“It was a world with no use for me or my classmates, who not for ten years would be wanted, and then only to kill our contemporaries, that future was not illegible, and I can remember no year thereafter in which I did not feel endangered by my country. I lived in its mouth like Jonah. I grew suspicious of its public tongue as my mother of the grocer’s scales, but with more reason, shortweight meant an early demise, and when I heard the politicians their hearts full, their minds blank, adjure all to patriotism I felt quite as I had when kneeling in a church whose deity was not there; I sensed that to statesmen I was only their raw material, to be used in execution of their vision much as I used words in execution of mine, and while not yet did I smell something evil in men that led them into places where they could do good, I had in mind a more voluntary choice of fate. And when my father had a kind eye even for our thrives - of the dapper mayor, soon to flee office and country, he said indulgently “well, more power to him” - I concluded he was indeed of a generation of fools.”