher.

An army of fifty thousand can do wonders on
a continuous march through a country unpre-
pared for war, but a line of one thousand miles
needs many blockhouses or intrenched camps ; and
each of these must be garrisoned and stored with
food. In 1914, William II. could have landed
one hundred thousand men at any point of our
Atlantic coast and marched to Chicago more
easily than the Vandal who raided Hippo from
Tangiers in 430, for he would have been assisted
by an equal proportion of Pacifists, Germans,
priests of a Pro-Prussian Pope, and the disloyal
elements of society who disguise disloyalty by
calling themselves Socialists. Had the Roman
Empire attacked Genseric with vigour whilst he
lay before Hippo that would have been the end
of him and his Imperial schemes. But, as I have

First Prussian Kaiser 29

already pointed out, the courts of Constantinople
and Roman Ravenna were jealous one of the other;
pacifism was the creed popularized by the Saints
and Fathers of the so-called Christian Church,
and thus Rome's most important province called
in vain for help while Genseric consolidated his
conquest.

Hippo is now a flourishing French port — the
modern Bona — connected by fast and luxurious
liners with the world at large and reaching towards
Egypt, Morocco, and the Southern Empire by
means of splendid roads and railways. France
has been less than a century in Northern Africa,
yet each year of her occupation has been marked
by public works, creditable to her engineering
genius and useful to the people over whom she
spreads the protection of her colonial mantle.
Whoever reads the description of Algiers, Oran,
Tunis, Tangiers, as were these places before the
arrival of France, and compares them with pre-
sent conditions, must rub his eyes in wonder.
Bona, which in the eighteenth century was a
forlorn village, now charms the eye of the tourist
and attracts the merchant or colonist by an

30 Genseric

administration at once enlightened and forceful.
The hundred huts of a hundred years ago have
given way to a city of near half a hundred thou-
sand, laid out with an eye to sanitary no less than
artistic effect, and the port which formerly afforded
precarious anchorage to irregular adventurers, to-
day shelters a fleet of steamers behind gigantic
moles of masonry.

Less than a century has converted Northern
Africa from a barbarous and depopulated wilder-
ness into a land of security for an ever-increasing
people. Less than a century sufficed for Genseric
to reduce this same territory from a land rich
in people and promise to one where the few sur-
vivors had but one consolation in their poverty —
that there was nothing more for a Vandal to
plunder.

But let us now return to the Hippo of St. Augus-
tine and see how Genseric finally became master
of Carthage — the second city of the Empire — a
city that had known no enemy since the younger
Scipio — nearly six centuries.

CHAPTER V

Genseric and Frederick II. — The women whom they hated —
Placidia, her husbands and her travels— Vandal offers of
Peace — Carthage surprised and held as the capital of the
Vandal Empire.

'"THE traveller who gazes at the Potsdam palace
where William II. was born is invited by the
Prussian guardian to admire the statues of three
women, whom the Great Frederick exposed in
a state of nudity for the edification of his subjects.
These three are made to support the Prussian
Crown which caps the dome of this enormous
but uninteresting pile ; and it was the intention of
this gallant bachelor to have the portraits exact
to the last — or most indecent — detail. Needless
to say, we all recognize only their faces — Ka-
therine II. of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria,
and Madame de Pompadour, the plenipotentiary
of Louis XV.

Genseric may also have had a Sans Souci at
31

32 Genseric

Carthage; and who knows if he did not anticipate
Prussian history by also erecting statues to the
three women whom he hated, for they ruled the
Roman world of the fifth century by influences
no less potent than those which excited the rage
of Frederick in the eighteenth. We have already
referred to Placidia the Regent of the Western
Roman Empire, whose court was at Ravenna,
and whose monument is even today an ornament
of that beautiful city. In any gathering of great
women, Placidia should find an honoured place,
and few have had experience more bitter or more
varied. Her father was Emperor of the East, her
mother the daughter of an Emperor, her brother
an Emperor, herself destined to be mother of an
Emperor and to guide his Imperial hands until
the day of her death. She was a woman of beauty
and superior education — reared in Constantinople
and at the age of twenty surprised in Rome by
the barbarian army of Alaric, who, of course,
carried her away as very fair spoil, after three
days spent in sacking the Imperial city. But
Placidia was not beautiful for nothing. She very
soon ceased being a slave of Alaric, by reducing

First Prussian Kaiser 33

his brother-in-law, the quasi Crown Prince, to
the r61e of suppliant for her hand. And thus
she became one of the mighty forces of the world
at an age when many girls are yet laboriously
spelling out Homer and Cicero at Vassar or Girton.
Good fortune followed close; for her German hus-
band died soon after succeeding to the throne;
as the widow of a King she returned to Italy,
after an eventful honeymoon voyage which em-
braced much of the Western Empire and afforded
her many precious glimpses of court life in the
barbarian world.

Husband number two was a Roman, by whom
she had the future Emperor, Valentinian III.
But this second husband lived but a few months,
which gave her occasion for another extensive
journey to her family in Constantinople. She
secured here not merely forgiveness for having
married a German, but was officially acclaimed
as Augusta and escorted with Imperial honours
back to the Roman Court at Ravenna, there to
rule the Western Empire in the name of her in-
fant son. And so well did she rule that her
death, twenty-five years later, was mourned as

34 Genseric

a national calamity, even by her son. Although
she lived only sixty years, forty of these were
spent either on a throne or so near to it as
to give her the virtual power of a ruler. Nor
did her son ever seek to interfere with her wise
regency.

When Placidia journeyed from Rome to Con-
stantinople, it required almost as much time and
much more physical effort than in our day does a
trip to Japan or Calcutta. The roads were well-
built and well-policed under the rule of Imperial
Rome, and people of means travelled then as
now for business, education, health, and recreation.
The cities of Greece, Italy, and Thrace offered
great attractions to scholars; and before the Ger-
man and Scythian hordes had commenced their
career of destruction, the traveller might count
upon passing day after day through smiling fields
and orchards, towns and villages no less pop-
ulous and perhaps much more interesting than
those of our time. In that of Genseric, to travel
was tantamount to absorbing knowledge. To-
day the man who takes the Orient Express from
London to Constantinople sees less and learns

First Prussian Kaiser 35

less than did Placidia in any one stage of her
leisurely journeys.

However, we must not forget our Vandal who
is hammering finally at the gates of Carthage,
having spent eight years in passing the two hun-
dred miles from Hippo. He succeeded at last,
and again duplicity was his chief weapon. From
Hippo he had sent to Rome ambassadors who
sued humbly for Peace on terms which restored
nearly all of his conquests. Placidia, who knew
that he was in dire straits, did all in her power to
stir the pacifistic rulers of Constantinople, no less
than of Rome, to combined warlike action. She
fitted out several expeditions which harassed his
line of communication to the westward, but while
these added much to his military embarrassment
only an armada of overwhelming strength, com-
manded by a Caesar or Scipio, could undo the
disaster achieved by the credulous Boniface.

Genseric signed peace treaties in order that the
Roman Pacifists might have another excuse for
delaying active war measures. He knew that
he could break treaties when the right moment
arrived; and meantime he turned his arms against

.**'••
#

:

36 Genseric

those who had been interfering with his dynastic
aspirations. Many of his family objected to a
bastard as their King — so he drowned the widow
of his brother, the late King, and killed her
sons and as many more of his collateral kin
as he could lay hands on. The Moors are a
fighting people, and we may be sure that Gen-
seric needed all his wits and weapons to ward
off attacks from this quarter during the critical
eight years between sacking Hippo and hoisting
his flag over the palace of his new Potsdam.
What this flag was we know not for sure, but as
the name Genseric includes the German for goose
(modern, Cans) no doubt such an emblem was
the prototype of the present bird that symbolizes
Prussian predatory ambition on the Hohenzollern
shield. Considering the short life that was ac-
corded to the Vandal Empire of Genseric, the
emblem of a wild goose would suggest mockery
if applied by any but a German. However, the
African dreams of William II. were of even less
duration !

So let us follow the Wild Goose chase of Genseric
which was a successful flight so long as Pacifists

First Prussian Kaiser 37

gave him their help in Rome and so long as the
world believed his professions of peace and good
will. His grand triumph came in 439, twelve
years after landing in Africa. In a time of pro-
found peace, the Vandals took the capital by
surprise. Genseric explained to an outraged world
that this was a strategic necessity, and the world
shook its finger and some sent him notes of protest
couched in elegant language. But the Vandals
raped and pillaged as though 439 were 1914, and
Carthage another name for Belgium.

CHAPTER VI

Pulcheria, Empress of the East — Her court of priests and eunuchs
—Pacifism and Papacy — Genseric at Carthage plans the
pillage of Rome — Sea supremacy then and now.

HPHE second lady whom Genseric selected to
adorn the cupola of his new palace at Car-
thage was Pulcheria, virtual Empress of Con-
stantinople for the best part of forty years. She
had barely reached the years of puberty when the
highest earthly rank was accorded her, that of
Augusta; but to a saintly soul no earthly honour
was comparable to that which became hers by
depositing her virginity as a sacrifice on the al-
tar of orthodox piety. Her palace of Constanti-
nople became a convent of nuns where no men
entered save only such as are abhorrent in the
eyes of healthy women. Genseric rubbed his
hands with joy when he learned by his spies that

pacifism was popular on the Bosphorus, and that

38

First Prussian Kaiser 39

his best friends were the Priests of the Papacy,
who opposed all war save that waged upon brother
Christians whom they called heretics.

Pulcheria was officially declared to have merited
the honour of sanctification at the hands of the
Pope, not merely because she declined to assist
in the propagation of her species, but mainly on
account of her pious zeal in the roasting of un-
orthodox Christians. And so we have here
the lesson of a long reign by a virgin, whose court
was a model of propriety ; whose counsellors were
priests and eunuchs; and whose people held
peace conferences whilst the Prussian was pre-
paring to sack the world's metropolis !

Some will possibly revert to the reign of Vic-
toria whilst reading that of Pulcheria — and some
may smile at a parallel fifteen centuries apart.
But when Prussia in 1864 broke into helpless
Denmark, robbed her of people and territory, as
Genseric did in North Africa, it was the duty of
Victoria to forbid this outrage as it was that of
Pulcheria to aid Placidia in protecting Carthage.
But Victoria was under pacifistic, not to say
Prussian, influence, and her complaisance towards

40 Genseric

Bismarck in the rape of Denmark led to the War
of 1866 and then that of 1870 — and all the while
pious people sang her praises in a hymn whose
refrain was ever, "She kept us out of war!"

Two years after the death of Pulcheria, the
Vandals were in Rome, and Victoria died during
a war which was lengthened if not created by
German influence. Victoria and Pulcheria were
good women in the church and drawing-room
sense; they stood for social purity and domestic
dignity; but as guiding forces of great empires
in a time of external menace they were useful
mainly to the enemy. William II. has profited
by the pacifistic policy of his sainted grandmother.
Genseric looked upon the eunuchs of Constanti-
nople as his most precious allies.

And so in this 439th year of our saintly era the
King of the Vandals made himself at home in
Carthage, first by enslaving all of the population
that was fit for labour, and secondly by confiscat-
ing all the real or personal property of this very
wealthy metropolis. It had taken the Vandals
nearly a full generation to shift their habitat
by a series of semi-pacific penetrations from the

First Prussian Kaiser 41

Baltic to the Straits of Gibraltar. Each stage
of their journey had brought them in contact with
people on a higher plane of social and political
ideas than those on the Havel. In Carthage,
after ten years amid the unwonted luxury of semi-
tropical civilisation, they finally found themselves
at the goal of their military ambition; masters of
a capital replete with the accumulated treasures
of many centuries; a city of palaces and noble
monuments; of academies, where the literary
grandeur of Euripides was exposed by men speak-
ing the tongue of Cicero. The Carthage of Rome
became the military headquarters of a Prussian
commander in chief; the light of learning waned as
the Vandal power waxed, and in less than a hun-
dred years the province that had been the garden of
the western world sank to the level of a Prussian
colony — an African Elsass-Lorraine.

Take up your atlas now, and think for yourselves
without consulting books. Note the position of
Carthage (or Tunis) half-way between the ends
of that long northern strip of Africa. Note that
with a fair westerly breeze you would require
but a few hours to reach Sicily, or with a westerly

42 Genseric

one arrive at Sardinia. Ancient Rome reasoned
justly that her empire was not safe whilst a
hostile navy was collected at Carthage. It was
imperative that Rome conquer Carthage as in-
cidental to conquering supremacy on the trade
routes of the then known world. So long as Rome
was true to her own history, the Mediterranean
remained a Roman lake, but when the Roman
navy was neglected, Genseric seized the oppor-
tunity and determined to challenge the mistress
of the seas on her hereditary element.

William II. was profoundly impressed by a book
on sea supremacy by an American naval officer.
There was nothing in the book that was not a
commonplace to Genseric, but it gave to the
Prussians of today their first idea of what they
might achieve if only the sea power of England
could in some manner be impaired. Genseric
may have read some similar work as Mahan's
Influence of Sea Power, for Carthage had excel-
lent libraries; and maybe like William II. he
had it translated into German and studied by
the cadets of his war classes. But this may have
been superfluous in the Prussian Carthage, be-

First Prussian Kaiser 43

cause the Vandals, according to the fashion of
their kind, were anxious to copy the ways of a
higher civilisation; and while no Roman would
ever learn Gothic, every German would be flat-
tered if his African concubine told him that he
spoke Latin with a Parisian — or Roman — accent!
And then the matter was made easy to Genseric
by the zeal of Christian missionaries or spies who
laid before him a detailed picture of the discord
in Church and State; how the people were dis-
tracted by theological civil war; how the slaves
and Jews would help along any cause likely to
help the enemy from outside ; how the court and
army were honeycombed with intrigue and Placi-
dia — a woman ! The wonder was, not that Gen-
seric plotted the sack of Rome, but that he
delayed so long an act that seemed prepared in
advance by the pacifistic policy of a priest-ridden
empire.

CHAPTER VII

Career of Alaric — Pillage of Greece and Rome — Aided by
Christians — End of Alaric.

'"PHERE are still many people who profess
indifference to past history, because they
have been early inoculated in the restful heresy
that the human race has evolved from apes or
oysters and that therefore the Prussian of 1918
is a more respectable man than Alaric, Attila, or
Genseric. The theory of so-called human evolu-
tion is an amusing guess that bears to science the
same relation that a William Jennings Bryan
does to an Alexander Hamilton or a Benjamin
Franklin. Genseric and Alaric and Attila were
the contemporaneous manifestation of God's law
in human affairs. They united in hastening the
downfall of the Roman Empire by methods an-
alogous to those in vogue today by the Prussia
of William II. The Barbarians of fourteen cen-

44

First Prussian Kaiser 45

turies ago were Christian and cruel — but not
more Christian or more cruel than those who
today expose women and children to slow death
in an open boat on the high seas or who have
revived the use of poisonous gas in war between
man and man. The Barbarians of old were
Christian and cruel, but let us not compare them
unfavourably with Prussians of today whose
Kaiser is a Lutheran and whose principal allies
are a polygamous Sultan and a celibate Pope.

Genseric, Attila, and Alaric form a German
trinity, dear to the Prussian of today — sacred
in their Walhalla of heroes — emblem of national
power in the past, promise of world empire in
the future.

Alaric was born at the mouth of the Danube
although his tribe was from the Baltic. His
family pride consisted in being of the Balti—
a name reminiscent of the great northern sea
and thence applied to the marshy district at the
Bulgarian mouth of the Danube. Some Ger-
man scholars have suggested that Alaric 's Baltic
root meant " audacious." But etymology is dan-
gerous— perhaps more dangerous even than theo-

46 Genseric

logy. We are left to surmise how Alaric rose
from a Bulgarian Baltic to be first King of the
Visigoths; but I am inclined to think from per*
sonal impression of that Lower Danubian swamp,
that the tribe of Balti owed its persistence and
power to the same fortunate circumstances that
preserved the Batavi at the mouths of the Rhine;
the Veneti in the lagoons of the Adriatic and the
Vandals on the upper waters of the Spree and
Havel. Germans today use the word belt for
parts of the Baltic — bell being a Keltic word
for sea, as balteus is Latin for a girdle. The Lithu-
anians possibly name the Baltic the white sea,
from its short choppy waves — baltas in their
tongue meaning white. Then again I have known
a Russian town named Bait a, between Kieff and
the Danube and there is another Balta on the
European side of the Bosphorus, to say nothing
of a Baltistan in British India.

So let us leave the pleasing yet perplexing fields
of philology and limit ourselves to knowing this
great German hero through the eyes of adoring
historians of his own race.

We must again remind you that the outskirts

First Prussian Kaiser 47

of the Roman Empire were guarded in a precarious
manner by armies of barbarian Germans, half-
soldiers and half-colonists, roughly analogous to
the Cossack tribes on the fringes of Russia or
some semi-independent states of British India
in our time. And again you must not expect
exactness, for you may find Huns, Vandals, Goths,
Alani, Suevi, Alemanni mixed up together under
any barbarian leader who happened to be so
popular and powerful as to promise a successful
campaign of plunder. Such a leader was Alaric,
and it was with such men that the old Roman
Empire made bargains with a view to protecting
itself against those more dangerous still. Don't
be too harsh in your contempt for the expiring
empire — she was more than one thousand years
old and her life had not been one of past inaction.
She was like a house full of lazy servants, and we
are considering her at a time when there is riot
in the servants' hall and the mistress is ill in bed.
Alaric passed under specious pretexts from the
Danube swamps to the Vale of Tempe and the
groves of Academe. In his path lay the glories
of ancient Greece and in his wake the flames of

48 Genseric

desolate villages. When he closed his visit to
the city of Pericles and Plato, it is said to have
recalled the bleeding and empty skin of a slaugh-
tered victim. Alexander was also a conqueror,
— so was Caesar — so was Napoleon. But Napo-
leon in Weimar talked of poesy with Goethe.
Alexander gloried in being a pupil of Aristotle;
and Caesar studied the science of government
with the wise men of an age rich in men of public
experience and intellectual grandeur. These three
were conquerors, but in their train went scholars,
poets, archaeologists, and men of science. The
train of Alaric was like that of the Prussian in
Belgium — a train of spies with lists of the people
who had something worth plundering — an in-
ventory of the pagan temples and their treasures
of art. Alaric found the Pope's alliance valuable —
or at least the daily assistance given to his generals
by the Christian priests, who thought it an act
of piety to obliterate every vestige of pagan art.
Alaric's raid through Hellas was about fifteen
centuries before the Hohenzollern led his Huns
into Belgium — and now we think better of Alaric,
if not of his priests.

First Prussian Kaiser 49

We next note the King of the Visigoths in Rome,
gratifying his motley army with a three days'
debauch at the expense of this treasury of metro-
politan magnificence. There is little but repeti-
tion in recording the sack of cities — girls are
seized and carried away from their homes for
purposes into which it is idle to make enquiry;
men are butchered if they happen to be in the
way of the conquerors; the spies are busy de-
nouncing those who have property and the
Roman slaves have ample opportunity for re-
venge against former oppressors. Slaves and
Jews make common cause with Christian priests
in denouncing the pagan aristocracy; in sacking
the pagan places of worship; in cementing the
brotherhood of the oppressed; in planting the
banner of a generous and gentle saviour amidst
the bleeding carcasses of those for whom He
died.

The work of ferreting out and torturing the
reluctant rich would have been difficult had Alaric
not enjoyed the zealous assistance of these allies.
His military waggons were soon loaded and thus,
thanks to Christian co-operation, he was enabled

50 Genseric

to march on to his ultimate goal — the conquest of
Africa.

He was about the same age as Genseric — and the
two might have met for the first time on an Afri-
can battlefield and there fought for the crown
of a world empire. But death put a stop to his
depredations, just when he was preparing to cross
over into Sicily and thence to Carthage.

A little stream of Calabria is called the Busento,
and here the chief was buried in fashion suited
to Prussian taste for crude and grandiose effect.
Thousands of Roman slaves were set to work,
digging a new channel for the stream and then,
in the dry bed of the old Busento, their youthful
King was buried with all the honours that his
mourning followers could devise. After this the
new course was closed and the waters were once
more permitted to pursue their natural course,
over the royal coffin. The river gods mourned
at this defilement — and still more so when the
thousands who had slaved at this profane task
were butchered at the river's bank in order that
the secret might remain a German one. The
stream ran red with innocent Roman blood; yet

First Prussian Kaiser 51

German histories revel in such cruelty, so long as
the perpetrator is a German and the victim one of
a higher race.

But nature herself was shocked and the scene
of this bloody funeral has since been visited by
earthquakes that have convulsed Calabria, torn
the earth as with the plough of an avenging God,
and shaken the coffin of Alaric from the bed of
the Busento, to be spewed out forever from the
soil of a free Italy — the land that had known her
Cicero and her Caesar; that was to know her Dante
and Savonarola, and that seems today reserved
for a triumph even more precious to humanity —
the triumph of civil liberty over priestcraft.

CHAPTER VIII

Attila and Martin Luther at Eisenach — Invasion of Gaul by
the Huns — Saints and soldiers — Final defeat of the Germans
at Chalons.

A TTILA is the third of our male trinity. His
origin is obscure, but he ruled over an army
composed of Germans, with a liberal admixture
of lower Danuban elements, mainly Magyar and
Mongolian. He and Genseric were born perhaps
in the same year; possibly under the same malevo-
lent horoscope; they were Prussian in purpose;
they were terrible in their powers of destruction;
their empires were short-lived, but their examples
are a consolation and stimulus to the modern
carriers of Kultur. Attila held for some time an
Imperial Court at Eisenach, where Tannhauser
sang the joys of amorous bestiality and where
Martin Luther translated the Holy Bible. On

the occasion of my visit the warden of the castle

52

First Prussian Kaiser 53

showed me a large splosh of ink in the cell of the
great reformer. I looked at it carefully — it had
the features of Attila, or was it that the King of
the Huns was uppermost in my thoughts as I
neared the stain of blackness! "It was here,"
said the warden, "that the Devil appeared to
our holy man, who seized his inkstand, threw it
violently, and — the Devil disappeared." But Attila
had the best of it, for while Martin Luther is
excluded from the Catholic Walhalla of German
heroes, Attila is a name enshrined in the heart
of every patriotic German, be he Protestant or
Papist, of Berlin or Bavaria. The high priests
of German heroes, the makers of national opera
and patriotic pictures, draw their inspiration from
the King of the Huns, and his contemporaries
in crime. The very name is given by mothers to
their innocent babes at the font of Christian bap-
tism, and Attila fills the heart of the modern
Prussian with dreams of glory and prospective
plunder. When William II. sent his troops to
Pekin, to a people who embody the gentle pre-
cepts of the Buddha to their most pacifistic con-
clusion, he used this language:

Al

54 Genseric

"And as one thousand years ago the Huns under
Attila achieved a fame that still lives and fills
the world with terror, so let Germany in China
appear in such frightfulness that no Chinaman
will ever again dare to look a German in the face ! "

The Germans who marched about China by
order of William II. needed little urging in order
to emulate the example of their terrible Etzel.
They plundered and they destroyed in the land
of Confucius with an efficiency worthy of their
great heroes, whether Hun or Hohenzollern.
The wells became choked with the corpses of
Chinese girls who preferred death to the clasp
of a Christian Prussian. The American general
protested in vain, when the commander of Wil-
liam II. carried away as booty to Potsdam even
the famous astronomical instruments that had
been for several centuries an ornament of the
Chinese capital through the bounty of a French
King.

All this I write down in order that you may no
longer do injustice to the memory of Attila. You
and I have been reared to regard him as the
Scourge of God, the enemy of mankind, and the

First Prussian Kaiser 55

name that enables us to characterize all that
awakens loathing under the one word HUN!
Indeed, even in the Germany of my youth, the
Huns were akin to Red Indians in the popular
mind; and when I enquired about towns and
castles of the Danube during a canoe trip that
carried me from its headwaters to the Black Sea,
there seemed to me scarce a settlement that had
not a tale of horror dating from the days of Attila.
But this horror has been slowly, systemati-
cally dissipated by patriotic professors. Richard
Wagner and the Nibelungen poets have at last
so hypnotized the minds of the modern youth,
that their Etzel of Etzelsburg now receives the
incense of every orthodox priest of Prussian Kul-
tur, because in general, his ferocity was directed
against a civilisation not "made in Germany!"

Genseric honoured in Alaric the German who
showed him the way to the plunder of Rome and
the conquest of Africa; but in Attila he found a
twin spirit who fought for him in the same strate-
gic field of war — who occupied the forces of Rome
in one part of the world while the Vandals
perfected their operations in another. Genseric

56 Genseric

knew that his hold on Carthage was precarious
unless he could secure the aid of his fellow Ger-
mans and thus prevent the Imperial forces from
uniting against him.

Attila came to the throne whilst Genseric was
meeting his difficulties in Hippo and preparing the
surprise of Carthage. Both men were of military
vision, and Attila could not fail to appreciate his
immense advantage — the opportunity of raiding
into the heart of the Roman Empire while his
Vandal ally completed the task of cutting off
Rome from her vast granary in Northern Africa.
Attila chose the line of the Danube and the
Rhine; broke into what is now France, destroyed
the beautiful buildings of Rheims; in short be-
haved there much as his descendants are now doing
in this fair garden of Europe — dotted then as now
with villas, works of art, monuments to municipal
prosperity — in short, the infinite signs of a wealthy
and well-ordered civilisation. The Hun had
razed Metz to the ground, and we have trust-
worthy record that such of them as now take an
interest in German affairs from other spheres
have no reason to think that the butchery, pillage,

First Prussian Kaiser 57*-

and arson, which he practised then on his march
into France, have been allowed to languish in the
modern campaigns of the Hohenzollern. France
blossomed into saintly fables by way of disguis-
ing her lack of soldiers — indeed so many were the
Christian pacifists by this time that it was easier
to find a saint than a soldier. Every town that
Attila contemptuously ignored as not worth delay,
at once attributed its deliverance to some celes-
tial interposition in the person of an angel, priest,
or other substitute for universal military service.
The Parisians to this day burn candles to St.
Genevieve, because they think she led Attila
astray, or at least caused him to avoid their city.
But the cities which were sacked and burned and
abandoned by the Hun — well — it's usual to con-
demn them as having deserved some such punish-
ment because they had been guilty of harbouring
heretics or pagans or if there were none such on
hand, then maybe their calamities came because
they had not offered candles enough to their
orthodox saint or money enough to their orthodox
priests ! Whichever way Attila turned, the Church
turned also, and always to its own advantage.

58 Genseric

France was much more saintly fifteen centuries
ago, when the German hordes devastated her
fields as far as Orleans. Are we to conclude that
the glorious victory of the Marne, in 1914, came
as a reward to a nation that chose rather to
rely on soldiers than saints in a battle for free-
dom and that preferred to see her priests at the
front fighting the enemy with a hand grenade
than in a pulpit at the rear, fulminating gases
that had no terror for the Hun?

At Orleans Attila was checked by the necessi-
ties of a wearisome siege and the news that a
combination of Roman armies was marching in
such force as to threaten his retreat to the Rhine.
His grand move had failed; the brother Barba-
rians on whom Attila had counted to aid hirn
against their master and employer of Rome saw
their interest in driving away so dangerous a
rival; and thus it came about that he was brought
to bay in the fields near Chalons-sur-Marne, and
compelled to fight one of the great decisive battles
of the world — a battle of such ferocity that the
very dead are in tradition seen battling overhead
whilst the streams run red with the blood of every

First Prussian Kaiser 59

tribe between the plains of Scythia and the mount-
ains of Thuringia. How many were killed in that
fight of civilisation against barbarism we cannot
tell. Darkness ended the bloody work; the Hun
retired, never again to reappear on French soil —
at least in the lifetime of Attila; and history
must choose between chronicles that tell of the
corpses numbering anywhere between one hun-
dred thousand and three hundred thousand.

CHAPTER IX

Attila retires and reappears at Aquileia — Huns and German
Kultur— -Death and funeral of Attila.

\A7HEN William II: made his great raid into
the somnolent Europe of 1914, he made
an ardent address to his men. Indeed he made
many, and the more he failed in the field, the
more ardent became his oratory. It was on Au-
gust igth of 1914 that he issued this august com-
mand: "It is now your task, first to exterminate
the scoundrelly English and brush aside the con-
temptible little army of General French."

Three summers have revolved since this Hun-
like boast insulted the summer skies of Belgium.
The little army of England has seized with joy
that clumsy word contemptible, and each year the
veterans of that famous fight come together as
brothers in arms and survivors of the first heroic

shock, and known affectionately as the "contemp-

60

First Prussian Kaiser 61

tibles." It was a small army that checked the
enemy at Thermopylae; Wellington faced Napo-
leon at Waterloo with a force that promised little,
and the hordes of Germany grinned at the prospect
of easy butchery when they saw how few were
the British, who stood between them and the
sack of London in that hot, desperate summer,
just 1463 years since the pillage of France by
Attila. The soldiers of William II. have spoiled
and raped; but rapine and spoils alone add little
to the lustre of a conqueror — save in the pages
of a Hun historian.

Attila recrossed the Rhine after the slaughter
of Chalons, but evidently his German followers
and particularly his German waggons, piled high
with plunder, spread the report of alleged victories
and concealed the number of his dead. The
Prussian is the most docile of soldiers under
the lash, but the most turbulent of mobs in the
forum, and we may assume that Attila knew his
Prussians and acted accordingly. On the retreat
from Chalons he massacred his hostages and tore
to pieces two hundred young women by lashing
their limbs to the whifHetrees and then lashing

62 Genseric

the horses. The bleeding remains were hung by
the roadside as a warning to his pursuers and a
lesson in Schrecklichkeit to the military mentors
that were to carry on his war methods — even unto
the day of Kaiser Kultur. If there is an abomina-
tion that the Huns did not commit in the France
of 452, it must be that Attila failed to think of it
in time. I have read widely in the history of
Tamerlane, Ghengis Khan, the Holy Inquisition,
and warfare amongst Red Indians, but the story
of our kind must be scraped with a fine-tooth comb
in order to find another example of cruelty so cold-
blooded, so persistent, and so ineffectual from a
white man's point of view.

But let us hurry on to poor Genseric who is
building a great German colony in Africa and will
be sacking Rome without our assistance unless
we dispose of Attila in this chapter.

Then behold the Hun once more safe beyond
the borders of France and on his throne, amidst
crouching courtiers from every tribe, between the
Elbe and the Alps. Europe had pushed him back,
but had not destroyed his power for mischief.
He was afforded time to gather a new army and

First Prussian Kaiser 63

start once more to plunder the fat cities of the
Empire — this time approaching Rome by way of
the Eastern Alps.

His march was through the rich country, ad-
joining modern Trieste; and as he was checked at
Orleans on his raid through France, so here the
siege of Aquileia gave time for Europe to get
her troops together — albeit very slowly and re-
luctantly. Aquileia was in those days an im-
portant seaport at the mouth of the Isonzo, a
centre of commercial highways, monuments of
art and schools of learning. Attila laid siege
to a city of half a million inhabitants; and when
that city fell the death-rate rose and the walls
crumbled and in a few weeks the Hun historian
could proudly state that the horse of Attila could
canter across the plain where Aquileia once was
and — never stumble. There were dozens of Aqui-
leias in the path of Attila, but they are forgot-
ten because of their mere number. There were
thousands put to the sword for the crime of hav-
ing defended their fireside; there were thousands
roasted and mutilated for the sake of treasure
imaginary or real, and the Hun waggon trains

64 Genseric

creaked away towards Rome filled with treasures
that a barbarian could steal, but not appreciate;
and beside the creaking carts were lashed thou-
sands of young girls whom savages could defile
but never conciliate.

To pursue the theme further were to watch
every ox or hog that sheds its blood in a Kansas
City packing house. One glimpse must be enough.
Nor would I give you even this one glimpse, but
for the great war inaugurated by the modern Hun.
We old people had gradually come to think that
there could be no more Attilas or Alarics or Gen-
series. We opened our political and academic
frontiers to Germans and welcomed them as
kindly creatures who wished to help us not merely
in developing our commerce, but in giving our
universities the blessings of Prussian Kultur.
We no more dreaded their disloyalty than did
the Europe of fifteen centuries ago — we became
pacifists here as they also did in Rome and Con-
stantinople. And now I am compelled to drag
Attila forth from his forgotten grave just as I
might feel compelled to exhibit the body of a
drunkard in order to warn a young man against

First Prussian Kaiser 65

over-indulgence. Attila was of little importance
in his time. He made some furious raids; he
killed many people; he put still more to the tor-
ture; he destroyed many precious works of art;
burned many libraries, and depopulated many
villages and towns. But what of that! Earth-
quakes, tornadoes, and tidal waves have done as
much. We lament these manifestations of nature,
profit by the experience, and set to work repairing
the damage to the extent of our power.

We might thus think of Attila and his boast
that, where the horse of a Hun had once rested
his hoof the grass never grew again. We might
shudder at such moral perversion as we do on
learning that the law has rid the world of some
peculiarly insane criminal. Indeed hi my boy-
hood, the civilised world was ready to relegate
the King of the Hun to the limbo of legendary
monsters out of which only a Richard Wagner
could concoct a hero.

But, no, Prussian Kultur would not let Attila
rest, nor yet his brother barbarians. We thought
the Prussians joked, but the war of 1914 came,
and with it a new Attila, with a bigger and newer

66 Genseric

army; with tribes equally varied and even more
hungry for blood and booty, and now as then
we must destroy the monster or be destroyed by
him.

Attila was again pushed back out of Italy,
after sacking many cities and negotiating a peace
treaty that left him all his booty, a handsome
indemnity, and his forces unimpaired. So he
made a triumphant retreat to his capital. This
time it was not Eisenach, but somewhere near the
modern Buda-Pest, a city renowned for the beauty
and vigour of its women. Here he celebrated his
alleged victories. Poets sang of the cities he had
sacked; his train of captives testified to the
success of his arms and the miles of waggons
rejoiced those whose eyes were unaccustomed to
the treasures of European palaces. Here he
received servile embassies from farthest lands,
even so far as Persia and Afghanistan, and here
he planned his next conquest — the world.

And who dares call him presumptuous, save
in so far as we may doom any conqueror to failure
who has not learned to conquer his own lower
appetites.

First Prussian Kaiser 67

Attila was conquered by a woman, not merely
pushed gently back as were his armies out of
France and Italy, but wholly routed and extin-
guished. Like Ludwig I. of Bavaria, Attila was
famed for the quantity of his concubines rather
than for their quality, and whilst celebrating his
victories over the sons of Mars he collapsed
ignominiously on the couch of Venus. His
empire collapsed with him, his armies dispersed,
his heirs scrambled in dispute over lands, which
had been held together only by the terror of his
name; and all by the magic of a little Magyar
maiden — and may God bless her posterity!

Of course Attila was buried with military honour
and as military honour is nothing if not bloody
in the land that glorifies the Hun, his grave was
dug by captives and these were slaughtered
immediately afterwards for the same sentimental
reasons that caused the butchery of those who
had assisted Alaric to his final resting place. No
one today knows the grave of this devastator;
we only guess at the city of Hungary where he
planned his prospective campaign; we hate him,
as we hate cruelty, perfidy, barbarism, but we

68 Genseric

must, in war, learn from our enemy, and since
Attila lives in the heart of his Hohenzollern
successors, it is our duty to know his ways and —
be warned.

CHAPTER X

Genseric in modern Germany — Colonization then and now —
Building of Vandal navy — Sea raids — And why the Roman
Empire did so little.

FREDERICK THE GREAT of Prussia is cred-
P

ited with a maxim, which no doubt came

down directly from Genseric: "My first business is
to grab. I can always find enough professors to
justify me afterwards." Genseric no doubt dis-
pensed many decorations and preferments to the
Pundits of Mauretania, who published poems or
pamphlets in his honour; he had his spies in the
university lecture-rooms no less than in the
churches, and whilst he loudly proclaimed Liberty
of Conscience, he silently suppressed those priests
or professors who treated him otherwise than as a
beneficent emanation from the Sun-God of Kultur.
Nothing has changed in this respect ; the professors
of modern Prussia swing incense before the altars

of their Hohenzollern high priest with a vigour no

69

70 Genseric

less than that which inspired the academic slaves
of Carthage and Hippo. It might some day be in-
teresting to study the spirit of modern Prussia,
as a reincarnation of those whom we know histori-
cally as Goths, Vandals, and Huns, and whom we
applaud at considerable expense when they bellow
at us from the opera, dressed up as heroes, and
labelled Siegfried, Gunter, and Dietrich von Bern.
Genseric therefore pacified his Prussian pro-
vinces of Africa undisturbed by the dread of public
opinion or any embarrassing questions in parlia-
ment. Wherever natives complained, he made a
punitive raid; killed all fighting men; carried
away those whom he could use as slaves; burned
the villages, after having plundered them; and as
a warning to the neighbours, mutilated the very
fruit trees. This last act of Genseric has been
reprobated by some historians, amongst them a
few Germans. But they wrote before William II.
invaded Belgium and renewed in Europe the
practices that made the name of German hateful
even to the Moors. Death is disagreeable only
in anticipation. Those whom Genseric killed
ceased to suffer; but who can paint the misery

First Prussian Kaiser 71

of mothers, children, and venerable dependents,
returning to find their little home ablaze, their
cattle driven away, their men butchered, and
their young women deported! How begin to
even live! How can they plant, plough, or
build anew their house and barn? But the final
blow falls when they see the trees that have taken
years to grow laid waste ! Their olive trees even !
But Prussian historians dwell sparingly on the
petty tragedy of a peasant's cabin, and modern
Germany knows little of the Kaiser's colonial
war in South-west Africa, where the Hereros
suffered under the rule of William II. much of
what Northern Africa felt under the Vandal
colonization. Genseric occupied sixteen years
in preparations to sack Rome, and these years
were spent in sending assurances to many courts
that he was a peace-loving monarch and if he
ever rattled his sabre it was to repel some attack
upon his beloved fatherland! He devoted all
the energy of his nature to construct a navy —
not merely one capable of making raids upon the
rebellious towns to the west of him, but one so
great as to ensure for him the mastery of the

72 Genseric

Mediterranean. The Algerine pirates have ever
been a byword for enterprising seamanship and
swift sailing galleys. Their craft was highly
developed many centuries before that of Genseric
and when the Vandal Empire vanished, the
Moorish keels remained, and even today warn us
how much we owe to the big ocean policeman
called John Bull!

Genseric was a pious prince, after the Prussian
pattern, and when he found leisure for a piratical
raid he led the way aboard his flagship and prayed
his Herr Gott to steer him towards any land de-
serving of divine punishment. And the German
historian notes with patriotic unction that as the
Vandal King never failed to find just the sort of
plunder sought for in his prayers, so the even
more pious William II. reached his promised land
for equally satisfactory reasons. The fleets of
Genseric descended at short intervals on every
island or coast within easy range of Carthage.
They gave no warning, their movements were
swift, the time was well chosen, and from each
raid they returned heavily freighted with money,
jewels, costly fabrics, and more slaves.

First Prussian Kaiser 73

And, of course, you ask why the great and
powerful Empire of Rome permitted these out-
rages. And, by way of answer, I ask you to
consider that in my youth Germany owned not a
single square mile of colonial territory and pro-
fessed complete indifference to such cumbersome
ornaments. But her rape of Denmark in 1864,
her absorption of several more states in 1866, and
finally the foul Prussianizing of Elsass-Lorraine
after the War of 1870, turned the taste of her
predatory princes towards possessions beyond the
narrow seas.

Answer me, therefore, how it happened that
the good-natured Europe of the Victorian Era
woke up one morning to find that Germany was
master of a colonial empire embracing more than
a million square miles ; and on the German throne
was a Kaiser who prayed and preached the gospel
of universal Peace. You must also answer me
why it was that Europe permitted the modern
Genseric to persistently increase his land and
sea forces, although he was threatened by none
of his neighbours. You must also explain how
it happened that for two decades before the raid

74 Genseric

into Belgium, Prussia was piling up stores of
war material and secretly perfecting new and
inhuman engines of destruction. Also you will
have to reconcile this with an elaborate pro-
German propaganda no less than the cordial
co-operation of the Pope of Rome, the Catholics
in the Berlin Reichstag, to say nothing of the Irish
priests in America and the Romish Canadians of
Quebec and Montreal.

Genseric was a pious man, after the Potsdam
pattern; and between his plundering raids he
cheerfully subscribed to treaties of amity and
promises of future fidelity. The courts of the
great Roman state did occasionally send forth an
expedition to punish him, but these failed because
Genseric was crafty, well-informed, swift in action,
terrible in his vengeance, and above all fought as
a professional against amateurs. We have in
these days seen the world ablaze since July of
1914; we have been part of an empire whose
population is officially rated at more than one
hundred million; we have been for three years
menaced by German submarines and our fron-
tiers have been raided by forces set in motion

First Prussian Kaiser 75

from Berlin. For three long years we have ex-
hibited our military nudity to the laughter of a
modern Genseric, and as I write our few troops
are shivering for want of suitable clothing, whilst
the death roll deals mainly in diseases traceable
to political neglect if not to pro-German pacifism.
When you shall have given to yourself a satisfac-
tory answer in regard to the Genseric of 1914, I
shall perhaps be able to blame the Europe of 455
for permitting the Vandal intruder, not merely
on the African coast but in the very capital of
the Empire.

And this brings us to the year when Genseric
pillaged Rome!

CHAPTER XI

Sack of Rome by Genseric — Eudoxia seized and deported —
One of her daughters married to the Crown Prince.

IN the early summer of 455, Genseric anchored
at the mouth of the Tiber. With him an-
chored a strong fleet manned by the best of his
Vandal and Moorish warriors, also many roomy
transports for a return cargo of booty. He had
long been preparing for this culminating stroke
and chose the hour when the holy city was torn
by civil disorder and a palace revolution. The
beautiful Empress Eudoxia had been left a widow
through the murder of her husband and had been
then compelled to marry his successor, whom she
rightfully suspected of having connived at the
bloody work. But he in turn was murdered
within three months; and the hour of his death
was that in which the advance of Genseric marched

from Ostia to the Vatican. The man of genius

76

First Prussian Kaiser 77

is he who eliminates the most accidents, and the
coincidence of Genseric's appearance at the mo-
ment of Eudoxia's vengeance should, we think,
be credited less to accident than to the planning
of a remarkably crafty and enterprising general.
The murderer of her husband shared the bed
but not the secrets of Eudoxia; and whilst she
smiled beside him on the throne, her emis-
saries were negotiating for the aid of Genseric
to rid her of this unhallowed consort. Love
and hatred are equally maddening, and we
may forgive Eudoxia for blindly clutching at
any help that promised release from the one
she hated.

And who knows if this Prussian prototype
did not for once feel impelled towards the
beautiful Eudoxia with sentiments in which
plunder played but a secondary role. Car-
thage was separate from Rome by only a few
days of fair wind and lusty rowing. Eudoxia
was free — the Roman throne was vacant — Con-
stantinople was far away — the Catholic Church
was a body of pacifists, and all that Genseric
needed to make him respectable was such an

78 Genseric

alliance as would enable him to speak as a cousin
of the Roman Caesars.

Bear in mind that the Vandal King was now
between fifty and sixty years of age. This is not
much for one whose life is regular and sheltered;
but in the case of a conqueror whose whole life
had been one of gypsy wandering and whose
frame had been shaken by many fevers, we must
consider him as an old man concerned more with
the future of his children than the success of his
next plundering expeditions. His African empire
was unstable as are all conquests made merely
by the sword. He was perpetually harassed by
domestic wars and still more disturbed by the
prospect of a conflict in which the whole might
of the two Roman empires would fall upon him
and drive him into the sea or the desert. He
had schemed for a German Colonial Empire,
but so far his success had been no more encourag-
ing than that of his descendants fourteen centu-
ries later. He had exhausted the resources of
trickery and cruelty, of fraud and frightf ulness. Are
we not reminded of William II. at Damascus
in that moving year of 1898, when, after failing

First Prussian Kaiser 79

to bully Admiral Dewey at Manila, he sought to
stir up the spirit of Mahometans against the
British in India. Listen to an evangelical Kaiser
proclaiming his love for the line of Bagdad — the
railway line, be it understood : ' ' May His Majesty
the Sultan as well as the three hundred million
of Mussulmans who venerate him as their Khalifa
be assured that the German Emperor is their
friend forever!" Genseric could not have spoken
more smoothly to Eudoxia — but it was all in
vain! Not only did the above mentioned three
hundred millions decline to follow the Kaiser
when he marched upon Belgium; they even
revolted against His Majesty the Sultan; they
remained loyal to England, whose flag floats
today (1918) both at Bagdad and Jerusalem.

But returning to the beautiful Eudoxia, Gen-
seric entered the capital of the ancient world
without a blow — even as a guest. The heads of
the Catholic community met him in state and in
return for this and other services, the Vandals
promised to spare all Christian sanctuaries. To
be sure, Genseric had but fourteen days of pillage;
but with a willing army and a large auxiliary

8o Genseric

force of Christian slaves and well-informed priests
the city of the Caesars was able to amply repay
this campaign of pacifistic penetration. Alaric
had been there forty -five years before, but only
for a short week; and besides Alaric was young—
a mere beginner compared with Genseric. Alaric
moreover had only a waggon train where the Vandal
had cargo space capable of transporting an almost
unlimited quantity. Alaric in 410 was hastening
to conquer an African province ; Genseric already
had one and needed now only some more furniture
for his home.

The work of pillage and torture was therefore
done more conscientiously in 455. Lists had
been prepared beforehand; and after the soldiers
had wearied themselves with the usual rape and
slaughter, Genseric set to work systematically to
strip the city of everything that was or could be
converted into coin. Pagan temples and Catholic
churches yielded their stores of gold and silver
ornament, and a third religion was laid under
contribution when Genseric seized the temple
spoils of Jerusalem which had been brought in
triumph by Titus nearly four centuries before.

First Prussian Kaiser 81

Amongst these was the golden candlestick with
the seven branches and many other holy objects
made under directions of the God who spake out
of the clouds on Mount Sinai. Where oh where !
were the innumerable saints whose miracles form
a weary catalogue of hagiological humbug? Why
did they not prevent the sack of orthodox treas-
ures? Why did they allow the holy altarpieces
of Moses to become the spoil of a heretic? Why
did they not sink the ships bearing such sacred
furniture? And what must the scoffer think
when we learn that the only holy spoils lost
to the Vandal by shipwreck were such as
came from temples dedicated to the Gods of
Olympus.

Rome had in those days perhaps two million
souls; and two weeks was a niggardly time allow-
ance for one who wished to pillage with efficiency.
But Genseric did his best — even to wrenching
the brass and lead from the roofs of public build-
ings. No written bulletins have been preserved;
but, knowing the Prussian as we do, it is not
reasonable to charge him with abandoning a fat
prize like Rome until he had searched out every

82 Genseric

ounce of plumbing and every square foot of cur-
tain or carpet. We must conclude, therefore, in
fairness to Genseric, that he was frightened away
by the danger of being cut off from his ships or
possibly news from his African hinterland. He
gathered together thousands of young girls,
selected for their capacity to work or amuse;
he took as many males as he needed to man
his extra galleys and finally he selected as
ornaments of his headquarters staff, not only
the beautiful Eudoxia, but her two Imperial
daughters.

One of these daughters he married off to his
crown prince Hunrich, and the name suggests a
compliment intended for the nation of the late
lamented King Attila. Eudoxia herself, although
only in her thirty-third year, and therefore just
blooming into the ripe age of worship-inspiring
womanhood, succeeded not merely in concealing
her hatred for the tyrant, but in protecting herself
from his degrading proposals. Seven years she
was kept as a hostage in Africa, but finally (462),
through costly negotiations and the fear of evil
consequences, Eudoxia was returned with Im-

First Prussian Kaiser 83

penal honours to her family. And thus Genseric
discovered the third and last nude statue for the
support of his Prussian crown at the top of his
Carthaginian palace — of New Potsdam!

CHAPTER XII

Genseric as Augustus — Christianity and its warring creeds—
German tribes become Arians — Constantine head of the
Church.

II 7 HEN Genseric made his triumphal entry
into Rome, sacked it; carried back to
Carthage an empress and her two daughters;
compelled one of them to marry his crown prince,
and thus linked himself matrimonially with
Augustus Caesar — what more simple than to de-
clare himself Imperator of Europe and Africa.
He was now between fifty and sixty years old —
about the same age as William II., when his troops
in Belgium noisily acclaimed him as Kaiser von
Europa. And like William II. he was a pious
Christian. But it is hard to be a pious Christian
and not desire to exterminate heresy. Even
William II. drew with his own hands a cruel cari-
cature of the gentle Buddha and had it scattered

84

First Prussian Kaiser 85

throughout the world in order to arouse the hatred
of his subjects against an oriental people of con-
spicuously peaceful habits. On this cartoon the
Oriental sage was depicted as a monster, whilst
a Christian saint was attacking him with a huge
sword. Thus William II. entered China as Gen-
seric entered Morocco. Both were pious, and
both inaugurated their colonial careers by stir-
ring up religious rancour and dispossessing the
original inhabitants — the one at Carthage, the
other at Kiao-Chow. They both achieved the
first conquest without firing a shot, but neither
knew that the conquest of the human heart is
one much more important than that of mere
square miles.

Africa was ablaze with domestic war when
Genseric placed the Imperial crown upon his
head — a war of Christian against Christian — a
war that had its beginning in the first doctrinal
sermon and that spread to the ends of the Christian
world so soon as the creed of Athanasius had been
accepted by the first general council of the Catholic
Church in the reign of the Emperor Constantine.

This Emperor founded Constantinople. The

86 Genseric

Catholic Church honours him as the official patron
of Christianity, although he died a heretic and
lived the life of an orthodox politician to whom
all creeds were indifferent save in so far as they
supported his Imperial throne. This is the same
Constantine of whom mention has already been
made — who saw in the heavens during some battle
a monstrous cross, and also illuminated letters:
In hoc signo vinces. He won the battle and sub-
sequently humoured the Christians by ornamenting
each regimental labarum by the symbol of Chris-
tianity rather than by the pagan emblems for-
merly in vogue. A cynic might amuse himself
by tabulating in one column the victories gained
by Roman legions when inspired by love of liberty
under pagan generals, and then in a second
column the number of victories secured by fol-
lowing the labarum of the saints. But this would
lead us too far when I am hurrying to explain
why Constantine called the first great council
at Nice (in Asia Minor); why he placed himself
as a super-pope to formulate the faith of the
Christian world and then to resume his sceptre
of super-Kaiser in order to see that all his sub-

First Prussian Kaiser 87

jects obeyed, not only the policeman, but the
priest as well. And so, when you hear the Athana-
sian Creed rapidly repeated by a minister of the
gospel, you may have difficulty in understanding
its mystic allusions, but probably more still in
learning that this beautiful piece of liturgy has
been the cause of more bloodshed amongst Chris-
tians than has been shed in the whole pagan world
from the days of Romulus and Remus to those
of Anus and Constantine.

There were hundreds of holy men throughout
Europe, Asia, and Africa, who lived only for the
glory of the true faith and the triumph of Christian-
ity. They worshipped in many ways, according
to climate, education, and political environment.
Many went as missionaries amongst the Barba-
rians, many practised asceticism after the Hindoo
manner of seeking lonely retreats in the desert
of Egypt, the mountains of Asia Minor, or the
islands of the ^Egean Sea. The gospel sounded
differently in the Atlas Mountains amongst the
ferocious Kabyle than it did when preached to
domestics and slaves on the shores of the Bos-
phorus or the Tiber.

88 Genseric

The German tribes had thousands of Christian
captives, and the Germans then as now have as-
siduously cultivated the dress, manners, language,
and external forms of their more civilised neigh-
bours. The German of today, whilst cursing his
enemies in Gothic guttural, has, nevertheless, a
vocabulary that would be poor indeed were it not
that the tongues of Shakespeare and Corneille
have been plundered for conversational material.
This has been made painfully apparent since the
Prussian Government commenced an official boy-
cott of all unpatriotic or un-German words. This
crusade has but raised into relief the broad fact
that for centuries the German has had to go abroad
not only for the elegancies of life but for the very
words by which they can today be described.

It was natural, therefore, that the Vandals,
Goths, Huns, and the dozens of other tribes that
lived in semi-dependence on the Imperial bounty,
should learn Latin and Greek; should gratify
their vanity by wearing costly clothing made by
fashionable tailors and in the course of time come
to regard their good old God Thor and his clumsy
hammer as a crude equivalent for a religion which,

First Prussian Kaiser 89

in the days of Const antine, celebrated the myster-
ies of Christianity in churches of noble proportion,
ministered to by priests famed for scholarship,
eloquence, and supernatural powers. The Ger-
man world went to sleep worshipping Thor
and Odin — they awoke as Christians. We have
no date to fix exactly this interesting transforma-
tion, but when we reflect that, only twelve centu-
ries later this same Germany lay down to rest in
the faith of Rome and woke to worship the teach-
ings of Martin Luther, why should we be aston-
ished? It is not necessary that we hear of any
individual act of conversion through the force of
reason. To the Prussian of Luther's time as to
those of Constantine's it sufficed that the order
came from their military chief or hereditary
monarch — and the order for a church parade is
in Potsdam no less binding on a recruit than a
parade of any other kind. In the days of the
great reformation a certain number of North
German princes rebelled against the Roman Pope,
and all their subjects did the same as a matter
of course. In South Germany an equal number
of princes concluded to remain papist, and, of

90 Genseric

course, this view was immediately shared by their
subjects. There were the usual number of excep-
tions; but in general, in spite of religious wars,
persecutions, and auto-da-f6s innumerable the con-
versions from Catholicism to Protestantism and
vice versa during the five centuries since the Diet
of Worms have been so few that they may be
conveniently ignored.

Now it so happened that the Germans of Gen-
seric's time had their baptismal water tinctured
with a Christianity, which today would sound
Unitarian and which at the first (Ecumenical
Council of 325 was denounced as a heresy. This
was unfortunate from the Athanasian point of
view, to say nothing of the Orthodox Catholic
party. It was the more regrettable since it might
easily have been otherwise had the first German
converts known or cared anything about the
subtleties of a theological dispute which was
tearing to pieces a brotherhood which had been
inaugurated three centuries before on the Mount
of Olives. The barbarian tribes would cheerfully
have become Hindoos, Buddhists, or Shintoists
had they been notified in time — but after the

First Prussian Kaiser 91

Council of Nice it was too late. The great Con-
stantine had spoken. The Athanasian Creed was
declared orthodox. The orthodox alone were
deemed fit to become saints and all who favoured
another creed were officially branded as criminals
condemned to suffer, not merely the wrath of
God on earth, but eternal damnation in a world
of which neither party could speak with historical
precision.

CHAPTER XIII

Religious war in North Africa — Sects and their origin then and
now — Donatists — Martyrdom of Cyprian — His trial.

\ \ 7ILLIAM II. once made a speech to his
recruits in which he warned them that
it was their sacred duty to obey — no matter what
the order might be — even to firing upon their
own parents. The spirit of Genseric was in these
words, although at the time we little dreamed that
soldiers could be found, even in Prussia, to shoot
down in cold blood a woman like Edith Cavell
whose only crime was an act of mercy!

The times of Genseric resembled those of Wil-
liam II. with this difference that the Prussian
fanaticism of today is national, material, and
political; whilst that of our Athanasians, Arians,
and Donatists was metaphysical if not mystic.

In my boyhood we joked about Mormonism as

an illegal anachronism that would vanish so soon

92

First Prussian Kaiser 93

as railways should link Utah with the rest of
North America. Railways have expanded, but
so has Mormonism. Their missionaries work
hopefully in the most distant fields and their
Bible inspires the spirit of martyrdom amongst
thousands who boast of their citizenship in a
free and enlightened Republic.

Some few years ago we were wont to laugh at
little groups of illiterate but very enthusiastic
boys and girls who waved tambourines, sang and
shouted; who dressed in burlesque military garb;
addressed one another as warriors, and called
sinners to repentance by exhorting the passers-by
in the slums of London. And now, after only a
very few years, I meet Salvation Army banners,
waving not merely in the avenues of England,
North America, and Australia, but in the bazaars
of Calcutta and Bombay, Rangoon or Rio Janeiro.

It seems but yesterday that we blessed Mrs.
Eddy for providing us with one more humorous
theme — the picture of thousands receiving "ab-
sent treatment" for as many ailments, and all
through believing the words of a Bible whose
sheets are barely dry from a rotary press. Here

94 Genseric

are but the three successful religions of my short
life — and there are dozens attempting to compete
with them, whose names I know and whose power
you may feel after I am no more. The three I
mention are today powerful, because they repre-
sent a combination of spiritual vitality, business
efficiency, and financial endowment. Today they
are a living protest against systems already in
force or else an attempt to follow the commands
of our blessed Saviour in original if not unorthodox
ways. They are today champions of free speech
and of toleration, because they are feeble as com-
pared with other and older religious bodies. They
are just as reasonable as were the early Christians
before the conversion of Constantine. All Chris-
tians were modest when in a minority, but when
they achieved power, they created the Inquisition
and burnt at the stake whoever dared to differ
with them on any article of faith.

All North Africa was Christian when Constan-
tine topped his labarum with a cross, but the
Christianity of Carthage ran to Puritanism,
whilst that of Constantinople cared less about a
bishop's concubine than the set of his surplice.

First Prussian Kaiser 95

There happened at the North African capital a
contested ecclesiastical election and whilst the
people of that country supported their Puritan
candidate Donatus, the Court party insisted
upon another bishop, whose fame was founded
upon high living rather than high thinking. You
who have read how a case of tea started a seven
years' war between England and her American
Colonies may imagine the storm that stirred from
the Pillars of Hercules to the edges of Egypt,
when it was learned that their pet puritan candi-
date was set aside in favour of one whom they
regarded as an anti-Christ. So the Moorish
Christians flew to arms, and the Roman authorities
were ordered to suppress a rebellion which from
the Donatist point of view was wholly theological,
while from that of Constantine it was political as
well. Donatist bishops were seized and deported;
Donatist priests were forbidden to exercise their
public functions; Donatist congregations were
declared illegal and their churches were handed
over to Catholics or closed. Orthodox Catholic
bishops now plundered the property abandoned
by their rivals and seized the persons of Donatists

96 Genseric

with a view to reforming their spiritual notions.
But the more the Catholics persecuted, the more
stubborn became the Donatists, until the breach
became so wide that all hope of reconciliation
disappeared, and the religious war which vexed
Northern Africa in the days of Constantine
continued throughout the Vandal century and
ceased only with the extinction of Christianity
itself.

Note also that the Donatists of Genseric's
days were to their brother Christians of Antioch
or Rome much as a congregational community
of Connecticut might appear to an Anglican
bishop in the reign of Charles the First. The
Catholics of the papacy became more and more
Imperial in their sympathies. The Donatists,
on the other hand, pushed the teachings of our
blessed Saviour to their logical conclusion and
little by little evolved a religion whose cardinal
tenet was the brotherhood of man, along with its
embarrassing corollary, the propriety of sharing
all things in common. And so fast as the ortho-
dox persecuted the Donatists, these in turn re-
taliated with interest; and the outlying country

First Prussian Kaiser 97

districts became infested with bands of pious
peasants who felt they were serving God when
sacking a Catholic church and who often sacked
without waiting for minute information regarding
its owner. Christians butchered one another,
each believing that the martyr's crown was worth
all the blood spilt for that purpose. The Roman
soldiers were ordered to assist the Catholic party,
but soldiers rarely do such work with the vigour
displayed by saints. Of course the military au-
thorities would not evade their duty, but they
showed in their performance a deplorable absence
of the persecuting zeal. Compare, for instance,
the martyrdom of Cyprian under Roman law with
that of John Huss more than one thousand years
later. Cyprian was an African bishop of the
Christians, who preached half a century before
Constantine and who attracted the ill-will of
patriotic Romans by advocating doctrines of a
pacifistic and therefore disloyal nature. The
patriots loudly clamoured for his indictment as
a traitor or at least his internment as an undesir-
able demagogue. All other religions respected
the temporal head of the state excepting only

7

98 Genseric

the Catholic hierarchy, of which Cyprian was the
most eloquent and most aggressive champion.
Every subject of Rome paid obeisance to Caesar
after the manner we employ in swearing allegiance
to the United States Constitution. It was the
law of the Roman Empire, and whoever refused
to comply was deemed disloyal. The law differs
little from similar laws in every state even to
our own time, and the present war has taught us
that we would have done well had we dealt with
our disloyals of today as Rome did with Cyprian.
This bishop knew the law well, but he knew
also that his fame waxed in proportion as he defied
the power of a pagan potentate, and so he kept on
abusing the head of the state, preaching socialistic
subversion of constituted authority, and courting
the fame of a Christian martyr. And so it hap-
pened that, after several years of immunity, the
legal machinery of Rome was reluctantly set in
motion and St. Cyprian was summoned for trial
on charges not far different from those which
might send to jail many demagogues who are
obstructing our government today. Cyprian was
not rudely arrested and locked up; on the contrary

First Prussian Kaiser 99

he was invited by the Roman governor, or viceroy,
to call upon him in his private council chamber
where he communicated to him the instructions he
had just received from his government — namely
that the Roman law tolerated none who were dis-
loyal to the practices and ceremonies of their an-
cestors. Cyprian, of course, protested that he was
a Christian and gloried in a religion superior to
that of his Emperor. In consequence he was sen-
tenced to banishment — to a pleasant seaside town
about forty miles from Carthage where every con-
venience, not to say luxury, was accorded him;
where he was allowed full liberty of correspond-
ence with brother Catholics throughout the world
and receiving the visits of his faithful.

Here he stayed but a short while — his sentence
was allowed to become a dead letter and in less
than a year he returned to his home in the neigh-
bourhood of Carthage. Throughout these pro-
ceedings we discover on the part of the Roman
authorities methods that might characterize the
languid procedure of a well-bred colonial British
governor called upon to punish some conniver
at a suttee on the Ganges or a devil dance on

ioo Genseric

the Zambesi. A courtly pro-consul would relish
the company of so eloquent and original a guest
as the Carthaginian Christian; he would shrug
his shoulders amiably over the amusing fables,
which inspired the zeal of Cyprian, and he would
wonder why the Metamorphoses of Ovid were not
equally edifying to all patriotic subjects of Rome.
Of course he had to obey when ordered to exe-
cute the law, but he did so in a way that offered
the saint every opportunity of saving his life by
flight and concealment.

From Rome came finally a warrant for the
execution of rebels, and all knew that Cyprian
would be honoured as the best of them — or worst.
He did not dare save his life by flight, any more
than an officer leading his men out of the trenches
or a skipper on the bridge. His whole life had
been but a preparation for this; and a recantation
at such a time would have made him a Judas
Iscariot in the eyes of his fanatical flock — and a
corpse into the bargain ; for his own people would
have murdered so flagrant a renegade. But since
he would not make the escape so temptingly
offered, he was placed under arrest with every

First Prussian Kaiser ioi

mark of honour. Two officers of rank conducted
him from his palace — not to a prison, but to the
handsome home belonging to one of them. A
splendid banquet was made in his honour. His
friends were not only welcomed, but were even
encouraged to smuggle him away from a scene
that was perhaps more painful to his Roman
judges than to his fanatical followers.

Next morning he was once more offered a
hearing; the sentence was read ; his judges begged
him to save his life by merely conforming to the
law of the land; all in vain. He was led out to
execution escorted by a crowd of his admirers.
These were not hindered from showing him acts
of devotion; assisting him in removing his upper
garments; catching his blood for the relic mongers
and finally burying the body with full honours.
The Roman guards protected their episcopal
prisoner from insult at the hands of over-zealous
patriots and in every other way manifested the
disinclination of well-disciplined men to do more
than what was ordered in a matter of which reli-
gious fanaticism formed so large a part. And
if you will bear in mind that Cyprian was exe-

102 Genseric

cuted in the third century after Christ; and that
hundreds of bishops had been preaching sedition
in and about Carthage; and that Rome had
looked on indifferently whilst her laws were being
slighted; and that up to this time no one had
been punished for such crimes — should we not
marvel that the fate of Cyprian was so long de-
layed and that Roman good nature was so blind
to the forces that were undermining her Empire?

CHAPTER XIV

Pagan and Christian procedure contrasted — John Huss and
his followers — John Nepomuk.

TN the preceding chapter I dwelt at some length
upon the manner in which pagan Rome
treated St. Cyprian in order that you might for
yourselves note how much more merciful, digni-
fied, and civilised was this procedure than that
which was typical of trials in which Christians
accused one another of analogous crimes. You
no doubt recall the procedure that caused Louis
XVI. and Charles I. to lose their crowns — and then-
heads; perhaps you have heard of the indignities
heaped upon the ex-President of our so-called
Confederate States after our great Civil War —
even to putting chains upon him like a felon!
These three instances are recent and of equal
notability with the trial of Cyprian. In each

case the prisoner was charged with a purely

103

104 Genseric

political offence and in each case he was treated
with a severity, not to say brutality, that would
have shocked the decencies of those who tried the
Catholic saint of Carthage.

Perhaps I should have illustrated this matter
by recalling some typical trial in which the majesty
of the Catholic Pope was prosecutor and the
prisoner another Catholic bishop — charged with
heresy — which is a technical word equivalent
to treason or lese majestt in a political court.
Compare then the pagan prosecution of St. Cyprian
in the fourth century with the Christian prosecu-
tion of the equally pious and beloved John Huss
one thousand years later — an interval so rich in
saintly activity that we should be justified in
looking for a bench of judges equal at least
in mercy to those that sat in the days of pagan
Rome.

John Huss is the father of Bohemian literature
and of her national conscience. He lived a cen-
tury before Martin Luther and frankly followed
the spiritual banners of the English reformer
Wyclif . He was a profound scholar and owed his
influence, like Cyprian, to the purity of his life

First Prussian Kaiser 105

and the eloquence with which he expounded the
living gospel to a people noted for their domestic
virtue, their idealism, and their intelligence. He
spoke to them in their own tongue and also wrote
popular hymns — in short he was one of those rare
and sublime figures that reconcile one to the com-
forting hypothesis that our blessed Saviour ap-
pears in our midst when a living witness to the
Truth is needed. You may read the interesting
life of John Huss elsewhere, for in this book about
Genseric I have but space to mention so much as
throws light upon the religious fanaticism that
flamed under papal protection and produced a
priesthood, whose credulity was equalled only
by its cruelty. The Roman Pope who tried Huss
for heresy (John XXIII.) had like many another
saint passed his youth in sounding the depths
of human depravity before passing judgment on
the more edifying if less tangible beatitudes of
the future life. Pope John had been a Neapolitan
pirate; and, consequently, we are not surprised
to learn from a sympathetic German scholar that
when he subsequently stepped from the quarter-
deck of a corsair to the palace of a cardinal he

io6 Genseric

promptly seized upon the throne of St. Peter by
the simple process of poisoning the holy incum-
bent who blocked the path of his ambition. Of
course he needed money; for merely poisoning
the Pope in power does not necessarily guarantee
the votes of one's brother cardinals, and there
were heavy election debts outstanding. Also
there was a war, which John waged against the
Catholic King of Naples, and in order to make a
new income tax popular, he described this as a
crusade and sent his agents to collect money.
But even amongst the faithful it is not always
easy to impose taxes unless one can show that the
purpose is holy or that some present gain be
forthcoming. Few in Bohemia took any interest
in a war conducted by a Neapolitan pope against
a Neapolitan king, and John Huss had by this
time so purified the religious minds of his people
that they were repelled rather than edified by the
papal agents who promised them forgiveness of
sins in exchange for their cash. The King of
Bohemia and the chief nobles sustained the bold
reformer, but the Vatican denounced him as
heretic and demanded his presence in court that

First Prussian Kaiser 107

he might be formally tried by a man who insolently
pretended to hold power of attorney from the
Father of Justice and Mercy.

The King of Bohemia made the Pope promise
that John Huss should have free passage to and
from the Council of Constance — but the Pope
broke this promise. Huss came to Constance
relying on the holy father's promise and was
by his orders there seized and kept in close con-
finement, in spite of indignant protest from the
King and his chief nobles. And in order to baffle
any plans that might be laid for his rescue, the
Pope had him secretly shifted from one prison
to another and finally brought for trial in the
presence of a notoriously bitter enemy, who
brought no serious charge against him, but de-
manded unconditional recantation of all that had
made his life precious in the eyes of humanity.

John Huss would not recant and he was therefore
immediately dragged to the stake and burned,
with every circumstance calculated to make him
ridiculous or odious to the spectators. Tradition
tells us that the smile of our Saviour illumined
his face as he gazed upon the ignorant peasants

io8 Genseric

bearing the fagots for his martyrdom. It was
in pity that he said of their labour: "0 sancta
simplicitas!" And as the smoke and flame com-
menced their work of hellish (or holy) torture
his spirit made its last earthly effort in a sweet
hymn of praise. The pagan Romans gave every
facility to those faithful who desired to honour
Cyprian on the scaffold and afterwards. The
Christian judges of John Huss not only tortured
their prisoner to death but pursued him into the
next world by scattering upon the waters of the
Rhine not merely his ashes, but even the soil
beneath his roasting place. His books were de-
stroyed, his every word and thought were con-
demned, and his soul was consigned to a Catholic
hell, by order of an infallible pope. In parenthesis
you may discover for yourselves that this same
pope was soon afterwards himself deposed and
tried on several dozen criminal indictments. But
since none of these charges included the preaching
of Bible truths, John the XXIII. was forgiven and
died in a palace at an age which permitted him
to reflect on the vicissitude of human life and above
all the curious fate that put pirate John upon a

First Prussian Kaiser 109

papal throne and the Christ-like Huss upon a
blazing wood-pile.

But John Huss, like John Brown of Ossawatomie,
had a soul that would not die, and for many years
the day of his martyrdom was throughout Bohemia
held as a national day of mourning. The peas-
ants and their lords flew to arms when the papal
forces marched into Bohemia for the purpose
of smothering the great Protestant movement
started by the burning of Huss. The Protestant
forces resisted successfully every attack, and in
the course of a war covering fifteen years they
carried their victorious banners even to the heart
of Germany. But kings and nobles wearied of
perpetual war and the papacy became concilia-
tory with a view to gaining time. Also we must
note that the John Huss Reformation produced
in Bohemia what the Donatist movement pro-
duced in Northern Africa, what the Lutheran
movement did in Germany, and what to some
extent happened in the American Colonies after
having achieved independence; namely, that many
lawless elements ranged themselves under Hussite
banners and brought discredit to their cause by

no Genseric

making plunder a conspicuous feature of their
programme.

The papal church waited patiently until the
dread of war haunted every heart and a new gene-
ration had arisen that knew not Huss and believed
what the new priests told them. Little by little
statues of St. John Huss disappeared and in their
places appeared a St. John Nepomuk. The new
St. John was a Jesuit, and in order to make him
popular the priests invented a fable very precious
to the papacy — if only the people could be made
to give it credence! Every pulpit was made to
proclaim the merit of this alleged saint, who chose
to die the death of a martyr rather than betray
a secret confided to him in the confessional. It
was a noble story — if true. There were miracles
certified by apostolic seals credited to this mythical
rival of John Huss. Witnesses deposed that John
Nepomuk was bound hand and foot and thus
tossed into the Moldau at Prague by a cruel king.
But he did not sink. On the contrary he floated
serenely down into the Elbe, past Dresden and
Magdeburg to Hamburg and Heligoland. The
journey is nearly one thousand miles, and the

First Prussian Kaiser in

current is a gentle one — consequently we would
have expected frequent mention of this interesting
corpse floating face upwards on a stream which
then, as now, had many populous towns on either
bank and floated thousands of well-manned ships.
Then too the orthodox fable tells us that a halo
formed round the head of the saint and five bright
stars hovered over him on this interesting river
trip.

If any one doubts let him but visit the magni-
ficent church in Prague dedicated to Nepomuk;
let him note the statue of this latter-day saint
upon every bridge in Catholic Germany; let him
mix in the crowd of pilgrims who annually
drop their pennies at his miracle-working shrine,
and let him reflect that the ancestors of these
very pilgrims gladly gave their blood and treasure
for the real patron saint of Bohemia — a martyr
in the cause of a spiritual religion — the immortal
John Huss.

CHAPTER XV

William II. and Genseric as colonists — Metz and Carthage —
Expedition of Majorian — Disaster in Carthagena — His end
— Also some thoughts on Mayor Mitchel and Majorian.

O RUSSIA had been master of Elsass-Lothrin-
gen or Alsace-Lorraine for about the same
number of years that Genseric ruled in North
Africa, when I happened to be in a crowd of French-
speaking citizens of Metz, listening to William II.
making a German speech to a people held only
by the sword and praying each day for deliverance
from its dominion. Never had I heard the Kaiser
grind out his gutturals more snappishly; never
had I seen his face and manner disclose so much
malevolence; never had I seen him clutch the
hilt of his sabre in a manner so suggestive of puni-
tive purpose. He had shown me his friendly and
human side for twenty-five years, but on this
occasion he spoke as Genseric might have done

112

First Prussian Kaiser 113

when laying the corner-stone of his neues Palais
amidst an audience of his newly conquered subjects
of Carthage.

"German you are," snarled the Kaiser at Metz,
"German you have ever been and German
shall you ever remain — so help me God and my
good sword."

As I am quoting from memory, a word or two
may have been otherwise; but the brutal manner
in which a brutal boast was brutally aimed at the
heads of a subject civilian population impressed
me ominously, nor was I surprised to hear through-
out that French-speaking crowd indignant mur-
murs which betrayed eloquently the failure of
Prussian colonization, after forty years of severely
conscientious methods — the same that have made
the name of Prussia hated in Denmark and Poland
to say nothing of equatorial Africa and the is-
lands of the Pacific. Genseric was successful as a
colonist to the same extent that William II. has
been. He too rattled his sabre and built churches
and monuments to Prussian Kultur; but even
after the sack of Rome and many other successful
raids, by which he added much new territory to

1 14 Genseric

his empire, he found that the cost of keeping his
conquests in order grew daily heavier, and that it
was easier to make corpses than friends.

The Roman Empire of the West was nearing
its term of greatness; but as often happens in a
decadent society it produced an Emperor in the
person of Majorian who for a brief four years
(457-461) permitted his contemporaries to under-
stand how Rome had reached her greatness in
the days of Scipio and how inevitably she was
moving towards inglorious pacifism. Majorian
undertook a campaign against Genseric to avenge
the sack of Rome, the rape of an Empress, and
the ruin of a great province. Had he united all the
forces of East and West and had the leader been
a Julius Caesar, our story would have closed with
this chapter. But Majorian had among his sub-
jects more priests than patriots and, therefore,
was compelled to perpetuate some old abuses
by recruiting his army, as did George III., from
amongst the mercenary Germans who hovered on
his border and who entered Roman service in a
spirit of loyalty similar to that which has flooded
the counting houses of London and New York,

First Prussian Kaiser 115

Cape Town and Calcutta with young Germans
who ask little and learn much, who have the train-
ing of soldiers and are doubly useful to their
fatherland in case of war. Under the banners
of Majorian marched barbarians of every tribe
between the Black Sea and Belgium — Gepidae,
Ostrogoths, Rugians, Suevi, Alani, Burgundians,
and Huns. They took pay to kill their fellow
Germans of Africa just as much in the way of
business as when Bavarians and Hanoverians
fought against Prussians no later than 1866.
Kaiser Genseric had raided the Italian coast, be-
tween Rome and Naples in the year of Majori-
an's accession (457), but had been driven back
to his boats in such bloody rout that amongst
the dead was found a brother-in-law of the Vandal
King. Genseric was, therefore, on his guard,
and spent much money in propaganda work,
so that his general staff in Carthage knew more
about Roman armaments than did the officials
in Ravenna — indeed we may say today that
.William II. knew, in 1914, more about American
inefficiency at our seat of government than did
our own statesmen. But Majorian worked well

n6 Genseric

at his task and himself led the army over the
snow-covered passes of the Alps, through France,
to Spain, and finally assembled his host in the
port of Carthagena ready for the descent upon
Carthage. Genseric was alarmed, for in Majorian
he recognized a soldier whom he could not hold
off by offers of a peace conference; whom he
could not humbug by signing treaties and, above
all, who was a patriot who knew that no per-
manent peace was possible so long as Carthage,
the Mediterranean key, was in German hands.
But the stars were with the Germans and so were
the forces of disloyalty amongst the mercenaries
of Majorian. Genseric was kept well posted,
and by the joint aid of treason and his own swift
galleys, Carthagena was surprised and the great
Roman armada dispersed — the work of years
wrecked in a few hours — and Genseric hurrying
to his palace in order to make a speech from the
balcony, in which he would boast that God had
helped him because his cause had been righteous.
We see him taunting the captive Eudoxia with
the failure of her Roman kin, and we see the
Crown Prince Hunric offering the wife whom he

First Prussian Kaiser 117

had enslaved, a gift of loot from the Roman
camp.

Majorian might have returned to Italy after
this disaster; created another army and navy;
called upon the people to do their duty, and in a
second campaign profited by the lessons of the
first. But the very measures which he had
taken for the good of his country raised up ene-
mies amongst priests and politicians — and the
disaster at Carthagena was eagerly seized upon
as a means of doing to death a patriotic Emperor
whose unpardonable crime consisted in hindering
those whose activities were inspired by thirst
for plunder and power. Majorian had passed
sweeping laws for the protection of agricultural
communities against rapacious tax collectors; he
had imposed checks on arbitrary action in vil-
lages and towns; he had arrested those who made
much money by selling the magnificent monu-
ments of ancient Rome as quarries of ready-cut
building stone. The many politicians who then
as now regarded public office as a means of bet-
tering themselves submitted silently but sullenly
to the reforms of Majorian. They might in time

n8 Genseric

have been reconciled to the better laws, but not
so the Catholic Church. The papal court then
as now can close an eye to any crimes affecting
only individuals and states; such crimes, let us
say, as the massacre of St. Bartholomew; the
plot to murder an English queen; the rape and
massacre of Belgian girls and inoffensive civil-
ians. These in the eyes of Rome are mundane
and transitory. But a pope never pardons the
patriot who deems loyalty to his country as
the first duty of a citizen. Rome never pardons
the French Republic for compelling priests to
obey the law; she has not pardoned Italy for
separating church and state ; the King of England
is today excommunicate and his Catholic subjects
are encouraged in acts of rebellion.

Even as I write, the metropolitan city of the
Western World has had a warning example of
what it means for a public official to obey the laws
of his country, when thereby he may expose the
wrong-doing of a priest. John Purroy Mitchel
has just been defeated at the polls of New York,
although he reluctantly permitted his name to
appear a second time as candidate for mayor

First Prussian Kaiser 119

His first term proved him to be not only a patriotic
and intelligent public servant, but in addition a
man of broad political vision, and of brilliant
capacity as a writer and speaker. He was the
unchallenged choice of every important political,
industrial, or social organization in New York,
and men of clean lives concluded with plausible
reason, that not only would he be re-elected as
mayor, but that in view of his excellent record
in the past, he would naturally be the people's
choice for any subsequent honour to which his
ambition might aspire.

Imagine then the stupefying sensation caused
by the news in November of 1917, that Mr.
Mitchel had been defeated overwhelmingly and
that the successful competitor bore a 'name of
which nothing was known, save that he was agree-
able to such political elements as are disloyal.

The Pope in Majorian's day sought vengeance
against one who had checked certain abuses of
priestly power — who, for instance, forbade any
woman from definitely becoming a nun until she
had reached the age of forty. Majorian was
concerned for the future of a country in which

120 Genseric

a fanatical church encouraged young women to
escape the burdens of maternity by entering a
nunnery. Young men with equal zeal were
induced to escape from the labours of the field
or the duty of a soldier by donning the robe of a
monk and preying upon the purses and the cre-
dulity of a saint-ridden community. Majorian
was made the object of a silent and subterraneous
attack in which the Church then as now prepared
the ground carefully and launched its blow as
mysteriously as that which sent the Lusitania to
the bottom with its cargo of innocent mothers
and babes. Majorian and Mitchel are separated
by 1456 years of time but their tale is one that
never is old, for it was there in the first grey dawn
of history and will be repeated whenever priests
presume to rule, where statesmen fear to tread.

CHAPTER XVI

Rip Van Winkle and the Seven Sleepers of Christendom— Pagan
and Christian Rome — Holy Coat of Treves.

T^HE story of Rip Van Winkle is familiar to
millions who laugh and cry by turns at the
good-natured Dutch lad who fell asleep in the
Catskill Mountains during the reign of George
III. and awaked to find his hair white, his gun
rotted, and his country changed into a republic.
Washington Irving laid the scene of this long
sleep in a wilderness which he had never visited,
yet already natives of these mountains point with
pious conviction to the exact spot where Rip
rolled ninepins with the dwarfs or laid him down
for his memorable nap.

The story of Rip, like all good stories, has been
common property ever since men gathered to-
gether about the family hearth and drew upon
their adventures or their imagination for song

121

122 Genseric

and story. In the days of Genseric there were
seven Rips — all of them saints — all of them
waked from a sleep that had lasted nearly two
centuries. They had escaped from Ephesus in
Asia Minor when the edict against Christianity
menaced them and had concealed themselves in
a cave where they fell asleep after blocking the
entrance with stone. They might still be sleep-
ing there but for the enterprise of an inquisitive
landlord who had inherited this ground and pro-
posed an inventory of his property. So he pulled
away the stones and let the sun stream in upon the
seven young men who had lain in darkness and
mental torpor for this long period. They rubbed
their eyes, felt hungry, and sought to buy some
food in Ephesus; but their strange garb, archaic
manner, and, above all, the money that had long
since gone out of usage, caused them to be arrested,
haled before a tribunal of justice, and charged
with being foreign spies and passers of illegal coin.
But their story was soon told and was the more
readily believed because of its miraculous char-
acter. Thousands of the faithful flocked to the
cave and were healed; and the Emperor himself

First Prussian Kaiser 123

made a pilgrimage to its sacred shades. And as
in the case of Rip, the story cheered all who heard
it. Mahomet wove it into the Koran, even going
so far in details as to explain that God entered
the cave each night and shifted the bodies about
in order to prevent putrefaction. You may hear
the story of the Seven Sleepers retailed in the
bazaars of Delhi and the tents of Arabia — it has
been traced back to earliest records in Scandina-
vian folklore, and ages to come will bless the man
who first made so wise a fable.

In 1864 I fell from a tree whilst at a German
boarding school and was carried senseless into
the house. Why should not I have been lain
in a cave and remained happily innocuous for
half a century? In India I heard of holy men
who had been buried alive for many weeks, and
subsequently professed that their mysterious re-
pose had improved them spiritually. And so
without here raising the question of relative
holiness or even the desirability of multiplying
funeral expenses permit me to consider for a
moment the feelings of a normal Christian lad
awaking in August of 1914, after having fallen

124 Genseric

asleep in the Germany of 1864. Of course he
would have been arrested for seeking to pass the
obsolete Groschen in lieu of the Imperial Mark,
and probably pardoned and ordered to serve the
equivalent of his uncompleted military time by
working in some factory devoted to military
equipment. He would rub his eyes and scratch
his ears on learning that the little provincial
capital of Berlin had become a northern Chicago
and that modest little Prussia had now an Emperor
who was the terror of the world. He would ask
about Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and the other sover-
eign states and learn that they had all been
ground up in the Prussian mill and knew now no
leader but the war lord of Potsdam. Then he
would be told of a colonial empire with a million
square miles and a navy challenging England for
the mastery of the seas, and then he would listen
to the Hymn of Hate, and then learn that in a
moment of profound peace this Hohenzollern
war lord had launched an army into Belgium
and had deported the civilian population of both
sexes and made them work like slaves in the fields
and factories of the captor. Then he would learn

First Prussian Kaiser 125

of air raids on English seaside resorts; of killing
the opposing enemy by foul gases; of sinking
hospital ships and ferryboats by skulking sub-
marines— and then he would be told that God was
fighting for the Kaiser and his peculiar Kultur.

In 1864, Germans sang only songs of human
brotherhood and happiness. They sought in-
spiration in the charms of nature, the forest, the
cascade, the song of birds. They read of wonders
in other countries and travelled for mental and
spiritual recreation. They loved France for her
wit and taste; England for her well-regulated
liberty; and America for the generosity with
which she gave away her national domain to
emigrants. They were a people threatened by
none, learning from all, and welcome everywhere.
Their universities were free temples dedicated
to the Muses, and their many principalities became
centres of scholarship, rivals only in each desiring
to attract the best in music, painting, sculpture,
and the drama. In those days we thought of
Germania as Greece in her golden age pictured
her goddess of the Parthenon. We lived in the
world of Goethe and Schiller, of . Humboldt and

126 Genseric

the tales of Grimm; of Beethoven and Schubert;
of Turnvater Jahn and Ernst Moritz Arndt.
Had any one then intruded a programme for
sacking London and approaching India by the
gates of Bagdad we would have declared him
insane, and the Prussian police would have locked
him up for holding opinions contrary to sound
public policy.

And yet so gradually has the educational
discipline worked under Hohenzollern guidance
that today all Germany worships as holy the
things which in my youth were regarded as retro-
grade, barbarous, and contrary to national ideals.

The story of the Seven Sleepers needs re-editing
every few years in order that we may pause and
trace the progress our race is making. These
seven Christian saints fell asleep in a pagan world
— they woke in the age of Genseric. The Catholic
Church claims this fable as a sign of divine favour,
yet in spite of the numberless miracles traceable
to that cave, it became Mahometan three centuries
thereafter and has remained Mahometan to this
day. When these young men fell asleep, the
world worshipped God in temples instead of in

First Prussian Kaiser 127

churches. All honoured God, all talked freely
of religion, all respected religious divergences,
all recognized the ruler of the state as the pro-
tector of temples, and all were tolerant — for were
they not all children of the same God! The
world of paganism read Pliny and Cicero, Horace,
Virgil, and hundreds of authors whom we emulate
in vain today — whether as masters of style or
doctors in the field of high thinking. The Greek
world was edified by master minds in drama,
history, poesy, and philosophy — thinkers and
writers whom we can imitate to advantage as
we do the art of Phidias and Praxiteles — imitate
hopelessly. All the pagan world was divided in
matters religious, as it was in matters of philo-
sophy, of art, and of public policy. All the world
discussed the high interests of mankind, but all
the world had learned to discuss without insulting ;
to differ metaphysically yet never on a point of
good breeding.

The Seven Sleepers woke to a world in which
saints were the product of every town and miracles
the machinery by which they secured legal title.
They had fallen asleep in a world where every

128 Genseric

gentleman regarded bathing and gymnastic exer-
cise conducive to health. They woke amidst
monks who boasted that their bodies were stran-
gers to water and their minds to the beauties of
nature. The Greeks and Romans who perfected
both body and mind as a duty to God, no less
than to the state, would have appreciated but
partially a community in which able-bodied men
and women passed their lives in idleness and filth;
avoided their obligations as tax-payers; evaded
military service, but made war fanatically upon
works of art which they were incapable of repro-
ducing. The Catholic world alone at this period
numbered about 1800 Christian bishops, and
clergy so numerous that it is fair to compute for
the Roman state more priests than all the soldiers
in all the legions. It was the world best suited
to a Prussian conqueror and we must not lose
sight of Genseric rubbing his hands each time that
he heard of new monasteries, nunneries, monks,
and miracles. He kept his own arms bright
whilst encouraging the sloth and sanctity ,of his
neighbours. Like William II. he built churches
and was a good friend to his allies, but knew better

First Prussian Kaiser 129

than to count beads when spears and swords
needed sharpening. It was in Genseric's day
that the seamless garment of our Saviour was
miraculously "discovered" and finally deposited in
the domains of William II. Every circumstance
of this preservation, discovery, and final transla-
tion to Treves is cloaked in forgery. Yet even
today it is being commercially exploited as a
miracle-working relic, and millions of Prussian
subjects have sought this shrine and been relieved
- — at least of their money.

Luther thundered against this pious fraud in
the sixteenth century; rival cities have com-
plained to the Pope that they alone possessed
the unique garment, and a commission of experts,
in weaving if not in hagiology, have carefully
examined the alleged wonder and certified under
oath that the few fragments still extant furnish
no evidence as to its material, its form, or even
the nature of any seam or seamlessness. And
if this reflects the intellectual state of a Catholic
diocese in our time, have we any reason for apply-
ing the term "dark ages" to the period of Genseric
rather than to that of William II. ?

CHAPTER XVII

Genseric and Eudoxia — Her restoration — Some comments on
her mother Athenais — Failure of the second great armada
against Carthage.

'"PHE victory of Genseric over the Roman
armada of Majorian was complete and led
to a succession of embassies resulting in cash for the
Vandal and professions of peace for the Empire. It
was written in the stars of destiny that the sword
of Genseric should be uniformly successful in
battle, but that, like the Hohenzollerns, he would
meet disaster so soon as that sword ceased to
swing. It is popularly supposed that the Prus-
sian eagle never surrenders the booty into which
its claws have once penetrated — this is true if
we amend the aphorism to read that Prussia
grabs everything and surrenders only under
compulsion. Frederick the Great grabbed and

held, but his successor lost all at the battle of

130

First Prussian Kaiser 131

Jena, and what he received back was owing to the
generosity of England and to the winter which
wore down the army of Napoleon in Russia.
Since Genseric was a Prussian, we may believe
that he surrendered the beautiful Empress Eu-
doxia for financial reasons rather than those of
chivalry — yet Eudoxia was in the pride of a
matron's beauty and at this time (462) barely
forty years of age. Genseric, moreover, was out-
wardly the first soldier of his time; master of the
seas; and now that Crown Prince Hunric was
married into the family of Augustus, he deemed
himself cousin to the Roman Caesars. The court
of Rome sent embassy after embassy to Carthage
to negotiate for the surrender of Eudoxia, but
not until seven years of captivity had passed did
Genseric succeed in securing the bribe he sought.
The Byzantine court was compelled to acknow-
ledge the validity of a connection repulsive to all
save the brutal Crown Prince, and into the bar-
gain, Genseric was paid a large sum as evidence
of legal dowry. Thus was the Vandal rapacity
gratified and also that yearning of the parvenu
potentate for recognition by his peers. To be

132 Genseric

sure his vanity was sorely offended that the beau-
tiful Eudoxia persistently repelled his amorous
advances, and the length of her captivity measures
perhaps the hope he sometimes entertained of her
ultimate surrender. And henceforth Eudoxia is
hated by Genseric with an intensity far surpass-
ing any love he may ever have once entertained.
She returned to her family and we need not be
told that the rest of her life was dedicated to the
task of preparing for war against the perfidious
Prussian.

There have been many Eudoxias in history, and
had Genseric been willing to depart from the Pots-
dam custom, he might have made a quartette
of naked beauties to support his prospective pal-
ace— the fourth being Eudoxia's famous mother
Athenais. Women were beautiful in those days
— they were powerful also when they combined
physical beauty with intellectual accomplish-
ments. But when to beauty of body and mind
they joined a spirit of god-like elevation, then
indeed was every portal open to them. Athenais
was the gifted daughter of a notable scholar of
Athens, who gave her every facility for cultivat-

First Prussian Kaiser 133

ing her admirable talents. But on his death, and
when she was but twenty years old, her inheritance
was contested by her two brothers, who thought
perhaps that her beauty and brains were portion
enough. But the money which a modern maiden
would have wasted on lawyers, she invested in a
journey to Constantinople, where her tears, her
modesty, her loss, and above all her radiant
beauty appealed to the then Empress Regent,
Pulcheria, who relieved her distress, and at the
same time that of her brother on the Byzantine
throne who would not be happy until the penni-
less pagan had consented to share his bed and
his throne. It was a romantic love marriage, if
ever such existed, and like many another such,
did not run forever in the smooth manner of our
fairy books. The writer of romance, however,
is always able to close his tale at the church door
and lay down his pen after the hopeful words:
"And they lived happily ever after!"

Athenais was a heroine of romance and her
heart bubbled with warmth for all the world.
To Pulcheria she was a submissive and sympathetic
sister — accepting her tracts and sermons — to say

134 Genseric

nothing of baptism and a Christian name. Hence-
forth she spoke no more in praise of Plato and the
gods of Homer, but pretended interest in the
flatuous fables of St. Augustine or the homo-
ousianism of St. Athanasius. The philosophy
buried beneath the stories of Proserpina, Eury-
dice, Hercules, and Prometheus were exchanged for
the doings of vulgar monks, who never bathed
their bodies, yet blasphemously pretended to the
attributes of holiness. To her Imperial husband
she was an object of infinite charm for she relieved
the boredom of his Byzantine court as no one
else had ever done and made him the father of
our third in the Genseric trinity. And to the
people she was also welcome for her beauty, her
wit, her charity, and above all for her Christian
piety. And that nothing should be wanting to
the romance, no sooner had she taken her seat
upon the throne of Constantinople, than her two
wicked brothers were summoned to court. They
came and trembled, as they fell prostrate before
the sister whom they had sought to harm. But
she raised them in Christian forgiveness, pardoned
their past behaviour, and crowned the burden of

First Prussian Kaiser 135

their shame by conferring on each a lucrative
office. Let us presume that they, too, turned
Christian for the sake of the salary if not of their
sister, and the presumption is the more easy con-
sidering how little they had to abjure!

The rest of our heroine's life is somewhat
remote from the career of Genseric, as compared
with that of her daughter, Eudoxia, but is inter-
esting, for it illustrates how completely woman
has ever had her own way when she was not bur-
dened by the ballot-box, and how much she may
soon lose, should the law degrade her to the level
of the merely masculine.

Athenais submitted to the stupidity of the
Byzantine Court and above all to the monastic
monotony of the pious Pulcheria, until she was
thirty-eight years old, when she pretended that
a holy vision had beckoned her to visit the tomb
of our Saviour, there to celebrate her escape from
paganism. This pilgrimage agreed so well with
her that she spent, with a brief exception, the
rest of her life in the Holy City; travelling at
intervals; addressing learned bodies in the purest
accents of Hellas; composing essays, poems,

136 Genseric

dramas, and otherwise enjoying herself to the full
extent of her purse, her social prestige, and above
all her personal charm and talents. Wherever
she went, her bounty assisted in the restoration
of monuments and the founding of worthy chari-
ties. She died in Jerusalem at the age of sixty,
rich in experience and the gratitude of thousands
whom she had benefited. Rumour says that
absence from the bed of an Emperor was made up
to her manyfold by consolations that were not
always theological.

And now let us return to Genseric when he
hears that there is a new Emperor called Leo I.,
reigning on the Bosphorus, and a new Emperor of
the West, and that the two have finally united
in a gigantic effort to drive the Vandals out of
Africa. It is ten years since the ill-fated disaster
of Majorian at Cartagena, six years after the
restoration of Eudoxia, and forty years since the
first proud landing at Tangiers. Genseric had
been uniformly successful, yet like the Prussians
in Alsace-Lorraine or a popular bandit in the good
old days of Sicilian chaos, he lived in constant
danger of a police raid or some other form of re-

First Prussian Kaiser 137

tribution. At last the happy combination oc-
curred which enabled the forces of East and
West to make a simultaneous descent upon the
North African shores. More than a thousand
warships sailed from the Bosphorus bearing a
complete equipment for field or siege work, to
say nothing of a hundred thousand picked men.
Another force marched from the mouth of the Nile
through the desert and yet another landed from
Italy to the westward of Carthage. The details
of the majestic armada may here be omitted be-
cause of its ignominious failure for a cause that
has wrecked many other armadas equally well
inaugurated.

Genseric trembled for his throne until he learned
that so far from selecting the best soldier for the
highest command, they had entrusted this post
to one whose only claim rested upon his blood
relation with a Byzantine monarch. Genseric
was now ripe in experience and cunning, however
much his body may have wasted under the seventy
years of agitated existence. He knew his enemy
and, like another William the Second in a war
where brute force failed of success, he flooded his

138 Genseric

adversaries with professions of friendship and
lofty concern that blood might be spared. The
wily old Vandal said he was ready to submit his
claims immediately to a General Peace Conference ;
indeed so eager was he for a cessation of hostili-
ties that he would commence that very day to
disarm if only Rome would be generous and grant
him five days in which to arrange the necessary
details.

And like a big stupid sentimental fool the Roman
commander fell into the trap and granted the
favour which seemed slight to an amateur but
meant the world to a professional.

For in war imagination plays a r61e second
hardly to shot and shell. The enemy surprised
and taken at a disadvantage is already half beaten
provided no opportunity be given to become
familiar with the source of this momentary alarm.
Had Genseric's promises been treated as they
deserved, and had the splendidly organized allies
moved swiftly upon the capital, and there dic-
tated the terms of an unconditional surrender,
no surprise would have been felt by those who
look for the usual effects of normal causes. But

First Prussian Kaiser 139

Genseric knew his enemy and also the value of
wind and weather, and before his five days were
up and when the great Roman fleet lay comfort-
ably crowded together, dreaming of an easy con-
quest and early return to towns decorated in
their honour, there appeared in the offing the
long, low, swift galleys of Genseric, towing an
abundance of inflammable material which bore
down inevitably and with disastrous effect amidst
the helpless transports from the Bosphorus. In
vain did they seek escape by flight; each ham-
pered the other and the flames communicated
so rapidly, thanks to the west wind for which
the Vandal had prayed, that in the course of a
single night and with scarce the loss of a single
life, Genseric once more won a crushing victory,
and once more made public thanks to God as
the peculiar protector of himself and his Prussian
Kultur.

CHAPTER XVIII

Persecution by Genseric — Miracles of St. Augustine and St.
Stephen — Idolatry of pagans and Christians— Effect of
African luxury on the Vandals.

"/^ OD is with Genseric " shouted the Vandals,
when they learned that the combined
armies of the eastern and western empires had
been scattered. His churches resounded with
hallelujahs in honour of the victory; his priests
made new plans for the extermination of Catholi-
cism, Donatism, Paganism, and other forms of
native heresy; and the orthodox joked about the
alleged miracles of St. Augustine. Each sect in
turn called itself orthodox and by virtue of that
title proceeded to persecute all other Christians,
whom they stigmatized as heretics.

The great victory of Genseric occurred in 468,
and he lived ten more years of Imperial glory,
blessed by his orthodox clergy, cursed by all

others, and not at all disturbed by the spiritual

140

First Prussian Kaiser 141

thunderbolts hurled at him by hundreds of saints
with thousands of miracles to their credit. There
is an old Spanish proverb defining a liar as one
who pretends to enumerate all the wonders per-
formed by the relics of St. Stephen, and since the
learned and holy St. Augustine of Hippo and
Carthage has set his seal on these, in a work
written to prove the truth of Christian doctrine,
and as Augustine was contemporary with Gen-
seric, should we not pause for one moment to
consider the author of these holy acts and then
to marvel that his powers were not invoked when
the fire ships of Genseric bore down upon the
armada of those who had his name on their
calendar of holy martyrs? Augustine himself
was no amateur as a miracle maker, for within
the space of two years and all in his own diocese
he solemnly entered upon the pages of his monu-
mental book, De Civitate Dei, seventy well-authen-
ticated miracles, amongst which are three corpses
called to life. Between Stephen and Augustine
Genseric should have been long ago expelled from
Africa as were snakes from Ireland by the legendary
Patricius of Scotland — or if not expelled his death

142 Genseric

should at least have been one of contrition for
past crimes and an edifying reconciliation with
the worshippers of holy relics.

Genseric, moreover, even though ignorant of
Latin, had the whole set of St. Augustine in his
library and could have had his secretary translate
the most edifying passages — particularly those re-
ferring to the first martyr in the A eta Sanctorum.

Stephen had lain in the ground several centu-
ries when a vision appeared to some farmer near
Jerusalem, announcing the welcome news that if he
would dig at a certain spot he would find a gold
mine or better still the body of a martyr. All
this happened in the days of Genseric, and you
will no doubt share my surprise that this holy
wave of miracles should have been held back for
three centuries and then have inundated the world
at a time when it was too late to do any good. It
is also interesting to note that this epidemic of
theological excavation occurred only after the
Emperor Constantine had officially approved of
idolatry under its new label and that relics were
dug up just as fast as there was a commercial de-
mand for them on the part of a credulous public.

First Prussian Kaiser 143

Moreover, every material difficulty in the way of
pious excavations was removed by a vision — and
as many more such as the particular job demanded.
And thus it happened in the case of St. Stephen.
Vision after vision guided the grave-digging parties
from Jerusalem until the coffin of the saint was
reached; when (on highest authority we learn
this) the earth trembled, and an odour certified
as that from Paradise rejoiced every faithful
nostril and seventy-three of the ailing bystanders
were immediately healed. Of course it was of
the utmost importance to the promoters of this
company of saintly excavators that the corpse
should be legally identified as that of the man
who was bruised to death four centuries ago; and
it was equally important that there should be
blood and bones enough on hand not merely to
fructify pecuniarily his shrine on Mount Sion, but
to supply at a fair profit thousands of churches
throughout Catholic Christendom that to this
day feel their zeal enhanced by the comforting
thought that in their midst is a bone filing or
drop of blood that once was part of Saint Stephen
—first Christian martyr.

144 Genseric

It would be interesting if a statistically equipped
philosopher could discover the number of Arians
killed by Catholics or the number of Pagans
killed by combined Christian effort — all of them
martyrs in the cause of religion. The Roman
Empire at home was persistently eradicating the
religion of the ancients by erecting figures of
saints on pedestals that once bore the statues of
classic deities. The peasants who had formerly
poured a libation to Pan or Demeter were now,
under pain of death, ordered to burn a costly
taper before a divinity, claiming to perform the
same or even more, possibly at even a lower price.
Idolatry was not suppressed, but the idols were
renamed. The Roman emperors did what Prus-
sian kaisers do in their conquered colonies — they
do not change the things that matter, but they
give them German labels.

Genseric spent the last ten years of his out-
wardly successful life in imitating the example set
by the Catholics of Christianity. He persecuted
the heretics with holy joy — and under that word
he included Pagans, Donatists, Catholics — all
who were not Arian. His zeal burnt the brighter

First Prussian Kaiser 145

for having been converted in early life, and when
he learned of his victims, burned or butchered to
death, he had the satisfaction that consoled the
last years of Philip II. of Spain, who insisted on
the Inquisition in this world as better than eternal
damnation in the next.

So soon as the Roman fleet had been dispersed,
the outlying possessions of Genseric submitted
once more to his rule; Sardinia, Tripoli, and Sicily
paid him tribute and his galleys again raided the
coasts of Asia, Greece, and Italy. He studiously
cultivated the friendship of his brother barbarians
in the Roman hinterland and the booty and tri-
bute which filled his treasury after every sea raid
served to meet the expense of his endless war
against the heretics of his own land.

For half a century Genseric scourged Northern
Africa — and for yet another half -century after his
death his descendants continued this Prussian
process. Yet in spite of scourging and dragon-
nading and efficiency of the most modern kind,
German colonization succeeded no better in Vandal
times than in those of his Hohenzollern imitators.

The followers of Genseric were like the followers

146 Genseric

of William II. today — they penetrated to all parts
of the civilised world as hirelings and spies, but
they rarely penetrated into social circles where the
word " gentleman " has a meaning to the initiate.
The Prussians, under Genseric, who found them-
selves suddenly masters of a wealthy Roman
province could enjoy the warm baths in a luxuri-
ous villa and the Moorish women who ministered
to their appetites. They relished as barbarians
the privilege of debauching girls of ancient lineage
in whose families their fathers had been servants.
They delighted in being waited upon by slaves
of a higher breeding than themselves ; and who
can paint the joy of a north German, strutting
ferociously amid a people compelled to make way,
and salute him as master. One must have visited
German colonies in order to appreciate the feel-
ings of these vandals when stretching their limbs
at leisure amid the palaces and palm groves of
Carthage and contrasting their present enjoyment
with the past misery of their lives in the swamps
and forests of Brandenburg.

But the Prussian, while a good worker under the
lash, is of inferior fibre spiritually; and rapidly

First Prussian Kaiser 147

degenerates when permitted to eat and drink
according to his appetites. It is under the
drudgery of discipline that Prussia produced the
Kanonenfutter of Frederick the Great, and only
persistent poverty has made that land the nur-
sery of docile peasants and hardy officers. Gen-
seric had led his followers into a land of luxury and
they readily contracted the diseases which luxury
engenders ; but as barbarians, they were incapable
of appreciating a society in which literature,
philosophy, and the fine arts had flourished for
many centuries before ever a barbarian had
emerged from his Baltic wilderness. The men
who beached their boats at Tangiers in 427 were
amongst the elders by the time Genseric beat
back the great invasion of 468, and when Genseric
passed on to his German Walhalla, there were
probably not more than a handful of those who
had shared his youthful perils.

The Vandal conquerors were imperceptibly
conquered by their Moorish and Roman slaves
—and still more completely by their own appetites.
The conquerors of yesterday became the volup-
tuaries of tomorrow — field exercises ceased to

148 Genseric

interest the fashionable circles — the ranks were
recruited more and more from natives and the
day was thus insensibly prepared when the nation
that Genseric had founded ceased to emulate his
warlike virtues, forgot his courage, and imitated
only his cruelty.

CHAPTER XIX

Some observations on the rise and fall of empires — Relative
progress of Paganism and Christianity — Mahometanism —
Buddhism — Hindooism.

HTHE Roman state had flourished for twelve
centuries before it received its death-blow
in the age of Genseric, and the Roman Church
ruled with apparently irresistible power from this
time on to that of the great Reformation in the
day of Martin Luther. Dates make dull reading
to some, but twelve is an easy number to remem-
ber, and thus you may form some idea of the
wisdom no less than the power of the mighty
empire which gave laws to the whole known
world over so long a stretch of time. It is not
uncommon for empires to rise and extend them-
selves rapidly over many countries. You may
call to mind that of Alexander the Great, which
reached from Macedonia to the valley of the
Indus; that of Genghis Khan, from China to

149

150 Genseric

Eastern Europe; of Attila and Tamerlane and
finally of the great Napoleon. Each of them
represents waste if not bloodshed, and it is not
always easy to determine how far the good over-
balances the harm done. All the great conquerors
that rise before our minds at this moment are
of the Christian era, and the Empire which still
merits our studious contemplation, if not our
unreserved praise, is that of ancient and pagan
Rome which for m9re than a thousand years
made the highways of commerce safe and made
her rule respectable by governing according to
principles of law that are still current in our best
schools of jurisprudence.

The words of our Saviour, proclaiming that he
brought a sword into the world, and not peace,
were sadly prophetic; and the devout Christian
is perplexed by the frequent reminder that in the
twelve centuries since Genseric more blood has
flowed under the labarum of Jesus than was ever
spilled by all the pagan legions who fought under
the sign of the she wolf of Romulus. We might
go one step further and offer evidence that Christ-
ians have shed more blood in wars of their own

First Prussian Kaiser 151

instigation since the days of Genseric than all the
rest of the world whom we speak of as heathen.
Nor should we forget that the cause of Christ
has rarely, if ever, been advanced through perse-
cution or religious wars — on the contrary, Christ-
ianity has almost wholly disappeared from those
countries which in the time of Genseric and the
saints were most active in the work of persecu-
tion. Morocco and all of North Africa are now
not merely Mahometan but are vigorously spread-
ing that faith amongst the African tribes to the
south. Egypt which was a nursery of anchorites
and monastic mysticism is now a theological
centre of Islam. The cities of Asia Minor, famil-
iar to every Sunday-school through the Gospel
pages and as the seats of famous synods and
councils, are now parts of a Turkish Empire
whose Sultan prays to Allah in a church founded
by a Christian Emperor on the European shores
of the Bosphorus. From the Pillars of Hercules
to the Persian Gulf and the Caspian, the Koran
has routed the creed of Athanasius, and made
millions of converts amongst people whose fathers
roasted such as hesitated to kiss a relic of St.

152 Genseric

Anthony. And if we go further afield, to India
and China, we find there the equally melancholy
traces of once flourishing churches whose Christ-
ian congregations have become Hindoo or Bud-
dhist and whose traces would be wholly lost but
for a fragment here and there — the Nestorian
tablet of North China, or the illuminating pages
of Marco Polo.

Let us also ponder on the perplexing picture
of such countries as have been most extensively
blessed by the papal benediction — for instance
Spain when her Inquisition was exterminating
the best of her people and driving away those
who prized liberty of conscience. Let us note
that Louis XIV. systematically extirpated religious
liberty and drove thousands of the best French-
men to Protestant countries. You may run
over the history of Christendom, from Ferdinand
and Isabella to William II. of Potsdam, and if
you study the periods when the papacy has been
favourable to a ruler, you will have to place
that ruler amongst those who have sought to
spread orthodoxy by violence, by insidious propa-
ganda, by the rack and the stake, in short, by

First Prussian Kaiser 153

methods odious to the gentle founder of our
faith.

Were not our theological writers bound by the
discipline of their divinity schools they would
trace the marvellous progress of Islamism in part,
at least, to the fact that the Hadjee and the Mufti
do not exterminate or even persecute those of
other creeds. Indeed from the very beginnings
of Mahometanism there have been Christian con-
gregations in many cities ruled by the Khalif,
and commerce has been uninterrupted between
the two worlds. The conquerors have naturally
preserved privileges for themselves and done little
to conceal their contempt for those who wanted a
God divided into three incomprehensible parts.
Their law was very easy, for it involved no meta-
physical subtleties such as delighted Athanasius
—indeed it involved no creed at all to a Christian,
for he already worshipped the Creator of all the
world, and the Koran held Jesus to be one of
the many manifestations of God on earth. The
Christian convert had, therefore, but to pay his
tithes to the Khalif instead of to a pope; and as
to the matter of frequently washing himself and

154 Genseric

practising prayers to the accompaniment of hy-
gienic gymnastics, all this was refreshing after
a course of hagiology in which saintliness was
associated with dirty linen and desiccated virgins.

The Mahometan did not make a virtue of
celibacy — he even permitted more than one wife.
We must not, however, think of them as always
polygamous; for human nature differs little the
wide world over and the large majority of men
have enough trouble without reaching out for the
questionable glory of maintaining a harem. And
besides even were a man so rich as to dream of such
expansion, he would not do so, save to obviate
many of the causes which today make America
the classic land of bachelor maids and seekers
after alimony.

But we must not wander from our theme which
is to point out that while the seed of church pros-
perity may here and there be enriched by spilling
upon it a drop or so of martyr's blood, it would be
dangerous to accept that aphorism unreservedly,
because although the Christian world has been
at great cost irrigating her holy ground with
the blood of alleged martyrs, the heathen, or

First Prussian Kaiser 155

heterodox, world has progressed uncommonly
well without such fertilizing agents.

While Spain, for instance, has persistently
shrunk in proportion as she became a tool of the
Pope and an agent of the Inquisition, Japan has
prospered in wealth, population, territory, and
prestige. Her religion is that of Buddha who
anticipated the Sermon on the Mount by five cen-
turies; her laws are enlightened; all creeds are
protected; all nationalities frequent her ports.
In the days of Taiko Sama every Christian Japan-
ese was ordered to return to the practices of his
ancestors on pain of death ; and Catholic martyr-
ology has gloried in the addition of several Japanese
to this ambiguous chronicle. But the historian
must protest against regarding this act of the
Tycoon other than that which sent to the gallows
Booth, Guiteau, or the murderer of President
McKinley. The Japanese interdicted Christians
in general and Jesuits in particular, not because
of their religious belief or practices, but merely
because they undermined loyalty to the head of
the state. The Popish priests taught the doctrine
that the first duty of a subject is not to his coun-

156 Genseric

try, but to a foreigner, ruling on the banks of the
Tiber, who blasphemously pretends to speak in
the name of God and insolently proclaims re-
bellion as meritorious when directed against a
government which is opposed to papal suprem-
acy. It was in Genseric's day that a Roman
Emperor first received his crown from the hands
of a Catholic prelate, and the fashion then set
has been followed pretty generally by those
monarchs who had something to lose by failing
to conciliate the Catholic priesthood.

In Benares and Rangoon; in Singapore, Ceylon,
and Calcutta; in Pekin, Tokyo — in short, wherever
opportunity has offered I have sought to sound
the religious feelings of those who make up more
than half of our humankind. I have talked
much and frankly with Hindoo and Buddhist
friends on the subject nearest the heart of every
man, and we never went far before it seemed to
me that they were the true followers of Christ
and we the people who used his holy name as
a trade-mark for commercial exploitation. At
home I hear priests who preach poverty; in the
East I see them practising it. In China I see

First Prussian Kaiser 157

some four hundred millions of highly moral peo-
ple who were taught the Sermon on the Mount
five centuries before our Saviour appeared to the
people of Jerusalem. These people have persisted
thousands of years, holding fast to the teachings
of a kindly Buddha and a wise Confucius. They
have had bad rulers; have been conquered;
have had internal revolution; yet in the long run
they have triumphed over those who held the
temporal power much as the Romans of Gaul
and Italy absorbed the German barbarians who
broke in upon them with violence. The people
of India have dozens of religions within their
border, but live in peace because like the Chinese
and their neighbours of Japan they do not per-
secute. The one thing which an Oriental fails
to understand is a man without religion. We
at home avoid religious themes in polished com-
pany, because we are not yet on the spiritual
plane, where we can discuss high themes without
losing our temper. We have not reached even
the stage when we can say that there is but one
God who loves all His creatures equally. We are
still floundering in the foul theological wallows

158 Genseric

reserved for those who insist that theirs is the
only God. We have abundantly seen in the his-
tory of our race that such an attitude with its
persecuting adjuncts has done worse than nothing
for the cause of Christ; we see millions of dollars
each year squandered in missionary propaganda
that is offensive to the nations who are compelled
to receive these holy hirelings; we see Christian
cities degraded by misery, vice, and crime, yet
taxing themselves to support in Ceylon and Tokyo
salaried agents who are much more pressingly
needed in Chicago or New York. In other words
it is the Far East that gave us the Living Christ;
it is the Far East that keeps alive his teachings
today; it is the Far East that is capable of once
more converting us to the Golden Rule.

The kingdom of Genseric was being torn to
pieces by the same religious intolerance that was
wrecking the rest of the Christian world — but
in the case of the Vandals the wrecking went on
more rapidly — and the end was soon to come.

CHAPTER XX

Death and burial of Genseric — His son Hunric succeeds —
Policy and manner of persecution — Deportation of hereti-
cal bishops — Torture of women.

AISER GENSERIC died in 477, full of years
and honour. He came to Africa with a
hardy following of well-drilled Prussians half a
century past, and in that short time had made
himself master of Rome's richest if not oldest
province; had achieved the mastery of the Medi-
terranean; had married his son to a daughter of
the Roman Emperor; had annexed Corsica, Sar-
dinia, and Sicily — in short, he could close his eyes,
happy in the consciousness of having done his
full share in the persecution of heretics and in
the founding of an empire which his son and
Crown Prince Hunric could easily rule and
amplify. Let us then assume that Genseric was

buried with barbaric pomp, equalling at least

i59

160 Genseric

that which marked the obsequies of Alaric and
his warm friend, Attila. Let us imagine a golden
coffin exposed in the great hall of shells of his
neues Palais, and let us mark the grief of his old
soldiers as they passed his corpse and pondered
on the coming reign under a Kaiser who rivalled
his father in cunning and cruelty but shared little
of his military genius. All Carthage wore out-
ward mourning with the possible exception of the
three Imperial nudities supporting his crown on
the dome of his mausoleum. Today we have no
trace of his grave, for he was not a saint of the
Catholic Church. Had his piety found vent in
the torture of pagans alone, no doubt his bones
would have been discovered by means of the
usual visions and the shrine of St. Genseric would
today be a precious source of saintly profit —
rivalling in virtue even that of St. Augustine.
For the present, however, we must limit ourselves
to supposing that thousands of heretics were
slaughtered at the tomb of the great Genseric
and every other detail attended to with orthodox
respect for the dead at whatever cost to the living.
The great Prussian pirate is now dead and

First Prussian Kaiser 161

buried, and I should also be allowed to rest.
But since the whole Vandal empire collapsed so
soon afterwards, I purpose in a few pages to in-
clude a sketch of Genseric's five successors who
in another half-century managed to dissipate so
completely the empire committed to their charge
that in less than sixty years from its founder's
death, not only had Prussian rule in Africa ceased
to exist, but not a Prussian could have been
found in the baths and palaces where he had
luxuriated not many months before.

Hunric as Crown Prince had broken into good
society by breaking to his will the daughter of
a Roman Emperor. The marriage of Napoleon
and Marie Louise of Austria was not a love-
match; even less was that of the Arian Huneric
and the Catholic Eudoxia. But Huneric signal-
ized his whole reign of seven years by a war
of extermination against non-Arians in general,
and more particularly against those who had the
same creed as his wife. We have had such fre-
quent occasion to use the words persecution and
extermination that we must crave indulgence
and remind you once more that the vast area of

1 62 Genseric

North Africa had a population of perhaps several
million and that this population outnumbered
that of the Arian Vandals almost in the same
proportion as does that of India overtop the
administrative and military whites of England.
We must also remember that the native of North
Africa entertains a contempt of death second only
to that of a Rajput or Sikh. Consequently,
while each religious raid of the Arian Vandal was
outwardly successful in that the afflicted people
could not withstand on the battlefield a charge
of well-drilled soldiers, the victories thus won
were as inconclusive as the punitive expeditions
which have made the name of Germany odious
in every colony of William II. The Vandal raids
in North Africa were successful for the best part
of a century. Heretical churches were destroyed,
villages where heresy was suspected to exist were
burned, crops were laid waste, and fruit trees cut
to the core. The peasants took to the mountains
or woods, if possible, and those caught were
compelled to renounce their heresies or be roasted.
Those who had wealth concealed were roasted
anyway, at least to the point of confessing the

First Prussian Kaiser 163

spot where digging would prove profitable. And
thus we could drag on a weary chronicle of dragon-
nading such as has disgraced the reigns of many
most Catholic monarchs in times relatively modern
—since the days of the so-called Renaissance.
Let me merely refer such as have patience to any
historical study of the Thirty Years' War which
killed off a full half of the whole population and
left a large part of Europe barren and barbarous —
and that war was conducted by Christian poten-
tates for the triumph of religion.

Crown Prince Huneric entered upon his task
with an energy worthy of Louis XIV. when dra-
gooning his Protestant people of the Cevennes or
Tilly in Magdeburg. The fanaticism of Huneric
was met by fanaticism equally ferocious, and the
war he waged could end only by extermination.
Rome protested in many embassies, but Huneric
answered with pitiless logic that the methods he
was following for the abatement of Catholicism
were copied from Catholic statutes applied to the
extirpation of Arianism. Were man a reasonable
creature as has been claimed by some optimist,
the Catholics of Rome and the Arians of Carthage

1 64 Genseric

would have agreed each to cease roasting the
other — but this suggestion was rejected by the
Pope to whom the mere word toleration had a
brimstone smell.

Wherever the Catholics had secured the upper
hand, they made use of synods and councils as a
means of condemning something they held to be
heretical; and after securing a majority vote
by fair means or foul, they proceeded to fine,
imprison, exile or burn alive all who still remained
in their former opinion. Huneric amused him-
self by proclaiming his loyalty to Catholic tactics
no less than Arian orthodoxy. So he too called a
religious conference of African bishops ostensibly
to debate an adjustment of minor differences.
Of those who were his dupes, four hundred and
sixty-six were Catholic; and when they gathered
in the Convocation Hall at Carthage, they discov-
ered to their terror that the presiding officer
was an Arian Patriarch. But it was too late;
there was a scuffle and in the confusion a few
managed to escape, but all the rest were deported
or exiled to distant places where they were set
to hard labour and deprived of their customary

First Prussian Kaiser 165

exercises. Huneric was logical after the example
of the Pope — he would tolerate none but orthodox
Arians — better a colony with no population than
one whose people held to another creed. It was
his will that no Catholic bishop should exercise
episcopal functions in his Empire and thus in the
course of time that no further priests should be
ordained, no congregations meet for worship —
and Catholic heresy die a natural death. But
the well-meant persecution of Huneric was evi-
dently lacking in efficiency, for the exiled priests
managed to evade the law and we are told that
soon thereafter more than two hundred bishops
of Athanasian activity were discovered and de-
ported to some feverish neighbourhood in the
island of Sardinia. It was a common sight to
see long trains of men, women, and children
trailing disconsolately towards a distant exile
on the edge of the desert, amidst the huts of
the unsympathetic moors. At night they were
rounded up like cattle and watched by their
mounted guards; and the march continued for
weary weeks after the manner of Russia in my
youth, deporting to Siberia all those who thought

166 Genseric

otherwise than the orthodox ruler. It is well to
treat with caution official records, however de-
tailed, when they outrage our ideas of probability.
Also bear in mind that the bulk of historic material
comes from Catholic victims of Vandal oppres-
sion. We might frequently hesitate accepting
the testimony of even orthodox saints, were it
not that measures which disgraced the reigns
of Genseric and Hunric have been applauded
when executed a thousand years later in the name
of religion and at the centre of an enlightened
Europe. Huneric systematically searched out the
heretic by means identical to those employed
in Catholic Spain against Jews, Mahometans,
and other heretics. The Arian inquisition com-
menced by fine and imprisonment which helped
fill the treasury, but did not materially affect the
number of heretics. If the victims remained true
to their creeds, torture was introduced; and we
have the picture of most respectable citizens,
their wives, their daughters — even the conse-
crated virgins — stripped naked before the inquisi-
tors, hung up by the wrists and then weighted at
the ankles in order that the pain might result

First Prussian Kaiser 167

in recantation. If this was not enough, their
bodies would be burned at the tenderest parts
with hot irons, their right hand cut off, their ears
or nose mutilated; and frequently in vain. How
many were thus done to death history says not,
although there is authentic record of at least one
bishop and a pro-consul who died rather than
recant under torture. Add to this a crusade of
the Arian priests, who employed physical violence
to baptize their captives and afterwards punished
them for apostasy if they did not abide by that
odious act. Indeed the reign of Hunric would
have earned him a seat beside Philip II. of Spain,
and an apostolic blessing reserved for the grandest
of inquisitors had his efforts been directed in
favour of Papists.

CHAPTER XXI

Belisarius lands in Africa — Enters Carthage in triumph — Is
welcomed as deliverer — The Vandal army dispersed—
The last of their kings killed — The usurper a fugitive.

DELISARIUS has been seized upon by paint-
ers, poets, novelists, and writers of opera
so recklessly that he seems unsuited to the pages
of sober history. Here, however, I must present
him as one of the great soldiers of all time — one
of those rare leaders who have combined the art
of war with that of administering wisely a con-
quered people. Like Genseric he was bred in the
camp, and like him spent his early life in perfect-
ing the great art of conquering an enemy in the
field and making his conquest of mutual advantage
as soon as peace was declared. This is the man
who, in less than a century from the sack of Car-
thage by Genseric, routed the armies of his de-
scendant under these same walls, scattered the

168

First Prussian Kaiser 169

Vandals forever, and re-established the sway of
Imperial Rome over the whole of North Africa.

Belisarius was not of distinguished parentage
and must have owed his rapid advancement to
merit, for before his thirtieth year he had held
many commands successfully, and at an age when
in our service an officer would barely be considered
equal to a company, he was entrusted with the
sole command of the third and final expedition
against the Vandal Empire in the Mediterranean.

It was a small force compared with those which
had been previously sent against Genseric, but the
commander-in-chief was prepared for such treach-
ery as had wrecked at Cartagena the fleet of
Majorian; and there was little fear that he could
fall into such a snare as was laid by Genseric
for the fleet that was burned in sight of Carthage
in 468. Belisarius knew his enemy and banked
wisely upon the general discontent. His advance
agents prepared large supplies for his army in
Sicily and secured there a friendly base of opera-
tions. The people of North Africa, to whom
Prussian rule had meant only a hateful adminis-
tration if not active persecution, were prepared to

170 Genseric

accept with resignation any invasion calculated
to rid, them of their German oppressors. But
when they were assured by trusted messengers
that Belisarius would approach their shores as
a friend and protector, the cause of the Vandal
Kaiser Gelimer was already half lost.

Belisarius came in 534 with only fifteen thousand
fighting men, five thousand horses, and six hundred
ships. The force was small, but he had picked
his men and made up by genius and discipline
what was lacking in numbers. Before his fleet
had cleared the Bosphorus, he illustrated what he
meant by discipline when the bodies of two men
were seen dangling from a yard arm and the in-
formation flew from ship to ship that this was
their punishment for having killed a comrade in
a drunken brawl. He was equally severe on such
as were discovered cheating the army in the
matter of rations or other supplies. In short,
shocking as this statement must be to Prussians
who invaded Belgium in 1914, the army of Beli-
sarius landed on the African coast and in a march
of nearly a fortnight reached the capital without
molesting a single young woman or robbing so

First Prussian Kaiser 171

much as a hen roost. The people were amazed at
a general who treated his word of honour as a
sacred bond; and to find a parallel in modern
times, we would have to recall the rage in Potsdam
when England fulfilled her promise and marched
to the rescue of mutilated Belgium in August of
1914. Belisarius counted on the neutrality if
not secret aid of that portion of the population
that had suffered most from Arian persecution;
but he found support also in the party that
regarded Gelimer as an usurper on the Vandal
throne. The legitimate successor, a son of the
Imperial Roman Eudoxia, and grandson of a
Roman emperor, had been deposed by Gelimer,
his nephew. It is difficult to ascertain the exact
reason for this act — it is not easy to say even
why Bismarck was dismissed by William II.
Whatever ground Gelimer alleged, they were not
credited in the Byzantine Court — on the contrary
the Emperor Justinian felt personally affronted
by the insult offered to his Imperial cousin by a
barbarian usurper. But Gelimer had, no doubt,
been coached by the Carthaginian Treitschkes
into a contempt for Roman menaces; he knew

172 Genseric

that all previous efforts had failed and was con-
fident that a third would end in similar discom-
fiture, so he kept his Imperial predecessor under
lock and key for three full years and treated with
rudeness every embassy which came to remon-
strate on this matter.

But when Gelimer had lulled himself into the
pleasing belief that the luxury-loving Romans
would never attempt to execute their threats and
when his forces were much dispersed throughout
his perpetually restless frontiers, Belisarius, with
a secrecy and celerity worthy of the Great Napo-
leon on the eve of Jena, made his landing; re-
ceived the submission of one city after the other;
acknowledged the services of loyal deputations;
paid in coin for all supplies purchased ; encouraged
the natives to bring their wares to market as in
time of peace; and after a few pitched battles,
in which Auerstadt and Jena were anticipated,
and a Prussian army scattered like a frightened
flock of sheep, Belisarius entered the enemy's
capital amidst the grateful acclamations of those
to whom any change would be for the better.
And here again the analogy of 1806 and 534

First Prussian Kaiser 173

obtrudes itself, for the rapidity with which Napo-
leon entered Berlin after Jena is recalled by the
success of Belisarius from the moment he touched
the soil of Africa to that in which he restored the
rule of Justinian in Carthage. In each case the
conqueror was acclaimed as a deliverer, or at
least occupied the enemy's capital with scarce a
struggle after the first short and sharp shock of
arms. In each case the king of the invaded
country lost control of his men and became a
fugitive in his own land. Frederick William III.
skulked from one hiding place to another until
he finally found shelter in a Russian camp; and
Gelimer was so completely outwitted by the
Roman general, that whilst he was marching
from Carthage against an imaginary force, Beli-
sarius was marching in and ascending the throne
vacated but a few hours before by the last of
the Vandal Dynasty.

Gelimer 's last act was one of cruelty to his
deposed kinsman — the legitimate king. He or-
dered him killed along with many of his house,
who shared a common dungeon. This murder
was more than a crime — it was a monumental

174 Genseric

political blunder — for it removed every obstacle
to Roman occupation, by removing the one ruler
whom Justinian had formally proclaimed as le-
gitimate. Prussian brutality, Prussian efficiency
— these had conquered an African Empire under
Genseric. But brutality and efficiency could not
make the conquest of permanent value without
that divine spark which God appears to have
omitted when creating bipeds suitable to a
Baltic wilderness. And so you see that the
bungling diplomacy which characterizes Prussia
today is only the recrudescence of manners and
methods that saved civilisation from the Vandal
in 534-

CHAPTER XXII

Gelimer captured and carried to Constantinople where he
adorns the triumph of Belisarius and is generously welcomed
by Justinian.

\ \ JE have now reached the last phase in this
tale of Prussian ambition, the conquest
of Africa — the place in the sun, the lordship of
the world. We are now considering the fugitive
King Gelimer, the last of the African Vandals,
the man who but yesterday sat on the throne
of his grandfather, Genseric. Even to this day,
travellers in Mauretania and the Atlas Mountains
are surprised by the sight of natives whose fea-
tures have little in common with the orthodox
Kabyle or Moor and still less the negro elements
of the Dark Continent. These people have for-
gotten their Gothic language, their Arian creed,
and the very name of Genseric. They might not
even have ever heard of Germany and the cradle
of their ancestors but for a speech made ten years

175

1 76 Genseric

ago at Tangiers by William II., who claimed to be
the protector par excellence of that country and
the Moslem faith. We are writing at a moment
when this boastful Hohenzollern is mourning the
loss of every square foot of colonial territory in
Africa, over which the Prussian war flag waved
triumphantly in the spring of 1914; and there is
something grotesquely parallel between the rapid
rise and fall of German Imperialism in our
day and the Genseric Empire fourteen centuries
ago.

Gelimer first sought flight by water and had
gathered together a flotilla loaded with treasures
of which perhaps the most precious were the
ornaments of the Temple at Jerusalem, once
proudly borne to Rome by Titus, then seized by
Genseric when he sacked the City of the Caesars
in 455, and finally deposited by Belisarius at the
feet of Justinian and Theodora in Constantinople.

The Roman commander-in-chief practised the
greatest of all the military maxims, by giving the
enemy no breathing space until every avenue
of escape had been occupied and the last spark
of resistance stamped out. While therefore he

First Prussian Kaiser 177

was yet organizing the civil government from his
court of Carthage, his ships were swiftly occupy-
ing every port on the coast between Tripoli and
Tangiers, and his cavalry made a network of police
posts throughout the interior. One of his gen-
erals soon tracked Gelimer to his hiding place in
the Numidian Mountains where he was immedi-
ately surrounded and summoned to surrender.
The Vandal refused, having perhaps a premoni-
tion that the murders and tortures of which he
had been guilty would be remembered against
him in spite of Roman promises. Let us quote
the Roman general, for his promises were not
Prussian. Pharas was the name of the general,
and he wrote thus to Gelimer: "Like yourself
I am an illiterate barbarian, but I speak the
language of plain sense and an honest heart.
Why will you persist in hopeless obstinacy?
Why will you ruin yourself, your family, and
nation ? Is it the love of freedom and abhorrence
of slavery? Alas, my dearest Gelimer, do you
think it a disgrace to be the subject of Justinian ?
Belisarius is his subject, and we ourselves, whose
birth is not inferior to your own, are not ashamed

178 Genseric

of our obedience to the Roman Emperor. That
generous prince will grant you a rich inheritance
of lands, a place in the Senate, and the dignity
of patrician. Such are his gracious intentions
and you may depend with full assurance on the
word of Belisarius. So long as Heaven has con-
demned us to suffer, patience is a virtue, but if we
reject the proffered deliverance, it degenerates
into blind and stupid despair."

In Gelimer's letter, rejecting the Roman offer,
he has these words referring to Justinian: "He
has sent against me, I know not from whence,
a certain Belisarius who has cast me headlong
from the throne into this abyss of misery. Justi-
nian is a man, he is a prince, does he not dread for
himself a similar reverse of fortune? I can write
no more, my grief oppresses me. Send me, I
beseech you, my dear Pharas, send me a harp,
a sponge, and a loaf of bread."

The Roman general sent these three extraordi-
nary gifts and while he was familiar with such
men as Gelimer who are insolent and cruel when
in power but lachrymose to hysteria under mis-
fortune he grieved over the apparent insanity

First Prussian Kaiser 179

of his captive, but redoubled his watchfulness
for fear of simulated dementia.

Whether from the soothing effects of music or
the tonic of good food or perhaps from a careful
study of the Roman general's military dispositions
Gelimer finally concluded that he was safer in a
Roman prison than footloose in his own kingdom.
It was no doubt difficult for one who habitually
perjured himself and massacred his prisoners to
realize that other nations did not do the same thing.
The Prussian of today wonders why their enemy
does not sing Hymns of Hate and massacre civil-
ians. Gelimer never recovered from the shock
of his first degradation and still less from the
second one which revealed to him the generosity
of his captors in contrast with his own behaviour.
Swedenborg had a vision of hell which consisted
of cruel and selfish people compelled to enjoy the
presence and conversation of those who persist-
ently strove to be kind and generous; and we
may thus measure the mixed feelings of Gelimer
when compelled to accept Roman hospitality at
the hands of men whom he had coarsely insulted.

When Gelimer at last surrendered, he was

i8o Genseric

escorted in honourable manner to the presence
of Belisarius, who received him on the outskirts
of Carthage in the midst of a vast crowd of citi-
zens who looked with eagerness for the language
that might be expected to fall from the lips of
their late sovereign. But instead of royal words
nothing came from the august prisoner but a
loon-like laugh loud and discordant. Was it the
effect of inward rage, shattered nerves, or the
wounded vanity of a hitherto omnipotent bar-
barian? He was swiftly transported to the
Bosphorus and Belisarius enjoyed there a tri-
umph ornamented by the magnificent spoils,
which Vandal kings had collected from every port
of the Mediterranean, during a hundred years in
which every year marked a hundred raids. Geli-
mer was in kingly purple when he approached the
throne of Justinian and the crowds of Constan-
tinople listened in wonder at these words which
the last king of the Vandals mumbled and mum-
bled after the manner of one demented or in a
dream — "Vanitas vanitatis omnia vanitas"

CHAPTER XXIII

Colonial Genseric and Colonial Prussia of today — Some com-
parative notes — Kiao-Chow and Papua — End of Prussian
Kaiserism in Northern Africa.

/^ERMANS under Genseric were offered every
opportunity to display their qualities as
colonists or colonial administrators and so far
from justifying any claims made by themselves
or their admirers in the field of Prussian Kultur,
when the regiments of Gelimer were scattered
like a rabble into the Numidian wilderness, all
Africa rejoiced and nothing remained but the
name "Vandalism."

The Empire of William II. has been the victim
of an educational propaganda, worthy of the palmy
days of Jesuitism. Not only has the subsidized
press and the large force of salaried functionaries
assisted the government, but every pulpit, every
professional cathedra, and above all every ele-
mentary school has been furnished with the serum

181

1 82 Genseric

of German colonial destiny and with minute in-
structions regarding its efficient injection. The
present German of grey head and weary eyes
cannot explain why his hatred of England over-
tops all other hates in this war of wars. He does
not know why Germany scoffed at the idea of
colonies in 1871, and yearned for them a few
years afterwards. His hatred and his scoffing
and his yearnings have no more to do with his
normal mental operations than a Catholic's belief
in the bones of a saint or the efficacy of holy water.
The word "Jesuit" in connection with education
means that the child has been drilled into forms
of belief and practice just as recruits are trained
to move automatically when certain sounds are
emitted by an officer. Give me the moulding
of a mind during childhood and I will guarantee
to make the mature product Mahometan or
Buddhist, Protestant or Papist, a man of sports-
manlike honour, or a servile specimen of latter-
day Prussianism, who bellows the Hymn of Hate
over his beer-mug and falls prostrate when the
sword of the Kaiser rattles in its scabbard.
When Genseric founded a German colony in

First Prussian Kaiser 183

Africa, it was greeted no doubt in every German
camp as a triumph and a foretaste of what Ger-
many could and would do in the near future.
We have seen, however, that within the lifetime
of the founder's grandchildren these forerunners
of Kultur not only forgot their language and their
dress, but above all, the rugged virtues which
spring from poverty not to say necessity.

On my visit to the German colony of Kiao-
Chow in China the most conspicuous mark of Ger-
man occupation was a formidable notice-board
forbidding the use of any language but that of
the Kaiser, and the male population of Chinese
had been arbitrarily commandeered to labour at
erecting a monument in honour of the conqueror.
The spirit of Genseric animated the Prussians of
Shantung and no one who had seen what I saw
could be surprised at the joy of the Orient when
the ugly black eagle of Potsdam made way for
the Rising Sun of Japan.

The Chinese language was forbidden yet I
noticed that in the mess of the German officers
the conquerors were compelled to practise the
little English they knew in order to make their

1 84 Genseric

wants known to their Chinese victims, who have
ever looked up to Englishmen as just rulers and
had acquired their language as the one most
useful in commercial intercourse.

One more illustration of Germany's failure to
take root in the province of Shantung, I venture
to note, although it is so puerile not to say incred-
ible that it would best merit oblivion, save on
such a theme where the religious feelings and
national customs of a conquered people play so
important a part. The Prussian Governor occu-
pied the palace or yamen of the dispossessed
Chinese commander-in-chief, and to emphasize
the superiority of his Prussian military subordi-
nates to all others of mankind, he reserved one
door for those bearing side-arms and compelled
all others to advertise their inferiority by using
only what we might call the servants' or trades-
men's entrance. The youngest of English coloni-
als would have warned this new Genseric that
he was in a country where the teachings of the
gentle Buddha were in practice, and moreover
he was an intruder in a province sacred to China-
men as the home of the immortal Confucius; and

First Prussian Kaiser 185

that in the social hierarchy of the great Middle
Kingdom, the profession of killing is not honoured
—on the contrary it is relegated to the very lowest
rank of necessary evils. Consequently when the
venerable native of great learning and considera-
tion in his own country is told by the Governor's
orderly that the meanest Prussian lieutenant may
take precedence of him and that when coming
to an official audience he must enter by the door
reserved for coolies and peddlers, he submits —
but the Oriental does not forget.

Only a few years before the Hohenzollern
forces broke into Belgium I visited in succession
each colonial post of Imperial Germany on the
shores of New Guinea and in the Bismarck Archi-
pelago and here again the spirit of Genseric
brooded over German expansion — an expansion
much like the Vandal one — rapid, ruthless but of
short duration. In Germany I had heard only
favourable reports, indeed I might say, that the
Fatherland was flooded with information, leading
the world to believe that German Kultur had not
only been accepted as a boon by the Papuans and
Kanakas of the South Seas, but that English in-

i86 Genseric

fluence was declining and manifest destiny pointed
to the Kaiser as prospective guardian of the
Pacific. What then was my surprise in discover-
ing, by conversation with German officials on the
spot and off their guard, that in a colonial occupa-
tion covering a whole generation not only had
the Prussian name become synonymous with
cruelty and treachery, but that the experiment
was an economic failure no less than a political
one.

Before England handed over this rich domain
to Prussian exploitation, British missionaries and
traders were welcome throughout the islands and
there was fair play for all who chose to seek
their fortunes in this field. Papuan children
came of their own accord to learn English of
the missionaries, and as these ministers of the
Gospel were supported generously by home soci-
eties, they had no temptation to act otherwise
than as benefactors, especially in the matter o|
defending native interests in the press and even
in the British Parliament when occasion arose.
The relations of England with New Guinea had
existed for more than a century in a peaceful

First Prussian Kaiser 187

haphazard way, which all recognized but no one
needed to legally define. Then of a sudden with
much rattling of war harness, in struts the Prus-
sian, in a manner recalling the introduction of
Genseric to Tangiers — and presto! all is changed.
The Englishman is excluded from his customary
trade-routes; British ships are boycotted even
to the extent of compelling them to leave port
without filling their water-tanks; native chiefs
are put under military rules and forced to furnish
slaves to German planters who exploit them after
a fashion that would have been repugnant in the
West Indies of a century ago, and which modern
Germany disguised by the euphemistic appella-
tion of contract labour. The Prussianizing of
these hitherto English fields was in full swing;
and as in Germany, so here, the pulpit and the
elementary school were relied upon to produce
in the next generation a population of Papuans
who would have forgotten all their English and
have learned to sing with patriotic gusto Deutsch-
land, Deutschland uber Alles. So far as brute
force was concerned, the Hohenzollern did about
as well in German New Guinea as the Potsdam

1 88 Genseric

Vandals did in North Africa; but both found their
severest stumbling-block in the field where Prussia
is weakest, namely the field of the spiritual forces,
which are sometimes called the imponderabilia
or in academic jargon, psychology. William the
Second did not feel the time ripe to expel every
English-speaking missionary because it might
have resulted in unpleasant retaliation, but he
applied to them a boycott intended to serve the
same purpose under the specious pretence that
he was only enforcing domestic regulations with
which no foreign power could find fault. The
Pope of Rome had given the solid Catholic vote
of his clerical faithful in the Fatherland in order
to strengthen the Kaiser and his military budget
against the attacks of radicals and socialists.
Gratitude if not a formal contract demanded that
in return for this the Prussian monarch should
pay the Pope handsomely and therefore the ad-
vent of the Prussian " assessor" in Friedrich-
wilhelmshafen was quickly followed by gifts
to Papal missions of land stolen from the
natives.

But missions cannot live from land alone;

First Prussian Kaiser 189

and therefore the Kaiser's police in Papua were
directed to scour the tropical jungle and compel
the bushy-headed children to come and learn gothic
type and gothic ideas in the schools nominally
conducted by missionaries, but actually directed
from Prussian police headquarters. In days
when the missionary was an English or American,
the natives were glad to come and learn. But
when Prussian priests and policemen pushed
their propaganda by means of the whipping-post
and forced them to learn a language not merely
hideous in itself but useless outside of Germany,
much murmuring followed and protests which
were treated as acts of rebellion. Punitive expe-
ditions were organized, villages were shot to
pieces or burned, and a few who were too old or
feeble to escape were made prisoners and brought
for sentence before a Prussian magistrate who
knew nothing of native custom and cared less.
The papers of the Fatherland resounded with
triumphs of their troops against alleged savages;
beautiful pictures were painted to show the
blessings of Kultur at Friedrichwilhelmshafen,
and every German mother who read the official

190 Genseric

bulletins praised the Kaiser for spreading religious
light in those dark waters.

The story of Kiao-Chow and the Bismarck
Archipelago is the story of East and West Africa
and above all of Samoa. It is a story with blood
on every page; the story of colonial ambition
directed by soldiers and not by statesmen; the
story of natives whose feelings are outraged and
liberties extinguished ; the story of colonies devoid
of colonists. Military power is needful — brute
force has its uses, but these are only a very small
part of colonial Empire.

England has had to organize police forces in all
her crown colonies, and has also had her native
wars, but these have been the exception. With
Germany, native discontent has been the rule.
And as a broad illustration of what I mean, let
me point out that in the colonial world as a whole,
not omitting India, the trend of emigration has
never been away from the British flag, but, on
the contrary, always towards her liberty-loving
folds. And in India itself, emigration has been
from the independent native states towards those
under British military rule — which is answer

First Prussian Kaiser 191

enough to the oft-repeated Prussian prediction
that in any future war all India would rise as one
man and drive every Englishman into the sea.
The Prussian of 1914 has been profoundly dis-
appointed as was no doubt the Prussian- Vandal
of 533 A.D., that British India not only remained
loyal, in the Great War, but did her full share
of service — and so did every other colony over
which the Union Jack has waved.

When Gelimer fled to the Numidian Mountains,
all North Africa rejoiced in his fall, as all German
colonies rejoiced on learning that henceforward
they would no longer be forced to learn that
barbarous tongue or submit to the insolence of
the Herr Assessor. The Germany of my time
differs little from that of Genseric and Gelimer.
I speak not of material differences such as are
made by railways, factories, transatlantic restau-
rants, and Wagner theatres. In things of mere
matter, modern Germany has achieved first place
and she has employed this material power to
prepare a war in which she fondly expected to
smash all such nations as had thought less of
material power and more of things spiritual.

192 Genseric

Prussia in our day stands on a lower plane spirit-
ually and intellectually than any of her neigh-
bours. The triumphs of which she boasts are
in the field of imitation and organization. Her
Kultur compares with civilisation as a Berlin
casino to an Atheneum Club of London, or a
Century Club of New York; she is a magnificent
department store as compared with the labora-
tory of an Edison, or the generous alcoves of the
British Museum. She is like a gaudy shop with
glaring lights attracting the passers-by through
much advertising of a noisy nature. I need only
refer you to Prussian propaganda in the past
thirty years; exchange professors; the visit of
Prince Henry; sending to Washington the big
bronze of Frederick of Prussia; societies for pro-
moting the German language in American schools
and colleges. All this has impressed the unthink-
ing and those who think after and not before,
reading the papers — that Germany is great be-
cause she is much in print. The corollary of this
is that countries cannot be great unless they are
advertised as such — and this view is encouraged
perhaps by a press largely controlled by Germans

First Prussian Kaiser 193

or by Jews, whose educational bias has been
gained in Frankfort or Posen.

The modern Prussian is a worshipper of mate-
rial success and military methods — and so was
the Prussian in Genseric and Gelimer. We also
worship success, but we worship higher things
as well, and when this war shall have ended,
we shall worship them even more. We shall do
a little thinking independently of German direc-
tion; we shall be less keen to have our university
catalogues bristling with Leipzig and Gottingen
Ph.D.'s; we shall seek assistance amongst those
who advertise less and accomplish more. We
shall enquire not so much the amount of a man's
fortune as the means by which it has been ac-
quired. We shall be less impressed by the vast
volume of German scholarship as by the quality
of her output and the tendency of her teaching.

We shall then learn what we might have
suspected many years ago, that Germany has
imitated the civilisation of others — never created
one of her own — least of all one which has aroused
the envy of any other country. Prussia is
crowded with schools of architecture, painting,

194 Genseric

sculpture — but how much of this would be worth
transporting from the banks of the Havel to those
of the Thames or the Seine? German philosophy,
poesy, drama, history, and fiction — these are
portentous in volume but in quality how meagre!
The educated German boasts noisily of his Goethe
and Schiller; his Hegel and Schopenhauer; his
Treitschke and Schiemann; but when alone he
warms himself at the flame of Shakespeare and
Moli£re; Bacon and Voltaire; Gibbon and Mon-
tesquieu. And as the Vandals of Carthage soon
forgot their Gothic in favour of Latin, so in our
day, fashionable Germany dresses to resemble
England and simulates a French accent in spite
of police and Imperial warnings.

In the mechanics of musical composition the
German has done much, but here again South
Germany and not Prussia may claim the credit.
Music has ever been the refuge of enslaved people
because it is one of the few avenues of escape for
the man forbidden to think. The police-ridden
may not speak aloud of tyranny, but they may
shout their griefs in an opera chorus or bellow
to the God of Battles in a Liederkranz gathering.

First Prussian Kaiser 195

Music is no assistance to the reason or the higher
perceptions — it plays upon passive chords — it ap-
peals most effectually to negroes, slaves, serfs,
and those who in general would be regarded as
excellent material for the hypnotic expert. Music
is at home in the lower Danube, where the Magyar
and the Tsigane fiddle away their moral fibre and
where emotional passion takes the place of civic
virtue. It is no accident that the communities
which have fought for civil and religious liberty,
and which have shown conspicuous capacity in
making and enforcing municipal law have pro-
duced no Strausses or Richard Wagners. The
Scotch Calvinists, the Puritan New Englanders,
the Dutch Boers of South Africa, the reforming
elements of England, the Swiss and Norwegians
—these are communities where the truth is a
living force and national needs understood, but
where there are fewer operas than in Spain, Italy,
Germany, or Russia.

Of course the songs of the people are the hymns
of all time and are independent of opera houses or
professional composers. They are like truth and
the fables of AZsop — of all time and no time. They

196 Genseric

know no frontiers and no original author. The
peasant has sung to his sweetheart and the mother
to her babe from the first dawn of humanity; and
when Wagner and his dreary demigods shall have
been forgotten, the lullaby and the folksong will
continue to cheer us at our labour, whether on
the Ganges or the Nile, in the Australian bush or
the mesas of Colorado. The German has com-
plicated and composed in music as in philosophy,
but we must look elsewhere for the author of
Annie Laurie, Old Folks at Home, and My Country
'/ is of Thee.

And now an end to Genseric and his short-
lived but terrible colony! We have brought the
last of his line, his grandson, Gelimer, as a captive
and cringing suppliant to the feet of a Roman
Emperor and his beautiful wife. The Vandal
of Potsdam principles was not executed or even
imprisoned — on the contrary he was allowed to
close his life amid royal pleasures on a vast estate
somewhere in Asia Minor, where in reincarnation
he might today hear the whistle of the Bagdad-
Berlin Express. Gelimer is known by name to
very few for he ruled by force alone. The name

First Prussian Kaiser 197

of Justinian is recorded with gratitude by the world
of science, because it is linked with an Empire which
even in its declining years asserted the supremacy
of general laws over personal caprice. And the
philosopher who muses on the mutability of human
affairs will remark that the Vandal king, born
in the purple, bowed before a throne on which
sat Justinian, reared as a peasant soldier, and
Theodora who had danced on the boards of a
public theatre. Yet the peasant soldier gave to
the world our monumental pandects in the very
year that saw German rule broken in Africa; and,
as to the Empress, she became a saintly light in
the Catholic Church, reigned twenty-two years
by the side of a loving husband, and built many
churches. But her crowning act of generosity
was in treating her Prussian captive with gener-
osity most un-Prussian.

CONCLUDING CHAPTER

Genseric, William II., and Frederick the Great

'"PHE future has few surprises for him who
knows the past; and the appearance of a
William II. should therefore have been anticipated
by those who knew Genseric. Yet such is the
capacity of man to believe what is most agreeable
to his wishes that we may trace throughout his-
tory a disposition to regard each war as the last,
and every peace as the signal for universal dis-
armament.

In the days of Frederick II. of Prussia, the philo-
sophers of Europe corresponded with one another
as members of an intellectual republic devoted
to the enlightenment of mankind by studying
the laws of nature and combating the rule of a
clergy, sunk in superstition. Scholars of Ger-
many, and France, and England knew no political

boundaries and looked upon the wars of that

198

First Prussian Kaiser 199

century as dynastic affairs which could not for
a moment snap the spiritual bond that linked
together a Voltaire and a David Hume; a Diderot
and a Baron Grimm.

When the great historian of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire paused at the close of
his immortal work — in which nearly every chap-
ter dealt with the interminable struggle of Civili-
sation against the German barbarian — he cast
his prophetic eye over the frontiers of his then
known world and congratulated Europe that the
Hun and the Vandal had at last disappeared and
that Genserics were no longer possible, because the
land that bred them had now become that of
Lessing and Wieland, Schiller and Goethe! Gib-
bon was perhaps the wisest of men in an age not-
able for learning and polite literature and he
wrote shortly before a war that was destined
to last more than twenty years; to involve every
hamlet of Europe and to place upon an Imperial
throne a conqueror whose father was notary in
Corsica!

The wise men of Europe — even the Franklins
of the New World — sounded no note of warning.

2oo Genseric

On the contrary, their letters are abundant evi-
dence that towards the close of the eighteenth
century the whole world of polite society agreed
to regard war as not merely brutal, but unfashion-
able; in short a relic of the Dark Ages, and
consequently not worth serious consideration by
such as looked forward to higher planes of human
progress.

The age of Frederick is well known to us of to-
day merely because the literature of the eighteenth
century is readable and interesting. But the
student of preceding centuries will be equally
amazed to note analogous letters during each
era of comparative quiet, whether in the days
of Montaigne, Erasmus, Chaucer, Justinian, or
Caesar Augustus.

Frederick II. was singularly like William II.
and Genseric in that all three were famed for the
craft with which they cultivated pacifism in every
country but their own. Each in turn raided first,
and declared war afterwards; each was a Vandal
in blood, yet each masked himself in the insignia
of civilised monarchy. Each of these monarchs
had remarkable success for a short time. Gen-

First Prussian Kaiser 201

seric overran Northern Africa. Frederick II. fig-
ured as the greatest soldier of Europe, after the
Seven Years' War, yet men who fought under him
at Torgau and Rossbach lived to see the whole
of the Prussian army chased like hares from the
fields of Auerstaedt and Jena. William II. preached
pacifism until 1896 and is now in the fourth
year of a world war which he has provoked by
the same arts that characterized Genseric and
Frederick. The rape of Belgium in 1914 may be
compared with Frederick's unannounced seizure
of Saxony in 1756, or Genseric's capture of Car-
thage in 539. What are a few centuries in the
life of man ! Why should we think that a Vandal
or Hun has changed in a few thousand years?
Because a Prussian dresses up to resemble a
gentleman, or a scholar, must we therefore be
blind to his real qualities, as he has revealed him-
self to us when off his guard?

Let us gaze for a moment on the Prussian
monument to the Great Frederick, which was
reared in the days of his peace-loving successor,
Frederick William IV. It is a monument of colos-
sal proportions intended to symbolize the greatness

2O2 Genseric

of the Hohenzollern monarchy at the moment of
its greatest power under a king who was not
merely a great war lord, but who posed as the
patron of science, art, and letters. The foreign
visitor sees from afar the lofty figure of the
Roi Philosophy — astride of his impatient charger;
and he approaches in order to study the many
personages grouped at the base. These, he
doubts not, must be intended for the illustrious
poets, painters, men of science of that philosophic
age. But he is puzzled by seeing them all in
military garb and is more puzzled still on learn-
ing that these are all Prussian soldiers. Where
then, he asks, are the great men of Germany?
Why are none but warriors on a monument,
dedicated to a nation's greatness — and our for-
eigner is turning away in surprise and sorrow,
when, on passing to the rear of the great King's
horse, he notices one figure in civilian dress — a
shrinking old man who seems uncomfortable in
this post of questionable comfort — immediately
under the horse's tail.

The foreign visitor clamours to know who this
is — the one human oasis in a desert of Prussian

First Prussian Kaiser 203

militarism — and he finds that it is Emanuel Kant
of Konigsberg, the grandson of a Scotch sadler.

And here you have in bronze, if not aere peren-
nius, the secret of Prussian Kultur. The brazen
boastfulness of a people who blush not to see
their period of greatest glory symbolized by mere
instruments of material destruction. It is this
spirit of recrudescent Vandalism that has made
Berlin a vast quarry of monumental mediocrity
and her people a by-word for lack of taste.

You can tell the Prussian a long ways off — but
you can't tell him much. You can tell the Prus-
sian woman still farther off, for she wears more
violent colours. It was so in the days of Genseric
—it remains true under William II. The Vandal
court has ever been the court of boisterous bore-
dom— Berlin does all it can to attract the stranger,
but few go at all and none remain long.

Give a Paris girl a few ribbons and feathers
and a bit of wire — and watch her as these trifles
grow in value under her dainty fingers, until she
hands it out to you, or your wife, a hat for which
you are glad to pay as to an artist. If you have
the courage to make the same experiment in

204 Genseric

Berlin you will grow depressed as you watch the
banana fingers of that Vandal Prussian maiden
mutilating your feathers and ribbons, and finally
offering you a hat that would make my cow go dry.

Here you have the reason why this war between
the barbarian and the people on a higher plane
must go on until one or the other is destroyed.
The Prussian commenced his preparations to
invade England and defy the United States in
1896, and I thought it my duty then as now to
publish what I knew to be the case. But such
warnings make unpopular literature. It is much
more in accordance with modern taste to preach
the Gospel according to Bryan and to assure the
money-making mob that our country is invul-
nerable and that in case of war, the Government
has but to issue a call to arms and a million men
will rally to the colours — all accoutred as for war —
well-armed and abundantly equipped with artil-
lery, aeroplanes, ammunition — to say nothing of
submarines and transport ships.

I have tried to draw the parallel between the
days of Roman pacifism under Genseric and
American Bryanism under William II. Both

First Prussian Kaiser 205

Bryan and William II. are each a manifestation,
deserving of microscopic research. They do not
stand isolated ; for should the so-called boy orator
of that shallow and broad-mouthed river Platte
be ever silenced, there are many graduates of
Lake Mohonk, eager to accept his burdens — and
his fees. And so William II. is the creature of
American Bryanism, as Genseric was a creature
of a Roman pacifism that preached disarma-
ment everywhere except in the world of German
barbarism.

We shall have raids from the Baltic so long as
the spirit of Genseric rules in those prolific regions.
Italy and England and France will continue to
create glorious works of art and the Vandal will
continue to envy the men whose work they clum-
sily seek to imitate. They cannot make Berlin
attractive, but they can at least bombard Notre
Dame and possibly depopulate Paris. The Prus-
sian artists can please only Prussians, yet they may
hope to wreck the Louvre and the Luxembourg,
as Genseric sacked Rome and Attila levelled
Aquileia to a dust heap. For half a century the
commerce of Germany has been fabulously in-

206 Genseric

creased through British generosity. Every Eng-
lish colony has been opened, not merely to German
shipping, but to the unhampered activity of
every commercial or political agent of the " Father-
land." Generosity is blind and John Bull was
once so fatuous as to believe that the Hohenzol-
lern would be grateful for this hospitality.

On the contrary! The Vandal Kaiser, who
could not imitate the virtues by which England
had built up her vast Empire of self-governing
states, taught his people that he could, at least,
undermine and finally smash this costly fabric
and possibly profit by such a calamity. So far
he has lost every colony that ever flew the Pots-
dam flag — and he has lost these territories, not
merely because the Allies had better fighting
material, but because the Prussian is hated by
every native, as much so today as when the last
Vandal King took refuge in the mountains of
Lybia and shunned the hospitality of his own
subjects more than the vengeance of a Roman
conqueror.

Queen Victoria did a wrong to her own people
and a greater one to her African and Oriental

First Prussian Kaiser 207

ones when she permitted Imperial Germany to
fly her flag over a million square miles of tropical
colony — some thirty years ago. But without
that political blunder the world would have lost
one of the noblest lessons of this war. Today
we see Britannia revealed as the mother of self-
governing colonies throughout the world; we see
her flag a symbol of justice to the man of colour
no less than to the white; we see her issuing
triumphantly from a colonial crisis prepared by
German intrigue and warmly seconded by the
Vatican, and the dullest may now at last see for
himself that if England has not merely found
assistance in her own colonies but has recon-
quered those she once weakly surrendered to
Germany, it is because the rule of William II.
is today no more humane in the colonial world
than it was fifteen centuries ago under his Vandal
avatar, Genseric.

THE END

Prussian Memories

By
Poultney Bigelow

12°. $1.50 net. By mail, $1.65

Mr. Poultney Bigelow passed some years
of his boyhood in Prussia, and in later years he
made various sojourns in Germany. At the
time of his school experience, his father, the
late John Bigelow, was Minister in Paris. The
father had friends among the Court officials in
Berlin, and young Bigelow had the opportunity,
during his school work, of associating as a play-
mate with the present Emperor William. His
boyish impressions were corrected or confirmed
through the knowledge secured in his later
visits to Prussia. He writes with full knowledge
and with freedom from prejudice. He has hi
fact an affectionate memory of his playfellow
William, and speaks with appreciation of other
noteworthy characters with whom he came into
relations. In summing up, however, the char-
acter, the aims, and the policies of Prussia, he
arrives at the conclusion that the success of
Prussia in its attempt to dominate Europe and
to create a world empire would bring serious
trouble upon Germany, upon Europe, and upon
the world. Mr. Bigelow has a keen sense of
humor and his narrative is dramatic, spirited,
and thoroughly readable.

G. P. Putnam's Sons

New York London

Deductions from the
World War

By Lieutenant-General Baron

von Freytag-Loringhoven

Deputy Chief of the German Imperial Staff

12°. $1.25 net. By mail, $1.35

" In the future, as in the past, the
German people will have to seek firm
cohesion in its glorious army and in its
belaurelled young fleet."

Some Extracts

14 The spirit of German militarism, which has
enabled us to stand the test of the World War,
we must preserve in future, because, with it,
our position stands or falls."

" Germany must for all time to come main-
tain her claim to world power."

" Lord Kitchener was prompt in grasping
the situation, and by raising a strong army
put the country in a position to sustain a long
war."

" Now, as always, it is the sword which
decides in war . . . it is victory on the
battlefield that gives the decision."

G. P. Putnam's Sons

New York London

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Genseric, king of the
Vandals and first Prussian
kaiser