"For this thy child, a woman earnest-eyed Who wears thy gracious favors worthily, -Sophie Jewett. "How white then should be the soul of every American woman. Upon her influence depend largely the spiritual forces which shall determine the status and progress of our nation." -Lydia Hoyt Farmer. INSTRUCTIONS HOW TO GET THE BEST OUT OF THIS BOOK Read first the prose version furnished by the Introduction, the topical headings in italics to each and the extracts from the lecture on "WISDOM" by LO-CARUS. verse, Then read uninterruptedly the narrative rhyme, and for quotation purposes, commit to memory any verses that take the fancy. Those here enumerated are especially commended to the readers attention. Verses 33 35 40 41 43 45-b-c 48 52 59 61 67 78 79 80 90 91 95 98 99 100 101 102 103 107 108 109 110 112 119 128 133 147 149 150 155 156 166 167 168 169 178 179 182 189 190 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 205 206 209 210 211 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 "We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams: World-losers and world-forsakers, With wonderful deathless ditties And o'erthrow them with prophesying A. O'Shaughnessy. 8 THE COSMIC COMEDY OR THE VITAL URGE INTRODUCTORY In press dispatches of December, 1918, the world read that: "The ex-Kaiser is seen at the window of the bedroom which he occupies in Amerongen Castle, Holland, writing furiously all the day long. He fills sheet after sheet of foolscap, which he violently tosses aside in his haste to get to the next. What is he writing?" In the following pages, the author considers himself impersonally privileged to become the medium in America for the transmission of the ex-ruler's message, written for the benefit of his sons and their progeny. He attempts to identify himself with each character that appears and wading into the shallow Hohenzollern temperament he dissects and analyzes the unfortunate mentality's reflections upon its past life. The Kaiser comes under the influence of the spirits of five of Prussia's notorious apostles:-Bismarck, the apostle of ambition and imperial expansion; Treitschke, the apostle of Pangermanism, economic and military; Nietzsche, the anti-Christ apostle of the ruthless oversoul or superman; Münsterberg, apostle of German "kultur" at Harvard University (who to his honestly expressed astonishment found superior civilization in the United States), and Luther, the greatest German apostle, who explains how his reformation aims were misunderstood and overshot the mark. The modern X-Quantity is made to realize that the brutality inherent and sporadic in the Prussian temperament arises from a lack of mental hygiene, to the racial absence of innate respect for womanhood, young and old, which creates the hidden, inner motherhood resentment of the species against the male and reflects in the progeny. He-the Kaiseris the typical example of this reflected resentment, long notorious for his lack of parental respect and his unfilial treatment of his mother, the former Crown Princess Elizabeth of England and Empress of Germany, the first child of Queen Victoria; against which her brother the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, had to protest and interfere, to bring his conceited nephew temporarily to his senses. In the light of subsequent events, when he compares the national vaunted German "kultur" with the rising values of Latin, British and American civilization, he further recognizes that evolution in racial regeneration rises and falls in nations, according to the respect and reverence accorded to the mother-mind of womanhood by MAN, for the reproduction of the species. Luther gives him a parallel to German "kultur" and its products as ancient as the Moloch-Minotaur period of Minoan or Cretan "kultur," while he finds that the "Yellow Peril" against which he warned the Western World is his own "yellow streak of Prussianism" traced back through Bismarckian aggression and the Teutonic order of robber chieftains of the Dark Ages to Attila and Genseric, the infamous leaders of the Hun hordes who devastated Europe and northern Africa in the third and fourth centuries A. D. Those descendants of the mongrel tribes of Mongols of northern Asia who invaded the Chinese Em |