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war which recently shook this planet and in whose backwash we are still struggling is habitually alluded to as the greatest in all history, but, so far as this country is concerned, the war with Spain, comparatively insignificant as it was, surpassed it in at least two respects: the World War inspired no poetry to equal William Vaughan Moody's "An Ode in Time of Hesitation," nor has it (to date) produced any sensation comparable with that which burst upon these United States on the night of April 21, 1899, when Captain Joseph Bullock Coghlan, of the cruiser Raleigh, rose at a banquet given in his honor at the Union League Club in New York, and recited "Hoch! der Kaiser."

The mists of the intervening years have dimmed the memory of that incident, and probably few of the younger generation ever heard of it; but it held column after column of frontpage space for days and days, rocked the country with mighty laughter, nearly involved us in a serious international complication, and brought forth frenzied frothings in the German-American press.