Corn and Cattle
Cattle are skittish at times, and generally the skittishness is associated with heat. Corn and Cattle do not suggest anything fierce, unless hunger intervene, and then the cattle may become, not skittish, but fierce, and even furious. Are the cattle and the corn once again made to speak a language not their own?
Depicted is an incident of this revealing bloody time. The Austrian Francis Joseph has been brought into subjection by Wilhelm of Potsdam, second of that name overlord of Germany. But, you say, Wilhelm is not overlord of Francis Joseph of Schönbrunn! Facts are as they are. Do you see that spiked helmet crowning the head of intolerance, moustache challenging heaven, and outstretched finger dropping ultimata! The earth is the Kaiser’s, and the cattle thereof. “If you won’t let me have your corn, I will not let you have my cattle”—though the cattle came from Denmark they are “my cattle.” True, there is the other “Kaiser” opposite; but that is another story. We are told it is risky work going hunting with a tiger; and methinks aged Francis Joseph will confess that it is even so. His grey hairs have not saved him personally, his “ramshackle Empire” has been, time and again, over-run, his territory has been offered as sops by his younger brother and master of Potsdam. The only wonder in the legend below is “your corn”; above the artist depicts a raging tyrant whose is all, to dispose as the laws of Kultur may please.
Honour among thieves! That is only when they are in the retail trade. The appetite grows as it is fed, and masterly never becomes master-ful. Austria-Hungary is reputed already as satiated with war’s losses, not repentant, and her people in dire need. But her partner in iniquity is a master: and Austria’s need is an opportunity to bargain, and to make subject; hence the shrinking, cringing Hapsburg before the challenging moustache, strident voice, accusing finger of young Hohenzollern, lean and worn! Before the world, here is the fact, these Kaisers, like foot-pads quarrelling—and there are the two privates, so lean and abject, while the “swag” is in question.
W. M. J. WILLIAMS
“If you won’t let me have your corn, I will not let you have my cattle.”