No! One can scarcely believe
that a man can be stupid enough not to realize that he looks
as if he had deliberately made himself up to represent a sort of
terrific military bogey intimating that, at he may pounce and say
'Boo?"
"There lies the peril. His pretensions seem too grotesque to be
treated seriously. And, while he should be watched as a madman is
watched, he is given a lifetime to we attack on a world that has
ceased to believe in the sole thing which is real to himself."
"You are fresh from observation." There was new alertness in her
eyes, though she had listened before.
"I tell you it GROWS!" he gave back and lightly struck the table
in emphasis. "Do you remember Carlyle--?"
"The French Revolution again?"
"Yes. Do you recall this? 'Do not fires, fevers, seeds, chemical
mixtures, GO ON GROWING. Observe, too, that EACH GROWS with a
rapidity proportioned to the madness and unhealthiness there is in
it.' A ruler who, in an unaggressive age such as this, can concentrate
his life and his people's on the one ambition of plunging the
world in an ocean of blood, in which his own monomania can bathe
in triumph--Good God! there is madness and unhealthiness to flourish
in!"
"The world!" she said. "Yes--it will be the world."
"See," he said, with a curve of the finger which included most of
the Map of Europe. "Here are countries engaged--like the Bandarlog--in
their own affairs.
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