Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View
Date: 2006-08-12T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Germany; National characteristics; German

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Title: Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

Author: Price Collier

Release date: August 12, 2006 [eBook #19036]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GERMANY AND THE GERMANS FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW ***

GERMANY AND THE GERMANS

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

BY PRICE COLLIER

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK 1913

Copyright, 1913, by Charles Scribner’s Sons

Published May, 1913

To MY WIFE KATHARINE whose deserving far outstrips my giving

CONTENTS

CHAPTER |
| INTRODUCTION
I. | THE CRADLE OF MODERN GERMANY
II. | FREDERICK THE GREAT TO BISMARCK
III. | THE INDISCREET
IV. | GERMAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE PRESS
V. | BERLIN
VI. | “A LAND OF DAMNED PROFESSORS”
VII. | THE DISTAFF SIDE
VIII. | “OHNE ARMEE KEIN DEUTSCHLAND”
IX. | GERMAN PROBLEMS
X. | “FROM ENVY, HATRED, AND MALICE”
XI. | CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

The first printed suggestion that America should be called America came from a German. Martin Waldseemüller, of Freiburg, in his Cosmographiae Introductio, published in 1507, wrote: “I do not see why any one may justly forbid it to be named after Americus, its discoverer, a man of sagacious mind, Amerige, that is the land of Americus or America, since both Europe and Asia derived their names from women.”

The first complete ship-load of Germans left Gravesend July the 24th, 1683, and arrived in Philadelphia October the 6th, 1683. They settled in Germantown, or, as it was then called, on account of the poverty of the settlers, Armentown.

Up to within the last few years the majority of our settlers have been Teutonic in blood and Protestant in religion. The English, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, Scotch-Irish, who settled in America, were all, less than two thousand years ago, one Germanic race from the country surrounding the North Sea.

Since 1820 more than 5,200,000 Germans have settled in America. This immigration of Germans has practically ceased, and it is a serious loss to America, for it has been replaced by a much less desirable type of settler. In 1882 western Europe sent us 563,174 settlers, or 87 per cent., while southern and eastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey sent 83,637, or 13 per cent. In 1905 western Europe sent 215,863, or 21.7 per cent., and southern and eastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey, 808,856, or 78.9 per cent. of our new population. In 1910 there were 8,282,618 white persons of German origin in the United States; 2,501,181 were born in Germany; 3,911,847 were born in the United States, both of whose parents were born in Germany; 1,869,590 were born in the United States, one parent born in the United States and one in Germany.

Not only have we been enriched by this mass of sober and industrious people in the past, but Peter Mühlenberg, Christopher Ludwig, Steuben, John Kalb, George Herkimer, and later Francis Lieber, Carl Schurz, Sigel, Osterhaus, Abraham Jacobi, Herman Ridder, Oswald Ottendorfer, Adolphus Busch, Isidor, Nathan, and Oscar Straus, Jacob Schiff, Otto Kahn, Frederick Weyerheuser, Charles P. Steinmetz, Claus Spreckels, Hugo Münsterberg, and a catalogue of others, have been leaders in finance, in industry, in war, in politics, in educational and philanthropic enterprises, and in patriotism.

The framework of our republican institutions, as I have tried to outline in this volume, came from the “Woods of Germany.” Professor H. A. L. Fisher, of Oxford, writes: “European republicanism, which ever since the French Revolution has been in the main a phenomenon of the Latin races, was a creature of Teutonic civilization in the age of the sea-beggars and the Roundheads. The half-Latin city of Geneva was the source of that stream of democratic opinion in church and state, which, flowing to England under Queen Elizabeth, was repelled by persecution to Holland, and thence directed to the continent of North America.”

In these later days Goethe, in a letter to Eckermann, prophesied the building of the Panama Canal by the Americans, and also the prodigious growth of the United States toward the West.

In a private collection in New York, is an autograph letter of George Washington to Frederick the Great, asking that Frederick should use his influence to protect that French friend of America, Lafayette.

In Schiller’s house in Weimar there still hangs an engraving of the battle of Bunker Hill, by Müller, a German, and a friend of the poet.

Bismarck’s intimate friend as a student at Göttingen, and the man of whom he spoke with warm affection all his life, was the American historian Motley.

The German soldiers in our Civil War were numbered by the thousands. We have many ties with Germany, quite enough, indeed, to make a bare enumeration of them a sufficient introduction to this volume.

On more than one occasion of late I have been introduced in places, and to persons where a slight picture of what I was to meet when the doors were thrown open was of great help to me. I was told beforehand something of the history, traditions, the forms and ceremonies, and even something of the weaknesses and peculiarities of the society, the persons, and the personages. I am not so wise a guide as some of my sponsors have been, but it is something of the kind that I have wished and planned to do for my countrymen. I have tried to make this book, not a guidebook, certainly not a history; rather, in the words of Bacon, “grains of salt, which will rather give an appetite than offend with satiety,” a sketch, in short, of what is on the other side of the great doors when the announcer speaks your name and you enter Germany.

GERMANY AND THE GERMANS

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

I THE CRADLE OF MODERN GERMANY

Eighty-one years before the discovery of America, seventy-two years before Luther was born, and forty-one years before the discovery of printing, in the year 1411, the Emperor Sigismund, the betrayer of Huss, transferred the Mark of Brandenburg to his faithful vassal and cousin, Frederick, sixth Burgrave of Nuremberg. Nuremberg was at one time one of the great trading towns between Germany, Venice, and the East, and the home later of Hans Sachs. Frederick was the lineal descendant of Conrad of Hohenzollern, the first Burgrave of Nuremberg, who lived in the days of Frederick Barbarossa (1152-1189); and this Conrad is the twenty-fifth lineal ancestor of Emperor William II of Germany. It is interesting to remember in this connection that when we count back our progenitors to the twenty-first generation they number something over two millions. When we trace an ancestry so far, therefore, we must know something of the multitude from which the individual is descended, if we are to gather anything of value concerning his racial characteristics. The solace of all genealogical investigation is the infallible discovery, that the greatest among us began in a small way.

If you paddle up the Elbe and the Havel from Hamburg to Potsdam, you will find yourself in the territory conquered from the heathen Wends in the days of Henry I, the Fowler (918-935), which was the cradle of what is now the German Empire.

The Emperor Sigismund, who was often embarrassed financially by reason of his wars and journeyings had borrowed some four hundred thousand gold florins from Frederick, and it was in settlement of this debt that he mortgaged the territory of Brandenburg, and on the 8th of April, 1417, the ceremony of enfeoffment was performed at Constance, by which the House of Hohenzollern became possessed of this territory, and was thereafter included among the great electorates having a vote in the election of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

It was Henricus Auceps, or Henry the Fowler, (so called because the envoys sent to offer him the crown, found him on his estates in the Hartz Mountains among his falcons), who fought off the Danes in the northwest, and the Slavonians, or Wends, in the northeast, and the Hungarians in the southeast, and established frontier posts or marks for permanent protection against their ravages. These marks, or marches, which were boundary lines, were governed by markgrafs or marquises, and finally gave the name of marks to the territory itself. The word is historically familiar from its still later use in noting the old boundaries between England and Scotland, and England and Wales, which are still called marks.

Henry the Fowler was also called Henry “the City Builder.” After the death of the last of the Charlemagne line of rulers, the Franks elected Conrad, Duke of Franconia, to succeed to the throne, and he on his death-bed advised his people to choose Henry of Saxony to succeed, for the times were stormy and the country needed a strong ruler. The Hungarians in the southeast, and the Wends, the old Slavonic population of Poland, were pillaging and harrying more and more successfully, and the more successfully the more impudently. Henry began the building of strong-walled, deep-moated cities along his frontier, and made one, drawn by lot, out of every ten families of the countryside, go to live in these fortified towns. Their rulers were burgraves, or city counts. Titles now so largely ornamental were then descriptive of duties and responsibilities.

In the light of their future greatness, it is well to take note of these two frontier counties, or marches. The first, called the Northern March, or March of Brandenburg, was the religious centre of the Slays, and was situated in the midst of forests and marshes just beyond the Elbe. This March of Brandenburg was won from the Slays in the first instance by the Saxons and Franks of the Saxon plain. When the burgrave, Frederick of Hohenzollern, came to take possession of his new territory he was received with the jesting remark: “Were it to rain burgraves for a whole year, we should not allow them to grow in the march.” But Frederick’s soldiers and money, and his Nuremberg jewels, as his cannon were called, ended by gaining complete control, a control in more powerful hands to-day than ever before.

The second, called the Eastern or Austrian March, was situated in the basin of the Danube. These two great states were formed in lands that had ceased to be German and had become Slav or Finnish territory. The fighting appetite of the German tribes, and the spirit of chivalry later, which had drawn men in other days in France to the East, in Spain against the Moors, in Normandy against England, were offered an opportunity and an outlet in Germany, by forays and fighting against the Finns and Slays.

Out of the conquest and settlement of these territories grew, what we know to-day, as the German Empire and the Austrian Empire. Out of their margraves, who were at first sentinel officers guarding the outer boundaries of the empire, and mere nominees of the Emperor, have developed the Emperor of Germany and the Emperor of Austria, the one ruling over the most powerful nation, the other the head of the most exclusive court, in Europe.

When a man becomes a power in the world, these days, our first impulse is to ask about his ancestry. Who were his father and his mother; what and who were his grandfathers and grandmothers, and who were their forebears. Where did they come from, what was the climate; did they live by the sea, or in the mountains, or in the plains. We are at once hot on the trail of his success. Be he an American, we wish to know whether his people came from Holland, from France, from England, or from Belgium; where did they settle, in New England, in New York, or in the South. We no longer accept ability as a miracle, but investigate it as an evolution. If the man be great enough, cities vie with each other to claim him as their child; he acquires an Homeric versatility in cradles.

Whatever one may think of William II of Germany, he is just now the predominating figure in Europe, if not in the world. This must be our excuse for a word or two concerning the race from which came his twenty-fifth lineal ancestor.

It is exactly five hundred years since his present empire was founded in the sandy plains about the Elbe, and a thousand years before that brings us to the dim dawn of any historical knowledge whatever about the Germans. When the Cimbrians and Teutonians came into contact with the Romans, in 113 B. C., is the beginning of all things for these people. In that year the inhabitants of the north of Italy awoke one morning to find a swarm of blue-eyed, light-haired, long-limbed strangers coming down from the Alps upon them. The younger and more light-hearted warriors came tobogganing down the snow-covered mountain-sides on their shields. They had been crowded out of what is now Switzerland, and called themselves, though they were much alike in appearance, the Cimbri and the Teutones. They defeated the Roman armies sent against them, and, turning to the south and west, went on their way along the north shores of the Mediterranean into what is now France. They had no history of their own. Tacitus writes that they could neither read nor write: “Literarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant.” Very little is to be found concerning them in the Roman writers. The books of Pliny which treated of this time are lost. It was toward the middle of the century before Christ that Caesar advanced to the frontier of what may be called Germany. He met and conquered there these men of the blood who were to conquer Rome, and to carry on the name under the title of the Holy Roman Empire. Caesar met the ancestors of those who were to be Caesars, and with an eye on Roman politics, wrote the “Commentaries,” which were really autobiographical messages, with the Germans as a text and an excuse.

Tacitus, born just about one hundred years after the death of Caesar, and who had access to the lost works of Pliny, was a moralist historian and a warm friend of the Germans. Over their shoulders he rapped the manners and morals of his own countrymen. “Vice is not treated by the Germans” (German, the etymologists say, is composed of Ger, meaning spear or lance, and Man, meaning chief or lord; Deutsch, or Teutsch, comes from the Gothic word Thiudu, meaning nation, and a Deutscher, or Teutscher, meant one belonging to the nation), he tells his countrymen, “as a subject of raillery, nor is the profligacy of corrupting and being corrupted called the fashion of the age.” With Rooseveltian enthusiasm he writes that the Germans consider it a crime “to set limits to population, by rearing up only a certain number of children and destroying the rest.”

The republicanism of Europe and America had its roots in this Teutonic civilization. “No man dictates to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command. When anything is advanced not agreeable to the people, they reject it with a general murmur. If the proposition pleases, they brandish their javelins. This is their highest and most honorable mark of applause; they assent in a military manner, and praise by the sound of their arms,” continues our author.

The great historian of the Roman historians, and of Rome, Gibbon, lends his authority to this praise of Tacitus in the sentence: “The most civilized nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of Germany; and in the rude institutions of those barbarians we may still distinguish the original principles of our present laws and manners.”

Rome, which was not only a city, a nation, an empire, but a religion; Rome, which replied to a suggestion that the people of Latium should be admitted to citizenship, “Thou hast heard, O Jupiter, the impious words that have come from this man’s mouth. Canst thou tolerate, O Jupiter, that a foreigner should come to sit in the sacred temple as a senator, as a consul?” Rome welcomed later the barbarians from the woods of Germany not only as citizens and consuls, but as emperors; and their descendants rule the world.

It was no Capuan training that finally distilled itself in a Charlemagne, an Otho, a Luther, a Frederick the Great, and a Bismarck; in an Alfred, a William the Conqueror, a Cromwell, a Clive, a Rhodes, or a Gordon; in a Washington, a Lincoln, a Grant, a Jackson, and a Lee.

Beyond the certified beyond, we see dimly through the mists of history, hosts of men marching, ever marching from the east, spreading some toward Norway and Sweden, some skirting the Baltic Sea to the south; driving their cattle before them, and learning the arts of peace and war, and self-government, from the harsh school-masters of pressing needs and tyrannical circumstances, the only teachers that confer degrees of permanent value. They become fishermen and small landholders in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. “Jeudi,” or Jupiter’s day, becomes their god Thor’s day, or Thursday; “Mardi,” or Mars’s day, is their Tiu’s day, or Tuesday; “Mercredi,” or Mercury’s day, is Odin’s or Woden’s day, or Wednesday.

These men trained to solitude in small bands, owing to the geographical exigencies of their northern country, become the founders of the particularist or individualistic nations, Great Britain and the United States among others. Those who had gone south, driven by pressure from behind, follow the Danube to the north and west, find the Rhine, and push on into what is now southwestern Europe.

It is worth noting that the Rhine and the Danube have their sources near together, and form a line of water from the North Sea to the Black Sea, a significant line in Europe from the beginning down to this day. This line of water divides not only lands but nations, manners, customs, and even speech, and what we call the North, and what we call the South, may be said to be, with negligible exceptions, what is north and what is south of those two rivers. It is and always has been the Mason and Dixon’s line of Europe.

All of these peoples mould their institutions, from the habits and customs forced upon them by their surroundings. The members of the tribe of the Suevi, now Swabians, were not allowed to hold fixed landed possessions, but were forced to exchange with each other from time to time, so that no one should become wedded to the soil and grow rich thereby. Readers of history will remember, that Lycurgus attempted similar legislation among the Spartans, hoping thus to keep them simple and hardy, and fit for war.

How many hundreds of years, these various tribes were working out their rude political and domestic laws, no man knows. The imaginative historian pushes his way through the mists, and sees that the tribes who lived in the Scandinavian peninsula were forced by their cramped territory to become fishermen and sailors, and cultivators of small areas of land, accustomed therefore to rule themselves in small groups, and hence independent and markedly individualist. Such historians divide even these rude tribes sharply between the patriarchal and the particularist. The particularist commune developed from the estate which was self-sufficient, isolated, and independent. When they were associated together it was for special and limited purposes, so that independence might be infringed upon to the least possible extent. The patriarchal commune, on the other hand, proceeded from the communal family which provided everything for everybody. It was a general and compulsory partnership, monopolizing every kind of business that might arise. The particularist group then, and their moral and political descendants now, strive to organize public authority, and public life in such a way, that they are distinctly subordinate to private and individual independence. In the one the Emperor is the father of the family - the Russian Emperor is still called “Little Father” - the independence of each member of the family is swallowed up in the complete authority of the head of the national family; in the other the president, or constitutional king, is the executive servant of independent citizens, to whom he owes as much allegiance as they owe to him.

In Saxony, to-day, more than ninety per cent. of the agricultural population are independent peasant proprietors, and the most admirable and successful agriculturists in the world. It is said indeed that the Curia Regis, which is the Latinized form of the Witenagemote, or assembly of wise men, of the Norman and Angevin kings, is the foundation of the common law of England, and the common law of England is the law of more than half of the civilized world.

Whatever the varieties and distinctions of government anywhere in the world, these two differences are the fundamental and basic differences, upon which all forms of government have been built up and developed.

In the one, everything so far as possible is begun and carried on by individual initiative; in the other the state gradually takes control of all enterprise. The philosophy of the one is based upon the saying: love one another; the political philosophy of the other is based upon the assumption that men are not brethren, but beasts and mechanical toys, who can only be governed by legislation and the police. The ideal of the one is the good Samaritan, the ideal of the other is the tax-collector. The one depends upon the wine and oil of sympathy and human brotherhood; the other claims that the right to an iron bed in a hospital, and the services of a state-paid and indifferent physician, are “refreshing fruit,” as though sympathy and consideration, which are what our weaker brethren most need, could be distilled from taxes!

It is claimed for these Teutonic tribes, that those of them which drifted down from the Scandinavian peninsula, are the blood and moral ancestors of the particularist nations now in the ascendant in the world. The love of independent self-government, born of the geographical necessities of the situation, stamped itself upon these people so indelibly, that Englishmen and Americans bear the seal to this day. This change from the patriarchal to the particularist family took place in this German race, and took place not in those who came from the Baltic plain, but in those who came from the Saxon plain.

The tribes from the Baltic plain, the Goths, for example, merely overran the Roman civilization, spread over it; drowned it in superior numbers, and with superior valor; but it was the Germans from the Scandinavian peninsula who conquered Rome, and conquered her not by force alone, but by offering to the world a superior social and political organization. It was to this branch of the German race that Varus lost his legions, at the place where the Ems has its source, at the foot of the Teutoburger Wald. Charlemagne was of these, and his name Karl, or Kerl, or peasant, and the fact that his title is the only one in the world compounded of greatness and the people in equal measure, is the pith of what the Germans brought to leaven the whole political world. He made the common man so great, that the world has consented to his unique and superlative baptismal title of Karl the Great, or Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne.

The pivotal fact to be remembered is that these German tribes saved Europe by their love of liberty, and by their virility, from the decadence of an orientalized Rome. Rome, and all Rome meant, was not destroyed by these ancestors of ours; on the contrary, they saved what was best worth saving from the decline and fall of Rome, and made out of it with their own vigorous laws a new world, the modern western world. Great Britain, Germany, and the United States are not descended from Egypt, Greece, or Rome, but from “those barbarians who issued from the woods of Germany.”

Every school-boy should be taught that Rome died of a disease contracted from contact with the Oriental, the Syrian, the Jew, the Greek, the riffraff of the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean; who, by the way, make up the bulk of the immigration into America at this time. Rome was an incurable invalid long before the Germans took control of the western world and saved it.

When the Roman Emperor Augustus died, in 14 A. D., to be succeeded by Tiberius, the Roman Empire was bounded on the north and east by the Rhine, the Danube, the Black Sea and its southern territory, and Syria; by all the known country from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean in northern Africa on the south; and by the Atlantic Ocean as far north as the river Elbe on the west. Five hundred years later, about 500 A. D., the Barbarians, as they were called, had thrust aside the Roman Empire. The Saxons controlled the southern and eastern coasts of England; the Franks were rulers in the whole country from the Loire to the Elbe; south of them the Visigoths ruled Spain; Italy and all the country to the north and east of the Adriatic, as far as the Danube, were in the hands of the Ostrogoths. The Roman Empire had been pushed to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, with its capital at Constantinople.

In another three hundred years, or in 800 A. D., the king of one of these German tribes revived the title of Roman Emperor, was crowned by the Pope, Leo III, and governed Europe as Charlemagne. His banner with the double-headed eagle, representing the two empires of Germany and Rome, is the standard of Germany to-day. Charles Martel, who led the West against the East, defeating the Arabs in the country between what is now Tours and Poitiers, was Charlemagne’s grandfather. What is now western Europe, became the home and the consolidated kingdom of the German tribes who had drifted down from the west of the Baltic, and into the Saxon plain. They had become masters in this territory: after victories over the Mongolian tribes, and the Huns under Attila, who had conquered and plundered as far as Strasburg, Worms, and Treves, and were finally defeated near what is now Chalons; after driving off the Arabs under Charles the Hammer (732); after imposing their rule upon the Roman Empire, the remains of which cowered in Constantinople, where the Ottoman Turk took even that from it in 1453, which date may well be taken as marking the beginning of modern history, and became themselves thereafter one of the first powers in Christian Europe; a power which is now, in 1912, the quarrel ground of the Western powers.

These are Brobdingnagian strides through history, to reach the days of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Froissart, and the first translation of the Bible into a vulgar tongue by Wickliffe, to the days when Lorenzo de Medici breathed Greece into Europe, and the feeling for beauty changed from invalidism to convalescence; to the days when cannon were first used, printing invented, America discovered, and the man Luther, who gave the Germans their present language by his translation of the Bible, and who delivered us from papal tyranny, born; and Agincourt, and Joan of Arc, are picturesque and poignant features of the historical landscape.

These rude German tribes had been welded by hardship and warfare, into compact and self-governing bodies. These loosely bound masses of men, women, and children, straggling down to find room and food, are now, in 1400 A. D., France, England, Austria, Germany, Scotland, and Spain. The same spirit and vigor that roamed the coasts all the way from Sweden and Norway to the mouth of the Thames, and to the Rhine, the Seine, and to the Straits of Gibraltar, are abroad again, landing on the shores of America, circumnavigating Africa, and bringing home tales of Indians in the west, and Indians in the east. This virile stock that had been hammered and hewn was now to be polished; and in Italy, France, England, and Germany grew up a passion for translating the rough mythology, and the fierce fancy of the north, into painting, building, poetry, and music.

France, Germany, England, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, too, grew out of these German tribes, who poured down from the territory roughly included between the Rhine, the North Sea, the Oder, and the Danube.

As we know these countries to-day, the definite thing about them is their difference. You cross the channel in fifty minutes from Dover to Calais, you cross the Rhine in five minutes, and the peoples seem thousands of miles apart. “How did it happen,” asks Voltaire, “that, setting out from the same point of departure, the governments of England and of France arrived at nearly the same time, at results as dissimilar as the constitution of Venice is unlike that of Morocco?”

One might ask as well how it happened, that the speech of one German invasion mixing itself with Latin became French, of another Spanish, of another Portuguese, of another Italian, of another English. These are interesting inquiries, and in regard to the former it is not difficult to see, that men grew to be governed differently, according as the geographical exigencies of their homes were different, and as they occupied themselves differently.

The observant traveller in the United States, may see for himself what differences even a few years of differing climate, and circumstances, and custom will produce. The inhabitants of Charleston, South Carolina, are evidently and visibly different from those in Davenport, Iowa. Two towns of similar size and wealth, Salisbury, Maryland, and Hingham, Massachusetts, are almost as different, except in speech, and even in speech the accent is perceptibly different even to the careless listener, as though Salisbury were in the south of France, and Hingham in the north of Germany. These changes and differences are only inexplicable, to those who will not see the ethnographical miracles taking place under their noses. Look at the mongrel crowd on Fifth Avenue at midday, and remember what was there only fifty years ago, and the differentiation which has taken place in Europe due to climate, intermarriage, laws, and customs seems easy to trace and to explain.

The fishermen and tillers of the soil in the Scandinavian peninsula, afterward the settlers in the Saxon plain and in England, recognized him who ruled over their settled place of abode as king; while roaming bands of fighting men would naturally attach themselves to the head of the tribe, as the leader in war, and recognize him as king. As late as the death of Charlemagne, when his powerful grip relaxed, the tribes of Germans, for they were little more even then, fell apart again. Another family like that of Pepin arose under Robert the Strong, and under Hugue Capet (987) acquired the title of Kings of France. The monarchy grew out of the weakening of feudalism, and feudalism had been the gradual setting, in law and custom, of a way of living together, of these detached tribes and clans, and their chiefs.

A powerful warrior was rewarded with a horse, a spear; later, when territory was conquered and the tribe settled down, land was given as a reward. Land, however, does not die like a horse, or wear out and get broken like a spear, and the problem arises after the death of the owner, as to who is his rightful heir. Does it revert to the giver, the chief of the tribe, or does it go to the children of the owner? Some men are strong enough to keep their land, to add to it, to control those living upon it, and such a one becomes a feudal ruler in a small way himself. He becomes a duke, a dux or leader, a count, a margrave, a baron, and a few such powerful men stand by one another against the king. A Charlemagne, a William the Conqueror, a Louis XIV is strong enough to rule them and keep them in order for a time. Out of these conditions grow limited monarchies or absolute monarchies and national nobilities.

More than any other one factor, the Crusades broke up feudalism. The great noble, impelled by a sense of religious duty, or by a love of adventure, arms himself and his followers, and starts on years of journeyings to the Holy Land. Ready money is needed above all else. Lands are mortgaged, and the money-lender and the merchant buy lands, houses, and eventually power, and buy them cheap. The returning nobles find their affairs in disarray, their fields cultivated by new owners, towns and cities grow up that are as strong or stronger than the castle. Before the Crusades no roturier, or mere tiller of the soil, could hold a fief, but the demand for money was so great that fiefs were bought and sold, and Philippe Auguste (1180) solved the problem by a law, declaring that when the king invested a man with a sufficient holding of land or fief, he became ipso facto a noble. This is the same common-sense policy which led Sir Robert Peel to declare, that any man with an income of $50,000 a year had a right to a peerage. There can be no aristocracy except of the powerful, which lasts. The difference to-day is seen in the puppet nobility of Austria, Italy, Spain, and Germany as compared with the nobility of England, which is not a nobility of birth or of tradition, but of the powerful: brewers and bankers, and statesmen and lawyers, and leaders of public opinion, covering their humble past with ermine, and crowning their achievements with coronets.

The Crusades brought about as great a shifting of the balance of power, as did later the rise of the rich merchants, industrials, and nabobs in England. As the power of the nobles decreased, the central power or the power of the kings increased; increased indeed, and lasted, down to the greatest crusade of all, when democracy organized itself, and marched to the redemption of the rights of man as man, without regard to his previous condition of servitude.

During the thousand years between the time when we first hear of the German tribes, in 113 B. C., and the year 1411, which marks the beginnings of what is now the Prussian monarchy, customs were becoming habits, and habits were becoming laws, and the political and social origins of the life of our day were being beaten into shape, by the exigencies of living together of these tribes in the woods of Germany.

There it was that the essence of democracy was distilled. Democracy, Demos, the crowd, the people, the nation, were already, in the woods of Germany, the court of last resort. They growled dissent, and they gave assent with the brandishing of their weapons, javelins, or ballots. They were called together but seldom, and between the meetings of the assembly, the executive work, the judicial work, the punishing of offenders, was left to a chosen few; left to those who by their control over themselves, their control over their families, their control over their neighbors, seemed best qualified to exercise the delegated control of all.

The chief aim of their organized government, such as it was, seems to have been to leave themselves free to go about their private business, with as little interference from the demands of public business as possible. The chief concern of each one was to secure his right to mind his own business, under certain safeguards provided by all. If those delegated to govern became autocratic, or evil-doers, or used their power for self-advancement or self-enrichment, they were speedily brought to book. The philosophy of government, then, was to make men free to go about their private business. That the time might come when politics would be the absorbing business of all, dictating the hours and wages of men under the earth, and reaching up to the institution of a recall for the angel Gabriel, and a referendum for the Day of Judgment, was undreamed of. The chiefs of the clans, the chiefs of the tribes, the kings of the Germans, and finally the emperors were all elective. The divine right of kings is a purely modern development. The descendants of these German tribes in England, elected their king in the days of William the Conqueror even, and as late as 1689 the Commons of England voted that King James had abdicated, and that the throne was vacant!

The so-called mayors of the palace, who became kings, were in their day representatives of the landholders, delegates of the people, who advised the king and aided in commanding the armies. These hereditary mayors of the palace drifted into ever greater and greater control, until they became hereditary kings. The title was only hereditary, however, because it was convenient that one man of experience in an office should be succeeded by another educated to, and familiar with, the same experiences and duties, and this system of heredity continues down to this day in business, and in many professions and so long as there is freedom to oust the incompetent, it is a good system. There can never be any real progress until the sons take over the accumulated wisdom and experience of the fathers; if this is not done, then each one must begin for himself all over again. The hereditary principle is sound enough, so long as there is freedom of decapitation in cases of tyranny or folly.

There has continued all through the history of those of the blood of the German tribes, whether in Germany, England, America, Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, the sound doctrine that ability may at any time take the place of the rights of birth. Power, or command, or leadership by heredity is looked upon as a convenience, not as an unimpeachable right.

Charlemagne (742-814), a descendant of a mayor of the palace who had become king by virtue of ability, swept all Europe under his sway by reason of his transcendent powers as a warrior and administrator. He did for the first time for Europe what Akbar did in his day for India. In forty-five years he headed fifty-three campaigns against all sorts of enemies. He fought the Saxons, the Danes, the Slays, the Arabs, the Greeks, and the Bretons. What is now France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, and most of Italy were under his kingship. He was a student, an architect, a bridge-builder, though he could neither read nor write, and even began a canal which was to connect the Danube and the Rhine, and thus the German Ocean, with the Black Sea. He is one of many monuments to the futility of technical education and mere book-learning.

The Pope, roughly handled, because negligently protected, by the Roman emperors, turns to Charlemagne, and on Christmas Day (800) places a crown upon his head, and proclaims him “Caesar Augustus” and “Christianissimus Rex.” The empire of Rome is to be born again with this virile German warrior at its head. Just a thousand years later, another insists that he has succeeded to the title by right of conquest, and gives his baby son the title of “King of Rome,” and just a thousand years after the death of Charlemagne, in 814, Napoleon retires to Elba. There is a witchery about Rome even to-day, and an emperor still sits imprisoned there, claiming for himself the right to rule the spiritual and intellectual world: “sedet, eternumque sedebit Infelix Theseus.”

Louis, called “the Pious,” because the latter part of his life was spent in mourning his outrageous betrayal, mutilation, and murder of his own nephew, whose rivalry he feared, succeeded his father, Charlemagne. He was succeeded again by his three sons, Lothair, Pepin, and Louis by his first wife, and Charles, who was his favorite son, by his second wife. He had already divided the great heritage left him by Charlemagne between his three sons Lothair, Pepin, and Louis; but now he wished to make another division into four parts, to make room for, and to give a kingdom to, his son Charles by his second wife. The three elder sons revolt against their father, and his last years are spent in vain attempts to reconcile his quarrelsome children. At his death war breaks out. Pepin dies, leaving, however, a son Pepin to inherit his kingdom of Aquitaine. Louis and Charles attempt to take his kingdom from him, his uncle Lothair defends him, and at the great battle of Fontenay (841) Louis and Charles defeat Lothair. Lothair gains the adherence of the Saxons, and Charles and Louis at the head of their armies confirm their alliance, and at Strasburg the two armies take the oath of allegiance: the followers of Louis took the oath in German, the followers of Charles in French, and this oath, the words of which are still preserved, is the earliest specimen of the French language in existence.

In 843 another treaty signed at Verdun, between the two brothers Lothair and Louis and their half-brother Charles, separated for the first time the Netherlands, the Rhine country, Burgundy, and Italy, which became the portion of Lothair; all Germany east of this territory, which went to Louis; and all the territory to the west of it, which went to Charles. Germany and France, therefore, by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, became distinct kingdoms, and modern geography in Europe is born.

From the death of Henry the Fowler, in 936, down to the nomination of Frederick I of Bavaria, sixth Burgrave of Nuremberg, to be Margrave of Brandenburg, in 1411, the history of the particular Germany we are studying is swallowed up in the history of these German tribes of central Europe and of the Holy Roman Empire. It is in these years of the seven Crusades, from 1095 to the last in 1248; of Frederick Barbarossa; of the centuries-long quarrel between the Welfs, or Guelphs, and the Waiblingers, or Ghibellines, which were for years in Italy, and are still in Germany, political parties; of the Hanseatic League of the cities to protect commerce from the piracies of a disordered and unruled country; of the Dane and the Norman descents upon the coasts of France, Germany, and England, and of their burning, killing, and carrying into captivity; of the Saracens scouring the Mediterranean coasts and sacking Rome itself; of the Wends and Czechs, Hungarian bands who dashed in upon the eastern frontiers of the now helpless and amorphous empire of Charlemagne, all the way from the Baltic to the Danube; of the quarrel between Henry IV and that Jupiter Ecclesiasticus, Hildebrand, or Gregory VII, who has left us his biography in the single phrase, “To go to Canossa”; of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes; of the long fight between popes and emperors over the right of investiture; of Rudolph of Hapsburg; of the throwing off of their allegiance to the Empire of the Kings of Burgundy, Poland, Hungary, and Denmark; of the settlement of the question of the legal right to elect the emperor by Charles IV, who fixed the power in the persons of seven rulers: the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margraf of Brandenburg, and the three Archbishops of Mayence, Treves, and Cologne; of the independence of the great cities of northern Italy; of Otto the Great, whose first wife was a granddaughter of Alfred the Great, and who was the real founder of the Holy Roman Empire, in the sense that a German prince rules over both Germany and Italy with the approval of the Pope, and in the sense that he, a duke of Saxony, appropriates the western empire (962), goes to Rome, delivers the Pope, subdues Italy, and fixes the imperial crown in the name and nation of Germany; of the beginning of that hope of a world-church and a world-state, of a universal church and a universal kingdom, which took form in what is known as the Holy Roman Empire; of that greatest of all forgeries, the Donation of Constantine by the monk Isidor, discovered and revealed by Cardinal Nicolaus, of Cura, in which it is pretended that Constantine handed over Rome to the Pope and his successors forever, with all the power and privileges of the Caesars, and of the effects of this, the most successful lie ever told in the world, during the seven hundred years it was believed: it is in these years of turbulence and change that one must trace the threads of history, from the first appearance of the Germans, down to the time when what is now Prussia became a frontier post of the empire under the rule of a Hohenzollern.

It is, perhaps, of all periods in history, the most interesting to Americans, for then and there our civilization was born. Writing of the conquest of the British Isles by the Germans, J. R. Green says: “What strikes us at once in the new England is this, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still remained Roman.” The roots of our civilization, are to be dug for in those days when the German peoples met the imperialism and the Christianity of Rome, and absorbed and renewed them. The Roman Empire, tottering on a foundation of, it is said, as many as fifty million slaves - even a poor man would have ten slaves, a rich man ten or twenty thousand - and overrun with the mongrel races from Syria, Greece, and Africa, and hiding away the remnants of its power in the Orient, became in a few centuries an easy prey to our ancestors “of the stern blue eyes, the ruddy hair, the large and robust bodies.”

“Caerula quis stupuit lumina? flavam
Caesariem, et madido torquentem cornua cirro?
Nempe quod haec illis natura est omnibus una,”

writes Juvenal of their resemblance to one another.

By the year 1411 long strides had been made toward other forms of social, political, religious, and commercial life, due to the German grip upon Europe. Dante, whose grandmother was a Goth, was not only a poet but a fighter for freedom, taking a leading part in the struggle of the Bianchi against the Neri and Pope Boniface, was born in 1265 and died in 1321; Francis of Assisi, born in 1182, not only represented a democratic influence in the church, but led the earliest revolt against the despotism of money; the movement to found cities and to league cities together for the furtherance of trade and industry, and thus to give rights to whole classes of people hitherto browbeaten by church or state or both, began in Italy; and the alliance of the cities of the Rhine, and the Hansa League, date from the beginning of the thirteenth century; the discovery of how to make paper dates from this time, and printing followed; the revolt of the Albigenses against priestly dominance which drenched the south of France in blood began in the twelfth century; slavery disappeared except in Spain; Wycliffe, born in 1324, translated the Gospels, threw off his allegiance to the papacy, and suffered the cheap vengeance of having his body exhumed and its ashes scattered in the river Swift; Aquinas and Duns Scotus delivered philosophy from the tyranny of theology; Roger Bacon (1214) practically introduced the study of natural science; Magna Charta was signed in 1215; Marco Polo, whose statue I have seen among those of the gods, in a certain Chinese temple, began his travels in the thirteenth century; the university of Bologna was founded before 1200 for the untrammelled study of medicine and philosophy; Abelard, who died in 1142, represented, to put it pithily, the spirit of free inquiry in matters theological, and lectured to thousands in Paris. What do these men and movements mean? I am wofully wrong in my ethnographical calculations if these things do not mean, that the people of whom Tacitus wrote, “No man dictates to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command,” were shaping and moulding the life of Europe, with their passionate love of individual liberty, with their sturdy insistence upon the right of men to think and work without arbitrary interference. Out of this furnace came constitutional government in England, and republican government in America. We owe the origins of our political life to the influence of these German tribes, with their love of individual freedom and their stern hatred of meddlesome rulers, or a meddlesome state or legislature.

Germany had no literature at this time. When Froissart was writing French history, and Joinville his delightful chronicles; when Chaucer and Wycliffe were gayly and gravely making play with the monks and priests, the only names known in Germany were those of the mystics, Eckhart and Tauler. When the time came, however, Germany was defiantly individualist in Luther, and Protestantism was thoroughly German. It was not from tales of the great, not from knighthood, chivalry, or their roving singer champions, that German literature came; but from the fables and satires of the people, from Hans Sachs and from the Luther translation of the Bible. This is roughly the setting of civilization, in which the first Hohenzollerns found themselves when they took over the Mark of Brandenburg, in the early years of the fifteenth century.

Here is a list of them, of no great interest in themselves, but showing the direct descent down to the present time; for from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the French Revolution the German states were without either men or measures, except Frederick the Great, that call for other than dreary comment:

Frederick I of Nuremberg | 1417
Frederick II | 1440
Albert III | 1470
Johann III | 1476
Joachim I | 1499
Joachim II | 1535
Johann George | 1571
Joachim Frederick | 1598
Johann Sigismund of Poland (first Duke of Prussia) | 1608
George William | 1619
Frederick William (the Great Elector) | 1640
Frederick III, Frederick I of Prussia (crowned first King of Prussia in 1701) | 1657-1713
Frederick William I (son of Frederick I of Prussia) | 1688-1740
Frederick II (the Great) (son of Frederick William I) | 1712-1786
Frederick William II (son of Augustus William, brother of Frederick the Great) | 1744-1787
Frederick William III (son of Frederick William II) | 1770-1840
Frederick William IV (son of Frederick William III, 1795-1861), reigned | 1840-1861
William I (son of Frederick William III, brother of Frederick William IV, 1797-1888), reigned | 1861-1888
Frederick III (son of William I, 1831-1888), reigned from March 9 to June 15, 1888. |
William II (son of Frederick III and Princess Victoria of England), born Jan. 27, 1859, succeeded Frederick III in 1888. |

These incidents, names, and dates are mere whisps of history. It is only necessary to indicate that to articulate this skeleton of history, clothe it with flesh, and give it its appropriate arms and costumes would entail the putting of all mediaeval European history upon a screen, to deliver oneself without apology from any such task. It may be for this reason that there is no history of Germany in the English tongue, that ranks above the elementary and the mediocre. There is a masterly and scholarly history of the Holy Roman Empire by an Englishman, which no student of Germany may neglect, but he who would trace the beginnings of Germany from 113 B. C. down to the time of the Great Elector, 1640, must be his own guide through the trackless deserts, of the formation into separate nations, of modern Europe. It is even with misgivings that the student picks his way from the time of the Great Elector to Bismarck, and to modern Germany.

The Peace of Westphalia, 1648, marks the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and finds Germany with a population reduced from sixteen millions to four millions. Famine which drove men and women to cannibalism, bands of them being caught cooking human bodies in a caldron for food; slaughter that drove men to make laws authorizing every man to have two wives, and punishing men and women who became monks and nuns; lawlessness that bred roving bands of murderers, who killed, robbed, and even ate their victims, demanded a ruler of no little vigor to lead his people back to civic, moral, and material health. The Great Elector wrested east Prussia from Poland, he defeated and drove off the Swedes, whom Louis XIV had drawn into an alliance against him, he travelled from end to end of his country, seeking out the problems of distress and remedying them by inducing immigration from Holland, Switzerland, and the north, by building roads, bridges, schools, and churches, and by encouraging planting, trade, and commerce. He built the Frederick William Canal connecting the Oder and the Spree, and introduced the potato to his countrymen. Germany now produces in normal years fifteen hundred million bushels of potatoes. The splendid equestrian statue of the Great Elector on the long bridge at Berlin, is a worthy monument to the first great Hohenzollern.

When Charles II of Spain died, Louis XIV, the Emperor Leopold I of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Elector of Bavaria, all three claimed the right to name his successor. In the war that followed and which lasted a dozen years, the Emperor, Holland, England, Portugal, the Elector of Hanover, and the Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg, the son of the Great Elector, were allied against France. Frederick, the Elector of Brandenburg, was permitted by the Emperor, in return for his services at this time, to assume the title of King, and he crowned himself and his wife Sophia Elizabeth, at Königsberg, King and Queen of Prussia, taking the title of Frederick I of Prussia, January 18th, 1701.

This novus homo among sovereigns was now a fellow king with the rulers of England, France, Denmark, and Sweden, and the only crowned head in the empire, except the Emperor himself, and the Elector of Saxony, who had been chosen King of Poland in 1697. By persistent sycophancy he had pushed his way into the inner circle of the crowned. Those who have picked social locks these latter days by similar sycophancies, by losses at bridge in the proper quarter, by suffering sly familiarities to their women folk, and by wearing their personal and family dignity in sole leather, may know something of the humiliating experiences of this new monarch. He was a feeble fellow, but his son and successor, Frederick William I, “a shrewd but brutal boor,” so Lord Rosebery calls him, and there could not be a better judge, amazed Europe by his taste for collecting tall soldiers, by his parsimony, his kennel manners in the treatment of his family and his subjects, and leaves a name in history as the first, greatest, and the unique collector of human beings on a Barnumesque scale. All known collectors of birds, beetles, butterflies, and beasts accord him an easy supremacy, for his aggregation of colossal grenadiers.

It is temptingly easy to be epigrammatic, perhaps witty, at the expense of Frederick William I of Prussia. The man, however, who freed the serfs; who readjusted the taxes; who insisted upon industry and honesty among his officials; who proclaimed liberty of conscience and of thought; who first put on, to wear for the rest of his life, the uniform of his army, and thus made every officer proud to wear the uniform himself; and who left his son an army of eighty thousand men, thoroughly equipped and trained, and an overflowing treasury, may not be dismissed merely with anecdotes of his eccentric brutality.

Only the ignorant and the envious, nibble at the successes of other men, with vermin teeth and venomous tongue. Those people who can never praise anything whole-heartedly come by their cautious censure from an uneasy doubt of their own deserving. The contempt of Frederick William I for learning and learned men, left him leisure for matters of far more importance to his kingdom at the time. His habitual roughness to his son was due, perhaps, to the fact that there was a curious strain of effeminate culture in the man who deified Voltaire. Poor Voltaire, who called Shakespeare “le sauvage ivre,” or to quote him exactly: “On croirait que cet ouvrage (Hamlet) est le fruit de l’imagination d’un sauvage ivre,” who said that Dante would never be read, and that the comedies of Aristophanes were unworthy of presentation in a country tavern! One is tempted to believe that the father was a man of robuster judgment in such matters than the son, whose own rather mediocre literary equipment, made him the easy prey of that acidulous vestal of literature, Voltaire. However that may be, he left a useful and unexpected legacy to his son, provided, indeed, the sinews for the making of a powerful Prussian kingdom.

March the 31st, 1740, this eccentric miser died, to be succeeded by his son, Frederick II, “the Great,” then twenty-eight years old. Here was a surprise indeed. Of these German kings and princes in their small dominions it has been written: “And these magnates all aped Louis XIV as their model. They built huge palaces, as like Versailles as their means would permit, and generally beyond those limits, with fountains and avenues and dismally wide paths. Even in our own day a German monarch has left, fortunately unfinished, an accurate Versailles on a damp island in a Bavarian lake. In those grandiose structures they cherished a blighting etiquette, and led lives as dull as those of the aged and torpid carp in their own stew-ponds. Then, at the proper season, they would break away into the forest and kill game. Moreover, still in imitation of their model, they held, as a necessary feature in the dreary drama of their existence, ponderous dalliances with unattractive mistresses, in whom they fondly tried to discern the charms of a Montespan or a La Vallière. This monotonous programme, sometimes varied by a violent contest whether they should occupy a seat with or without a back, or with or without arms, represented the even tenor of their lives.”

This good stock was evidently lying fallow, and humanity is neither dignified nor pleasant in the part of fertilizer. Frederick the Great, it should be remembered, was a Prussian and for Prussia only. He cared no more about a united Germany than we care for a united America to include Canada, Mexico, and the Argentine. He cared no more for Bavarians and Saxons than for Swedes and Frenchmen, and, as we know, he was utterly contemptuous of German literature or the German language. He redeemed the shallowness and the torpidity of those other mediocre rulers by resisting, and resisting successfully, for what must have been to him seven very long years, the whole force of Austria and some of the lesser German powers, with the armies of Russia and France back of them.

He had a turbulent home life; his father on one occasion even attempted to hang him with his own hands with the cords of the window curtains, and when he fled from home he captured him and proposed to put him to death as a deserter, and only the intervention of the Kings of Poland and Sweden and the Emperor of Germany prevented it. His accomplice, however, was summarily and mercilessly put to death before his eyes. There is no illustration in all history, of such a successful outcome of the rod theory in education, as this of Frederick the Great. The father put into practice what Wesley preached: “Break their wills betimes, whatever it costs; break the will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly.”

The meanness and cruelty, the parsimony and the eccentricities, of the father left the son an army of eighty thousand troops, troops as superior to other troops in Europe as are the Japanese infantry to-day, to the Manchu guards that pick the weeds in the court-yards of the palace at Mukden; and he left him, too, a kingdom with no debts and an overflowing treasury. It is seldom that such insane vanities leave such a fair estate and an heir with such unique abilities for its skilful exploitation. Of Frederick’s wars against Austria, against France, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, and Poland; of his victories at Prague, Leuthen, Rossbach, and Zorndorf; of his addition of Siberia and Polish Prussia to his kingdom; of his comical literary love affair with Voltaire; of his brutal comments upon the reigning ladies of Russia and France, which brought upon him their bitter hatred; of his restoration and improvement of his country; of his strict personal economy and loyalty to his own people, scores of volumes have been written. The hero-worshipper, Carlyle, and the Jove of reviewers, Macaulay, have described him, and many minor scribes besides.

It is said of his victory of Rossbach, in 1757, that then and there began the recreation of Germany, the revival of her political and intellectual life, and union under Prussia and Prussian kings. Frederick the Great deserves this particular encomium; for as Luther freed Germany, and all Christendom indeed, from the tyranny of tradition, as Lessing freed us from the tyranny of the letter, from the second-hand and half-baked Hellenism of a Racine and a Corneille, so Frederick the Great freed his countrymen at last from the puerile slavery to French fashions and traditions, which had made them self- conscious at home and ridiculous abroad. He first made a Prussian proud to be a Prussian.

This last quarter of the eighteenth century in Germany saw the death of Lessing in 1781, the publication of Kant’s “Kritik der Reinen Vernunft” in the same year, and the death of the great Frederick in 1786. These names mark the physical and intellectual coming of age of Germany. Lessing died misunderstood and feared by the card-board literary leaders of his day, men who still wrote and thought with the geometrical instruments handed them from France; Kant attempted to push philosophical inquiry beyond the bounds of human experience, and Frederick left Prussia at last not ashamed to be Prussia. Napoleon was eighteen years old when Frederick died, and he, next to Bismarck, did more to bring about German unity than any other single force. Unsuccessful Charlemagne though he was, he without knowing it blazed the political path which led to the crowning of a German emperor in the palace at Versailles, less than a hundred years after the death of Frederick the Great. In 1797 at Montebello, Napoleon said: “If the Germanic System did not exist, it would be necessary to create it expressly for the convenience of France.”

II FREDERICK THE GREAT TO BISMARCK

Frederick the Great died in 1786, leaving Prussia the most formidable military power on the Continent. In financial, law, and educational matters he had made his influence felt for good. He distributed work-horses and seed to his impoverished nobles; he encouraged silk, cotton, and porcelain industries; he built the Finow, the Planesche, and Bromberger Canals; he placed a tariff on meat, except pork, the habitual food of the poor, and spirits and tobacco and coffee were added to the salt monopoly; he codified the laws, which we shall mention later; he aided the common schools, and in his day were built the opera-house, library, and university in Berlin, and the new palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam.

Almost exactly one hundred years after the death of Frederick the Great, there ended practically, at the death of the Emperor William I, in 1888, the political career of the man, who with his personally manufactured cement of blood and iron, bound Germany together into a nation. The middle of the seventeenth, the middle of the eighteenth, and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, with the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck as the central figures, mark the features of the historical landscape of Germany as with mile-stones.

How difficult was the task to bring at last an emperor of all Germany to his crowning at Versailles, January 18, 1871, and how mighty the artificer who accomplished the work, may be learned from a glance at the political, geographical, and patriotic incoherence of the land that is now the German Empire.

Germany had no definite national policy from the death of Frederick the Great till the reign of Bismarck began in 1862. Hazy discussions of a confederation of princes, of a Prussian empire, of lines of demarcation, of acquisitions of German territory, were the phantoms of a policy, and even these were due to the pressure of Prussia.

The general political torpidity is surprisingly displayed, when one remembers that Goethe (1749-1832), who lived through the French Revolution, who was thirty-seven years old when Frederick the Great died, and who lived through the whole flaming life of Napoleon, was scarcely more stirred by the political features of the time than though he had lived in Seringapatam. He was a superlatively great man, but he was as parochial in his politics as he was amateurish in his science, as he was a mixture of the coxcomb and the boor, in his love affairs. Lessing, who died in 1781, Klopstock, who died in 1803, Schiller, who died in 1805, Kant, who died in 1804, Hegel, who died in 1831, Fichte, who died in 1814, Wolf, who died in 1824, “Jean Paul” Friedrich Richter, who died in 1825, Voss, who died in 1826, Schelling, who died in 1854, the two Schlegels, August Wilhelm and Frederick, who died in 1845 and in 1829, Jacob Grimm, who died in 1863, Herder, Wieland, Kotzebue, what a list of names! What a blossoming of literary activity! But no one of them, these the leaders of thought in Germany, at the time when the world was approaching the birthday of democracy through pain and blood, no one of these was especially interested in politics.

There was theoretical writing about freedom. Heine mocked at his countrymen and at the world in general, and deified Napoleon, from his French mattress, on which he died, in 1856, only fifty-seven years old. Fichte ended a course of lectures on Duty, with the words: “This course of lectures is suspended till the end of the campaign. We shall resume if our country become free, or we shall have died to regain our liberty.” But Fichte neither resumed nor died! Herder criticised his countrymen for their slavish following of French forms and models in their literature, as in their art and social life. And well he might thus criticise, when one remembers how cramped was the literary vision even of such men as Voltaire and Heine. We have already mentioned some of Voltaire’s literary judgments in the preceding chapter, and Heine ventured to compare Racine to Euripides! No wonder that Germany needed schooling in taste, if such were the opinions of her advisers. Such literary canons as these could only be accepted by minds long inured to provincial, literary, and social slavery.

Just as every little princeling of those days in Germany took Louis XIV for his model, so every literary fledgling looked upon Voltaire as a god, and modelled his style upon the stiff and pompous verses of the French literary men of that time.

Not even to-day has Germany escaped from this bondage. In Baden three words out of ten that you hear are French, and the German wherever he lives in Germany still invites you to Mittagessen at eight P. M. because he has no word in his own language for diner, and must still say anständiger or gebildeter Mensch for gentleman. To make the German even a German in speech and ideals and in independence has been a colossal task. One wonders, as one pokes about in odd corners of Germany even now, whether Herder’s caustic contempt, and Bismarck’s cavalry boots, have made every German proud to be a German, as now he surely ought to be. The tribal feeling still exists there.

Fichte’s lectures on Nationality were suppressed and Fichte himself looked upon askance. The Schlegels spent a lifetime in giving Germany a translation of Shakespeare. Hegel wrote the last words of his philosophy to the sound of the guns at the battle of Jena. Goethe writes a paragraph about his meeting with Napoleon. Metternich, born three years before the American Revolution, and who died a year before the battle of Bull Run, declared: “The cause of all the trouble is the attempt of a small faction to introduce the sovereignty of the people under the guise of a representative system.”

If this was the attitude of the intellectual nobility of the time, what are we to suppose that Messrs. Muller and Schultze and Fischer and Kruger, the small shop-keepers and others of their ilk, and their friends thought? Even forty years later Friedrich Hebbel, in 1844, paid a visit to the Industrial Exposition in Paris. He writes in his diary: “Alle diese Dinge sind mir nicht allein gleichgültig; sic sind mir widerwärtig.” Germany had not awakened even then to any wide popular interest in the world that was doing things. As Voltaire phrased it, France ruled the land, England the sea, and Germany the clouds, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. This is the more worth noting, as giving a peg upon which to hang Germany’s astounding progress since that time. Even as late as Bismarck’s day he complained of the German: “It is as a Prussian, a Hanoverian, a Würtemberger, a Bavarian, or a Hessian, rather than as a German, that he is disposed to give unequivocal proof of patriotism.” The present ambitious German Emperor said, in 1899, at Hamburg: “The sluggishness shown by the German people in interesting themselves in the great questions moving the world, and in arriving at a political understanding of those questions, has caused me deep anxiety.” What kind of material had the nation-makers to work with! What a long, disappointing task it must have been to light these people into a blaze of patriotism! In those days America, though the population of the American colonies was only eleven hundred and sixty thousand in 1750, talked, wrote, and fought politics. The outstanding personalities of the time were patriots, soldiers, politicians, not a dreamer among them.

England was so nonchalantly free already, that the betting-book at White’s Club records that, “Lord Glengall bets Lord Yarmouth one hundred guineas to five that Buonaparte returns to Paris before Beau Brummel returns to London!” Burke and Pitt, and Fox and North, and Canning might look after politics; Hargreaves and Crompton would take care to keep English industries to the fore, and Watt, and the great canal-builder Brindley, would solve the problem of distributing coal; their lordships cracked their plovers’ eggs, unable to pronounce even the name of a single German town or philosopher, and showed their impartial interest, much as now they do, in contemporary history, by backing their opinions with guineas, with the odds on Caesar against the “Beau.”

Weimar was a sunny little corner where poetry and philosophy and literature were hatched, well out of reach of the political storms of the time. The Grand Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach with his tiny court, his Falstaffian army, his mint and his customs-houses, with his well-conducted theatre and his suite of littérateurs, was one of three hundred rulers in the Germany of that time.

The Holy Roman Empire, consisting, in Napoleon’s time, of Austria, Prussia, and a mass of minor states, these last grouped together under the name of the Confederation of the Rhine, and wholly under French influence, lasted one thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight years, or from Caesar’s victory of Pharsalia down to August the 1st, 1806, when Napoleon announced to the Diet that he no longer recognized it.

This institution had no political power, was merely a theoretical political ring for the theoretical political conflicts of German agitators and dreamers, and was composed of the representatives of this tangle of powerless, but vain and self-conscious little states. This Holy Roman Empire, with an Austrian at its head, and aided by France, strove to prevent the development of a strong German state under the leadership of Prussia. After Napoleon’s day it became a struggle between Prussia and Austria. Austria had only eight out of thirty-six million German population, while Prussia was practically entirely German, and Prussia used her army, politics, and commerce to gain control in Germany. Even to-day Austria-Hungary contains the most varied conglomeration of races of any nation in the world. Austria has 26,000,000 inhabitants, of whom 9,000,000 are Germans, 1,000,000 Italians and Rumanians, 6,000,000 Bohemians and Slovacs, 8,000,000 Poles and Ruthenians, 2,000,000 Slovenes and Croatians. Of the 19,000,000 of Hungary there are 9,000,000 Magyars, 2,000,000 Germans, 2,500,000 Slovacs and Ruthenians, 3,000,000 Rumanians, and nearly 3,000,000 Southern Slays.

Weimar was one of the three hundred capitals of this limp empire, with tariffs, stamps, coins, uniforms, customs, gossip, interests, and a sovereign of its own. When Bismarck undertook the unifying of the customs tariffs of Germany, there were even then fifteen hundred different tariffs in existence!

Weimar had its salon, its notables: Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, Frau von Stein, Dr. Zimmermann as a valued correspondent; its Grand Duke Karl August and his consort; Herder, who jealous of the renown of Goethe, and piqued at the insufficient consideration he received, soon departed, to return only when the Grand Duchess took him under her wing and thus satisfied his morbid pride; its love affair, for did not the beautiful Frau von Werthern leave her husband, carry out a mock funeral, and, heralded as dead, elope to Africa with Herr von Einsiedel? But Weimar was as far away from what we now agree to look upon as the great events of the day, as were Lords Glengall and Yarmouth at White’s, in Saint James’s.

It requires imagination to put Goethe and Schiller and Wieland in the bow window at White’s, and to place Lords Glengall and Yarmouth in Frau von Stein’s drawing-room in Weimar; but the discerning eye which can see this picture, knows at a glance why England misunderstands Germany and Germany misunderstands England. For White’s is White’s and Weimar is Weimar, and one is British and one is German as much now as then! In the one the winner of the Derby is of more importance than any philosopher; in the other, philosophers, poets, professors, and playwrights are almost as well known, as the pedigrees of the yearlings to be sold at Newmarket, are known at White’s. They still have plover’s eggs early in the season at White’s, and they still recognize the subtle distinction there between “port wine” and “port”; while in Weimar nobody, unless it be the duke, even boils his sauerkraut in white wine!

One could easily write a chapter on Weimar and its self-satisfied social and literary activities. There were three hundred or more capitals of like complexion and isolation: some larger, some smaller, none perhaps with such a splendid literary setting, but all indifferent with the indifference of distant relatives who seldom see one another, when the French Revolution exploded its bomb at the gates of the world’s habits of thought.

No intelligent man ever objected to the French Revolution because it stood for human rights, but because it led straight to human wrongs. The dream was angelic, but the nightmare in which it ended was devilish. The French Revolution was the most colossal disappointment that humanity has ever had to bear.

More than the demagogue gives us credit for, are the great majority of us eager to help our neighbors. The trouble is that the demagogue thinks this, the most difficult of all things, an easy task. God and Nature are harsh when they are training men, and we, alas, are soft, hence most of our failures. Correction must be given with a rod, not with a sop. There lies all the trouble.

The political and philanthropic wise men were setting out for the manger and the babe, their eyes on the star, laden with gifts, when they were met by a whiff of grape-shot from the guns commanded by a young Corsican genius. The French Revolution found us all sympathetic, but making men of equal height by lopping off their heads; making them free by giving no one a chance to be free; making them fraternal by insisting that all should be addressed by the same title of, “citizen,” was soon seen to be the method of a political nursery.

It was no fault of the French Revolution that it was no revolution at all, in any political sense. Men maddened by oppression hit, kick, bite, and burn. They are satisfied to shake the burden of the moment off their backs, even though the burden they take on be of much the same character. “It is perfectly possible, to revive even in our own day the fiscal tyranny which once left even European populations in doubt whether it was worth while preserving life by thrift and toil. You have only to tempt a portion of the population into temporary idleness, by promising them a share in a fictitious hoard lying in an imaginary strong-box which is supposed to contain all human wealth. You have only to take the heart out of those who would willingly labor and save, by taxing them ad misericordiam for the most laudable philanthropic objects. For it makes not the smallest difference to the motives of the thrifty and industrious part of mankind whether their fiscal oppressor be an Eastern despot, or a feudal baron, or a democratic legislature, and whether they are taxed for the benefit of a corporation called Society or for the advantage of an individual styled King or Lord,” writes Sir Henry Maine. In short it matters not in the least what you baptize oppression, so long as it is oppression, or whether you call your tyrant “Jim” or “My Lord,” so long as he is a tyrant. Many people are slowly awakening to the fact in England and in America, that plain citizen “Jim” can be a most merciless tyrant in spite of his unpretentious name and title. No royal tyrant ever dared to attempt to gain his ends by dynamiting innocent people, as did the trades-unionists at Los Angeles, or to starve a whole population as did the trades-unionists in London. We have not escaped tyranny by changing its name. The idea of the Contrat Social and of all its dilutions since, has been that individuals go to make up society, and that society under the name of the state must take charge of those individuals. The French Revolution was a failure because it fell back upon that tiresome and futile philosophy of government which had been that of Louis XIV. Louis XIV took care of the individual units of the state by exploiting them. He was a sound enough Socialist in theory. France gained nothing of much value along the lines of political philosophy.

Whether it is Louis XIV who says “l’état c’est moi” or the citizens banded together in a state, who claim that the functions of the state are to meddle with the business of every man, matters little. It is the same socialistic philosophy at bottom, and it has produced to-day a France of thirty-eight millions of people pledged to sterility, one million of whom are state officials superintending the affairs of the others at a cost, in salaries alone, of upward of five hundred million dollars a year.

In no political or philosophical sense was the French Revolution a revolution at all. It was a change of administration and leaders, but not a change of political theory. The French Revolution put the state in impartial supremacy over all classes by destroying exemptions claimed by the nobility and the clergy, and thus extended the power of the state. The English Revolution without bloodshed reduced the power of the state, not for the advantage of any class, but for individual liberty and local self-government. We Americans are the political heirs of the latter, not of the former, revolution.

Germany was stirred slightly to hope for freedom, but stirred mightily to protest against anarchy later. These were the two influences from the French Revolution that affected Germany, and they were so contradictory that Germany herself was for nearly a hundred years in a mixed mood. One influence enlivened the theoretical democrat, and the other sent the armies of all Europe post-haste to save what was left of orderly government in France.

But Prussia was not what she had been under Frederick the Great. Frederick was more Louis XIV than Louis XIV himself. The economic and political errors of the French Revolution found their best practical exponent in Frederick the Great. In the introduction to his code of laws we have already mentioned are the words: “The head of the state, to whom is intrusted the duty of securing public welfare, which is the whole aim of society, is authorized to direct and control all the actions of individuals toward this end.” Further on the same code reads: “It is incumbent upon the state to see to the feeding, employment, and payment of all those who cannot support themselves, and who have no claim to the help of the lord of the manor, or to the help of the commune: it is necessary to provide such persons with work which is suitable to their strength and their capacity.”

When Frederick died he left Prussia in the grip of this enervating pontifical socialism, which always everywhere ends by palsying the individual, and through the individual the state, with the blight of demagogical and theoretical legislation. The fine army grew pallid and without spirit, the citizens lost their individual pride, the nation as a whole lost its vigor, and when Napoleon marched into Berlin, he remarked that the country hardly seemed worth conquering.

The century from the death of Frederick the Great, in 1786, to the death of William the First, in 1888, includes, in a convenient period to remember: the downfall of Frederick’s patriotic edifice; the apathy and impotency that followed upon the breaking up of the bureaucracy he had welded into efficiency; the shuffling of the German states by Napoleon as though they were the pack of cards in a great political game; a revival of patriotism in Prussia after floggings and insults that were past bearing; the jealousies and enmities of the various states, the betrayal of one by the other, and finally the struggle between Austria and Prussia to decide upon a leader for all Germany; and at last the war against France, 1870-71, which was to make it clear to the world that Germany had been Prussianized into an empire.

Frederick William II, the nephew of Frederick the Great, who succeeded him, was King of Prussia from 1786 to 1797. Frederick William III, his son, and the husband of the beautiful and patriotic Queen Louisa, was King of Prussia from 1797 to 1840. Frederick William IV, a loquacious, indiscreet, loose-lipped sovereign, of moist intellect and mythical delusions, was King of Prussia from 1840 to 1857, when his mental condition made his retirement necessary, and he was succeeded by his brother, Frederick William Ludwig, first as regent, then as king in 1861, known to us as that admirable King and Emperor, William I, who died in 1888.

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of these sovereigns, to those of us who look upon Germany to-day as autocratically governed in fact and by tradition, is their willing surrender to the people, on every occasion when the demand has been, even as little insistent as the German demand has been. In the case of Frederick William IV, his claim, at least in words, upon his divine rights as a sovereign was the mark of a wavering confidence in himself. He was not satisfied with a rational sanction for his authority, but was forever assuring his subjects that God had pronounced for him; much as men of low intelligence attempt to add vigor to their statements by an oath. “I hold my crown,” he said, “by the favor of God, and I am responsible to Him for every hour of my government.” Much under the influence of the two scholars Niebuhr and Ranke, he hated the ideas of the French Revolution, and dreamed of an ideal Christian state like that of the Middle Ages. He was caricatured by the journals of the day, and laughed at by the wits, including Heine, and pictured as a king with “Order” on one hand, “Counter-order” on the other, and “Disorder” on his forehead.

Though Frederick William II marched into France in 1792, to support the French monarchy, neither his army nor his people were prepared or fit for this enterprise, and he soon retired. In 1793, Prussia joined Russia in a second partition of Poland, but in 1795, angry with what was considered the double dealing of Austria and Russia, Prussia concluded a peace with France, the treaty of Basle was signed in 1795, and for ten years Prussia practically took no part in the Napoleonic wars.

Napoleon took over the lands on the left bank of the Rhine, took away the freedom of forty-eight towns, leaving only Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfort, Augsburg, and Nuremberg, and in 1803 he took Hanover. Later, in 1805, Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden aided Napoleon to fight the alliance against him of Austria, England, Russia, and Sweden. In that same year the Electors of Würtemberg and Bavaria were made kings by Napoleon. In 1806 Bavaria, Baden, Würtemberg, and Hessen seceded from the German Empire, formed themselves into the Confederation of the Rhine, and acknowledged Napoleon as their protector. In 1806 Francis II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, resigned, and there was neither an empire nor an emperor of Germany, nor was there a Germany of united interests.

In 1806 Frederick William III, driven by the grossest insults to his country and to his wife, finally declared war against France; there followed the battle of Jena, in which the Germans were routed, and in that same year Napoleon marched into Berlin unopposed. In 1807 the Russian Emperor was persuaded to make peace, and Prussia without her ally was helpless. The Peace of Tilsit, in July, 1807, deprived Prussia of the whole of the territory between the Elbe and the Rhine, and this with Brunswick, Hessen-Cassel, and part of Hanover was dubbed the Kingdom of Westphalia, and Napoleon’s youngest brother Jerome was made king. The Polish territory of Prussia was given to the Elector of Saxony, who was also rewarded for having deserted Prussia after the battle of Jena by being made a king. Prussia was further required to reduce her army to forty-two thousand men.

It is neither a pretty nor an inspiriting story, this of the mangling of Germany by Napoleon; of the German princes bribed by kingly crowns from the hands of an ancestorless Corsican; but it all goes to show how far from any sense of common aims and duties, how far from the united Vaterland of to-day, was the Germany of a hundred years ago. It adds, too, immeasurably to the laurels of the man who produced the present German Empire out of his own pocket, and stood as chief sponsor at its christening at Versailles in 1871.

This Prussia that sent twenty thousand troops to aid Napoleon against Russia, and which during the retreat from Moscow went over bodily to the enemy; this Prussia whose vacillating king simpered with delight at a kind word from Napoleon, and shivered with dismay at a harsh one; this army with its officers as haughty as they were incapable, and its men only prevented from wholesale desertion by severe punishment, an army rotten at the core, with a coat of varnish over its worm-eaten fabric; this Prussia humiliated and disgraced after the battle of Jena, in 1806, in seven years’ time came into its own again. Vom Stein, Scharnhorst, the son of a Hanoverian peasant, and Hardenberg put new life into the state. At Waterloo the pummelled squares of red-coats were relieved by these Prussians, and Blücher, or “Old Marschall Vorwärts” as he was called, redeemed his countrymen’s years of effeminate lassitude and vacillation.

“Such was Vorwärts, such a fighter,
Such a lunging, plunging smiter,
Always stanch and always straight,
Strong as death for love or hate,
Always first in foulest weather,
Neck or nothing, hell for leather,
Through or over, sink or swim,
Such was Vorwärts-here’s to him!”

Napoleon goes to Saint Helena and dies in 1821. What he did for Germany was to prove to her how impossible was a cluster of jealous, malicious provincial little state governments in the heart of Europe, protecting themselves from falling apart by the ancient legislative scaffolding of the Holy Roman Empire. He squeezed three hundred states into thirty-eight, and the very year of Waterloo, on April the 1st, a German Napoleon was born who was to further squeeze these states into what is known to-day as the German Empire.

The Congress of Vienna was a meeting of the European powers to redistribute the possessions, that Napoleon had scattered as bribes and rewards among his friends, relatives, and enemies, so far as possible, among their rightful owners.

From the island of Elba, off the coast of Tuscany, Napoleon looked on while the allies quarrelled at this Congress of Vienna. Prussia claimed the right to annex Saxony; Russia demanded Poland, and against them were leagued England, Austria, and France, France represented by the Mephistophelian Talleyrand, who strove merely to stir the discord into another war. In the midst of their deliberations word came that the wolf was in the fold again. Napoleon was riding to Paris, through hysterical crowds of French men and women, eager for another throw against the world, if their Little Corporal were there to shake the dice for them. He had another throw and lost. The French Revolution in 1789, followed by the insurrection of all Europe against that strange gypsy child of the Revolution, Napoleon, from 1807-1815, ended at last at Waterloo. This lover, who won whole nations as other men win a maid or two; this ruler, who had popes for handmaidens and gave kingdoms as tips, who dictated to kings preferably from the palaces of their own capitals; this fortunate demon of a man, who had escaped even Mlle. Montausier, was safely disposed of at Saint Helena, and the ordinary ways of mortals had their place in the world again.

The Congress of Vienna reassembled, and the readjustment of the map of Europe began over again. Prussia is given back what had been taken away from her. A German confederation was formed in 1815 to resist encroachments, but with no definite political idea, and its diet, to which Prussia, Austria, and the other smaller states sent representatives, became the laughing-stock of Europe. Jealous bickerings and insistence upon silly formalities paralyzed legislation. Lawyers and others who presented their claims before this assembly from 1806-1816 were paid in 1843! The liquidation of the debts of the Thirty Years’ War was made after two hundred years, in 1850! The laws for the military forces were finally agreed upon in 1821, and put in force in 1840!

There were three principal forms of government among these states: first, Absolutist, where the ruler and his officials governed without reference to the people, as in Prussia and Austria; second, those who organized assemblies (Landslände), where no promises were made to the people, but where the nobles and notables were called together for consultation; and third, a sort of constitutional monarchy with a written constitution and elected representatives, but with the ruler none the less supreme. One of the first rulers to grant such a constitution to his people was the Grand Duke who presided over the little court at Weimar.

The mass of the people were wholly indifferent. The intellectuals were divided among themselves. The schools and universities after 1818 form associations and societies, the Burschenschaft, for example, and in a hazy professorial fashion talk and shout of freedom. They were of those passionate lovers of liberty, more intent on the dower than on the bride; willing to talk and sing and to tell the world of their own deserts, but with little iron in their blood.

When a real man wants to be free he fights, he does not talk; he takes what he wants and asks for it afterward; he spends himself first and affords it afterward. These dreamy gentlemen could never make the connection between their assertions and their actions. They were as inconsistent, as a man who sees nothing unreasonable in circulating ascetic opinions and a perambulator at the same time. They were dreary and technical advocates of liberty.

At a great festival at the Wartburg, in 1817, the students got out of hand, burned the works of those conservatives, Haller and Kotzebue, and the Code Napoleon. This youthful folly was purposely exaggerated throughout Germany, and was used by the party of autocracy to frighten the people, and also as a reason for passing even severer laws against the ebullitions of liberty. At a conference at Carlsbad in 1819 the representatives of the states there assembled passed severe laws against the student societies, the press, the universities, and the liberal professors.

From 1815-1830 the opinions of the more enlightened changed. The fear of Napoleon was gradually forgotten, and the hatred of the absolutism of Prussia and Austria grew.

In 1830 constitutions were demanded and were guardedly granted in Brunswick, Saxony, Hanover, and Hesse-Cassel. In 1832 things had gone so far that at a great student festival the black, red, and gold flag of the Burschenschaft was hoisted, toasts were drunk to the sovereignty of the people, to the United States of Germany, and to Europe Republican! This was followed by further prosecutions. Prussia condemned thirty-nine students to death, but confined them in a fortress. The prison-cell of the famous Fritz Reuter may be seen in Berlin to-day. In Hesse, the chief of the liberal party, Jordan, was condemned to six years in prison; in Bavaria a journalist was imprisoned for four years, and other like punishments followed elsewhere. It was in 1857, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, that Hanover was cut off from the succession, as Hanover could not descend to a woman. The Duke of Cumberland became the ruler of Hanover, and England ceased to hold any territory in Europe.

From 1839-1847 there was comparative quiet in the political world. The rulers of the various states succeeded in keeping the liberal professorial rhetoric too damp to be valuable as an explosive.

Interwoven with this party in Germany, demanding for the people something more of representation in the government, was a movement for the binding together of the various states in a closer union. In 1842 when the first stone was laid for the completion of the Cologne Cathedral, at a banquet of the German princes presided over by the King of Prussia, the King of Würtemberg proposed a toast to “Our common country!” That toast probably marks the first tangible proof of the existence of any important feeling upon the subject of German unity.

At a congress of Germanists at Frankfort, in 1846, professors and students, jurists and historians, talked and discussed the questions of a German parliament and of national unity more perhaps than matters of scholarship.

In 1847 Professor Gervinus founded at Heidelberg the Deutsche Zeitung, which was to be liberal, national, and for all Germany.

I should be sorry to give the impression that I have not given proper value to the work of the German professor and student in bringing about a more liberal constitution for the states of Germany. Liebig of Munich, Ranke of Berlin, Sybel of Bonn, Ewald of Göttingen, Mommsen in Berlin, Döllinger in Munich, and such men as Schiemann in Berlin to-day, were and are, not only scholars, but they have been and are political teachers; some of them violently reactionary, if you please, but all of them stirring men to think.

No such feeling existed then, or exists now, in Germany, as animated Oxford some fifty years ago when the greatest Sanscrit scholar then living was rejected by a vote of that body, one voter declaring: “I have always voted against damned intellect, and I trust I always may!” A state of mind that has not altogether disappeared in England even now. Indeed I am not sure, that the most notable feature of political life in England to-day, is not a growing revolt against legislation by tired lawyers, and an increasing demand for common-sense governing again, even if the governing be done by those with small respect for “damned intellect.”

The third French revolution of 1848 set fire to all this, not only in Germany but in Austria, Hungary, Roumania, and elsewhere. We must go rapidly through this period of seething and of political teething. The parliament at Frankfort with nothing but moral authority discussed and declaimed, and finally elected Archduke John of Austria as “administrator” of the empire. There followed discussions as to whether Austria should even become a member of the new confederation. Two parties, the “Little Germanists” and the “Pan Germanists,” those in favor of including, and those opposed to the inclusion of Austria, fought one another, with Prussia leading the one and Austria, with the prestige of having been head of the former Holy Roman Empire, the other.

In 1849 Austria withdrew altogether and the King of Prussia was elected Emperor of Germany, but refused the honor on the ground that he could not accept the title from the people, but only from his equals. There followed riots and uprisings of the people in Prussia, Saxony, Baden, and elsewhere throughout Germany. The Prussian guards were sent to Dresden to quell the rioting there and took the city after two days’ fighting. The parliament itself was dispersed and moved to Stuttgart, but there again they were dispersed, and the end was a flight of the liberals to Switzerland, France, and the United States. We in America profited by the coming of such valuable citizens as Carl Schurz and many others. There were driven from Germany, they and their descendants, many among our most valuable citizens. The descendant of one of the worthiest of them, Admiral Osterhaus, is one of the most respected officers in our navy, and will one day command it, and we could not be in safer hands. In 1849 the German Federal fleet was sold at auction as useless; Austria was again in the ascendant and German subjects in Schleswig were handed over to the Danes.

In 1850 both the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria called congresses, but Prussia finally gave up hers, and the ancient confederation as of before 1848 met as a diet at Frankfort and from 1851-1858 Bismarck was the Prussian delegate and Austria presided over the deliberations.

A factor that made for unity among the German states was the Zollverein. From 1818-1853 under the leadership of Prussia the various states were persuaded to join in equalizing their tariffs. Between 1834-5 Prussia, Bavaria, Würtemberg, Saxony, Baden, Hesse-Nassau, Thuringia, and Frankfort agreed upon a common standard for customs duties, and a few years later they were joined by Brunswick, Hanover, and the Mecklenburgs. German industry and commerce had their beginnings in these agreements. The hundreds of different customs duties became so exasperating that even jealous little governments agreed to conform to simpler laws, and probably this commercial necessity did more to bring about the unity of Germany than the King, or politics, or the army.

With the struggles of the various states to obtain constitutions we cannot deal, nor would it add to the understanding of the present political condition of the German Empire.

Prussia, after riots in Berlin, after promises and delays from the vacillating King, who one day orders his own troops out of the capital and his brother, later William I, to England to appease the anger of the mob, and parades the streets with the colors of the citizens in revolt wrapped about him; and the next day, surly, obstinate, but ever orating, holds back from his pledges, finally accepts a constitution which is probably as little democratic as any in the world.

Of the sixty-five million inhabitants of the German Empire, Prussia has over forty millions. The Landtag of Prussia is composed of two chambers, the first called the Herrenhaus, or House of Lords, and the second the Abgeordnetenhaus, or Chamber of Deputies. This upper house is made up of the princes of the royal family who are of age; the descendants of the formerly sovereign families of Hohenzollern- Hechingen and Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen; chiefs of the princely houses recognized by the Congress of Vienna; heads of the territorial nobility formed by the King; representatives of the universities; burgomasters of towns with more than fifty thousand inhabitants, and an unlimited number of persons nominated by the King for life or for a limited period. This upper chamber is a mere drawing-room of the sovereign’s courtiers, though there may be, and as a matter of fact there are at the present time, representatives even of labor in this chamber, but in a minority so complete that their actual influence upon legislation, except in a feeble advisory capacity, amounts to nothing. In this Herrenhaus, or upper chamber, of Prussia there are at this writing among the 327 members 3 bankers, 8 representatives of the industrial and merchant class, and 1 mechanic; 12 in all, or not even four per cent., to represent the industrial, financial, commercial, and working classes. Even in the lower chamber, or Abgeordnetenhaus, there are only 10 merchants, 19 manufacturers, 7 labor representatives, and 1 bank director, or 37 members who represent the commercial, manufacturing, and industrial interests in a total membership of 443.

In the other states of Germany much the same conditions exist. In Bavaria, in the upper house, or Kammer der Reichsräte, there is no representative, and in the lower house of 163 members only 29 representatives of the industrial world.

In Saxony, the most socialistic state in Germany, the upper chamber with 49 members has 5 industrials; the lower chamber with 82 members has 40 representatives of commercial, industrial, and financial affairs.

In Würtemberg, in the upper chamber with 51 members there are 3 industrials; and in the second chamber with 63 members there are 17 industrials.

In Baden, of the 37 members of the upper house there are 6 industrials; of the 73 members of the lower house there are 23 representatives of commerce and industry.

This condition of political inequality is the result of the maintenance of the old political divisions, despite the fact that in the last thirty years the whole complexion of the country has changed radically, due to the rapid increase of the city populations representing the industrial and commercial progress of a nation that is now the rival of both the United States and Great Britain. In more than one instance a town with over 300,000 inhabitants will be represented in the legislature in the same proportion as a country population of 30,000. Stettin, for example, with a population of 245,000, which is a seventh of the total population of Pomerania, has only 6 of the 89 provincial representatives. Further, the three-class system of voting in Prussia and in the German cities, is a unique arrangement for giving men the suffrage without either power or privilege. According to this system every male inhabitant of Prussia aged twenty-five is entitled to vote in the election of members of the lower house. The voters, however, are divided into three classes. This division is made by taking the total amount of the state taxes paid in each electoral district and dividing it into three equal amounts. The first third is paid by the highest tax-payers; the second third by the next highest tax-payers, and the last third by the rest. The first class consists of a comparatively few wealthy people; it may even happen that a single individual pays a third of the taxes in a given district. These three classes then elect the members of an electoral college, who then elect the member of the house. In Prussia it may be said roughly that 260,000 wealthy tax-payers elect one-third; 870,000 tax-payers elect one-third, and the other 6,500,000 voters elect one-third of the members of the electoral college, with the consequence that the 6,500,000 are not represented at all in the lower house of Prussia. In order to make this three-class system of voting quite clear, let us take the case of a city where the same principle may be seen at work on a smaller scale. In 1910, in the city of Berlin, there were:

931 voters of the first class paying 27,914,593 marks of the total tax.

32,131 voters of the second class paying 27,908,776 marks of the total tax.

357,345 voters of the third class paying 16,165,501 marks of the total tax.

Roughly the voters in the first class each paid $7,500; those in the second class $218; those in the third class $11. The 931 voters elected one-third, 32,131 voters elected one-third, and 357,345 elected one-third of the town councillors. In this same year in Berlin there were:

521 persons with incomes between $25,000 and $62,500.

139 persons with incomes between $62,500 and $125,000.

22 persons with incomes between $125,000 and $187,500.

19 persons with incomes between $187,000 and $250,000.

19 persons with incomes of $250,000 or more. Or 720 persons in Berlin in 1912 with incomes of over $25,000 a year, and they are practically the governors of the city.

As a result of these divisions according to taxes paid, of the 144 town councillors elected, only 38 were Social-Democrats, though Berlin is overwhelmingly Social-Democratic, and consequently the affairs of this city of more than 2,000,000 inhabitants are in the hands of 33,062 persons who elect two-thirds of the town councillors.

In the city of Düsseldorf there were, excluding the suburbs, 62,443 voters at the election for town councillors in 1910. The first class was composed of 797 voters paying from 1,940 to 264,252 marks of taxes; 6,645 voters paying from 222 to 1,939 marks; and 55,001 voters paying 221 marks or less. These 7,442 voters of the first and second classes were in complete control of the city government by a clear majority of two-thirds.

It is this three-class system of voting that makes Prussia, and the Prussian cities as well, impregnable against any assault from the democratically inclined. In addition to this system, the old electoral divisions of forty years ago remain unchanged, and consequently the agricultural east of Prussia, including east and west Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, Posen, and Silesia, with their large landholders, return more members to the Prussian lower house than the much greater population of western industrial Prussia, which includes Sachsen, Hanover, Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Hohenzollern, Hessen-Nassau, and the Rhine. Further, the executive government of Prussia is conducted by a ministry of state, the members of which are appointed by the King, and hold office at his pleasure, without control from the Landtag.

How little the people succeeded in extorting from King Frederick William IV in the way of a constitution may be gathered from this glimpse of the present political conditions of Prussia.

The local government of Prussia is practically as centralized in a few hands as the executive government of the state itself. The largest areas are the provinces, whose chiefs or presidents also are appointed by the sovereign, and who represent the central government. There are twelve such provinces in Prussia, ranging in size from the Rhineland and Brandenburg, with 7,120,519 and 4,093,007 inhabitants respectively, to Schleswig-Holstein, with 1,619,673.

Each province is divided into two or more government districts, of which there are thirty-five in all. At the head of each of these districts is the district president, also appointed by the crown.

In addition there is the Kreis, or Circle, of which there are some 490, with populations varying from 20,000 to 801,000. These circles are, for all practical purposes, governed by the Landrath, who is appointed for life by the crown, and who is so fully recognized as the agent of the central government and not as the servant of the locality in which he rules, that on one occasion several Landräthe were summarily dismissed for voting against the government and in conformity to the wishes of the inhabitants of the circle in which they lived! Though the Landrath is nominated by the circle assembly for appointment by the crown, he can be dismissed by his superiors of the central hierarchy. As his promotion, and his career in fact, is dependent upon these superiors, he naturally sides with the central government in all cases of dispute or friction.

Further, and this is important, all officials in Germany are legally privileged persons. All disputes between individuals and public authorities in Germany are decided by tribunals quite distinct from the ordinary courts. These courts are specially constituted, and they aim at protecting the officials from any personal responsibility for acts done by them in their official capacity.

In America, and I presume in Great Britain also, any disputes between public authorities and private individuals are settled in the ordinary courts of justice, under the rules of the ordinary law of the land. This super-common-law position of the Prussian official is a fatal incentive to the aggravating exaggeration of his importance, and to the indifference of his behavior to the private citizen. There may be officials who are uninfluenced by this sheltered position, indeed I know personally many who are, but there is equally no doubt that many succumb to arrogance and lethargy as a consequence.

How thoroughly Prussia is covered by a network of officialdom, is further discovered when it is known, that the entire area of Prussia is some twenty thousand square miles less than that of the State of California. The whole Prussian doctrine of local self-government, too, is entirely different from ours. Their idea is that self-government is the performance by locally elected bodies of the will of the state, not necessarily of the locality which elects them. Local authorities, whether elected or not, are supposed to be primarily the agents of the state, and only secondarily the agents of the particular locality they serve. In Prussia, all provincial and circle assemblies and communal councils, may be dissolved by royal decree, hence even these elected assemblies may only serve their constituencies at the will and pleasure of the central authority.

It would avail little to go into minute details in describing the government of Prussia; this slight sketch of the electoral system, and of the centralization of the government, suffices to show two things that it is particularly my purpose to make clear. One is the preponderating influence of Prussia in the empire, due to the maintenance of power in a single person; and the other is to show how ridiculously futile it is to refer to Prussia as an example of the success of social legislation. The state ownership of railroads, old-age pensions, accident and sickness insurance, and the like are one thing in Prussia which is a close corporation, and quite another in any community or country under democratic government. What takes place in Prussia would certainly not take place in America or in England. To draw inferences from a state governed as is Prussia, for application to such democratic communities as America or England, is as valuable as to argue from the habits of birds, that such and such a treatment would succeed with fish.

It was with this autocratic Prussia at his back, that the greatest man Germany has produced, succeeded in bringing about German unity and the foundation of the German Empire. As the representative of Prussia in the Diet, as her ambassador to Russia, and to France, he gained the insight into the European situation which led him to hold as his political creed, that only by blood and iron, and not by declamations and resolutions, could Germany be united.

“During the time I was in office,” he writes, “I advised three wars, the Danish, the Bohemian, and the French; but every time I have first made clear to myself whether the war, if successful, would bring a prize of victory worth the sacrifices which every war requires, and which now are so much greater than in the last century. ... I have never looked at international quarrels which can only be settled by a national war from the point of view of the Göttingen student code; ... but I have always considered simply their reaction on the claim of the German people, in equality with the other great states and powers of Europe, to lead an autonomous political life, so far as is possible on the basis of our peculiar national capacity.” In 1863 he writes to von der Goltz, then German ambassador in Paris: “The question is whether we are a great power or a state in the German federation, and whether we are conformably to the former quality to be governed by a monarch, or, as in the latter case would be at any rate admissible, by professors, district judges, and the gossips of the small towns. The pursuit of the phantom of popularity in Germany which we have been carrying on for the last forty years has cost us our position in Germany and in Europe; and we shall not win this back again by allowing ourselves to be carried away by the stream in the persuasion that we are directing its course, but only by standing firmly on our legs and being, first of all, a great power and a German federal state afterward.”

After Napoleon and the interminable elocutionary squabbles of the German states, first, for constitutional rights, and, second, for some basis of unity among themselves, which were the two main streams of political activity, there were three main steps in the formation of the now existing empire: first, in 1866, the North German Confederation under the presidency of Prussia and excluding Austria; second, the conclusion of treaties, 1866-1867, between the North German Confederation and the south German states; third, the formal union of the north and south German states as an empire in 1871.

Although the Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist legally in 1806, it is to be remembered that as a fiction weighing still upon the imagination of German politicians, it did not wholly disappear until the war between Prussia and Austria, for then Prussia fought not only Austria but Bavaria, Würtemberg, Saxony, Hanover, Nassau, Baden, and the two Hesse states, and at Sadowa in Bohemia the war was settled by the defeat of the Austrians before they could be joined by these allies, who were disposed of in detail. Frankfort was so harshly treated that the mayor hanged himself, and the Prussianizing of Hanover has never been entirely forgiven, and the claimants to the throne in exile are still the centre of a political party antagonistic to Prussia. The taking over of north Schleswig, of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, and Nassau by Prussia after the Austrian war was according to the rough arbitrament of conquest. “Our right,” replied Bismarck to the just criticism of this spoliation, “is the right of the German nation to exist, to breathe, to be united; it is the right and the duty of Prussia to give the German nation the foundation necessary for its existence.” In taking Alsace-Lorraine from France, Bismarck insisted that this was a necessary barrier against France and that Germany’s possession of Metz and Strassburg were necessities of the situation also.

The history of German unity is the biography of Bismarck. Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was born in Schönhausen, in that Mark of Brandenburg which was the cradle of the Prussian monarchy, on the first of April, 1815. His grandfather fought at Rossbach under the great Frederick. He was confirmed in Berlin in 1831 by the famous pastor and theologian, Schleiermacher, and maintained all his life that without his belief in God he would have found no reason for his patriotism or for any serious work in life.

He matriculated as a student of law and science at Göttingen in May, 1832, and later at Berlin in 1834. He was a tall, large-limbed, blue-eyed young giant, the boldest rider, the best swordsman, and the heartiest drinker of his day. He is still looked upon in Germany as the typical hero of corps student life, and his pipe, or his Schläger, or his cap, or his Kneipe jacket is preserved as the relic of a saint. His was not the tepid virtue born of lack of vitality. One has but to remember Augustine and Origen and Ignatius Loyola, to recall the fact that the preachers of salvation, the best of them, have generally had themselves to tame before they mastered the world.

This youth Bismarck must have had some vigorous battles with Bismarck before he married Johanna Friederika Charlotte Dorothea Eleanore von Puttkamer, July 28, 1847, much against the wishes of her parents, and settled down to his life-work. As was said of John Pym, “he thought it part of a man’s religion to see that his country was well governed,” and his country became his passion. Like most men of intense feeling, he loved few people and loyally hated many. More men feared and envied him than liked him. His wife, his sister, his king, a student friend, Keyserling, and the American, Motley, shared with his country his affection. Germany might well take it to heart that it was Motley the American who was of all men dearest to her giant creator. The same type of American would serve her better to-day than any other, did she only know it! In 1849 he was elected to the Prussian Chamber. In 1852 a whiff of the old dare-devil got loose, and he fought a duel with Freiherr von Vincke.

In 1852 he is sent on his first responsible mission to Vienna, and found there the traditions of the Metternich diplomacy still ruling. What Napoleon had said of Metternich he no doubt remembered: “Il ment trop. Il faut mentir quelquefois, mais mentir tout le temps c’est trop!” for he adopted quite the opposite policy in his own diplomatic dealings.

In 1855 he became a member of the upper house of Prussia, and in 1859 is sent as minister to St. Petersburg. In May, 1862, he is sent as minister to Paris, and learns to know, and not greatly to admire, the third Napoleon and his court.

On the 23d of September, 1862, he is appointed Staats-minister, and a week later thunders out his famous blood-and-iron speech. On October the 8th, 1862, he is definitely named Minister President and Minister for Foreign Affairs.

William I had succeeded his brother as king. He was a soldier and a believer in the army, and wished to spend more on it, and to lengthen the time of service with the colors to three years. The legislature opposed these measures. A minister was needed who could bully the legislature, and Bismarck was chosen for the task. He spent the necessary money despite the legislative opposition, pleading that a legislature that refused to vote necessary supplies had ipso facto laid down its proper functions, and the king must take over the responsibilities of government that they declined to exercise. The cavalry boots were beginning to trample their way to Paris, and to the crowning of an emperor.

In February, 1864, Prussia and Austria together declare war upon Denmark over the Schleswig-Holstein succession. They agree to govern the spoils between them, but fall out over the question of their respective jurisdiction, and the Prussian army being ready, and the Moltke plan of campaign worked out, war is declared, and in seven weeks the Treaty of Prague is signed, in 1866, by which Austria gives up all her rights in Schleswig-Holstein, and abandons her claim to take part in the reorganization of Germany. The North German Confederation is formed to include all lands north of the Main; Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, the Hesse states, Nassau, and Frankfurt-am-Main become part of Prussia; and the south German states agree to remain neutral, but allies of Prussia in war.

On the 11th of March, 1867, a month after the formation of the Confederation of the North German States, Bismarck proclaims with pride in the new Reichstag: “Setzen win Deutschland, so zu sagen, in den Sattel! Reiten wird es schon können!”

October 13th, 1868, Leopold von Sigmaringen, a German prince of the House of Hohenzollern, is named for the first time as a candidate for the Spanish throne. Nobody in Germany, or anywhere else, was much more interested in this candidature, than we are now interested in the woman’s suffrage or the prohibition candidate at home. But France had looked on with jealous eyes at the vigorous growth and martial successes of Prussia. It was thought well to attack her and humiliate her before she became stronger. All France was convinced, too, that the southern German states would revert to their old love in case of actual war, and side with the nephew of their former friend, the great Napoleon. The French ambassador is instructed to force the pace. Not only must the Prussian King disavow all intention to support the candidacy of the German prince, but he must be asked to humiliate himself by binding himself never in the future to push such claims.

William I is at Ems, and Benedetti, the French ambassador, reluctantly presses the insulting demand of his country upon the royal gentleman as he is walking. The King declines to see Benedetti again, and telegraphs to Bismarck the gist of the interview. Lord Acton writes: “He [Bismarck] drew his long pencil and altered the text, showing only that Benedetti had presented an offensive demand, and that the King had refused to see him. That there might be no mistake he made this official by sending it to all the embassies and legations. Moltke exclaimed, ‘You have converted surrender into defiance.’ ” The altered telegram was also sent to the Norddeutscher Allgemeine Zeitung and to officials. It is not perhaps generally known that General Lebrun went to Vienna in June, 1870, to discuss an alliance with Austria for an attack on the North German Confederation in the following spring. Bismarck knew this. This was on the 13th of July, 1870; on the 16th the order was given to mobilize the army, on the 31st followed the proclamation of the King to his people: “Zur Errettung des Vaterlandes.” On August the 2d, King William took command of the German armies, and on September 1st, Napoleon handed over his sword, and on January the 18th, 1871, King William of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of the Mirrors in the Palace at Versailles.

“It sounds so lovely what our fathers did,
And what we do is, as it was to them,
Toilsome and incomplete.”

It is easy to forget in such a rapid survey of events that Bismarck could have had any serious opposition to face as he tramped through those eight years, from 1862 to 1870, with a kingdom on his back. It is easy to forget that King William himself wished to abdicate in those dark hours, when his people refused him their confidence, and called a halt upon his endeavors to strengthen the absolutely essential instrument for Prussia’s development, the army; it is easy to forget that even the silent and seemingly imperturbable Moltke hesitated and wavered a little at the audacity of his comrade; it is easy to forget the conspiracy of opposition of the three women of the court, the Crown Princess, Frau von Blumenthal, and Frau von Gottberg, all of English birth, and all using needles against this man accustomed to the Schläger and the sword; it is easy to forget that even Queen Victoria’s influence was used against him to prevent the reaping of the justifiable fruits of victory in 1871; it is easy to forget what a bold throw it was to go to war with Austria, and to array Prussia against the very German states she must later bind to herself; it is easy to forget the dour patience of this irascible giant with the petulant and often petty legislature with which he had to deal.

I cannot understand how any German can criticise Bismarck, but there are official prigs who do; little decorated bureaucrats who live their lives out poring over papers, with an eye out for a “von” before their bourgeois names, and as void of audacity as a sheep; men who creep up the stairway to promotion and recognition, clinging with cautious grip to the banisters. One sees them, their coats covered with the ceramic insignia of their placid servitude, decorations tossed to them by the careless hand of a master who is satisfied if they but sign his decrees, with the i’s properly dotted, and the t’s unexceptionably crossed. They are the crumply officials who melted into defencelessness and moral decrepitude after Frederick the Great, and again at the glance of Napoleon, and who owe the little stiffness they have to the fact that Bismarck lived. It is one of the things a full-blooded man is least able to bear in Germany, to hear the querulous questioning of the great deeds of this man, whose boot-legs were stiffer than the backbones of those who decry him.

What a splendid fellow he was!

“Give me the spirit that, on this life’s rough sea,
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble and his masts do crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is - there’s not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.”

He was no worshipper of that flimsy culture which is, and has been for a hundred years, an obsession of the German. He knew, none knew better indeed, that the choicest knowledge is only mitigated ignorance. He surprised Disraeli with his mastery of English, and Napoleon with his fluency in French, both of which he had learned from his Huguenot professors. The popular man, the popular book, the popular music, picture, or play, were none of them a golden calf to him. He mastered what he needed for his work, and pretended to no enthusiasm for intellectualism as such. He knew that there is no real culture without character, and that the mere aptitude for knowing and doing without character is merely the simian cleverness that often dazzles but never does anything of importance. “Culture!” writes Henry Morley, “the aim of culture is to bring forth in their due season the fruits of the earth.” Any learning, any accomplishments, that do not serve a man to bring forth the fruits of the earth in their due season are merely mental gimcracks, flimsy toys, to admire perhaps, to play with, and to be thrown aside as useless when duty makes its sovereign demands.

Much as Germany has done for the development of the intellectual life of the world, she has suffered not a little from the superficial belief still widely held that instruction, that learning, are culture. Their Great Elector, their Frederick the Great, and their Bismarck, should have taught them the contrary by now.

The newly crowned German Emperor left Versailles on March 7th for Berlin, and on March 21st the first Diet of the new empire was opened, and began the task of adapting the constitution to the altered circumstances of the new empire.

The German Empire now consists of four kingdoms: Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Würtemberg; of six grand duchies: Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, Saxe-Weimar, Oldenburg, Meeklenburg-Strelitz, and Mecklenburg-Schwerin; of five duchies: Saxe-Meinigen, Saxe-Altenburg Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Brunswick, and Anhalt; of seven principalities: Schwartzburg-Sondershausen, Schwartzburg-Rudolstadt, Waldeck, Reuss (older line), Reuss (younger line), Lippe, and Schaumburg-Lippe; of three free towns: Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck; and of one imperial province: Alsace Lorraine.

The new empire is in a sense a continuation of the North German Confederation. There are 25 states, the largest, Prussia, with a population of over 40,000,000; the smallest, Schaumburg-Lippe, with a population of a little more than 46,000 and an area of 131 square miles.

The central or federal authority controls the army, navy, foreign relations, railways, main roads, canals, post and telegraph, coinage, weights and measures, copyrights, patents, and legislation over nearly the whole field of civil and criminal law, regulation of press and associations, imperial finance and customs tariffs, which are now the same throughout Germany.

Bavaria still manages her own railways, and Saxony and Würtemberg have certain privileges and exemptions. Administration is still almost entirely in the hands of the separate states.

The law is imperial, but the judges are appointed by the states, and are under its authority. The supreme court of appeal (Reichsgericht) sits at Leipsic.

The head of the executive government is the Emperor, no longer elective but hereditary, and attached to the office of the King of Prussia. Outside of Prussia he has little power in civil matters and no veto on legislation. He is commander-in-chief of the army and of the navy; foreign affairs are in his hands, and in the federal council, or Bundesrath, he exercises a mighty influence due to Prussia’s preponderating influence and voting power. There is no cabinet, just as there is no cabinet in Great Britain, that modern institution being merely a legislative fiction down to this day. The chancellor of the empire, who is also prime minister of Prussia, with several secretaries of state, is chief minister for all imperial affairs. The chancellor presides in the Bundesrath, and has the right to speak in the Reichstag, and frequently does speak there. Indeed, all his more important pronouncements are made there. The chancellor is responsible to the Emperor alone, by whom he is nominated, and not to the representatives of the people.

The federal council, or Bundesrath, or upper chamber of the empire, consists of delegates appointed by and representing the rulers of the various states. There are 58 members. Prussia has 17, Bavaria 6, Saxony 4, Würtemberg 4, Baden 3, Hessen 3, Mecklenburg-Schwerin 2, Brunswick 2, and each of the other states 1.

This body meets in Berlin, sits in secret, and the delegates have no discretion, but vote as directed by their state governments. Here it is that Prussia, and through Prussia the Emperor, dominates. This Bundesrath is the most powerful upper chamber in the world. With respect to all laws concerning the army and navy, and taxation for imperial purposes, the vote of Prussia shall decide disputes, if such vote be cast in favor of maintaining existing arrangements. In other words, Prussia is armed in the Bundesrath with a conservative veto! In declaring war and making treaties, the consent of the Bundesrath is required. The following articles also give the Bundesrath a very complete control of the Reichstag. Article 7 reads: “The Bundesrath shall take action upon (1) the measures to be proposed to the Reichstag and the resolutions passed by the same; (2) the general administrative provisions and arrangements necessary for the execution of the imperial laws, so far as no other provision is made by law; (3) the defects which may be discovered in the execution of the imperial laws or of the provisions and arrangements heretofore mentioned.”

The Reichstag, or lower house, is elected by universal suffrage in electoral districts which were originally equal, but as we have noted are far from equal now. This house has three hundred and ninety-seven members, of whom two hundred and thirty-five are from Prussia. It sits for five years, but may be dissolved by the Bundesrath with the consent of the Emperor. All members of the Bundesrath, as well as the chancellor, may speak in the Reichstag. Nor the chancellor, nor any other executive officer, is responsible to the Reichstag, nor can be removed by its vote, and the ministers of the Emperor are seldom or never chosen from this body. This Reichstag is really only nominally a portion of the governing body. It has the right to refuse to pass a bill presented by the government, but if it does so it may be summarily dismissed, as has happened several times, and another election usually provides a more amenable body.

Of the various political parties in the Reichstag we have written elsewhere. It is, perhaps, fair to say that such powerful parties as the Socialists and the Centrum must be reckoned with by the chancellor. He cannot actually trample upon them, nor can he disregard wholly their wishes in framing and in carrying through legislation. It would be going much too far in characterizing the weakness of the Reichstag to leave that impression upon the reader. None the less it remains true that it is the executive who rules and has the whip-hand, and who in a grave crisis can override the representatives of the people assembled in the Reichstag, and on more than one occasion this has been done.

It seems highly unnecessary to announce after this description of the imperial constitution that there is no such thing in Germany as democratic or representative government. But this fact cannot be proclaimed too often since in other countries it is continually assumed that this is the case. All sorts of deductions are made, all sorts of illustrations used, all sorts of legislative and social lessons taught from the example of Germany, without the smallest knowledge apparently on the part of those who make them, that Germany to-day is no more democratic than was Turkey twenty years ago.

What can be done and what is done in Germany has no possible bearing upon what can be done in America or in England. All analogies are false, all illustrations futile, all examples valueless, for the one reason that the empire of Germany is governed by one man, who declaims his independence of the people and admits his responsibility to God alone. This may be either a good or a bad thing. Certainly in many matters of economical and comfortable government for the people- witness more particularly the development and wise control of their municipalities-they are a century ahead of us, but this is not the question under discussion. The point is, that a compact nation under strict centralized control, served by a trained horde of officials with no wish for a change, and backed by a standing army of over seven hundred thousand men, who are not only a defence against the foreigner, but a powerful police against internal revolution, cannot serve as a model in either its successes or failures for a democratic country like ours. Where in Germany legislative schemes succeed easily when this huge bureaucratic machine is behind them, they would fail ignominiously in a country lacking this machinery, and lacking these pitiably tame people accustomed to submission.

In France, for example, that thrifty and individualistic folk made a complete failure of the attempt to foist contributory old-age pensions upon them, and I doubt whether such sumptuary legislation can succeed with us. That, however, is neither here nor there. The gist of the matter is, that because such things succeed in Germany, gives not the slightest reason for supposing that they will succeed with us. If this outline of their history and this sketch of their government have done nothing else, it must have made this clear. It may also help to show how vapid is the talk about what the German people will or will not do; whether they will or will not have war, for example. We shall have war when the German Kaiser touches a button and gives an order, and the German people will have no more to say in the matter than you and I.

III THE INDISCREET

The casual observer of life in England would find himself forced to write of sport, even as in India he would write of caste, as in America he would note the undue emphasis laid upon politics. In Germany, wherever he turns, whether it be to look at the army, to inquire about the navy, to study the constitution, or to disentangle the web of present-day political strife; to read the figures of commercial and industrial progress, or the results of social legislation; to look on at the Germans at play during their yachting week at Kiel, or their rowing contests at Frankfort, he finds himself face to face with the Emperor.

The student visits Berlin, or Potsdam, or Wilhelmshöhe; or with a long stride finds himself on the docks at Hamburg or Bremen, or beside the Kiel Canal, or in Kiel harbor facing a fleet of war-ships; or he lifts his eyes into the air to see a dirigible balloon returning from a voyage of two hundred and fifty miles toward London over the North Sea, and the Emperor is there. Is it the palace hidden in its shrubbery in the country; is it the clean, broad streets and decorations of the capital; is it a discussion of domestic politics, or a question of foreign politics, the Emperor’s hand is there. His opinion, his influence, what he has said or has not said, are inextricably interwoven with the woof and web of German life.

We may like him or dislike him, approve or disapprove, rejoice in autocracy or abominate it, admire the far-reaching discipline, or regret the iron mould in which much of German life is encased, but for the moment all this is beside the mark. Here is a man who in a quarter of a century has so grown into the life of a nation, the most powerful on the continent, and one of the three most powerful in the world, that when you touch it anywhere you touch him, and when you think of it from any angle of thought, or describe it from any point of view, you find yourself including him.

Personally, I should have been glad to leave this chapter unwritten. I have no taste for the discussion and analysis of living persons, even when they are of such historic and social importance, and of such magnitude, that I am thus given the proverbial license of the cat. But to write about Germany without writing about the Emperor is as impossible as to jump away from one’s own shadow. When the sun is behind any phase or department of German life, the shadow cast is that of Germany’s Emperor.

This is not said because it is pleasing to whomsoever it may be, for in Germany, and in much of the world outside Germany, this situation is looked upon as unfavorable, and even deplorable; and certainly no American can look upon it with equanimity, for it is of the essence of his Americanism to distrust it. It is, however, so much a fact that to neglect a discussion of this personality would be to leave even so slight a sketch of Germany as this, hopelessly lop-sided. He so pervades German life that to write of the Germany of the last twenty-five years without attempting to describe William the Second, German Emperor, would be to leave every question, institution, and problem of the country without its master-key.

In other chapters dealing more particularly with the political development of Germany, and with the salient characteristics, mental and moral, of the people, we shall see how it has come about, that one man can thus impregnate a whole nation of sixty-five millions with his own aims and ambitions, to such an extent, that they may be said, so to speak, to live their political, social, martial, religious, and even their industrial, life in him. It is a phenomenon of personality that exists nowhere else in the world to-day, and on so large a scale and among so enlightened a people, perhaps never before in history.

Nothing has made scientific accuracy in dealing with the most interesting and most important factors in the world, so utterly inaccurate and misleading, as those infallibly accurate and impersonal agents, electricity and the sun. If one were to judge a man by his photographs, and the gossip of the press, one would be sure to know nothing more valuable about him than that his mustache is brushed up, and that his brows are permanently lowering. Personality is so evasive that one may count upon it that when a machine says “There it is!” then there it is not! You will have everything that is patent and nothing that is pertinent.

We are forever talking and writing about the smallness of the world, of how much better we know one another, and of how much more we should love one another, now that we flash photographs and messages to and fro, at a speed of leagues a second. Nothing could be more futile and foolish. These things have emphasized our differences, they have done nothing to realize our likeness to one another. We are as far from one another as in the days, late in the tenth century, when they complained in England that men learned fierceness from the Saxon of Germany, effeminacy from the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane.

As probably the outstanding figure and best-known, superficially known, man in the world, the German Emperor has escaped the notice of very few people who notice anything. His likeness is everywhere, and gossip about him is on every tongue. He is as familiar to the American as Roosevelt, to the Englishman as Lloyd-George, to the Frenchman as Dreyfus, to the Russian as his Czar, and to the Chinese and Japanese as their most prominent political figure. And yet I should say that he is comparatively little known, either externally or internally, as he is.

It is perhaps the fate of those of most influence to be misunderstood. Of this, I fancy, the Emperor does not complain. Indeed, those feeble folk who complain of being misunderstood, ought to console themselves with the thought that practically all our imperishable monuments, are erected to the glory of those whom we condemned and criticised; starved and stoned; burned and crucified, when we had them with us.

William II, German Emperor and King of Prussia, was born January 27, 1859, and became German Emperor June 15, 1888. He is, therefore, in the prime of life, and looks it. His complexion and eyes are as clear as those of an athlete, and his eyes, and his movements, and his talk are vibrating with energy. He stands, I should guess, about five feet eight or nine, has the figure and activity of an athletic youth of thirty, and in his hours of friendliness is as careless in speech, as unaffected in manner, as lacking in any suspicion of self- consciousness, or of any desire to impress you with his importance, as the simplest gentleman in the land.

Alas, how often this courageous and gentlemanly attitude has been taken advantage of! I have headed this chapter The Indiscreet, and I propose to examine these so-called indiscretions in some detail, but for the moment I must ask: Is there any excuse for, or any social punishment too severe for, the man who, introduced into a gentleman’s house in the guise of a gentleman, often by his own ambassador, leaves it, to blab every detail of the conversation of his host, with the gesticulations and exclamation points added by himself? To add a little to his own importance, he will steal out with the conversational forks and spoons in his pockets, and rush to a newspaper office to tell the world that he has kept his soiled napkin as a souvenir. The only indiscretion in such a case is when the host, or his advisers, or gentlemen anywhere, heed the lunatic laughter of such a social jackal.

To count one’s words, to tie up one’s phrases in caution, to dip each sentence in a diplomatic antiseptic, in the company of those to whom one has conceded hospitality, what a feeble policy! Better be brayed to the world every day as indiscreet than that!

It is a fine quality in a man to be in love with his job. Even though you have little sympathy with Savonarola’s fierceness or Wesley’s hardness, they were burning up all the time with their allegiance to their ideals of salvation. They served their Lord as lovers. Many men, even kings and princes and other potentates, give the impression that they would enjoy a holiday from their task. They seem to be harnessed to their duties rather than possessed by them; they appear like disillusioned husbands rather than as radiant lovers.

The German Emperor is not of that class. He loves his job. In his first proclamation to his people he declared that he had taken over the government “in the presence of the King of kings, promising God to be a just and merciful prince, cultivating piety and the fear of God.” He has proclaimed himself to be, as did Frederick the Great and his grandfather before him, the servant of his people. Certainly no one in the German Empire works harder, and what is far more difficult and far more self-denying, no one keeps himself fitter for his duties than he. He eats no red meat, drinks almost no alcohol, smokes very little, takes a very light meal at night, goes to bed early and gets up early. He rides, walks, shoots, plays tennis, and is as much in the open air as his duties permit.

It is not easy for the American to put side by side the attitudes of a man, who is the autocratic master and at the same time declares himself to be the first servant of his people. Perhaps if it is phrased differently it will not seem so contradictory. What this Emperor means, and what all princes who have believed in their right to rule meant, was not that they were the servants of their people, but the servants of their own obligations to their people, and of the duties that followed therefrom. If in addition to this the claim is made by the sovereign, that his right to rule is of divine origin, then his service to his obligations becomes of the highest and most sacred importance.

We should not allow our democratic prejudices to stifle our understanding in such matters. We are trying to get clearly in perspective a ruler, who claims to rule in obedience to no mandates from the people, but in obedience to God. We could not be ruled by such a one in America; and in England such a ruler would be deemed unconstitutional. It is elementary, but necessary to repeat, that we are writing of Germany and the Germans, and of their history, traditions, and political methods. We are making no defence of either the German Emperor or the German people; neither are we occupying an American pulpit to preach to them the superiority of other methods than their own. My sole task is to make clear the German situation, and not by any means to set up my own or my countrymen’s standards for their adoption. I am not searching for that paltry and ephemeral profit that comes from finding opportunities to laugh or to sneer. I am seeking for the German successes, and they are many, and for the reasons for them, and for the lessons that we may learn from them. Any other aim in writing of another people is ignoble.

This attitude of the ruler will be as incomprehensible to the democratic citizen as alchemy, but, in order to draw anything like true inferences or useful deductions, in order to understand the situation and to get a true likeness of the ruler, one must take this utterly unfamiliar and to us incomprehensible claim into consideration, and acknowledge its existence whether we admit the claim as justifiable or not. The relation of such a ruler to his people is like that of a Catholic bishop to his flock. The contract is not one made with hands, but is an inalienable right on the one hand, and an undisseverable tie upon the other. Bismarck wrote on this subject: “Für mich sind die Worte, ‘von Gottes Gnaden,’ welche christliche Herrscher ihrem Namen beifügen, kein leerer Schall, sondern ich sehe darin das Bekenntniss, des Fürsten das Scepter was ihnen Gott verliehen hat, nur nach Gottes Willen auf Erden führen wollen.”

On several occasions the German Emperor has made it unmistakably clear that this is his view of the origin and sanctity of his responsibilities. “If we have been able to accomplish what has been accomplished, it is due above all things to the fact that our house possesses a tradition by virtue of which we consider that we have been appointed by God to preserve and direct, for their own welfare, the people over whom he has given us power.” These words are from a speech made in 1897 at Bremen. In 1910, at Königsberg, he declares: “It was in this spot that my grandfather in his own right placed the royal crown of Prussia upon his head, insisting once again that it was bestowed upon him by the grace of God alone, and not by parliaments and meetings and decisions of the people. He thus regarded himself as the chosen instrument of heaven, and as such carried out his duties as a ruler and lord. I consider myself such an instrument of heaven, and shall go my way without regard to the views and opinions of the day.”

Prince Henry of Prussia, the popular, and deservedly popular, sailor brother of the Emperor, has signified his entire allegiance to this doctrine by saying that he was actuated by one single motive: “a desire to proclaim to the nations the gospel of your Majesty’s sacred person, and to preach that gospel alike to those who will listen and to those who will not.”

This language has a strange and far-away sound to us. It is as though one should come into the market-place with the bannered pomp of Milton’s prose upon his lips. The vicious would think it a trick, the idle would look upon it as a heavy form of joking, the intelligent would see in it a superstition, or a dream of knighthood that has faded into unrecognizable dimness. Some men, on the other hand, might wish that all rulers and governors whatsoever were equally touched with the sanctity of their obligations.

It is somewhat strange in this connection to remember, that we all wish to have our wives and daughters believers; that we all wish to bind to us those whom we love with more sacred bonds than those which we ourselves can supply. We are none of us loath to have those who keep our treasures, believe in some code higher than that of “honesty is the best policy.” As Archbishop Whately said: “Honesty is the best policy, but he who is honest for that reason is not an honest man.”

Far be it from me to appear as an advocate of the divine right of kings; but I am no fit person for this particular task if I have only a sniff, or a guffaw, as an explanation of another’s beliefs. History sparkles with the lives of men and women, who proclaimed themselves messengers and servants of God, obedient to him first, and utterly and courageously negligent of that feline commodity, public opinion. Every man, even to-day,

“Who each for the joy of the working, and each in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are,”

has a grain of this salt of divine independence in him. To-day, even as in the days of Pericles: “It is ever from the greatest hazards that the greatest honors are gained,” and the greatest hazard of all is to shut your visor and couch your lance and have at your task with a whispered: God and my Right! It is well to remember that under no government, whether democratic or aristocratic, has the individual ever been given any rights. He has always everywhere been pointed to his duties; his rights he must conquer for himself.

The liberal in theology, as the liberal in politics, has perhaps leaned too far toward softness. The democratization of religion has gone on with the rest, and in our rebound from Calvin, and John Knox, and Jonathan Edwards, we have left all discipline and authority out of account. We have preached so persistently of the fatherhood of God, of his nearness to us, of his profound pity for us, that we have lost sight of his justice and his power. This nearness has become a sort of innocuous neighborliness, and God is looked upon not as a ruler, but as a vaporish good fellow whose chief business it is to forgive. We have substituted a feverish-handed charity for a sinewy faith, and are excusing our divorce from divinely imposed duties, by a cheerful but illicit intercourse with chance acquaintances, all of whom are dubbed social service.

This Cashmere-shawl theology is as idle an interpretation of man’s relation to the universe, and far more debilitating, than any that has gone before. When we come to measure rulers who make divine claims for their duties, from any such coign of flabbiness as this, no wonder we stand dumb. I am willing to concede that perhaps even an emperor has been baptized with the blood of the martyrs, and feels himself to be in all sincerity the instrument of God; if we are to understand this one, we must admit so much.

In certain departments of life, we not only grant, but we demand, that our wives and mothers should look upon their special duties and peculiar functions as divinely imparted, and as beyond argument, and as above coercion. This assumption, therefore, of inalienable rights is not so strange to us; on the contrary, it is an every-day affair in most of our lives. This particular manifestation of it is all that is new or surprising. We Americans and English look upon it as dangerous, but the Germans, more mystical and far more lethargic about liberty than are we, are not greatly disturbed by it. The secular press, largely in Jewish hands, and the new socialist members of the Reichstag, jealous of their prerogatives but unable to assert them, criticise and even scream their abhorrence and unbelief; but I am much mistaken, if the mass of the Germans are at heart much disturbed by their Emperor’s assertions of his divine right to rule. A conservative member of the Reichstag speaks of, “a parliament which will maintain the monarch in his strong position as the wearer of the German imperial crown, not the semblance of a monarch but one that is dependent upon something higher than party and parliament - one dependent upon the King of all kings.”

To a thoroughbred American, with two and more centuries of the traditions of independence behind him, this question of the divine right of kings is a commonplace. He is a king himself, he holds his own rights to be divine, and his influence and his power to be limited only by his character and his abilities, like that of any other sovereign. He may rule over few or many, he may control the destiny of only one or of many subjects, he may be well known or little known, but that he is a sovereign individual by the grace of God, it never occurs to him to doubt. It is perhaps for this reason that the real American is placid and unself-conscious before this claim. It is those who admit and suffer from the exactions and tyrannies of such a claim that he pities, not the man who makes it, whom he distrusts. I carry my sovereignty under my hat, says the American; if any man or men can knock off the hat and take away the sovereignty, there is a fair field and no favor; for those who whimper and complain of tyranny he has long since ceased to have a high regard.

That William the Second is the chief figure of interest in the world to-day is due, not alone to this assumption of a divine relation to the state, or to his own vigorous and electric personality, but to the freedom to develop and to express that personality. Men in politics have dwindled in importance and in power, as the voters have increased in numbers and in influence. Genius must be true to itself to bloom luxuriantly. It is impossible to be seeking the suffrage of a constituency and at the same time to be wholly one’s self. The German Emperor is unhampered, as is no other ruler, by considerations of popular favor; and at the same time he directs and influences not Russian peasants, nor Turkish slaves, but an instructed, enlightened, and ambitious people. This environment is unique in the world to-day, and the Germans as a whole seem to consider their ruler a valuable asset, despite occasional vagaries that bring down their own and foreign criticism upon him.

Here we have a versatile and vigorous personality with no shadow of a stain upon his character, and with no question upon the part of his bitterest enemy of the honesty of his intentions, or of his devotion to his country’s interests. So far as he has been assailed abroad, it is on the score that he has made his country so powerful in the last twenty-five years that Germany is a menace to other powers; so far as he has been criticised at home it is on the score of his indiscretions.

It is of prime importance, therefore, both to glance at the progress of Germany and to examine these so-called indiscretions. Throughout these chapters will be found facts and figures dealing with the fairy-like change which has taken place in Germany since my own student days. I can remember when a chimney was a rare sight. Now there are almost as many manufacturing towns as then there were chimneys. Leipzig was a big country town, Pforzheim, Chemnitz, Oschatz, Elberfeld, Riessa, Kiel, Essen, Rheinhausen, and their armies of laborers, and their millions of output, were mere shadows of what they are now.

In 1873, when Bismarck began his attempts at railway legislation, Germany was divided into sixty-three “railway provinces,” and there were fifteen hundred different tariffs, and it is to be remembered that it was only as late as 1882 that the state system of railways at last triumphed in Prussia. In only ten years the railway trackage has increased from 49,041 to 52,216 miles; the number of locomotives from 18,291 to 26,612; freight-cars from 398,000 to 558,000; the passengers carried from 804,000,000 to 1,457,000,000; and the tons of freight carried from 341,000,000 tons to 519,000,000 tons. In Prussia alone there are 1,000,000 more horses, 1,000,000 more beef cattle, and 10,000,000 more pigs. The total production of beet sugar in the world approximates 7,000,000 tons; of this amount Germany produces 2,500,000 tons. Great Britain consumes more sugar per head of the population than any other country, and of her consumption of 1,460,000 tons of beet sugar all of it is produced from beets grown on the continent. Between 1885 and 1912 the population increased from 46,000,000 to 66,000,000. The expenditure on the navy has increased in the last ten years from $47,500,000 to $110,000,000, and the number of men from 31,157 to 60,805, with another increase in both money and men, voted at the moment of this writing in the summer of 1912.

The debt of Germany, exclusive of paper money, in 1887 was 486,201,000 marks; in 1903 it stood at 2,733,500,000. In 1911 the funded debt of the empire was 4,524,000,000 marks, and the funded debt of the states 14,880,000,000; and the floating debt amounts to 991,000,000, of which Prussia alone bears 610,000,000 and the empire 300,000,000. Between the years 1871 and 1897 a debt of $500,000,000 was incurred, bearing an average interest charge of 3 3/4 per cent. In the year 1908 the combined expenditures of the states and of the empire reached the enormous total of $1,775,000,000. The debt of the city of Berlin alone in 1910 had reached $110,750,000 and has increased in the last two years.

For purposes of comparison one may note that our own later national budgets run roughly to $1,000,000,000. The British budget for 1911 was $906,420,000. After the French war, speculation on a large scale ensued. The payment of the $1,000,000,000 indemnity had a bad effect. As has often happened in America, money, or the mere means of exchange, was taken for wealth. The earth will be as cold as the moon before men learn that the only real wealth is health. Many schemes and companies were floated and after 1873 there was a prolonged financial crisis in Germany. It is said that bankruptcy and the liquidation of bubble companies entailed a loss of a round $90,000,000. It was in 1876-7, when Germany was thus suffering, that the policy of protection was mooted and finally put into operation by Bismarck in 1879. Ten years later the laws for accident, old age, and sickness insurance were passed, at the instigation and under the direct influence of the present Emperor.

The tonnage of steam vessels under 4,000 tons in Great Britain (net tons) was, some five years ago, 8,165,527; in Germany (gross tons), 977,410; but the tonnage of steam vessels of 4,000 tons and over was in Great Britain 1,446,486, in Germany 1,119,537! It should be added that no small part of Great Britain’s big ships belong to the American Shipping Trust, sailing under the British flag. Albert Ballin became a director of the Hamburg-American line in 1886, and was made general director in 1900. During his directorship the capital of the line has been increased from 15,000,000 to 125,000,000 of marks, and the number of steamers from 26 to 170.

Germany’s combined export and import trade in 1880 was $1,429,025,000; in 1890, $1,875,050,000; and in 1905 it was $3,324,018,000; in 1910, $4,019,072,250. The German production of coal and coal products in 1910 was the highest in its history, amounting to 265,148,232 metric tons. It would be easy enough to chronicle the commercial and industrial strides of Germany during the last quarter of a century by the compilation of a catalogue of figures. It is not my intention to persuade the reader to believe in any such fantastic theory as that the present Kaiser is entirely responsible for this progress. I am no Pygmalion that I can make an Emperor by breathing prayers before pages of statistics.

It is only fair, however, in any sketch of the Emperor to give this skeleton outline of what has taken place in the empire over which he rules, and which, in certain quarters, it is said, he menaces by his predilection for war. These few figures spell peace, they do not spell war, and the ruler who has some 700,000 armed men at his back, and a navy the second in strength in the world guarding his shores, and a mercantile marine carrying his trade which is hard on the heels of Great Britain as a rival, but who has none the less kept his country at peace with the world for twenty-five years, may be credited at least with good intentions.

It may be said in answer to this same argument that this building and training and enriching of a nation are a threat in themselves. True, a strong man is more dangerous than a weak one; but it is equally true that a strong man is a greater safeguard than a weak one where the question of peace is at stake. It is also true that a rich and powerful man must needs take more precautions against attack and robbery than a tramp. A tramp seldom carries even a bunch of keys, and pays no premium on fire, accident, or burglary insurance.

William the Second knows his history as well as any of his people, and incomparably better than his English, French, or American critics. He knows that only twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great, the Prussian power went down before Napoleon like a house of cards, and that the country’s humiliation was stamped in bold outlines when Napoleon was received in Berlin with the ringing of bells, the firing of cannons, and he himself greeted as a savior and a benefactor. That was only a hundred years ago. Is it an indiscretion, then, when the present ruler, speaking at Brandenburg the 5th of March, 1890, says: “I look upon the people and nation handed on to me as a responsibility conferred upon me by God, and that it is, as is written in the Bible, my duty to increase this heritage, for which one day I shall be called upon to give an account; those who try to interfere with my task, I shall crush”?

On his accession to the throne his first two proclamations were to the army and the navy, his third to the people. On the 14th of July, 1888, he reviewed the fleet at Kiel, and for the first time an Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia appeared there in the uniform of an admiral. In April, 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated the sixtieth year of her reign, and Prince Henry represented Germany, appearing as admiral of the fleet in an old battle-ship, the King William. On the 24th of April the Emperor telegraphed to his brother: “I regret exceedingly that I cannot put at your disposition for this celebration a better ship, especially when all other countries are appearing with their finest ships of war. It is a sad consequence of the manoeuvring of those unpatriotic persons who have obstructed the construction of even the most necessary war-ships. But I shall know no rest till I have placed our navy on a par for strength with our army.” From that day to this he has gone steadily forward demanding of his people a strong army and a powerful fleet. He now has both. He has pulled Germany out of danger and beyond the reach, for the moment at least, of any repetition of the catastrophe and humiliation of a hundred years ago. This is a solid fact, and for this situation the Emperor is largely, one might almost say wholly, responsible.

One hears and one reads criticisms of the Emperor’s habit of speaking and writing of “my navy.” It is said that the other states of Germany have borne taxation to build the fleet, and that it is no more the Emperor’s than that of the King of Bavaria, or of Würtemberg, or of Saxony. This is the petty, pin-pricking babble of boarding-school girls, or of those official supernumeraries who have turned sour in their retirement. Even the honest democrat is made indignant. If the German navy is not the work of William the Second, then its parentage is far to seek; and if the German navy is not proud to be called “my navy,” it is wofully lacking in gratitude to its creator.

No man who looks back over his own career, say of twenty-five years, but is both chastened and amused. He is chastened by the unforeseen dangers that he has escaped; he is amused by the certificates of failure, and the prophecies of disaster, that always everywhere accompany the man who takes part in the game in preference to sitting in the reserved seats, or peeking through a hole in the fence. I have not been honored with any such intimate association with the German Emperor as would enable me to say whether he has a highly developed sense of humor or not. I can only say for myself, that if I had lived through his Majesty’s last twenty-five years, I should need no other fillip to digestion than my chuckles over the prophecies of my enemies.

It has been said of him that he is volatile; that he flies from one task to another, finishing nothing; that his artistic tastes are the extravagant dreams of a Nero; that he loves publicity as a worn and obese soprano loves the centre of the stage; that his indiscretions would bring about the discharge of the most inconspicuous petty official. Others speak and write of him as a hero of mythology, as a mystic and a dreamer, looking for guidance to the traditions of mediaeval knighthood; while others, again, dub him a modernist, insist that he is a commercial traveller, hawking the wares of his country wherever he goes, and with an eye ever to the interests of Bremen and Hamburg and Essen and Pforzheim. Again, you hear that he is a Prussian junker, or that he is a cavalry officer, with all the prejudices and limitations of such a one; while, on the other hand, he is chided for enlisting the financial help of rich Jews and industrials. He is versatile, but versatility is a virtue so long as it does not extend to one’s principles. Every man who has profoundly influenced the life of the world, from Moses to Lincoln, has been versatile. Carlyle goes so far as to say: “I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men.” He speaks French well enough to address the Académie; he speaks English as well as a cultivated American, and no one speaks it more distinctly, more crisply, more trippingly upon the tongue, these days; he preaches a capital sermon; he is an accomplished binder of books; he is a successful and enthusiastic farmer, and he is frankly audacious in his loves and hatreds, his ambitions and his beliefs. He has, in short, no vermin blood in him at any rate. If you do not like him, you know why; and if you do, you know why as easily. He even knows what he believes about woman’s suffrage and about God, a rare conciseness of thinking in these troublous times.

There stands before you a man apparently as sound in mind and in body as any man who treads German soil; a man of great vivacity of mind and manner, and of wholesome delight in living; who bears huge responsibilities with good humor, and that most unwholesome of all things, undisputed power, with humility. At a banquet in Brandenburg the 5th of March, 1890, speaking of his many voyages, he said: “He who, alone at sea, standing on the bridge, with nothing over him but God’s heaven, has communed with himself will not mistake the value of such voyages. I could wish for many of my countrymen that they might live through similar hours of self-contemplation, where a man takes stock of what he has tried to do, and of what he has accomplished. Then it is that a man is cured of vanity, and we have all of us need of that.”

It is obvious that a man cannot be modest, as the above quotation would indicate, and at the same time preening with vanity; a Sir Philip Sidney and a Jew peddler; a careless, dashing cavalry officer or proud Prussian squire, and at the same time a wary and astute insurance agent for the empire; a preacher of duty and honor, and belief in God, and at the same time a political comedian deceiving his rivals abroad, and hoodwinking his subjects at home.

Not a few men, even of slight powers of observation and of meagre experience, have noted the strange fact that a blank and direct statement of the truth is very apt to be put down as a lie; and that a man who frankly expresses his beliefs and ambitions, and openly goes about his business and his pleasures with no thought of concealment, is often regarded as Machiavellian and deceitful, because a timid and cautious world finds it hard to believe that he is really as audacious as he appears.

Even those with the most limited list, of the great names of history at their disposal, cannot fail to remember that simplicity and directness have in the persons of their highest exemplars been misunderstood; hunted down like wild beasts, burned, crucified, and then, when they were well out of the way, crowned and held up to humanity as the saviors of the race. We will have none of them when authority, faith, truth, courage, show us our distorted images in the mirror of their lives. Crucify him, crucify him! has always been the cry when such a one asserts his moral kingship, or his sonship to God, or his audacious intention to live his own life; and in less tragic fashion, but none the less along the same lines, the world tends to pick at, and to fray the moral garments of, its leaders still to-day. When such a one succeeds through sheer simplicity, then that last feeble epitaph of mediocrity is applied to him: “He is lucky,” because so few people realize that “luck,” is merely not to be dependent upon luck.

It is apparent from the quotations I have given, and many more of the same tenor are at our disposal, that the personality we are studying has a very definite image of his place in the world, of the duties he is called upon to perform, of his rights according to his own conception of his authority and responsibilities, and of his intentions.

It is equally apparent that he looks upon history in quite another way than that usually accepted by the modern scientific historian. Taine and Green may explain everything, even kings and emperors, by the forces of climate, environment, and the slow-heaving influence of the people. This school of historians will tell you how Charlemagne, and Luther, and Cromwell, and Napoleon are to be accounted for by purely material explanations.

The German Emperor apparently believes that the history of the world and the development of mankind are due to a series of mighty factors, mysteriously endowed from on high and bearing the names of men, and not infrequently the names of emperors and kings. He is continually recalling his ancestors, the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and William I, his grandfather. These men made Prussia and Prussia made the German Empire, he declares. To the Brandenburg Parliament he says: “It is the great merit of my ancestors that they have always stood aloof from and above all parties, and that they have always succeeded in making political parties combine for the welfare of the whole people.”

Due to a quality in the German character that need not be discussed here, it is true that they have been led, and driven, and welded by powerful individuals. No Magna Charta, no Cromwell, no Declaration of Independence is to be found in German history. No vigorous demand from the people themselves marks their progress. You can read all there is of German history in the biographies of the Great Elector, of Frederick William the First, of Frederick the Great, of York, of von Stein, Hardenberg, Sharnhorst, and Blücher, of Bismarck, William I, and the present Emperor.

What the Kaiser believes of history is true of German history. If he asserts himself as he does in Germany, it is because two hundred and fifty years of German history put him wholly and entirely in the right. It is to be presumed that what every student of German history may see for himself, has not escaped the flexible intelligence of the present Emperor, and that is, that only the autocratic kings of Prussia succeeded, and that only an autocratic statesman succeeded, in bringing the whole country into line, by the acknowledgment of the King of Prussia, and his heirs forever, as German emperors.

The first so-called indiscretion of the present Emperor was magnificent. He dismissed Bismarck two years after he came to the throne. If you have ever been the owner of a yacht and your sailing-master has grown to be a tyrant, and you have taken your courage in your hand and bundled him over the side, you have had in a microcosmic way the sensations of such an experience.

It is said that Bismarck, then seventy-five years old, and since 1862 accustomed to undisputed power, demurred to the wish of the Emperor that the other ministers should have access to him directly, and not as heretofore only through the chancellor. It is said too that the matter-of-fact and somewhat cynical Bismarck, had but scanty respect for the mystical view of his grandfather as a saint, that the Emperor everywhere proclaimed. In 1896, the 20th of February, in speaking of his grandfather, he refers to him as: “The Emperor William, that personality which has become for us in some sort that of a saint.”

Bismarck, too, objected to the Emperor’s policy as regards the treatment of, and the legislation for, the workingmen. On February the 5th, 1890, he writes to Bismarck: “It is the duty of the state to regulate the duration and conditions of work in such manner that the health and the morality of the workingman may be preserved, and that his needs may be satisfied and his desire for equality before the law assured.”

“Now this is the tale of the Council the German Kaiser decreed,

“And the young king said:-‘I have found it, the road to the rest ye seek:
The strong shall wait for the weary, and the hale shall halt for the weak;
With the even tramp of an army where no man breaks from the line,
Ye shall march to peace and plenty, in the bond of brotherhood — sign!’ ”

Whatever the reasons, the criticisms, or the causes, the man whom we have been describing was as certain to dismiss Bismarck from office, as a bird is certain to fly and not to swim. The ruler who at a banquet May the 4th, 1891, proclaimed: “There is only one master of the nation: and that is I, and I will not abide any other”; and later, on the 16th of November, in an address to recruits said: “I need Christian soldiers, soldiers who say their Pater Noster. The soldier should not have a will of his own, but you should all have but one will and that is my will; there is but one law for you and that is mine.” Again, in addressing the recruits for the navy on the 5th of March, 1895, he said to them: “Just as I, as Emperor and ruler, consecrate my life and my strength to the service of the nation, so you are pledged to give your lives to me.” Such a man could not share his rule with Bismarck.

Bismarck left Berlin amid groans and tears. A prop had been rudely pushed from beneath the empire. The young Emperor would stumble and sway, and fall without this strong guide beside him. Men said this was the first sign of an imperious will and temper.

There is an Arab proverb which runs: “When God wishes to destroy an ant he gives it wings.” The Kaiser was to be given power for his own destruction. But what has happened? Absolutely nothing of these evil prophecies. In 1884 Bismarck was saying to Gerhard Rohlfs, the African explorer: “The main thing is, we neither can nor really want to colonize. We shall never have a fleet like France. Our artisans and lawyers and time-expired soldiers are no good as colonists.” If the ideas of William the Second were to prevail, it was time that Bismarck went over the side as pilot of the ship of state. The Kaiser in appropriate terms regretted the loss of this tried public servant and said: “However, the course remains the same — full steam ahead!”

Three days after the Jameson raid, on the 3d of January, 1896, the Kaiser telegraphed to President Krüger: “I beg to express to you my sincere congratulations that, without help from foreign powers, you have succeeded with your own people and by your own strength in driving out the armed bands which attempted to disturb the peace of your country, and in reestablishing order and in defending the independence of your people from attacks from outside.”

On the 28th of October, 1908, The Daily Telegraph of London published a long interview with the Emperor, the gist of which was that the British press and people continued to distrust him, while all the time he was and had been the friend of Great Britain. The Emperor cited instances of his friendship, declared the English were as mad as March hares not to believe in him; insisted that by reason of Germany’s increasing foreign commerce, and on account of the growing menace to peace in the Pacific Ocean, Germany was determined to have an adequate fleet, which perhaps one day even England might be glad to have alongside of her own.

In addition to these two incidents, the Emperor had written a letter to Lord Tweedmouth, who was already then a sick man, and probably not wholly responsible, in which it was said he had offered advice as to the increase of the British navy.

I have described these furious indiscretions, as they were called at the time, together, though they were years apart; for these utterances, and the constant repetition of his sense of responsibility to God, and not to the people he governs, are the heart of this whole contention that the German Emperor is indiscreet, is indiscreet even to the point of damaging his own prestige, and injuring his country’s interests abroad.

Of all these so-called indiscretions there is the question to ask: Should these things have been said? Should these things have been written? There are several things to be said in answer to these questions. I shall treat each one in turn, but all these statements told the truth and cleared the air. The Krüger telegram was not written by the Emperor, and when the worst construction is put upon it, it expressed what? It was merely the condemnation of freebooting methods, a condemnation, be it said, that it received from many right- minded and sincerely patriotic Englishmen, a condemnation too that was re-echoed from America. Only the honorable and winning personality of one of the most patriotic and charming men in England, Sir Starr Jameson, saved the raid from looking like piracy. A brave man spoke his mind about it, and he happened to be in a position so conspicuous that the rumble of his words was heard afar.

So far as The Daily Telegraph interview is concerned, the secret history of the incident has never been fully divulged. One may say, however, without fear of contradiction that the importance of the matter was unduly magnified, by those, both at home and abroad, who had something to gain by exaggeration. It is admitted on all sides by those best informed that at any rate the Emperor was neither responsible for the publication, a point to be kept in mind, nor for the choice of expressions used in the interview.

The letter to Lord Tweedmouth was a friendly communication dealing with the conditions of the British and German fleets in the past and present, and without a word in it that might not have been published in The Times. It was quite innocent of the sinister significance placed upon it by those who had not seen it; and the British Ministry declined to publish it for entirely different reasons, reasons in no way connected with the German Emperor.

As we read The Daily Telegraph interview to-day, it is a plain document. Every word of it is true. The moment one looks at it from the point of view, that the Emperor of Germany is sincerely desirous of an amiable understanding with England, and that he is, for the peace and quiet of the world, working toward that end, there is no adverse criticism to be passed upon it. The English are thoroughly and completely mistaken about the attitude of the German Emperor toward them. He is far and away the best and most powerful friend they have in Europe, and I, for one, would be willing to forgive him were he irritated at their misunderstanding of him. Personally, I have not the shadow of a doubt that had France or Russia treated the German Emperor with the cool distrust shown him by the British, the German army and fleet would have moved ere this.

To those who know the Britisher he is forgiven for those luxuries of insular stupidity which punctuate his history. I know what a fine fellow he is, and I pass them by. Mr. Churchill speaks of the German fleet as a “luxury”; but this is only one of those cold-storage impromptus that a reputation for cleverness must keep on hand, and when Lord Haldane in a clumsy attempt to praise the German Emperor speaks of him as “half English” I laugh, as one laughs at the story of fat Gibbon kneeling to propose to a lady and requiring a servant to get him on his legs again. British courting often needs a lackey to keep it on its legs.

Could anything be more burningly irritable to the Germans than those two unnecessary statements? For the moment I am dealing with the attitude of the Emperor alone. Of the tirades of Chamberlain and Woltmann, Schmoller, Treitschke, Delbrück, Zorn, and other under-exercised professors, one may speak elsewhere. They are as unpardonable as the yokel rhetoric of our British friends. Of the Emperor’s insistence upon his friendliness, of his outspoken betrayal of his real feelings, of his audacious policy of telling the blunt truth, I am, alas, no fair judge, for I am too entirely the advocate of keeping as few cats in the bag as possible. If these things had not been said and written, it is true that there would have been no tumult; having been said and written, I fail to see the slightest indication in the political life of either Germany or England to-day that they did harm. Certainly, from his own point of view of what his position entails, they can hardly, as the radicals in Germany claim, be considered as unconstitutional or beyond his prerogative.

When the German Emperor says: “I,” he refers to the authority and responsibility and dignity of the German imperial crown. He is not magnifying his personal importance; he is emphasizing the dignity and importance of every German citizen. Let us try to understand the situation before we pass judgment! Both German radicalism and German socialism are peculiar to Germany, and everywhere misunderstood abroad. They both demand things of the government for the easement of their position, they both demand certain privileges, but they do not seek or want either authority or responsibility. Look at the figures of their proportionate increase and compare this with their actual influence in the Reichstag to-day. From 1881 to 1911, here is the percentage of votes cast by the five representative political parties:

| 1881 | 1893 | 1911
The National Liberals | 14.6 | 12.9 | 14.0
The Freisinnige and south German Volkspartei | 23.2 | 14.2 | 13.1
The Conservatives, including the Deutsche and Freikonservative | 23.7 | 20.4 | 12.4
The Centrum (Catholic party) | 23.2 | 19.0 | 16.3
The social Democrats | 6.1 | 23.2 | 34.8

If it were thought for a moment in Germany that the Socialists could come into real power, their vote and the number of their representatives in the Reichstag would dwindle away in one single election.

The average German is no leader of men, no lover of an emergency, no social or political colonist, and he would shrink from the initiative and daring and endurance demanded by a real political revolution and a real change of authority, as a hen from water. The very quality in his ruler that we take for granted he must dislike is the quality that at the bottom of his heart he adores, and he reposes upon it as the very foundation of his sense of security, and as the very bulwark behind which he makes grimaces and shakes his fist at his enemies. Such men as the present chancellor, von Bethmann-Hollweg, a very calm spectator of his country’s doings, and the Emperor himself, both know this.

As he looks at history and at life, it follows that he must be interested in everything that concerns his people, and not infrequently take a hand in settling questions, or in pushing enterprises, that seem too widely apart to be dealt with by one man, and too far afield for his constitutional obligations to profit by his interference. Certainly German progress shows that the Germans can have no ground to quote: “Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi,” of their Emperor.

In the discussion of this question, I may remind my American readers, although the German constitution is dealt with elsewhere, that there is one difference between Germany and America politically, that must never be left out of our calculations. Such constitution and such rights as the German citizens have, were granted them by their rulers. The people of Prussia, or of Bavaria, or of Würtemberg, have not given certain powers to, and placed certain limitations upon, their rulers; on the contrary, their rulers have given the people certain of their own prerogatives and political privileges, and granted to the people as a favor, a certain share in government and certain powers, that only so long as seventy years ago belonged to the sovereign alone. It is not what the people have won and then shared with the ruler, but it is what the ruler has inherited or won and shared with the people, that makes the groundwork of the constitutions of the various states, and of the empire of Germany. Nothing has been taken away from the people of Prussia or from any other state in Germany that they once had; but certain rights and privileges have been granted by the rulers that were once wholly theirs. Bear this in mind, that it is William II and his ancestors who made Prussia Prussia, and voluntarily gave Prussians certain political rights, and not the citizens of Prussia who stormed the battlements of equal rights and made a treaty with their sovereign.

The King of Prussia is the largest landholder and the richest citizen of Prussia. We have seen what he expects of his navy and of his army. Speaking on the 6th of September, 1894, he says: “Gentlemen, opposition on the part of the Prussian nobility to their King is a monstrosity.”

But arid details are not history, and in this connection let us have done with them. I have documented this chapter with dates and quotations because the situation politically, is so far away from the experience or knowledge of the American, that he must be given certain facts to assist his imagination in making a true picture. I have done this, too, that the Kaiser may have his real background when we undertake to place him understandingly in the modern world. Here we have patriarchal rule still strong and still undoubting, coupled with the most successful social legislation, the most successful state control of railways, mines, and other enterprises; and a progress commercial and industrial during the last quarter of a century, second to none.

This ruler believes it to be essentially a part of his business to be a Lorenzo de Medici to his people in art; their high priest in religion; their envoy extraordinary to foreign peoples; their watchful father and friend in legislation dealing with their daily lives; their war-lord, and their best example in all that concerns domestic happiness and patriotic citizenship. He fulfils the words of the old German chronicle which reads: “Merito a nobis nostrisque posteris pater patriae appelatur quia erat egregius defensor et fortissimus propugnator nihili pendens vitam suam contra omnia adversa propter justitiam opponere.”

If history is not altogether valueless in its description of symptoms, the Germans are of a softer mould than some of us, more malleable, rather tempted to imitate than led by self-confidence to trust to their own ideals, and less hard in confronting the demands of other peoples, that they should accept absorption by them.

Spurned and disdained by Louis XIV, they fawned upon him, built palaces like his, dressed like his courtiers, wrote and spoke his language, copied his literary models, and even bored themselves with mistresses because this was the fashion at Versailles. He stole from them, only to be thrown the kisses of flattery in return. He sneered at them, only to be begged for his favors in return. He took their cities in time of peace, and they acknowledged the theft by a smirking adulation that he allowed one of their number to be crowned a king.

As for Napoleon, he performed a prolonged autopsy upon the Germans. They were dismembered or joined together as suited his plans. At his beck they fought against one another, or against Russia, or against England. He tossed them crowns, that they still wear proudly, as a master tosses biscuits to obedient spaniels. He put his poor relatives to rule over them, here and there, and they were grateful. He marched into their present capital, took away their monuments, and the sword of Frederick the Great, and they hailed him with tears and rejoicing as their benefactor, while their wittiest poet and sweetest singer, lauded him to the skies.

It is unpleasant to recall, but quite unfair to forget, these happenings of the last two hundred years in the history of the German people. What would any man say, after this, was their greatest need, if not self-confidence; if not twenty-five years of peace to enable them to recover from their beatings and humiliation; if not a powerful army and navy to give them the sense of security, by which alone prosperity and pride in their accomplishments and in themselves can be fostered; if not a ruler who holds ever before their eyes their ideals and the unfaltering energy required of them to attain them!

What nation would not be self-conscious after such dire experiences? What nation would not be tenderly sensitive as to its treatment by neighboring powers? What nation would not be even unduly keen to resent any appearance of an attempt to jostle it from its hard-won place in the sun? Their self-consciousness and sensitiveness and vanity are patent, but they are pardonable. As the leader of the Conservative party in the Reichstag, Doctor von Heydebrandt, speaking at Breslau in October, 1911, anent the Morocco controversy, said, after, alluding to the “bellicose impudence” of Lloyd-George: “The [British] ministry thrusts its fist under our nose, and declares, I alone command the world. It is bitterly hard for us who have 1870 behind us.” They feel that they should no longer be treated to such bumptiousness.

I trust that I am no swashbuckler, but I have the greatest sympathy with the present Emperor in his capacity as war-lord, and in his insistent stiffening of Germany’s martial backbone.

When shall we all recover from a certain international sickliness that keeps us all feverish? The continual talk and writing about international friendships, being of the same family, or the same race, the cousin propagandism in short, is irritating, not helpful. I do not go to Germany to discover how American is Germany, nor to England to discover how American is England; but to Germany to discover how German is Germany, to England to see how English is England. I much prefer Americans to either Germans or Englishmen, and they prefer Germans or Englishmen, as the case may be, to Americans. What spurious and milksoppy puppets we should be if it were not so. So long as there are praters going about insisting that Germany, with a flaxen pig-tail down her back, and England, in pumps instead of boots, and a poodle instead of a bulldog, shall sit forever in the moonlight hand in hand; or that America shall become a dandy, shave the chin-whisker, wear a Latin Quarter butterfly tie of red, white, and blue, and thrum a banjo to a little brown lady with oblique eyes and a fan, all day long; just so long will the bulldog snarl, the flaxen-haired maiden look sulky, the chin-whisker become stiffer and more provocative, and the fluttering fan seem to threaten blows.

We have been surfeited with peace talk till we are all irritable. One hundredth part of an ounce of the same quality of peace powders that we are using internationally would, if prescribed to a happy family in this or any other land, lead to dissensions, disobedience, domestic disaster, and divorce. Mr. Carnegie will have lived long enough to see more wars and international disturbances, and more discontent born of superficial reading, than any man in history who was at the same time so closely connected with their origin. Perhaps it were better after all if our millionaires were educated!

The peace party need war just as the atheists need God, otherwise they have nothing to deny, nothing to attack. Peace is a negative thing that no one really wants, certainly not the kind of peace of which there is so much talking to-day, which is a kind of castrated patriotism. Peace is not that. Peace can never be born of such impotency. When German statesmen declare roundly that they will not discuss the question of disarmament, they are merely saying that they will not be traitors to their country. If the Emperor rattles the sabre occasionally, it is because the time has not come yet, when this German people can be allowed to forget what they have suffered from foreign conquerors, and what they must do to protect themselves from such a repetition of history.

When the final judgment is passed upon the Emperor, we must recall his deep religious feeling that he is inevitably an instrument of God; his ingrained and ineradicable method of reading history as though it were a series of the ipse dixits of kings; his complacent neglect of how the work of the world is done by patient labor; of how works of art are only born of travail and tears: his obsession by that curious psychology of kings that leads them to believe that they are somehow different, and under other laws, as though they lived in another dimension of space. In addition, he is a man of unusually rapid mental machinery, of overpowering self-confidence, of great versatility, of many advantages of training and experience, and, above all, he is unhampered. He is answerable directly to no one, to no parliament, to no minister, to no people. He is father, guardian, guide, school- master, and priest, but in no sense a servant responsible to any master save one of his own choosing.

The only wonder is that he is not insupportable. Those who have come under the spell of his personality declare him to be the most delightful of companions; what Germany has grown to be under his reign of twenty-five years all the world knows, much of the world envies, some of the world fears; what his own people think of him can best be expressed by the statement that his supremacy was never more assured than to-day.

I agree that no one man can be credited with the astonishing expansion of Germany in all directions in the last thirty years; but so interwoven are the advice and influence, the ambitions and plans, of the German Emperor with the progress of the German people, that this one personality shares his country’s successes as no single individual in any other country can be said to do.

Whether he likes Americans or not one can hardly know. No doubt he has made many of them think so; and, alas, we suffer from a national hallucination that we are liked abroad, when as a matter of fact we are no more liked than others; and in cultured centres we are in addition, laughed at by the careless and sneered at by the sour.

That the Kaiser is liked by Americans, both by those who have met him and by those who have not, is, I think, indisputable. He is of the stuff that would have made a first-rate American. He would have been a sovereign there as he is a sovereign here. He would have enjoyed the risks, and turmoil, and competition; he would have enjoyed the fine, free field of endeavor, and he would have jousted with the best of us in our tournament of life, which has trained as many knights sans peur et sans reproche as any country in the world.

I believe in a man who takes what he thinks belongs to him, and holds it against the world; in the man who so loves life that he keeps a hearty appetite for it and takes long draughts of it; who is ever ready to come back smiling for another round with the world, no matter how hard he has been punished. I believe that God believes in the man who believes in Him, and therefore in himself. Why should I debar a man from my sympathy because he is a king or an emperor? I admire your courage, Sir; I love your indiscretions; I applaud your faith in your God, and your confidence in yourself, and your splendid service to your country. Without you Germany would have remained a second-rate power. Had you been what your critics pretend that they would like you to be, Germany would have been still ruling the clouds.

Here’s long life to your power, Sir, and to your possessions, and to you! And as an Anglo-Saxon, I thank God, that all your countrymen are not like you!

IV GERMAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE PRESS

In the days when Bismarck was welding the German states into a federal organization and finally into an empire, he used the press to spray his opinions, wishes, and suspicions over those he wished to instruct or to influence. He used it, too, to threaten or to mislead his enemies at home and abroad. The Hamburger Nachrichten was the newspaper for which he wrote at one time, and which remained his confidential organ, though as his power grew he used other journals and journalists as well.

As Germany has few traditions of freedom, having rarely won liberty as a united people, but having been beaten into national unity by her political giants, or her robuster sovereigns, so the press before and during Bismarck’s long reign, from 1862 to 1890, was kept well in hand by those who ruled. It is only lately that caricature, criticism, and opposition have had freer play. That a journalist like Maximilian Harden (a friend and confidant of Bismarck, by the way) should be permitted to write without rebuke and without punishment that the present Kaiser “has all the gifts except one, that of politics,” marks a new license in journalistic debate. That this same person was able, single-handed, to bring about the exposure and downfall of a cabal of decadent courtiers whose influence with the Emperor was deplored, proves again how completely the German press has escaped from certain leading-strings. A sharp criticism of the Emperor in die Post, even as lately as 1911, excited great interest, and was looked upon as a very daring performance.

There are some four thousand daily and more than three thousand weekly and monthly publications in Germany to-day; but neither the press as a whole, nor the journalists, with a few exceptions, exert the influence in either society or politics of the press in America and in England. As compared with Germany, one is at once impressed with the greater number of journals and their more effective distribution at home. In America there are 2,472 daily papers; 16,269 weeklies; and 2,769 monthlies. Tri-weekly and quarterly publications added bring the total to 22,806. One group of 200 daily papers claim a circulation of 10,000,000, while five magazines have a total circulation of 5,000,000. It is calculated that there is a daily, a weekly, and a monthly magazine circulated for every single family in America. Not an unmixed blessing, by any means, when one remembers that thousands, untrained to think and uninterested, are thus dusted with the widely blown comments of undigested news. Editorial comment of any serious value is, of course, impossible, and the readers are given a strange variety of unwholesome intellectual food to gulp down, with mental dyspepsia sure to follow, a disease which is already the curse of the times in America, where superficiality and insincerity are leading the social and political dance.

To carry the comparison further, there are 22,806 newspapers published in America; 9,500 in England; 8,049 in Germany; and 6,681 in France: or 1 for every 4,100 of the population in America; 1 for every 4,700 in Great Britain; 1 for every 7,800 in Germany, and 1 for every 5,900 in France.

That a prime minister should have been a contributor to the press, as was Lord Salisbury; that a correspondent or editorial writer of a newspaper should find his way into cabinet circles, into diplomacy, or into high office in the colonies; that the editor and owner of a great newspaper should become an ambassador to England, as in the case of Mr. Reid, is impossible in Germany. The character of the men who take up the profession of journalism suffers from the lack of distinction and influence of their task. Raymond, Greeley, Dana, Laffan, Godkin, in America, and Delane, Hutton, Lawson, and their successors, Garvin, Strachey, Robinson, in England, are impossible products of the German journalistic soil at present.

There have been great changes, and the place of the newspaper and the power of the journalist is increasing rapidly, but the stale atmosphere of censordom hangs about the press even to-day. Freedom is too new to have bred many powerful pens or personalities, and the inconclusive results of political arguments, written for a people who are comparatively apathetic, lessen the enthusiasm of the political journalist. There are not three editors in Germany who receive as much as six thousand dollars a year, and the majority are paid from twelve hundred to three thousand a year. This does not make for independence. I am no believer in great wealth as an incentive to activity, but certainly solvency makes for emancipation from the more debasing forms of tyranny.

Several of the more popular newspapers are owned and controlled by the Jews, and to the American, with no inborn or traditional prejudice against the Jews as a race, it is somewhat difficult to understand the outspoken and unconcealed suspicion and dislike of them in Germany. There is no need to mince matters in stating that this suspicion and dislike exist. A comedy called “The Five Frankfurters” has been given in all the principal cities during the last year and has had a long run in Berlin. It is a scathing caricature of certain Jewish peculiarities of temperament and ambition.

There is even an anti-semitic party, small though it be, in the Reichstag, while the party of the Centre, of the Conservatives and the Agrarians, is frankly anti-semitic as well. No Jew can become an officer in the army, no Jew is admitted to one of the German corps in the universities, no Jew can hold office of importance in the state, and I presume that no unbaptized Jew is received at court. I am bound to record my personal preference for the English and American treatment of the Jew. In England they have made a Jew their prime minister, and in America we offer him equal opportunities with other men, and applaud him whole-heartedly when he succeeds, and thump him soundly with our criticism when he misbehaves. The German fears him; we do not. We have made Jews ambassadors, they have served in our army and navy, and not a few of them rank among our sanest and most generous philanthropists.

To a certain extent society of the higher and official class shuts its doors against him. One of the well-known restaurants in Berlin, until the death of its founder, not long ago, refused admission to Jews.

I venture to say that no intelligent American stops to think whether the Speyer brothers, or Kahn, or Schiff, or the members of the house of Rothschild, are Jews or not, in estimating their political, social, and philanthropic worth. Even as long ago as the close of the fourteenth century the great strife between the princes of Germany and the free cities ceased, in order that both might unite to plunder the Jews.

Luther preached: “Burn their synagogues and schools; what will not burn bury with earth that neither stone nor rubbish remain.” “In like manner break into and burn their houses.” “Forbid their rabbis to teach on pain of life and limb.” “Take away all their prayer-books and Talmuds, in which are nothing but godlessness, lies, cursing, and swearing.” In the chronicles of the time occurs frequently “Judaei occisi, combusti.”

The German comes by his dislike of the Jew through centuries of traditional conflict, plunder, and hatred, and the very moulder of the present German speech, Luther, was a furious offender. The Jews have been materialists through all ages, claim the Germans: “The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” It is to be in our day the battle of battles, they claim, whether we are to be socially, morally, and politically orientalized by this advance guard of the Orient, the Jews, or whether we are to preserve our occidental ideals and traditions. Many more men see the conflict, they maintain, than care to take part in it. The money-markets of the world are ramparts that few men care to storm, but, if the independent and the intelligent do not withstand this semitization of our institutions, the ignorant and the degraded will one day take the matter into their own hands, as they have done before, and as they do to this day in some parts of Russia.

There are 600,000 Jews in Germany, 400,000 of them in Prussia and 100,000 of these in Berlin. In New York City alone there are more than 900,000. They are always strangers in our midst. They are of another race. They have other standards and other allegiances. Perhaps we are all of us, the most enlightened of us, provincial at bottom, we like to know who and what our neighbors are, and whence they came; and we dislike those who are outside our racial and social experiences, and our moral and religious habits, and the Jew is always, everywhere, a foreigner. At any rate, so the German maintains.

Strange as it may sound in these days, the Germans are not at heart business men. There are more eyes with dreams in them in Germany than in all the world besides. They work hard, they increase their factories, their commerce, but their hearts are not in it. The Jew has amassed an enormous part of the wealth of Germany, considering his small proportion of the total population. The German, because he is not at heart a trader, is an easy prey for him.

These things trouble us in America very little, and we smile cynically at the not altogether untruthful portraits of “Potash and Pearlmutter,” and their vermin-like business methods. There is an undercurrent of feeling in America, that the virile blood is still there which will stop at nothing to throw off oppression, whether from the Jew or from any one else. If we are pinched too hard financially, if confiscation by the government or by individuals goes too far, no laws even will restrain the violence which will break out for liberty. So we are at peace with ourselves and with others, trusting in that quiet might which will take governing into its own hands, at all hazards, if the state of affairs demands it.

With the Germans it is different. No people of modern times has been so harried and harrowed as these Germans. The Thirty Years’ war left them in such fear and poverty that even cannibalism existed, and this was years after Massachusetts and Maryland were settled. But nothing has tarnished their idealism. Whether as followers of Charlemagne, or as hordes of dreamers seeking to save Christ’s tomb and cradle in the Crusades, or as intoxicated barbarians insisting that their emperor must be crowned at Rome, or as the real torch-bearers of the Reformation, or even now as dreamers, philosophers, musicians, and only industrial and commercial by force of circumstances, they are, least of all the peoples, materialists.

They have given the world lyric poetry, music, mythology, philosophy, and these are still their souls’ darlings. They entered the modern world just as science began to marry with commerce and industry, and so their unworn, fresh, and youthful intellectual vigor found expression in industry. Renan writes that he owes his pleasure in intellectual things to a long ancestry of non-thinkers, and he claims to have inherited their stored-up mental forces. Germany is not unlike that. Her recent industrial and intellectual activity may be the release from bondage, of the centuries of stored-up intellectual energy from the “Woods of Germany.”

It is true that they are easily governed and amenable, but this is due not wholly to the fact that they have been so long under the yoke of rulers, or because they are of cow-like disposition, but because their ideals are spiritual, not material. The American seeks wealth, the Englishman power, the Frenchman notoriety, the German is satisfied with peaceful enjoyment of music, poetry, art, and friendly and very simple intercourse with his fellows.

Certainly I am not the man to say he is wrong, when I see how spiritual things in my own country are cut out of the social body as though they were annoying and dangerous appendices.

The German of this type looks down upon the spiritual and intellectual development of other countries as far inferior to his own. Such an one in talking to an Englishman feels that he is conversing with a high-spirited, thoroughbred horse; to a Frenchman, as though he were a cynical monkey; to an American, as though he were a bright youth of sixteen.

The German considers his dealings with the intangible things of life to be a higher form, indeed the highest form, of intellectual employment. He is therefore racially, historically, and by temperament jealous or contemptuous, according to his station in life, of the cosmopolitan exchanger of the world, the Jew. He denies to him either patriotism or originality, and looks upon him as merely a distributer, whether in art, literature, or commerce, as an exchanger who amasses wealth by taking toll of other men’s labor, industry, and intellect. It has not escaped the German of this temper, that the whirling gossip and innuendoes that have lately annoyed the present party in power in England, have had to do with three names: Isaacs, Samuels, and Montagu, all Jews and members of the government.

German politics, German social life, and the German press cannot be understood without this explanation. The German sees a danger to his hardly won national life in the cosmopolitanism of the Jew; he sees a danger to his duty-doing, simple-living, and hard-working governing aristocracy in the tempting luxury of the recently rich Jew; and besides these objective reasons, he is instinctively antagonistic, as though he were born of the clouds of heaven and the Jew of the clods of earth. This does not mean that the German is a believer, in the orthodox sense of the word, for that he is not. He loves the things of the mind not because he thinks of them as of divine creation, and as showing an allegiance to a divine Creator, but because they are the playthings of his own manufacture that amuse him most. His superiority to other nations is that he claims to enjoy maturer toys. Not even France is so entirely unencumbered by orthodox restraints in matters of belief.

So far, therefore, as the German press is Jew-controlled, it is suspected as being not German politically, domestically, or spiritually; as not being representative, in short. It should be added that, though this is the attitude of the great majority in Germany, there is a small class who recognize the pioneer work that the Jew has done. Few men are more respected there, and few have more influence than such men as Ballin and Rathenau and others. For the very reason that the German is an idealist the Jew has been of incomparable value to him in the development of his industrial, commercial, and financial affairs. Not only as a scientific financier has he helped, not only has he provided ammunition when German industrial undertakings were weak and stumbling, but along the lines of scientific research, as chemists, physicists, artists - perhaps no one stands higher than the Jew Liebermann as a painter - the Jew has done yeoman service to the country in return for the high wages that he has taken. There are Germans who recognize this, and there are in the Jewish world not a few men to whom the doors of enlightened society are always open.

Whatever one may feel of instinctive dislike, the open-minded observers of the historical progress of Germany, all recognize that Germany would not be in the foremost place she now occupies in the competitive markets of the world, if she had not had the patriotic, intelligent, and skilful backing of her better-class Jewish citizens.

Printing was born in Germany, and the town of Augsburg had a newspaper as early as 1505, while Berlin had a newspaper in 1617 and Hamburg in 1628. Every foreigner who knows Germany at all, knows the names of the Kölnische Zeitung, the Lokal Anzeiger and Der Tag, Hamburger Nachrichten, Berliner Tageblatt, Frankfurter Zeitung, and the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, this last the official organ of the foreign office. The Neue Preussische Zeitung, better known by its briefer title of Kreuz Zeitung, is a stanch conservative organ, and for years has published the scholarly comments once a week of Professor Shiemann, who is a political historian of distinction, and a trusted friend of the Emperor. The Deutsche Tageszeitung is the organ of the Agrarian League. The Reichsbote is a conservative journal and the organ of the orthodox party in the state church. Vorwärts is the organ of the socialists and, whatever one may think of its politics, one of the best-edited, as it is one of the best-written, newspapers in Germany. The Zukunft, a weekly publication, is the personal organ of Harden, is Harden, in fact. The Zukunft in normal years sells some 22,000 copies at 20 marks, giving an income of 440,000 marks; this with the advertisements gives an income of say 500,000 marks. The expenses are about 350,000 marks, leaving a net income to this daring and accomplished journalist of 150,000 marks a year. In Germany such an income is great wealth. The Zukunft and its success is a commentary of value upon the appreciation of, as well as the rarity of, independent journalism in Germany.

The Vossische Zeitung, or “Aunty Voss” as it is nicknamed, is a solid, bourgeois sheet and moderately radical in tone. It is proper, wipes its feet before entering the house, and may be safely left in the servants’ hall or in the school-room. Die Post represents the conservative party politically, is welcome in rich industrial circles, and is rather liberal in religious matters, though hostile to the government in matters of foreign politics, and of less influence at home than the frequent quotations from it in the British press would lead one to suppose. The two official organs of the Catholics are the Germania and the Volks Zeitung, of Cologne, whose editor is the well-known Julius Bachern. The Lokal Anzeiger and the Tageblatt of Berlin attempt, with no small degree of success, American methods, and give out several editions a day with particular reference to the latest news.

Leipsic, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Strasburg, Dresden, Königsberg, Breslau, with its Schlessische Zeitung, and the Rhine provinces and the steel and iron industries represented by the Rheinisch- Westfälischer Zeitung, and other cities and towns have local newspapers. A good example of such little-known provincial newspapers is the Augsburger Abendzeitung, with its first-rate reports of the parliamentary proceedings in Bavaria and its well-edited columns. The circulation of these journals is, from our point of view, small. The Berliner Tageblatt in a recent issue declares its paid circulation to have been 73,000 in 1901; 106,000 in 1905; 190,000 in 1910; and 208,000 in 1911.

The custom in Germany of eating in restaurants, of taking coffee in the cafés, of writing one’s letters and reading the newspapers there, no doubt has much to do with the small subscription lists of German journals of all kinds, whether daily, weekly, or monthly. The German economizes even in these small matters. A German family, or small café or restaurant, may, for a small sum, have half a dozen or more weekly and monthly journals left, and changed each week; thus they are circulated in a dozen places at the expense of only one copy. Where a family of similar standing in America takes in regularly two morning papers and an evening paper, several weekly and monthly, and perhaps one or two foreign journals, the German family may take one morning paper. The custom of having half a dozen newspapers served with the morning meal, as is done in the larger houses in America and in England, is practically unknown. Economy is one reason, indifference is another, provincial and circumscribed interests are others.

The German has not our keen appetite for what we call news, which is often merely surmises in bigger type. Only the very small number who have travelled and made interests and friends for themselves out of their own country, have any feeling of curiosity even, about the political and social tides and currents elsewhere.

An astounding number of Germans know Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare better than we do, but they know nothing, and care nothing, for the sizzling, crackling stream of purposeless incident, and sterile comment, that pours in upon the readers of American newspapers, and which has had its part in making us the largest consumers of nerve-quieting drugs in the world. All too many of the pens that supply our press are without education, without experience, without responsibility or restraint. What Mommsen writes of Cicero applies to them: “Cicero was a journalist in the worst sense of the term, over-rich in words as he himself confesses, and beyond all imagination poor in thought.”

No one of these journals pretends to such power or such influence as certain great dailies in America and in England. They have not the means at their command to buy much cable or telegraphic news, and lacking a press tariff for telegrams, they are the more hampered. The German temperament, and the civil-service and political close-corporation methods, make it difficult for the journalist to go far, either socially or politically. The German has been trained in a severe school to seek knowledge, not to look for news, and he does not make the same demands, therefore, upon his newspaper.

German relations with the outside world are of an industrial and commercial kind, and until very lately the German has not been a traveller, and is not now an explorer, and their colonies are unimportant; consequently there is no very keen interest on the part of the bulk of the people in foreign affairs. Even Sir Edward Grey’s answering speech on the Morocco question did not appear in full in Berlin until the following day, though Germany had roused itself to an unusual pitch of excitement and expectancy.

As the Germans are not yet political animals, so their newspapers reflect an artificial political enthusiasm. Society, too, is as little organized as politics. There are no great figures in their social world. A Beau Brummel, a d’Orsay, a Lady Palmerston, a Lady Londonderry, a Duke of Devonshire, a Gladstone, a Disraeli, a Rosebery, would be impossible in Germany, especially if they were in opposition to the party in power. When a chancellor or other minister is dismissed by the Kaiser, he simply disappears. He does not add to the weight of the opposition, but ceases to exist politically. This has two bad results: it does not strengthen the criticism of the administration, and it makes the office-holder very loath to leave office, and to surrender his power. An ex-cabinet officer in America or in England remains a valuable critic, but an ex-chancellor in Germany becomes a social recluse, a political Trappist. Even the leading political figures are after all merely shadowy servants of the Emperor. They represent neither themselves nor the people, and such subserviency kills independence and leaves us with mediocrities gesticulating in the dark, and making phrases in a vacuum.

There are, it is true, charming hostesses in Berlin, and ladies who gather in their drawing-rooms all that is most interesting in the intellectual and political life of the day; but they are almost without exception obedient to the traditional officialdom, leaning upon a favor that is at times erratic, and without the daring of independence which is the salt of all real personality.

There are, too, country-houses. One castle in Bavaria, how well I remember it, and the accomplished charm of its owner, who had made its grandeur cosey, a feat, indeed! But all this is detached from the real life of the nation, which is forever taking its cue from the court, leaving any independent or imposing social and political life benumbed and without vitality. There is no free and stalwart opposition, no centres of power; and much as one tires of the incessant and feverish strife political and social at home, one returns to it taking a long breath of the free air after this hot-house atmosphere, where the thermometer is regulated by the wishes of an autocrat.

The press necessarily reflects these conditions. The Social Democrats, divided into many small parties, and the Agrarians and Ultramontanes, divided as well, give the press no single point of leverage. These political parties wrangle among themselves over the dish of votes, but what is put into the dish comes from a master over whom they have no control. If they upset the dish they are turned out as they were in 1878, 1887, 1893, and 1907, and when they return they are better behaved.

The parties themselves are not real, since thousands of voters lean to the left merely to express their discontent; but they would desert the Social Democrats at once did they think there was a chance of real governing power for them. A small industrial was warned of the awful things that would happen did the Socialists come into power. “Ah,” he replied, “but the government would not permit that!” What has the press to chronicle with insistence and with dignity of such flabby political and social conditions?

The press may be, and often is, annoying, as mosquitoes are annoying, but its campaigns are dangerous to nobody. As I write, it is hard to believe that within a few days the members of a new Reichstag are to be elected. There are political meetings, it is true, there are articles and editorials in the newspapers, there is some languid discussion at dinner-tables and in society, but there is a sense of unreality about it all, as though men were thinking: Nothing of grave importance can happen in any case! We shall have something to say farther on of political Germany; here it suffices to say that the press of Germany betrays in its political writing that it is dealing with shadows, not with realities. “They have been at a great feast of language, and stolen the scraps,” that’s all.

The snarling Panther that was sent to Agadir, teeth and claws showing, came back looking like an adventurous tomcat that wished only to hide itself meekly in its accustomed haunts; and its unobtrusive bearing seemed to say, the less said about the matter the better. What a storm of obloquy would have burst upon such inept diplomacy in America, or in England, or even in France. Not so here. Everybody was sore and sorry, but the newspapers and the journalists could raise no protest that counted. It is all explained by the fact that the people do not govern, have nothing to do with the whip or the reins, nor have they any constitutional way of changing coachmen, or of getting possession of whip and reins; and hooting at the driver, and jeering at the tangled whip-lash and awkwardly held reins, is poor-spirited business. Only one political writer, Harden, does it with any effect, and his pen is said to have upset the Caprivi government.

As one reads the newspapers day by day, and the weekly and monthly journals, it becomes apparent that the German imagines he has done something when he has had an idea; just as the Frenchman imagines he has done something when he has made an epigram. We are less given either to thinking or phrasing, and far less gifted in these directions than either Germans or Frenchmen, and perhaps that is the reason we have actually done so much more politically. We do things for lack of something better to do, while our neighbors find real pleasure in their dreams, and take great pride in their epigrams.

As all great writing, from that of Xenophon and Caesar till now, is born of action or the love of it, or as a spiritual incitement to action, so a people with little opportunity for political action, and no centres of social life with a real sway or sovereignty, cannot create or offer substance for the making of a powerful and independent press.

There is no New York, no Paris, no London, no Vienna even, in Germany. Berlin is the capital, but it is not a capital by political or social evolution, but by force of circumstances. Germany has many centres which are not only not interested in Berlin, but even antagonistic. Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, Leipsic, Frankfort, Dresden, Breslau, and besides these, twenty-six separate states with their capitals, their rulers, courts, and parliaments, go to make up Germany, and perhaps you are least of all in Germany when you are in Berlin. It is true that we have many States, many capitals, and many governors in America, but they have all grown from one, and not, as in Germany, been beaten into one, and held together more from a sense of danger from the outside than from any interest, sympathy, and liking for one another.

With us each State, too, has a powerful representation both in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, which keeps the interest alive, while in Germany Prussia is overwhelmingly preponderant. In the upper house, or Bundesrat, Prussia has 17 representatives; next comes Bavaria with 6; and the other states with 4 or less, out of a total of 58 members. In the Reichstag, out of a total of 397 representatives, Prussia has 236.

Political society is not all centred in Berlin, as it is in London, Paris, or Washington, nor is social life there representative of all Germany. Berlin’s stamp of approval is not necessary to play, or opera, or book, or picture, or statue, or personality. Indeed, Berlin often takes a lead in such matters from other cities in Germany where the artistic life and history are more fully developed, as, for instance, in other days, Weimar, and now Munich, Dresden, and, in literary matters, Leipsic. A recent example of this, though of small consequence in itself, is the case of the opera, the “Rosen Kavalier,” which was given repeatedly in Dresden and Leipsic, whither many Berlin people went to hear it, before the authorities in Berlin could be persuaded to produce it.

The nobility, the society heavy artillery, come to Berlin only for three or four weeks, from the middle of January to the middle of February, to pay their respects to their sovereign at the various court functions given during that time. They live in the country and only visit in Berlin. It is complained, that the double taxation incident to the up-keep of an establishment both in town and in the country, makes it impossible for them to be much in Berlin. They stay in hotels and in apartments, and are mere passing visitors in their own capital. They have, therefore, practically no influence upon social life, and Berlin is merely the centre of the industrial, military, official, and political society of Prussia. It is the clearing-house of Germany, but by no means the literary, artistic, social, or even the political capital of Germany, as London is the English, or Paris the French, or as Washington is fast growing to be the American, capital.

There is no training-ground for an accomplished or man-of-the-world journalist, and the views and opinions of a journalist who is more or less of a social pariah, and he still is that with less than half a dozen exceptions, and of a man who begs for crumbs from the press officials at the foreign or other government offices, are neither written with the grip of the independent and dignified chronicler, nor received with confidence and respect by the reader.

It may be a reaction from this negligence with which they are treated that produces a quality, both in the writing and in the illustrations of the German newspapers, which is unknown in America. Many of the illustrated papers indulge in pictorial flings which may be compared only to the scribbling and coarse drawings, in out-of-the-way places, of dirty-minded boys. With the exception of the well-known Fliegende Blätter, Kladderadatsch, and one or two less representative, there is nothing to compare with the artistic excellence and restrained good taste of Life or Punch, for example.

There is one illustrated paper published in Munich, Simplicissimus, which deserves more than negligent and passing comment. It has two artists of whom I know nothing except what I have learned from their work, Th. Th. Heine and Gulbransson. These men are Aristophanic in their ability as draughtsmen and as censors, in striking at the weaknesses, political, military, and official, of their countrymen. Their work is something quite new in Germany, and worthy of comparison with the best in any country. It is not elegant, it is Rabelaisian; and though I have nothing to retract in regard to coarseness, and no wish to commend the attitude taken toward German political and social life, in fairness one is bound to call attention to the pictorial work in this particular paper as of a very high order, and to recognize its power. If Heine could have turned his wit into the drawings of Hogarth, we should have had something not unlike Simplicissimus, and any German annoyed at the criticisms of his national life from the pen of a foreigner, may well turn to his own Simplicissimus, and be humbly grateful that no foreign pen-point can possibly pierce more deeply, than this domestic pencil, at work in his own country.

The danger for the critic and the wit, which few avoid, is that with incomparable advantages over his opponent he will not play fair. In spite of the awful reputation of our so-called “yellow press,” which is often boisterously impudent, and sometimes inclined to indulge in comments and revelations of the private affairs of individuals which can only be dubbed coarse and cowardly, there is seldom a descent to the indescribably indecent caricatures which one finds every week in the illustrated papers in Germany. As we have noted elsewhere, just as the citizens of Berlin, as one sees them in the streets and in public places, give one the impression that they are not house-trained, so many of the pens and pencils which serve the German press, leave one with the feeling that their possessors would not know how to behave in a cultivated and well-regulated household.

Every gentleman in Germany must have been ashamed of the writing in the German press after the sinking of the Titanic. There was a blaze of brutal pharisaism that put a bar-sinister across any claim to gentlemanliness on the part of the majority. When every brave man in the world was lamenting the death of Scott, the English Arctic explorer, one German paper intimated that he had committed suicide to avoid the bankruptcy forced upon him by England’s lack of generosity toward his expedition. It is almost unbelievable that such a cur should have escaped unthrashed, even among the German journalists. These two examples of lack of fine feeling mark them for what they are. Among gentlemen no comment is necessary. The mark of breeding is more often discovered in what one does not say, does not write, does not do, than in positive action. There was much, at that time, when fifteen hundred people had been buried in icy water, and scores of American and English gentlemen had gone down to death, just in answer to: “Ladies first, gentlemen!” that should have been left unsaid and unwritten. The quality of the German journalist, with half a dozen exceptions, was betrayed to the full in those few days, and many a German cheek mantled with shame.

However, a man may eat with his knife and still be an authority on bridge-building; he may tuck his napkin under his chin preparatory to, and as an armor against, the well-known vagaries of liquids, before he takes his soup or his soft-boiled eggs, and still be an authority on soap-making; he may wear a knitted waistcoat with a frock-coat to luncheon, and be deeply versed in Russian history. He may have no inkling of the traditions of fair play, or of the reticences of courtesy, no shred of knightliness, and yet be a scholar in his way. Indeed, in none of the other cultured countries does one find so many men of trained minds, but with such untrained manners and morals. In their hack of sensation-mongering, in their indifference to social gossip, in their trustworthy and learned comments upon things scientific, musical, theatrical, literary, and historical, they are as men to school-boys compared to the American press. They have the utter contempt for mere smartness that only comes with severe educational training. They have the scholar’s impatience with trivialities. They skate, not to cut their names on the ice, but to get somewhere, and the whole industrial and scientific world knows how quickly they have arrived.

Our newspapers make a business of training their readers in that worst of all habits, mental dissipation. The German press is not thus guilty. Despite all I have written, I am quite sure that if I were banished from the active world and could see only half a dozen journals on my lonely island, one of them would be a German newspaper. It may be that I have a perverted literary taste, for I can get more humor, more keen enjoyment, out of a census report or an etymological dictionary than from a novel. My favorite literary dissipation is to read the works of that distinguished statistician at Washington, Mr. O. P. Austin, the poet-laureate of industrial America, or the toilsome and exciting verbal journeys of the Rev. Mr. Skeat. The classic humorists do not compare with them, in my humble opinion, as sources of fantastic surprises. This, perhaps, accounts for my sincere admiration for that quality of scholarship, learning, and accuracy in the German press. Nor does the possession of these qualities in the least controvert the impression given by the German press of political powerlessness, of social ignorance and incompetence, and of boorish ignorance of the laws of common decency in international comment and controversy. A great scholar may be a booby in a drawing-room, and a lamentable failure as an adviser in matters political and social. “As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from his place.” Germany has put some astonishing failures to her credit through her belief that learning can take the place of common-sense, and scholarship do the tasks of that intelligent and experienced observation to which the abused word, worldliness, is given. Perhaps it is as well that the German press declines to keep a social diary; well, too, that it has no candidates for the office of society Haruspex, whose ghoulish business it is to find omens and prophecies in the entrails of his victims. In that respect, at any rate, both society and the press in Germany are as is the salon to the scullery, compared with ours. As for that little knot of illustrated weekly papers in England, with their nauseating letter-press for snobs inside, and their advertisements of patent complexion remedies and corsets outside, there is nothing like them in Germany or anywhere else, so far as I know. You may advertise your shooting-party, your dance, or your dinner-party, and thus keep yourself before the world as though you were a whiskey, a soap, or a superfluous-hair-destroyer, if you please, and, alas, many there are who do so. At least Germany knows nothing of this weekly auction of privacy, this nauseating snobbery which is a fungus-growth seen at its strongest in British soil.

I am bound, both by tradition and experience as an American, to discover the reason for such conditions in the lack of fluidity in social and political life in Germany. The industrials, the military, the nobility, the civil servants, and to some extent the Jews, are all in separate social compartments; and the political parties as well keep much to themselves and without the personal give and take outside of their purely official life which obtains in America and in England.

It is an impossible suggestion, I know, but if the upper and lower houses of the empire, or of Prussia, could meet in a match at base-ball, or golf, or cricket; if the army could play the civil service; if the newspaper correspondents could play the under-secretaries; if they could all be induced occasionally, to throw off their mental and moral uniforms, and to meet merely as men, a current of fresh air would blow through Germany, that she would never after permit to be shut out.

Personal dignity is refreshed, not lost, by a romp. Who has not seen distinguished Americans and distinguished Englishmen, in their own or in their friends’ houses, or at one or another of our innumerable games, behaving like boys out of school, crawling about beneath improvised skins and growling and roaring in charades; indulging in flying chaff of one another; in the skirts of their wives and sisters playing cricket, or base-ball, or tennis with the one hand only; caricaturing good-humoredly some of their own official business, or arranging a match of some kind where their own servants join in to make up a side; or, and well I remember it, half a dozen youths of about fifty playing cricket with one stump and a broom-handle for an hour one hot afternoon, amid tumbles and shouts of laughter, and a shower of impromptu nicknames, and one or two of them bore names known all over the English-speaking world. Nobody loses any dignity, any importance; but there is an unconquerable stiffness in Germany that makes me laugh almost as I make this suggestion. We have only a certain reserve of serious work in us. To attempt to be serious all the time is never to be at rest. This worried busyness, which is a characteristic of the more mediocre of my own countrymen also, is really a symptom of deficient vitality. Things are in the saddle and you are the mule and not the man, if you are such an one. The stiffness and self-consciousness of the Germans is really a sign of their lack of confidence in themselves. Youth is always more serious than middle age, for the same reason. A man who is at home in the world laughs and is gay; he who is shy and doubtful scowls. It is the God-fearing who are not afraid, it is the man-fearing who are awkward and uncomfortable.

The first thing to be afraid of is oneself, but after oneself is conquered why be afraid to let him loose!

It would be quite untrue to give the impression that there is no fun, no harking, no chaff, in Germany, although I am bound to say that there is little of this last. I can bear witness to a healthy love of fun, and to an exuberant exploitation of youthful vitality in many directions among the students and younger officers, for example. Better companions for a romp exist nowhere. Having been blessed with an undue surplus of vitality, which for many years kept me fully occupied in directing its expenditure, alas, not always with success, I can only add that I found as many youthful companions in a similar predicament in Germany, as anywhere else.

But with the Englishman and the American, both temperament and environment permit youthfulness to last longer. The German must soon get into the mill and grind and be ground, and he is by temperament more easily caught and put into the uniform of a constantly correct behavior. As for us, we are all boys still at thirty, many of us at fifty, and some of us die ere the school-boy exuberance has all been squeezed or dried out of us. Not so in Germany. One sees more men in Germany who give the impression that they could not by any possibility ever have been boys than with us. They begin to look cramped at thirty, and they are stiff at fifty, as though they had been fed on a diet of circumspection, caution, and obedience. They are drilled early and they soon become amenable, and then even indulgent, toward the drill-master.

This German people have not developed into a nation, they have been squeezed into the mould of a nation. The nation is not for the people, the people are for the nation. “By the word Constitution,” writes Lord Bolingbroke, “we mean, whenever we speak with propriety and exactness, the assemblage of laws, institutions, and customs derived from certain fixed principles of reason, directed to certain fixed objects of public good, that compose the general system by which the community hath agreed to be governed.” The Germans have no such constitution, for the community was scarcely consulted, much less hath it agreed to the general system by which it is governed.

Of course, in every nation its affairs are, and must be, conducted by officials. That is as true of America as of Germany. The fundamental difference is that with us these official persons are executive officers only, the real captain is the people; while in Germany these official persons are the real governors of the people, subject to the commands of one who repeatedly and publicly asserts that his commission is from God and not from the people. This puts whole classes of the community permanently into uniform, and the wearers of these uniforms are almost afraid to laugh, and would consider it sacrilege to romp.

Caution is a very puny form of morality. “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.” It is as true politically as of other spheres of life that “he or she who lets the world or his own portion of it choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.” Thus writes John Stuart Mill, and what else can be said of the political activities of the Germans? What journalist or what patriot indeed can take seriously a majority that has no power? What people can call itself free to whom its rulers are not responsible? The Social Democrats, at the moment of writing, have won one hundred and ten seats in the Reichstag, but the army and navy estimates are beyond their reach, the taxes are fixtures, a constitution is a dream, and if they are cantankerous or truculent the Reichstag will be dismissed by a wave of the hand. Say what one will, they are a mammillary people politically, and the strongest party in the Reichstag is merely an energetic political mangonel. Their leaders moult opinions, they do not mould them, and could not translate them into action if they did.

Not since 1874 has there been a Reichstag so strongly radical, but nothing will come of it. The Reichskanzler, Doctor von Bethmann-Hollweg, did not hesitate to take an early opportunity, after the opening of the new Reichstag, to state boldly that the issue was Authority versus Democratization, and that he had no fear of the result. It is customary for the newly elected Praesidium, the president and two vice-presidents of the Reichstag, to be received in audience by the Emperor. On this occasion the Socialists forbade their representative to go, and the Emperor, therefore, refused to receive any of them. As usual, they played into his hands. Hans bleibt immer Hans, and on this occasion his vulgar hack of good manners only brought contumely upon the whole Reichstag, and left the Emperor as the outstanding dignified figure in the controversy. Such behavior is not calculated to invite confidence, and not likely to induce this enemy-surrounded nation to put its destinies in such hands, not at any rate for some time to come. “Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.”

Intellectually Germany is a republic, and we Americans perhaps beyond all other peoples have profited by her literature, her philosophy, her music, her scientific and economic teaching. We have kneaded these things into our political as well as into our intellectual life. “Intellectual emancipation, if it does not give us at the same time control over ourselves, is poisonous.” And who writes thus? Goethe! But the intellectual freedom of Germany has done next to nothing to bring about political or, in the realm of journalism, personal self-control.

It is a strange state of affairs. Intelligent men and women in Germany do not realize it. Not once, but many times, I have been told: “You foreigners are forever commenting upon our bureaucracy, our officialdom, but it is not as all-powerful as you think. We have plenty of freedom!” These people are often themselves officials, nearly always related to, or of the society, of the ruling class. The rulers and the ruling class have naturally no sense of oppression, no feeling that they are unduly subject to others, since the others are themselves. I am quite willing to believe of my own and of other people’s personal opinions that they are not dogmas merely because they are baptized in intolerance. I must leave it to the reader to judge from the facts, whether or no the Germans have a political autonomy, which permits the exercise and development of political power. A glance at the political parties themselves will make this perhaps the more clear.

The official organization of the conservative party, may be said to date back to the founding of the Neue Preussische Zeitung in 1848, and the organization of the party in many parts of Germany. Earlier still, Burke was the hero of the pioneers of this party, whose first newspaper had for editor, no less a person than Heinrich von Kleist, and whose first endeavors were to support God and the King, and to throw off the yoke of foreign domination.

In 1876 was formed the Deutsch-Konservativ party supporting Bismarck. “Königthum von Gottes Gnaden” is still their watchword, with opposition to Social Democracy, support of imperialism, agrarian and industrial protection, and Christian teaching in the schools, as the planks of their platform. They also combat Jewish influence everywhere, particularly in the schools. Allied to this party is the Bund der Landwirte and the Deutscher Bauernbund. In the election of 1912 they elected forty-five representatives to the Reichstag, a serious falling off from the sixty-three seats held previous to that election. The Free Conservative portion of the Conservative party, is composed of the less autocratic members of the landed nobility, but there is little difference in their point of view.

The Centrum, or Catholic party, is in theory not a religious party; in practice it is, though it does not bar out Protestant members who hold similar views to their own. Its political activity began in 1870, and the first call for the formation of the party came from Reichensperger in the Kölnischer Volkszeitung. The famous leader of the party, and a politician who even held his own against Bismarck, was the Hanoverian Justizminister, Doctor Ludwig Windthorst. The stormy time of the party was from 1873 to 1878, when Bismarck attempted to oppose the growing power of the Catholic Church, and more particularly of the Jesuits. The so-called May laws of that year forbade Roman Catholic intervention in civil affairs; obliged all ministers of religion to pass the higher-schools examinations and to study theology three years at a university; made all seminaries subject to state inspection; and gave fuller protection to those of other creeds. In 1878 Bismarck needed the support of the Centrum party to carry through the new tariff, and the May laws, except that regarding civil marriage, were repealed. The party stands for religious teaching in the primary schools, Christian marriage, federal character of empire, protection, and independence of the state. More than any other party it has kept its representation in the Reichstag at about the same number. In 1903 they cast 1,875,300 votes and had 100 members. In 1907 they had 103 members, and in the last election of 1912 they won 93 seats. Even this Catholic party is now divided. Count Oppersdorff leads the “Only- Catholic” party, against the more liberal section which has its head-quarters at Cologne, where the late Cardinal Fisher was the leader. At the session of the Reichstag in 1913, when the question of the readmission of the Jesuits was raised, the Centrum party even sided with the Socialists in the matter of the expropriation law for Posen, in order to annoy the chancellor for his opposition to themselves. Such political miscegenation as this does not show a high level of faith or of policy.

It may be of interest to the reader to know that in 1903 the population of Germany was 58,629,000, and the number qualified to vote 12,531,000; in 1907 the population was 61,983,000, and the number qualified to vote, 13,353,000; in 1912 the population was 65,407,000, and the qualified voters numbered over 14,000,000, of whom 12,124,503 voted. In 1903 there were 9,496,000 votes cast; in 1907, 11,304,000. The German Reichstag has 397 members, or 1 representative to every 156,000 inhabitants; the United States House of Representatives has 433 members, or 1 for every 212,000 inhabitants; England, 670 members, or 1 for every 62,000; France, 584, or 1 for every 67,000; Italy, 508, or 1 for every 64,000; Austria, 516, or 1 for every 51,000.

Despite the fact that the Conservative and the Catholic parties have much in common, and are the parties of the Right and Centre: these names are given the political parties in the Reichstag according to their grouping on the right, centre, and left of the house, looking from the tribune or speaker’s platform, from which all set speeches are delivered, they are often at odds among themselves, and Bismarck and Bülow brought about tactical differences among them for their own purposes. Their programme may be summed up as “As you were,” which is not inspiring either as an incentive or as a command.

The Liberal parties are the National liberale; Fortschrittspartei, or Progressives; and the Freisinnige Volkspartei, or Liberal Democratic party.

The National Liberal party was strongest during the days when Prussia’s efforts were directed mainly toward a federation and a strengthening of the bonds which hold the states together; “unter dem Donner der Kanonen von Königgratz ist der nationalliberale Gedanke geboren.” Loyalty to emperor and empire, country above party, a fleet competent to protect the country and its overseas interests, are watchwords of the party. The party is protectionist, and in matters of school and church administration in accord with the Free Conservatives.

The Liberal Democratic party demands electoral reform, no duties on foodstuffs, and imperial insurance laws for the workingmen.

The Fortschrittspartei finds its intellectual beginnings, in the condensing of the hazy clouds of revolution in 1848, in the persons of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Freiherr von Stein. Politically, the party came into being in 1861, and Waldeck, von Hoverbeck, and Virchow are familiar names to students of German political history; later Eugen Richter was the leader of the party in the Reichstag. This party is still for free-trade, in opposition to military and bureaucratic government, favorable to parliamentary government. Of the grouping and regrouping of these parties; of their divisions for and against Bismarck’s policies; of their splits on the questions of free-trade and protection; of their leanings now to the right, now to the left; of their differences over details of taxation for purposes of defence; of their attitudes toward a powerful fleet, and toward the Jesuits, it would require a volume, and a large one, to describe. Though it is dangerous to characterize them, they may be said without inaccuracy to represent the democratic movement in Germany both in thought and political action, and to hold a wavering place between the Conservatives and the Social Democrats.

The Social Democratic party, the party of the wage-earners only assumed recognizable outlines after the appeal of Ferdinand Lassalle for a workingman’s congress at Leipsic in 1863. In 1877 they mustered 493,000 voters. Bismarck and the monarchy looked askance at their growing power. It was attempted to pass a law, punishing with fine and imprisonment: “wer in einer den öffentlichen Frieden gefährdenden Weise verschiedene Klassen der Bevölkerung gegeneinander öffentlich aufreizt oder wer in gleicher Weise die Institute der Ehe, der Familie und des Eigentums öffentlich durch Rede oder Schrift angreift.” This was a direct attack upon the Socialists, but the Reichstag refused to pass the law. In May, 1878, and shortly after in June, two attempts were made upon the life of the Kaiser. Bismarck then easily and quickly forced through the new law against the Socialists .

Under this law newspapers were suppressed, organizations dissolved, meetings forbidden, and certain leaders banished. For twelve years the party was kept under the watchful restraint of the police, and their propaganda made difficult and in many places impossible. After the repeal of this law, and for the last twenty years, the party has increased with surprising rapidity. In 1893 the Social Democrats cast 1,787,000 votes; in 1898, 2,107,000; in 1903, more than 3,000,000; and in the last election, 1912, 4,238,919; and they have just returned 110 delegates to the Reichstag out of a total of 397 members.

It is noteworthy that in America there is one Socialist member of the House of Representatives; while in Germany, which combines autocratic methods of government, with something more nearly approaching state ownership and control, than any other country in the world, the most numerous party in the present Reichstag is that of the Social Democrats.

Freedom is the only medicine for discontent. There is no rope for the hanging of a demagogue like free speech; no such disastrous gift for the socialist as freedom of action. Imagine what would have happened in America if we had attempted to suppress Bryan! The result of giving him free play and a fair hearing, the result of allowing the people to judge for themselves, has been a prolonged spectacle of political hari-kiri which has had a wholesome though negative educational influence. The most accomplished oratorical Pierrot of our day, who changes his political philosophy as easily as he changes his costume, has seen one hundred and sixty cities and towns in America turn to government by commission, and has kept the heraldic donkey always just out of reach of the political carrots, until the Republican party itself fairly pushed the donkey into the carrot-field, but even then with another leader. No autocrat could have done so much.

As early as 1887 Auer, Bebel, and Liebknecht outlined the programme of the party, and this programme, again revised at Erfurt in 1891, stands as the expression of their demands. They claim that: “Die Arbeiterklasse kann ihre ökonomischen Kämpfe nicht führen und ihre ökonomische Organisation nicht entwickeln ohne politisehe Rechte.” Roughly they demand: the right to form unions and to hold public meetings; separation of church and state; education free and secular, and the feeding of school-children; state expenditure to be met exclusively by taxes on incomes, property, and inheritance; people to decide on peace and war; direct system of voting, one adult one vote; citizen army for defence; referendum; international court of arbitration. Their leader in the Reichstag to-day is Bebel, and from what I have heard of the debates in that assembly I should judge that they have not only a majority over any other party in numbers, but also in speaking ability. The members of the Socialist party always leave the house in a body, at the end of each session, just before the cheers are called for, for the Emperor. They have become more and more daring of late in their outspoken criticism of both the Emperor and his ministers. In consequence, they are replied to with ever-increasing dislike and bitterness by their opponents. At a recent banquet of old university students in Berlin, Freiherr von Zedlitz, presiding, quoted Barth and Richter: “The victory of Social Democracy means the destruction of German civilization, and a Social Democratic state would be nothing more than a gigantic house of correction.”

In addition to the four important political divisions in the Reichstag, the Conservative, Liberal, Clerical, and Socialist, there are many subdivisions of these. Since 1871 there have been some forty different parties represented, eleven conservative, fourteen liberal, two clerical, nine national-particularist, and five socialist. To-day, besides four small groups and certain representatives acknowledging no party, there are some eleven different factions.

| 1871 | 1881 | 1893 | 1907 | 1912
Right, or Conservative | 895,000 | 1,210,000 | 1,806,000 | 2,141,000 | 1,149,916
Liberal | 1,884,000 | 1,948,000 | 2,102,000 | 3,078,000 | 3,227,846
Clerical | 973,000 | 1,618,000 | 1,920,000 | 2,779,000 | 2,012,990
Social Democrats | 124,000 | 312,000 | 1,787,000 | 3,259,000 | 4,238,919

So far as one may so divide them, the voters have aligned themselves as follows: In the last elections, in 1912, the Conservatives and their allies elected 75 members; the Clericals, 93; the Poles, 18; and the Guelphs, 5; and these come roughly under the heading of the party of the Right. Under the heading Left, the National Liberals and Progressive party elected 88, and the Social Democrats 110 members to the Reichstag. The parties stand therefore roughly divided at the moment of writing as 191 Conservative, and 200 Radical, with 6 members unaccounted for. The Poles with 18 seats, the Alsatians with 5, the Guelphs and Lorrainers and Danes with 8 seats, and the no-party with 2 seats, are also represented, but are here placed with the party of the Right. To divide the parties into two camps gives the result that, roughly, four and a half millions voted that they were satisfied, and seven and a half millions that they were not.

No doubt any chancellor, including Doctor von Bethmann-Hollweg, would be glad to divide the Reichstag as definitely and easily as I have done. Theoretically these divisions may be useful to the reader, but practically to the leader they are useless. Bebel, the leader of the Social Democrats, declares himself ready to shoulder a musket to defend the country; Heydebrandt, the leader of the Conservatives, and possibly the most effective speaker in the Reichstag, has spoken warmly in favor of social reform laws; the Clericals are for peace, almost at any price; the Agrarians or Junkers for a tariff on foodstuffs and cattle, and one might continue analyzing the parties until one would be left bewildered at their refining of the political issues at stake. Back to God and the Emperor; and forward to a constitutional monarchy with the chancellor responsible to the Reichstag, and perhaps later a republic, represent the two extremes. Between the two everything and anything. It is hard to put together a team out of these diverse elements that a chancellor can drive with safety, and with the confidence that he will finally arrive with his load at his destination. In addition to these parties there are the frankly disaffected representatives of conquered Poland, of conquered Holstein, of conquered Alsace-Lorraine, and of conquered Hanover, this last known as the Guelph party; all of them anti-Prussian.

It is not to be wondered at that the comments, deductions, and prophecies of foreigners are wildly astray when dealing with German politics. In America, religious differences and racial differences play a small rôle at Washington; but the 220 Protestants, the 141 Catholics, the 3 Jews, the 5 free-thinkers, and so on, in the last Reichstag are in a way parties as well. In that same assembly 2 members were over 80, 78 over 60, 271 between 40 and 60, 42 under 40, and 3 under 30 years of age. One hundred and six members were landed proprietors; 220 were of the liberal professions, including 37 authors, 35 judges or magistrates, 21 clericals, 7 doctors, and 1 artist; 13 merchants; 21 manufacturers; and 20 shopkeepers and laborers. Seventy-two members were of the nobility, a decided falling off from 1878, when they numbered 162. Two hundred and fifty members were educated at a university, and practically all may be said to have had an education equal if not superior to that given in our smaller colleges.

In the American Congress, in the House of Representatives, we have 212 lawyers, though there are only 135,000 lawyers in our population of 90,000,000. We have in that same assembly 50 business men, representing the 15,000,000 of our people engaged in trade and industry. Perhaps the German Reichstag is as fairly representative as our own House of Representatives, though both assemblies show the babyhood of civilization which still votes for flashing eyes, thumping fists, hollering patriotism, and smooth phrases. The surprising feature of elective assemblies is that here and there Messrs. Self-Control, Ability, Dignity, and Independence find seats at all. The members are paid, since 1906, a salary of 3,000 marks, with a deduction of 20 marks for each day’s absence. They have free passes over German railways during the session. The Reichstag is elected every five years.

The appearance of the Reichstag to the stranger is notable for the presence of military, naval, and clerical uniforms. It is, as one looks down upon them, an assembly where at least one-fourth are bald or thin-haired, and together they give the impression of being big in the waist, careless in costume, slovenly in carriage, and lacking proper feeding, grooming, and exercise. It is clearly an assemblage, not of men of action, but of men of theories. Not only their appearance betrays this, but their debates as well, and what one knows of their individual training and preferences goes to substantiate this judgment of them. There are no soldiers, sailors, explorers, governors of alien people; no men, in short, who have solved practical problems dealing with men, but only theorists. Such men as Götzen, Solf, and others, who have had actual experience of dealing with men, are rare exceptions. Probably the best men in Germany wish, and wish heartily, that there were more such men; indeed, I betray no secret when I declare that the most intelligent and patriotic criticism in Germany coincides with my own.

The electoral divisions of Germany, as we have noted elsewhere, have not been changed for forty years, with a consequent disproportionate representation from the rural, as over against the enormously increased population, of the urban and industrial districts. The Conservatives, for example, in 1907 gained 1 seat for every 18,232 votes; the Clericals or Centrum, 1 seat for every 20,626 votes; the National Liberals, 1 for every 30,635 votes; and the Social Democrats, 1 for every 75,781 votes. It may be seen from this, how overwhelming must be the majority of votes cast by the Social Democrats, in order to gain a majority representation in the Reichstag itself. In 1912 they cast more than one-third of the votes, and are represented by 110 members out of the total of 397.

For the student of German politics it is important to remember, that the Social Democrats are not all representatives of socialism or of democracy. Their demands at this present time are far from the radical theory that all sources of production should be in the hands of the people. Only a small number of very red radicals demand that. Their successes have been, and they are real successes, along the lines of greater protection and more political liberty for the workingman. The number of their votes is swelled by thousands of voters who express their general discontent in that way. The state in Germany owns railroads, telegraph and telephone lines; operates mines and certain industries, and both controls and directly helps certain large manufactories which are either of benefit to the state, or which, if they were entirely independent, might prove a danger to the state. The state enforces insurance against sickness, accident, and old age, and the three million office-holders are dependent upon the state for their livelihood and their pensions.

It is a striking thing in Germany to see human nature cropping out, even under these ideal conditions; for it is difficult to see how the state could be more grandmotherly in her officious care of her own. But this is not enough. Physical safety is not enough, the demand is for political freedom, and for a government answerable to the people and the people’s representatives. Rich men, powerful men, representative men by the thousands, men whom one meets of all sorts and conditions, and who are neither radical nor socialistic, vote the Social Democrat ticket. The Social Democrats are by no means all democrats nor all socialists. As a body of voters they are united only in the expression of their discontent with a government of officials, practically chosen and kept in power over their heads, and with whose tenure of office they have nothing to do.

The fact that the members of the Reichstag are not in the saddle, but are used unwillingly and often contemptuously as a necessary and often stubborn and unruly pack-animal by the Kaiser-appointed ministers; the fact that they are pricked forward, or induced to move by a tempting feed held just beyond the nose, has something to do, no doubt, with the lack of unanimity which exists. The diverse elements debate with one another, and waste their energy in rebukes and recriminations which lead nowhere and result in nothing. I have listened to many debates in the Reichstag where the one aim of the speeches seemed to be merely to unburden the soul of the speaker. He had no plan, no proposal, no solution, merely a confession to make. After forty-odd years the Germans, in many ways the most cultivated nation in the world, are still without real representative government.

Why should the press or society take this assembly very seriously, when, as the most important measure of which they are capable, they can vote to have themselves dismissed by declining to pass supply bills; and when, as has happened four times in their history, they return chastened, tamed, and amenable to the wishes of their master?

No wonder the political writing in the press seems to us vaporish and without definite aims. It is perhaps due to this weakness that the writing in the German journals upon other subjects is very good indeed. The best energies of the writers are devoted to what may be called educational and literary expositions. In the field of foreign politics the German press is less well-informed, less instructive, and consequently irritating. The poverty of material resources makes such writing as that of Sir Valentine Chirrol, and in former days that of Mr. G. W. Smalley, beyond the reach of the German journalist, and their press is painfully narrow, frequently unfair, and often purposely insulting to foreign countries. They are not only anti- English, but anti-French, anti-American, and at times bitter. If the American people read the German newspapers there would be little love lost between us.

V BERLIN

He is a fortunate traveller who enters Berlin from the west, and toward the end of his journey rolls along over the twelve or fifteen miles of new streets, glides under the Brandenburger Tor, and finds himself in Unter den Linden. The Kaiserdamm, Bismarck Strasse, Berliner Strasse, Charlottenburgerchaussee, Unter den Linden, give the most splendid street entrance into a city in the world. The pavement is without a hole, without a crack, and as clear of rubbish of any kind as a well-kept kitchen floor. The cleanliness is so noticeable that one looks searchingly for even a scrap of paper, for some trace of negligence, to modify this superiority over the streets of our American cities. But there is no consolation; the superiority is so incontestable that no comparison is possible. For the whole twelve or fifteen miles the streets are lined with trees, or shrubs, or flowers, with well-kept grass, and with separate roads on each side for horsemen or foot-passengers. In the spring and summer the streets are a veritable garden.

Broadway is 80 feet wide; Fifth Avenue is 100 feet wide; the Champs Elysées is 233 feet wide; and Unter den Linden is 196 feet wide, and has 70 feet of roadway.

For every square yard of wood pavement in Berlin there are 24 square yards of asphalt and 37 square yards of stone. The total length of streets cleaned in Berlin, which has an area of 25 square miles, according to a report of some few years ago, was 316 miles; there are 700 streets and some 70 open places, and the area cleaned daily was 8,160,000 square yards. The cost of the care of the Berlin streets has risen with the growth of the city from 1,670,847 marks, [1] in 1880, to 6,068,557 marks, in 1910. The total cost of the street-cleaning in New York, in 1907, was $9,758,922, and in Manhattan, The Bronx, and Brooklyn 5,129 men were employed; while the working force in Berlin, in 1911, was 2,150. It should be said also that in New York an enormous amount of scavenging is paid for privately besides. In New York the street-sweepers are paid $2.19 a day; in Berlin the foremen receive 4.75 marks the first three years, and thereafter 5 marks; the men 3.75 marks the first three years, then 4 marks, and after nine years’ service 4.50 marks. The boy assistants receive 2 marks, after two years 2.25 marks, and after four years service 3 marks. The whole force is paid every fourteen days. The street-cleaning department is divided into thirty-three districts, these districts into four groups, each with an inspector, and all under a head-inspector. Attached to each district are depots with yards for storage of vehicles, apparatus, brooms, shovels, uniforms, with machine shops, where on more than one occasion I have seen enthusiastic workmen trying experiments with new machinery to facilitate their work.

[1] The mark is equal to a little less than twenty-five cents.

Over this whole force presides, a politician? Far from it; a technically educated man of wide experience, and, of the official of my visit I may add, of great courtesy and singular enthusiasm both for his task and for the men under him. What his politics are concerns nobody, what the politics of the party in power are concerns him not at all. That an individual, or a group of individuals, powerful financially or politically, should influence him in his choice or in his placing of the men under him is unthinkable. That a political boss in this or in that district, should dictate who should and who should not, be employed in the street-cleaning department, even down to the meanest remover of dung with a dust-pan, as was done for years in New York and every other city in America, would be looked upon here as a farce of Topsy-Turvydom, with Alice in Wonderland in the title-rôle.

The streets are cleaned for the benefit of the people, and not for the benefit of the pockets of a political aristocracy. The public service is a guardian, not a predatory organization. In our country when a man can do nothing else he becomes a public servant; in Germany he can only become a public servant after severe examinations and ample proofs of fitness. The superiority of one service over the other is moral, not merely mechanical.

The street-cleaning department is recruited from soldiers who have served their time, not over thirty-five years of age, and who must pass a doctor’s examination, and be passed also by the police. The rules as to their conduct, their uniforms, their rights, and their duties, down to such minute carefulness as that they may not smoke on duty “except when engaged in peculiarly dirty and offensive labor,” are here, as in all official matters in Germany, outlined in labyrinthine detail. Sickness, death, accident, are all provided for with a pension, and there are also certain gifts of money for long service. The police and the street-cleaning department co-operate to enforce the law, where private companies or the city-owned street-railways are negligent in making repairs, or in replacing pavement that has been disturbed or destroyed. There is no escape. If the work is not done promptly and satisfactorily, it is done by the city, charged against the delinquent, and collected!

One need go into no further details as to why and wherefore Berlin, Hamburg, even Cologne in these days, Leipsic, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Munich, keep their streets in such fashion, that they are as corridors to the outside of Irish hovels, as compared to the city streets of America; for the definite and all-including answer and explanation are contained in the two words: no politics.

Berlin is governed by a town council, under a chief burgomaster and a burgomaster, and the civic magistracy, and the police, these last, however, under state control. The chief burgomaster and the burgomaster are chosen from trained and experienced candidates, and are always men of wide experience and severe technical training, who have won a reputation in other towns as successful municipal administrators.

In May, 1912, Wermuth, the son of the blind King of Hanover’s right-hand man, and he himself the recently resigned imperial secretary of the treasury, was elected Oberburgomaster of Berlin. Such is the standing of the men named to govern the German cities. It is as though Elihu Root should be elected mayor of New York, with Colonel John Biddle as police commissioner, and Colonel Goethals as commissioner of street-cleaning. May the day come when we can avail ourselves of the services of such men to govern our cities!

The magistracy numbers 34, of whom 18 receive salaries. The town council consists of 144 members, half of whom must be householders. They are elected for six years, and one-third of them retire every two years, but are eligible for re-election. They are elected by the three-class system of voting, which is described in another chapter. This three-class system of voting results in certain inequalities. In Prussia, for example, fifteen per cent. of the voters have two-thirds of the electoral power, and relatively the same may be said of Berlin.

Unlike the municipal elections in American cities, the voters have only a simple ballot to put in the ballot-box. National and state politics play no part, and the voter is not confused by issues that have nothing to do with his city government. The government of their cities is arranged for on the basis that officials will be honest, and work for the city and not for themselves. Our city organizations often give the air of living under laws framed to prevent thievery, bribery, blackmailing, and surreptitious murder. We make our municipal laws as though we were in the stone age.

These German cities are also, unlike American cities, autonomous. They have no state-made charters to interpret and to obey; they are not restricted as to debt or expenditure; and they are not in the grip of corporations that have bought or leased water, gas, electricity, or street-railway franchises, and these, represented by the wealthiest and most intelligent citizens, become, through the financial undertakings and interests of these very same citizens, often the worst enemies of their own city. The German cities are spared also the confusion, which is injected into our politics by a fortunately small class of reformers, with the prudish peculiarities of morbid vestals; men who cannot work with other men, and who bring the virile virtues, the sound charities, and wholesome morality into contempt.

We all know him, the smug snob of virtue. You may find him a professor at the university; you may find him leading prayer-meetings and preaching pure politics; you may find him the bloodless philanthropist; you may find him a rank atheist, with his patents for the bringing in of his own kingdom of heaven. These are the men above all others who make the Tammanyizing of our politics possible. Honest men cannot abide the hot-house atmosphere of their self-conscious virtue. Nothing is more discouraging to robust virtue than the criticisms of teachers of ethics, who live in coddled comfort, upon private means, and other people’s ideas.

Germany is just now suffering from the spasms of moral colic, due to overeating. All luxury is in one form or another overeating. Berlin itself has grown too rapidly into the vicious ways of a metropolis, where spenders and wasters congregate. In 1911 the betting-machines at the Berlin race-tracks took in $7,546,000, of which the state took for its license, 16 2/3 per cent. There were 128 days of racing, while in England they have 540 days’ racing in the year!

In 1911, 1,300,000 strangers visited Berlin, of whom 1,046,162 were Germans, 97,683 Russians, 39,555 Austrians, 30,550 Americans, and 16,600 English. Berlin killed 2,000,000 beasts for food, including 10,500 horses; she takes care of 3,000 nightly in her night-shelters, puts away $17,500,000 in savings-banks, and has deposits therein of $90,500,000. On the other hand, she has built a palace of vice costing $1,625,000, in which on many nights between 11 P. M. and 2 A. M. they sell $8,000 worth of champagne. No one knows his Berlin, who has not partaken of a “Kalte Ente,” or a “Landwehrtopp,” a “Schlummerpunsch,” or “Eine Weisse mit einer Strippe.” There is still a boyish notion about dissipation, and they have their own great classic to quote from, who in “Faust” pours forth this rather raw advice for gayety:

“Greift nur hinein ins volle Menschenleben!
Ein jeder lebt’s, nicht vielen ist’s bekannt,
Und wo Ihr’s packt, da ist es interessant!”

Berlin is still in the throes of that sophomorical philosophy of life which believes that it is, from the point of view of sophistication, of age, when it is free to be befuddled with wine and befooled by women. But the German mind has no sympathy with hypocrisy. They may be brutal in their rather material views of morals, but they are frank. There may be mental prigs among them, but there are no moral prigs. In both England and America we suffer from a certain morbid ethical daintiness. There is a ripeness of moral fastidiousness that is often difficult to distinguish from rottenness. It is part of the feminism of America, born of our prosperity, for not one of these fastidious moralists is not a rich man, and Germany escapes this difficulty.

The government of a German city is so simple in its machinery that every voter can easily understand it. No doubt Seth Low and George L. Rives could explain to an intelligent man the charter under which New York City is governed, but they are very, very rare exceptions.

Our city government is bad, not because democracy is a failure, not because Americans are inherently dishonest, but because we are a superficially educated people, untrained to think, and, therefore, still worshipping the Jeffersonian fetich of divided responsibility between the three branches of the government. The judicial, the legislative, and the executive are, with minute care, forced to check and to impede one another, and we even carry this antiquated superstition, born of a suspicious and timid republicanism, into the government of our cities. With the exception of those cities in America which are governed by commissions, our cities are slaves as compared with the German cities. They are slaves of the predatory politicians, and they, on the other hand, are the bribed taskmasters of the rich corporations. The German asks in bewilderment why our men of wealth, of leisure, and of intelligence are not devoting themselves to the service of the state and the city. Alas, the answer is the pitiable one that the electoral machinery is so complicated that the voters can be and are, continually humbugged; and worse, many of the wealthy and intelligent, through their stake in valuable city franchises, are incompetent to deal fairly with the municipal affairs of their own city. Both in England and in America, the man in the street is quite sound in his judgment, when he declines to trust those who dabble in securities with which their own department has dealings. The British Caesar’s wife official, caught with a handkerchief on her person, woven on the looms of a company whose directors are dealing with the British government, can hardly claim exemption from suspicion, because she bought the handkerchief in America. We all know that when London sniffles the value of handkerchiefs goes up in New York. Caesar’s wife finds it difficult to persuade honorable men that she merely had a financial cold, but not the smallest interest in a corner in handkerchiefs.

In the great majority of German cities public-utility services, gas, water, electricity, street-railways, slaughter-houses, and even canals, docks, and pawn-shops are owned and controlled by the cities themselves. There is no loop-hole for private plunder, and there is, on the contrary, every incentive to all citizens, and to the rich in particular, to enforce the strictest economy and the most expert efficiency.

What theatres, opera-houses, orchestras, museums, what well-paved and clean streets, what parks Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco might have, had these cities only a part of the money, of which in the last twenty-five years they have been robbed! It is true that the older cities of Germany have traditions behind them that we lack. Art treasures, old buildings, and an intelligent population demanding the best in music and the drama we cannot hope to supply, but good house-keeping is another matter. Berlin, for example, is a new city as compared with New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and its growth has been very rapid.

It cannot be said for us alone that we have grown so fast that we have had no time to keep pace with the needs of our population. Berlin, all Germany indeed, has been growing at a prodigious rate. The population of Berlin in 1800 was 100,000; in 1832 only 250,000; hardly half a million in 1870; while the population now is over 2,000,000, and over 3,000,000 if one includes the suburbs, which are for all practical purposes part and parcel of Berlin. Charlottenburg, for example, with a population of 19,517 in 1871, now has a population of 305,976, and the vicinage of Berlin has grown in every direction in like proportions.

There were no towns in Germany till the eighth century, except those of the Romans on the Rhine and the Danube. In 1850 there were only 5 towns in Germany with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and in 1870 only 8; in 1890, 26; in 1900, 33; in 1905, 41; in 1910, 47; and nearly the whole increase of population is now massed in the middle-sized and large cities. The same may be said of the drift of population in America. “A thrifty but rather unprogressive provincial town of 60,000 inhabitants,” writes Mr. J. H. Harper, of New York, in 1810.

Between 1860 and 1900 the proportion of urban to rural population in the United States more than doubled. In the last ten years the percentage of people living in cities, or other incorporated places of more than 2,500 inhabitants, increased from 40.5 to 46.3 per cent. of the total; while twenty years ago only 36.1 per cent. of the population lived in such incorporated places.

As late as the thirteenth century the Christian chivalry of the time was spending itself in the task of converting the heathen of what is now Prussia; and it was well on into the nineteenth century before serfdom was entirely abolished in this region. It is the newness and rawness of the population, in the streets of the great German and Prussian capital which surprise and puzzle the American, almost more than the cleanliness and orderliness of the streets themselves. It is as though a powerful monarch had built a fine palace and then, for lack of company, had invited the people from the fields and farm-yards to be his companions therein.

“Jamais un lourdaud, quoi qu’il fasse
Ne saurait passer pour galaud.”

One should read Hazlitt’s “Essay on the Cockney” to find phrases for these Berliners. It is a gazing, gaping crowd that straggles along over the broad sidewalks. Half a dozen to a dozen will stop and stare at people entering or leaving vehicles, at a shop, or hotel door. I have seen a knot of men stop and stare at the ladies entering a motor-car, and on one occasion one of them wiped off the glass with his hand that he might see the better. It is not impertinence, it is merely bucolic naïveté. The city in the evening is like a country fair, with its awkward gallantries, its brute curiosity, its unabashed expressions of affection by hands and lips, its ogling, coughing, and other peasant forms of flirtation. It should be remembered that this people as a race show somewhat less of reticence in matters amatory than we are accustomed to. In the foyer of the theatre you may see a young officer walking round and round, his arm under that of his fiancée or bride, and her hand fondly clasped in his. It is a commentary, not a criticism, on international manners that the German royal princess, a particularly sweet and simple maiden, just engaged to marry the heir of the house of Cumberland, is photographed walking in the streets of Berlin, her hand clasped in that of her betrothed, and both he, and her brother who accompanies them, smoking! Gentlemen do not smoke when walking or driving with ladies, with us, though I am not claiming that it is a moral disaster to do so. It is a difference in the gradations of respect worth noting, but nothing more. I have even seen kissing, as a couple walked up the stairs from one part of the theatre to another. In the spring and summer the paths of the Tiergarten of a morning are strewn with hair-pins, a curious, but none the less accurate, indication of the rather fumbling affection of the night before.

To live in a fashionable hotel, in a land whose people you wish to study, is as valueless an experience as to go to a zoölogical garden to learn to track a mountain sheep or to ride down a wild boar. You must go about among the people themselves, to their restaurants, to their houses, if they are good enough to ask you, and to the resorts of all kinds that they frequent.

The manners are better than in my student days, but there is still a deal of improvised eating and drinking. There is much tucking of napkins under chins that the person may be shielded from misdirected food-offerings. There is not a little use of the knife where the fork or spoon is called for; but this last I always look upon as a remnant of courage, of the virility remaining in the race from a not distant time when the knife served to clear the forest, to build the hut, to kill the deer, and to defend the family from the wolf; and the traditions of such a weapon still give it predominance over the more epicene fork, as a link with a stirring past. Mere daintiness in feeding is characteristic of the lapdog and other over-protected animals. Unthinking courage in the matter of victuals is rather a relief from the strained and anxious hygienic watchfulness of the overcivilized and the overrich. The body should be, and is, regarded by wholesome-minded people, not as an idol, but as an instrument. The German no doubt sees something ignominious in counting as one chews a chop, in the careful measuring of one’s liquids, in the restricting of oneself to the diet of the squirrel and the cow. He would perhaps prefer to lose a year or two of life rather than to nut and spinach himself to longevity. The wholesome body ought of course to be unerring and automatic in its choice of the quantity and quality of its fuel.

A well-dressed man in Berlin is almost as conspicuous as a dancing bear. This comparison may lead the stranger to infer, in spite of what has been said of the orderliness of Berlin, that dancing bears are permitted in the streets. It is only fair to Berlin’s admirable police president, von Jagow, to say that they are not.

If one leaves the officers, who are a fine, upstanding, well-groomed lot, out of the account, the inhabitants of Berlin are almost grotesque in their dowdiness. This is the more remarkable for the reason that the citizens of Berlin, wherever you see them, not only in the West-end, but in the tenement districts, in the public markets, going to or coming from the suburban trains, in the trains and underground railway, in the cheaper restaurants and pleasure resorts, taking their Sunday outing, or in the fourth-class carriages of the railway trains, or their children in the schools, show a high level of comfort in their clothing. There is poverty and wretchedness in Berlin, of which later, but in no great city even in America, does the mass of the people give such an air of being comfortably clothed and fed.

We have been deluged of late years with figures in regard to the cost of living in this country and in that, and never are statistics such “damned lies” as in this connection. There is better and cheaper food in Berlin, and in the other cities of Germany, than anywhere else in our white man’s world. Having for the moment no free-trade, or protectionist, or tariff-reform axe to grind, and having tested the pudding not by my prejudices but my palate, and having eaten a fifteen-pfennig luncheon in the street, and climbed step by step the gastronomical stairway in Germany all the way up to a supper at the court, where eight hundred odd people were served with a care and celerity, and with hot viands and irreproachable potables, that made one think of the “Arabian Nights,” I offer my experience and my opinion with some confidence. You can get enough to stave off hunger for a few pfennigs, you can get a meal for something under twenty-five cents, and the whole twenty-five cents will include a glass of the best beer in the world outside of Munich. If you care to spend fifty cents there are countless restaurants where you can have a square meal and a glass of beer for that price; and for a dollar I will give you as good a luncheon with wine as any man with undamaged taste and unspoiled digestion ought to have.

There is one restaurant in Berlin which feeds as many as five thousand people on a Sunday, where you can dine or sup, and listen to good music, and enjoy your beer and tobacco for an hour afterward, and all for something under fifty cents if you are careful in your ordering. During my walks in the country around Berlin, I have often had an omelette followed by meat and vegetables, and cheese, and compote, and Rhine wine, with all the bread I wanted, and paid a bill for two persons of a little over a dollar. The Brödchen, or rolls, seem to be everywhere of uniform size and quality, and the butter always good.

Paris is fast losing its place as the home of good all-round eating as compared with Berlin. Of course, New York for geographical reasons, and also because the modern Maecenas lives there, is nowadays the place where Lucullus would invite his emperor to dine if he came back to earth; but I am not discussing the nectar and ambrosia classes, but the beer, bread, and pork classes, and certainly Berlin has no rival as a provider for them.

After all our study of statistics, of figures, of contrasts, I am not sure that we arrive at any very valuable conclusions. American working-classes work ever shorter hours, gain higher wages, but they are indubitably less happy, less rich in experience, less serene than the Germans. This measuring things by dollars, by hours, by pounds and yard-sticks, measures everything accurately enough except the one thing we wish to measure, which is a man’s soul. We are producing the material things of life faster, more cheaply, more shoddily, but it is open to question whether we are producing happier men and women, and that is what we are striving to do as the end of it all. Nothing is of any value in the world that cannot be translated into the terms of man-making, or its value measured by what it does to produce a man, a woman, and children living happily together. Wealth does not do this; indeed, wealth beyond a certain limit is almost certain to destroy the foundation of all peace, a contented family.

A shady beer-garden, capital music, and happy fathers and mothers and children, what arithmetic, or algebra, or census tells you anything of that? The infallible recipe for making a child unhappy, is to give it everything it cries for of material things, and never to thwart its will. We throw wages and shorter hours of work at people, but that is only turning them out of prison into a desert. No statistics can deal competently with the comparative well-being of nations, and nothing is more ludicrous than the results arrived at where Germany is discussed by the British or American politician. Whatever figures say, and whatever else they may lack, they are better clothed, better fed and cared for, and have far more opportunities for rational enjoyment, and a thousand-fold more for aesthetic enjoyment, than either the English or the Americans. That they lack freedom, in our sense, is true, but freedom is for the few. The worldwide complaint of the hardship of constant work is rather silly, for most of us would die of monotony if we were not forced to work to keep alive, and to make a living.

The city, with its broad, clean streets, its beautiful race-course, shaded walks, its forests and lakes, toward Potsdam, or at Tegel, or Werder, when the blossoms are out, with its well-kept gardens, its profusion of flowers and shrubs and trees, is physically the most wholesome great city in the world; but Hans bleibt immer Hans! Goethe, after a visit to Berlin, wrote: “There are no more ungodly communities than in Berlin.” [2]

[2] “Est giebt keine gottlosere Völker als in Berlin.”

No one knows his Berlin better than that prince of German literary Bohemians, Paul Lindau, and he makes a character in one of his novels say of it: “untidy and orderly, so boisterous and so regulated, so boorish and so kindly, so indescribable-so Berlinish-just that!” [3]

[3] “Staubig und ordentlich, so Taut und geregelt, so grob und gemütlich, so unbeschreiblich, so berlinerisch, gerade so!”

In another place the same author writes: “Berlin as the Capital of the German Empire! There are many respects in which it nevertheless hasn’t yet succeeded in taking on the character of a cosmopolitan city.” [4] Not even literature finds material for a city novel. There is no Balzac, no Thackeray. Germany is still dominated by the village and the town. Goethe, Auerbach, Spielhagen, Heyse, Gottfried Keller, Freytag, my unread favorite “Fritz” Reuter, deal not with the life of cities. There is as yet no drama, no novel, no art, no politics born of the city. There is no domineering Paris or London or New York as yet.

[4] “Berlin als Haupstadt des deutchen Reiches: in mancher Beziehung hatte es sich dem weltstädtischen Charakter doch noch nicht aneignen können.”

After some years of acquaintance with Germany as school-boy, as student at the universities, and lately as a most hospitably received guest by all sorts and conditions of men, I do not remember meeting a fop. A German Beau Brummel is as impossible as a French Luther, an American Goethe, or an English Wagner. We have had attempts at foppery in America, but no real fops. A genuine fop, whether in art, in literature, or in costumes, must have brains, ours have been merely effigies, foppery taking the dull commercial form of a great variety of raiment. It is a strange contradiction in German life that while they are as a people governed minutely and in detail, forbidden personal freedom along certain lines to which we should find it hard to submit, they are freer morally, freer in their literature, their art, their music, their social life, and in their unself-conscious expression of them than other people. There is a curious combination of legal and governmental slavery, and of spiritual and intellectual freedom; of innumerable restrictions, and great liberty of personal enjoyment, and that enjoyment of the most naïf kind. They seem to have done less to destroy life’s palate with the condiments of civilization, and therefore, still find plain things savorous.

I am not sure that the ecumenical sophistication, known as world-etiquette, marks a very high degree of knowledge or usefulness anywhere. To know which hat goes with which boots, and what collar and tie with what coat and waistcoat, and what costume is appropriate at 10 A. M., and what at 10 P. M., and to know the names of the head-waiters of the principal restaurants, are minor matters. These are the conveniences of the gentleman, but the characteristic burdens of the ass. Such a mental equipment is not the stuff of which soldiers, sailors, statesmen, explorers, or governors are made.

We must not overrate the value of this feminine worldliness in judging the Germans. This effeminate categorical imperative of etiquette has not influenced them greatly as yet. But on the other hand, one must claim for the amenities of life that they have their value, that they are, after all, the external decorations of an inward discipline. It is not necessarily a fine disdain of material things, but rather a keen sense of moral and physical efficiency, which pays due heed to wherewithal ye shall be clothed, at any rate outside of Palestine. Those who dream and discuss may wear anything or nothing. It mattered not what Socrates wore. But men of action must wear the easy armor that fits them best for their particular task. Men who toil either at their pleasure or at their work must change their raiment, if only for the sake of rest and health. Now that government is in the hands of the vociferators rather than the meditaters, even politicians must look to their costumes, merely out of regard to cleanliness. Evening clothes with a knitted tie dribbling down the shirt front; a frock-coat as a frame for a colored waistcoat, such as at shooting, or riding, or golf, we permit ourselves to break forth in, as a weak surrender to the tailor, or to the ingenuity of our womenfolk who are not “unbred to spinning, in the loom unskilled”; the extraordinary indulgence in personal fancies in the choice of colored ties, as though the male citizens of Berlin had been to an auction of the bastards of a rainbow; the little melon-shaped hats with a band of thick velvet around them; the awkward slouching gait, as of men physically untrained; the enormous proportion of men over forty, who follow behind their stomachs and turn their toes out at an angle of more than forty-five degrees, whose necks lie in folds over their collars, and whose whole appearance denotes an uncared-for person and a negligence of domestic hygiene: these things are significant. No man who walks with his toes pointing southwest by south, and southeast by south, when he is going south, will ever get into France on his own feet, carrying a knapsack and a rifle. Cranach’s painting of Duke Henry the Pious, in the Dresden Gallery, gives an accurate picture of the way many Germans still stand and walk; while every athlete knows that runners and walkers put their feet down straight, or with a tendency to turn them in rather than out. The Indians of northwest India, and the Indians of our own West are good examples of this.

It is evident that the orderliness of Berlin is enforced orderliness and not voluntary orderliness. Both pedestrians and drivers of all sorts of vehicles, take all that is theirs and as much more as possible. There is none of the give and take, and innate love of fair play and instinctive wish to give the other fellow a chance, so noticeable in London streets, whether on the sidewalks or in the roadway. There is a general chip-on-the-shoulder attitude in Prussia, which may be said, I think not unfairly, to be evident in all ranks, from their recent foreign diplomacy, down to the pedestrians and drivers.

Many people whom I have met, not only foreigners but Germans from other parts of Germany, are loud in their denunciations of the Berliners. “Frech” and “roh” are words often used about them. There is a surly malice of speech and manner among the working classes, that seems to indicate a wish to atone for political impotence, by braggart impudence to those whom they regard as superior. When we played horse as children, we champed the wooden bit, shied, and balked and kicked, and the worse we behaved the more spirited horses we thought ourselves. There is a certain social and political radicalism verging upon anarchy, which plays at life in much the same way, with no better reason, and with little better result. Shying, balking, and kicking, and champing the political bit, are only spirited to the childish.

Their awkward and annoying attentions to women alone on the streets; their staring and gaping; their rudeness in pushing and shoving; the general underbred look, the slouching gait, the country-store clothes, hats, and boots; the fearful and wonderful combinations of raiment; the sweetbread complexions, as of men under-exercised and not sufficiently aired and scrubbed; their stiff courtesy to one another when they recognize acquaintances with hat-sweeping bows; their fierce gobbling in the restaurants; their lack of small services and attentions to their own women when they go about in public with them; their selfish disregard of others in public places, their giving and taking of hats, coats, sticks, and umbrellas at the garde-robes of the theatres, for example; their habit of straggling about in the middle of the streets, like the chickens and geese on a country road: all these things I have noted too, but I must admit the surprising personal conclusion that I have grown to like the people. A good pair of shoulders and an engaging smile go far to mitigate these nuisances. It makes for good sense in this matter of criticism always to bear in mind that delicious piece of humor of the psalmist: “Let the righteous rather smite me friendly; and reprove me. But let not their precious balms break my head.” The “precious balms” of the lofty and righteous critic are not of much value when they merely break heads.

I have been all over Berlin, and in all sorts of places, by day and by night. I have found myself seated beside all sorts of people in restaurants and public places, and I have yet to chronicle any rudeness to me or mine. I like their innocent curiosity, their unsophisticated ways, their bumpkin love-making in public; and many a time I have found entertainment from odd companions who seated themselves near me, when I have strayed into the cheaper restaurants, to hear and to see something of the Berliner in his native wilds. Their malice and rudeness and apparent impertinences are due to lack of experience, to the fact that their manners are still untilled, I believe, rather than to intentional insult. They are not house-broken to their new capital, that is all, and that will come in time. Their malicious jealousy peeps out in all sorts of ways. In the lower house of the Prussian Diet, recently, a member protested vigorously against the employment of an American singer in the Opera House! Chauvinism carried to this extreme becomes comic, and is noted here only to indicate to what depths of farm-yard provinciality some of the citizens of this great city can descend.

They are dreamers and sentimentalists too. There are more kissing, more fondling, more exuberance of affection, more displays of friendliness in Germany in a week than in England and America in six months. I confess without shame that I like to see it, and when it comes my way, as beyond my deserts it has, I like to feel it. How lasting is this friendliness I have no means of knowing till the years to come tell me, but that it is a pleasant atmosphere to live in there can be no doubt.

The driving is of the very worst. A man behind a horse, or horses, who knows even the elements of handling the reins and the whip and the brake, would be a curiosity indeed. I have not seen a dozen coachmen, private or public, to whom my youngest child could not have given invaluable suggestions as to the bitting, harnessing, and handling of his cattle. On the other hand, I one day saw a street sign twisted out of its place. I was fascinated by this unexampled mark of negligence. I determined to watch that sign; alas, within forty-eight hours it was put right again.

Let it not be understood that there are no fine horses to be seen in Berlin. You will go far to find a better lot of horse-flesh, or better-looking men on the horses, than you will see when the Kaiser rides by to the castle after his morning exercise; and he sits his horse and manages him with the easy skill of the real horseman, and looks every inch a king besides. It is told of Daniel Webster, walking in London, that a navvy turned to his companion and remarked: “That bloke must be a king!” You would say the same of the Kaiser if you saw him on horseback.

At horse shows and in the Tiergarten, and in riding-places in other cities, I have looked at hundreds of horses, and, if I mistake not, Germany is both buying and breeding the very best in the way of mounts, though their civilian riders are often of the scissors variety. There are comparatively few harness horses, and in Berlin scarcely a dozen well-turned-out private carriages, outside the imperial equipages, which are always superbly horsed and beautifully turned out; so my eyes tell me at least, and I have watched the streets carefully for months. The minor details of a properly turned-out carriage (bits, chains, liveries, saddle-cloths, and so on) are still unknown here. I have had the privilege of driving and riding some of the horses in the imperial stables; and I have seen all of them at one time or another being exercised in harness and under the saddle. I have never driven a better-mannered four, or ridden more perfectly broken saddle-horses. There are three hundred and twenty-six horses in his Majesty’s stables, and for a private stable of its size it has no equal in the world. I may add, too, that there is probably no better “whip” in the world to-day, whether with two horses, four horses, or six horses, than the gentleman who trains the harness horses in the imperial stables. This German coachman would be a revelation at a horse show in either New York or London. If the citizens of Berlin were as well-mannered as the horses in the imperial stables, this would be the most elegant capital in the world. It is to be regretted that his Majesty’s very accomplished master of the horse cannot also hold the position of censor morum to the citizens of Berlin. Individual prowess in the details of cosmopolitan etiquette has not reached a high level, but in all matters of mere house-keeping there are no better municipal housewives than these German cities and towns.

As a further example, the statues of Berlin are carefully cleaned in the spring, but what statues! With the exception of the Lessing, the Goethe, and the Great Elector statues, the statue of Frederick the Great, and the reclining statues of the late emperor and empress, by Begas, and one or two others, one sees at once that these citizens are no more capable of ornamenting their city than of dressing themselves.

Poor Bismarck! Grotesque figures (men, women, animals) surround the base of his statue in Berlin, in Leipsic; and in Hamburg, clad in a corrugated golf costume, with a colossal two-handed sword in front of him, he is a melancholy figure, gazing out over a tumble-down beer-garden. At Wannsee, near Berlin, there is, I must admit, a really fine bust of Bismarck. On a solid square pedestal of granite, covered with ivy and surrounded by the whispering, or sighing, or creaking and cracking trees that he loved, and facing the setting sun, and alone in a secluded corner, just the place he would have chosen, there are the head and shoulders of the real Bismarck. Here for once he has escaped the fussy attentions of the artistry that he detested. Lehnbach, who painted Bismarck so many scores of times, never gave him the color that his face kept all through life, and with the exception of this bust, of the scores of Bismarck memorials one sees all commiserate the lack of artist ability; they do not commemorate Bismarck. If this is what they do to the greatest man in their history, what is to be expected elsewhere? What has poor Joachim Friedrich done that he should pose forever in the Sieges Allee as an intoxicated hitching-post? What, indeed, have his companions done that they should stand in two rows there, studies in contortion, with a gilded Russian dancer with wings at one end of their line, and a woodeny Roland at the other? But there they are, simpering a paltry patriotism, insipid as history and ridiculous as art. What has become of Lessing, and Winckelmann, and Goethe, and their teachings? Is this the price that a nation must pay for its industrial progress?

The German, with all his boasting about the “centre of culture,” has not discovered that the beauty of antiquity is the expression of those virtues which were useful at the time of Theseus, as Stendhal rightly tells us. Individual force, which was everything of old, amounts to almost nothing in our modern civilization. The monk who invented gunpowder modified sculpture; strength is only necessary now among subalterns. No one thinks of asking whether Frederick the Great and Napoleon were good swordsmen. The strength we admire, is the strength of Napoleon advancing alone upon the First Battalion of the royal troops near Lake Loffrey in March, 1815; that is strength of soul. The moral qualities with which we are concerned are no longer the same as in the days of the Greeks. Before this cockney sculpture was planned, there should have been a closer study of the history and philosophy of art in Berlin.

It is true that we in America are living in a glass house to some extent in these matters, but where in all Germany is there any modern sculpture to compare with our Nathan Hale, our Minute Man, and that most spirited bit of modern plastic art in all the world, the Shaw Monument in Boston? You cannot stand in front of it without keeping time, and here lips of bronze sing the song of patriotism till your heart thumps, and you are ready to throw up your hat as the splendid young figure and his negro soldiers march by - and they do march by! It is almost a consolation for what Boston has done to that gallant soldier and humble servant of God, that modest gentleman, Phillips Brooks. In a statue to him they have travestied the virtues he expounded, slain the ideal of the Christ he preached, theatricalized the least theatrical of men, and placed this piece of mortifying misunderstanding in bronze under the very eaves of the house that grew out of his simple eloquence. There is in Leipsic a similar misdemeanor in a statue of Beethoven. He sits, naked to the waist, in a bronze chair, with a sort of bath-towel drapery of colored marble about his legs, and an eagle in front of him. He has a chauffeurish expression of anxious futility, as though he were about to run over the eagle.

Men are without great dreams in these days, and art is elaborate and fussy and self-conscious. The technical part of the work is predominant. One sees the artist holding up a mirror to himself as he works. Pygmalion congratulates the statue upon the fact that he carved it, instead of being lost in the love of creating. It is as though a lover should sing of himself instead of singing of his lady. The subtle poison of self-advertisement has crept in, and peers like a satyr from the picture and from the statue. Even the most prominent name in German music at this writing is that of a man who is notorious as an expert salesman of symphonic sensationalism.

Though the streets are so well kept, the buildings in these miles of new streets are flimsy-looking, and evidently the work of the speculative builder. The more pretentious buildings ape a kind of Nuremberg Renaissance style, and are as effective as a castle made of cardboard. This does not imply that there are not simple and solid buildings in Berlin and, in the case of the new library and a score of other buildings, worthy architecture; but the general impression is one of haste multiplied by plaster.

The whole city blossoms with statuary, like a cosmopolitan ’Arriet who cannot get enough flowers and feathers on her Sunday hat. A certain comic anthropomorphism is to be seen, even on the balustrades of the castle, where the good Emperor William is posed as Jupiter, the Empress Augusta as Juno, Emperor Frederick as Mars, and his wife as Minerva! On the façades of houses, on the bridges, on the roofs of apartment houses, on the hotels even, and scattered throughout the public gardens, are scores of statues, and they are for the most part what hastily ordered, swiftly completed art, born of the dollar instead of the pain and travail of love and imagination, must always be.

A certain literary snob taken to task by Doctor Parr for pronouncing the one-time capital of Egypt “Alexandria,” with the accent on the long i, quoted the authority of Doctor Bentley. “Doctor Bentley and I,” replied Doctor Parr, “may call it ‘Alexandria,’ but I should advise you to call it ‘Alexandrïa.’ ” It was all very well for the Medici, to ornament their cities and their homes with the fruit of the great artistic springtime of the world, but I should strongly advise the Berliners to pronounce it “Alexandria” for some years to come. No matter how fervid the lover, nor how possessed he may be by his mistress, he cannot turn out every day, even,

“A halting sonnet of his own poor brain,
Fashion’d to Beatrice.”

All this pretentious over-ornamentation is cosmeticism, the powder and paint of the vulgarian striving to conceal by a futile advertisement her lack of refinement. Paris was teaching the world when there was no capital in Germany; London has been a commercial centre for a thousand years, and Oxford was a hundred years old before even the University of Prague, the first in Germany, was founded by Charles IV in 1348. You may like or dislike these cities, but, at any rate, they have a bouquet; Berlin has none.

When Germany deals with the inanimate and amenable factors of life, she brings the machinery of modern civilization well-nigh to the point of perfection. As a municipal and national housewife she has no equal, none. But art has nothing to do with brooms and dust-pans, and human nature is woven of surprises and emergencies, and what then? An interesting example in the streets of Berlin is the difference between the perfection of the street-cleaning, which deals with the inanimate and with accurately calculable factors, and the governing of the street traffic. Horses and men and motor-driven vehicles are not as dependable as blocks of pavement. When the traffic in the Berlin streets grows to the proportions of London, Paris, and New York, one wonders what will happen. Nowhere are there such broad, well-kept streets in which the traffic is so awkwardly handled.

The police are all, and must be, indeed, noncommissioned officers of the army, of nine years service, and not over thirty-five years of age. They are armed with swords and pistols by night, and in the rougher parts of the town with the same weapons by day as well. After ten years service they are entitled to a pension of twenty-sixtieths of their pay, with an increase of one-sixtieth for each further year of service. They are not under the city, but under state control, and the chief of police is a man of distinction, nearly always a nobleman, and nominated by, and in every case approved by, the Emperor. In Berlin he is appointed by the King of Prussia. He is a man of such standing that he may be promoted to cabinet rank. The men are well-turned out, of heavy build, very courteous to strangers, so far as my experience can speak for them, and quiet and self-controlled. Under the police president are one colonel of police, receiving from 6,000 to 8,500 marks, according to his length of service; 3 majors, receiving from 5,400 to 6,600 marks; 20 captains, receiving from 4,200 to 5,400 marks; 156 lieutenants, receiving from 3,000 to 4,500 marks; 450 sergeants, receiving from 1,650 to 2,300 marks; and 5,382 patrolmen, receiving from 1,400 to 2,100 marks. There are also some 300 mounted police, receiving from 1,400 to 2,600 marks. The colonel, majors, and captains receive 1,300 marks additional, and the lieutenants 800 marks additional, for house rent. The mounted police are well-horsed, but it is no slight to them to say, however, that their horses are not so well trained and well mannered, nor the men such skilful horsemen, as those of our mounted squad in New York, who, man for man and horse for horse, are probably unequalled anywhere else in the world.

The demand for these non-commissioned officers of nine years of army discipline, who cannot be called upon to serve in the army again, has grown with the growth of the great city, with its need of porters, watchmen, and the like, and so valuable are their services deemed that the present police force of Berlin is short of its proper number by some seven hundred men.

The examination of those about to become policemen extends over four weeks, and includes every detail of the multiplicity of duties, which ranges from the protection of the public from crime, down to tracking down truants from school, and the regulation of the books of the maid-servant class. The policeman who aspires to the rank of sergeant undergoes a still more rigorous examination, extending over twenty weeks of preparation, during which time he studies - note this list, ye “young barbarians all at play,” German, rhetoric, writing, arithmetic, common fractions, geography, history, especially the history of the House of Hohenzollern from the time of the margraves to the present time (!), political divisions of the earth, especially of Prussia and Germany, the essential features of the constitution of the Prussian Kingdom and German Empire, the organization and working of the various state authorities in Prussia and Germany, elementary methods of disinfection, common veterinary remedies, the police law as applicable to innumerable matters from the treatment of the drunk, blind, and lame, to evidences of murder, and the press law. The man who passes such an examination would be more than qualified to take a degree, at one of our minor colleges, if he knew English and the classics were not required, and could well afford to sniff disdainfully at the pelting shower of honorary degrees of Doctor of Divinity, which descend from the commencement platforms of our more girlish intellectual factories of orthodoxy.

The cost of the police in Berlin in 1880 was 2,494,722 marks; in 1890, 3,007,879 marks; in 1900, 6,065,975 marks; and in 1910, 8,708,165 marks.

I fancy that after an accident has taken place the literary, legal, and hygienic details are cared for by the Berlin police as nowhere else. In their management of the traffic they are distinctly lacking in decision and watchfulness. On the western side of the Brandenburger Tor there is seldom an hour, without a tangle of traffic which is entirely unnecessary if the police knew their business. On the Tiergarten Strasse, a rather narrow and much used thoroughfare in the fashionable part of the town, trucks, cabs, and other vehicles are not kept close to the curbs, often they drive along in pairs, slowing up all the traffic, and at the east end of the street is a corner which could easily be remedied by the building of a “refuge,” and an authoritative policeman to guard the three approaches. Not once, but scores of times, at the very important corner of Unter den Linden and Wilhelm Strasse I have seen the policeman talking to friends on the curb, quite oblivious to a scramble of cabs, wagons, and motors at cross purposes in the street. Potsdamer Platz presents a difficult problem at all times of the day, especially when the crowds are coming from or going toward home, but a few ropes and iron standards, and four alert Irish policemen, would make it far plainer sailing than now it is. It is to be remembered, too, that the traffic is a mere dribble as compared to a torrent, when one remembers Paris, New York, and London. In 1909 the street accidents in Paris numbered 65,870, and there was one summons for every 77 motor taxicabs, but Paris is now without a rival as the dirtiest, worst-paved capital in Europe, and the home of social anarchy; a place where adventurous spirits will go soon rather than to Africa, or to the Rocky Mountains, for excitement in affrays with revolvers, vitriol, and chloroform.

In London, in 1909, there were 13,388 accidents. In Berlin there was a total of 4,895 accidents in 1900; 4,797 in 1905; and 4,233 in 1910. One hundred persons were killed in 1900; 115 in 1905; and 136 in 1910. In this connection it is to be said, that Berlin has fewer and much less adventurous inhabitants, very much less complicated traffic, much broader and better streets, and far fewer problems than the older cities. If the citizens of Berlin were anything like as capable of taking care of themselves in the streets, as they should be, there would be hardly any accidents at all. The new police regulation of the traffic has been only some four or five years in existence in its more rigid form, and perhaps neither people nor police are accustomed to it. Even then, out of the total of 4,233 accidents in 1910, 1,876 of them were caused by the street-railway cars. This shows of itself how light the traffic must be, for worse driving and more awkward pedestrians one would go far to find.

The cost of Berlin housekeeping increases by leaps and bounds. The total city expenses were: 45,221,988 marks in 1880; 89,364,270 in 1890; 121,405,356 in 1900; and 355,424,614 in 1910. The debt of Berlin has risen from 126,161,605 marks in 1880, and 272,912,350 in 1900, to 475,799,231 in 1910, with a very considerable addition voted for 1912. In the ten years alone between 1897 and 1907 the debt of German cities including only those with a population of more than 10,000, increased by $1,050,000,000. Municipal expenditure in Paris has risen in the last ten years from $59,200,000 to $76,000,000. The budget expenditure of France has reached $1,040,000,000. In 1898 it was only $600,000,000.

It cannot be expected that the best-kept, cleanest, and most orderly cities in the world, and there need be no hesitation in saying this of the German cities, should not spend much money, and the states in which they are situated much money as well. The various states of the empire spent, according to a report of four years ago, $1,352,500,000; and the empire itself $738,250,000, or a total of $2,090,750,000. From the various state or empire controlled enterprises, such as railways, forests, mines, post and telegraph, imperial printing-office, and so on, the states and empire received a net income of $216,525,000, and the balance was, of course, raised by direct and indirect taxation.

One may put appropriately enough under this heading, the invaluable and unpaid services of a host of honorary officials, who render expert service both in the state and city governments. There are over ten thousand honorary officials in the city of Berlin alone, more than three thousand of whom serve under the school authorities. They are chosen from citizens of standing, education, wealth, and ability, and assist in all the departments with advice and expert knowledge, and sit upon the various committees. The German citizen has not only his pocket taxed, but his patriotism also, and a capital philosophy of government this implies.

A friend, a large landholder in Saxony, gives, between his services as a reserve officer in the army and his magisterial and other duties, something over nine weeks of his time to the state every year, and he is by no means an exception, he tells me. A certain amount of this is required of him by the state, with a heavy fine for nonperformance of these duties. The same is true of the many members of the various standing committees in the cities. Each citizen is compelled to contribute a certain proportion of his mental and moral prowess to the service of his state and city, but he receives a return for it in his beautifully kept city, in the educational advantages, in the theatres, concerts, opera, and in the peaceful orderliness, the value of which only the foreigner can fully appreciate.

Almost all the court theatres, for example, throughout Germany are under a director who works in harmony with the reigning prince. The King of Prussia gives for his theatres in Berlin, Wiesbaden, Hanover, and Cassel, more than $625,000 a year from his private purse; the Duke of Anhalt, $75,000 a year to the Dessauer theatre. The players have a sure position under responsible and intelligent government, and feel themselves to be not mere puppets, but educational factors with a certain pride and dignity in their work.

There are more Shakespeare plays given in Germany in a week than in all the English-speaking countries together in a year. This is by no means an exaggeration. The theatre is looked upon as a school. Fathers and mothers arrange that their older children as well as themselves shall attend the theatre all through the winter, and subscribe for seats as we would subscribe to a lending library. During the last year in Germany, the plays of Schiller were given 1,584 times, of Shakespeare 1,042 times, the music-dramas of Wagner 1,815 times, the plays of Goethe 700 times, and of Hauptmann 600 times. There is no spectacular gorgeousness, as when an Irving, a Booth, or a Beerbohm Tree sugarcoats Shakespeare to induce us barbarians to go, in the belief that we are after all not wasting our time, since the performance tastes a little of the more gorgeous music halls. The scenery and costumes are sufficient, and the performance always worth intelligent attention, for the reason that both the director and his players have given time and scholarship to its interpretation. The acting is often indifferent as compared to the French stage, but it is at least always in earnest and intelligent. The theatre prices in Berlin are high, even as compared with New York prices, but in other cities and towns of Germany cheaper than in England, France, or America.

Pericles passed a law in Athens by which each citizen was granted two oboli, one to pay for his seat at the theatre, the other to provide himself with refreshment. In Athens the play began at 6 or 7 A. M., and during the morning three tragedies and a satirical drama were played, followed in the afternoon by a comedy. The theatre of Dionysius seated 30,000 people, who brought their cushions, food, and drink, and occasionally used them to express their dislike of the performance or the performers. At one of the larger industrial towns in Germany, during a Sunday of my visit, there were three performances; one at 11 A. M., of a patriotic melodrama, “Glaube und Heimat”; another, at 3.30 P. M., of “Der Freischütz”; and another, at 7.30 P. M., of Sudermann’s play, “Die Ehre.” The prices of seats for the morning performance ranged from eight cents to forty-five cents; a little more in the afternoon; and from seventeen cents to $1.15 in the evening. At the performance I attended the house was crowded and attentive. I was not enough of an Athenian to attend all three. Even at the Music Hall in Berlin, where, as in other cities, the thinly covered salacious is ladled out to the animal man, there was a capital stage caricature of Oedipus, which atoned for the customary ewig Legliche, which now rules in these resorts. If for some untoward reason women ceased to have legs, what would the British and American theatrical trust managers do!

The German takes his theatre and his music, as from the beginnings of these it was intended we all should do. They are not a distraction merely, but an education, an education of the senses, and through the senses of the whole man. There are music-lovers and serious playgoers in America; but for the most part our theatres cater to, and are filled by, a public seeking a soothing and condimented mental atmosphere, in which to finish digestion. Theatrical salmagundi is served everywhere, and seems to be the dish best suited to the American aesthetic palate as thus far educated. We cannot complain, since other wares would be quickly provided did we but ask for them.

America has suffered because she was overtaken by a great material prosperity before she had a sufficient spiritual and intellectual development, and up to now the material side of life has had the upper hand. We buy the best pictures, the rare books and manuscripts, armor and silver and porcelain, and it must be said that there is a fine idealism here, because they are bought almost without exception by uncultured, often almost unlettered, rich men, who know nothing and care very little for these things, but who are providing rare educational opportunities for another generation. In 1910 objects of art to the value of $22,000,000 were imported, in 1911 $36,000,000 worth, and in 1912 sixty per cent. more than in 1911. In the same way we hire the best musicians and singers, but our surroundings and the powerful circumambient ambitions, have not tempted us as yet to live contentedly and understandingly in any such atmosphere as the Germans do. It is a striking contrast, perhaps of all the contrasts the most interesting to the student, this of America growing from industrialism toward idealism, of Germany growing out of idealism into industrialism.

Germany floats in music; in America a few, a very few, float on it. In Germany everybody sings, almost everybody plays some instrument, and from the youngest to the oldest everybody understands music; at least that is the impression you carry away with you from the land of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms, and Beethoven, and Wagner, and I might fill the page with the others.

You are at least on the ramparts of Paradise, in the Thomas Kirche in Leipsic at the weekly Saturday concert of the scholars of the Thomas Schule. The worldliness is melted out of you, as you sit in the cool, quiet church with the sunlight slanting in upon you, and the atmosphere alive with sweet sounds. And this is only one of hundreds of such experiences all over Germany. At the Kreuz Kirche in Dresden, at the great Dom church in Berlin at Easter time, for the asking you may have the oil and wine of music’s Good Samaritan poured upon the wounds of those sore-pressed travellers, your hopes and ideals, your dreams and ambitions, that have fallen among thieves, on the long, long way from Jericho to Jerusalem.

It is, I must admit, a drab and dreary crowd to look at, these Germans at the theatre, at the opera, in the concert halls. They do not dress, or if they are women undress, for their music as do we; their music dresses for them. They come, most of them, in the clothes that they have worn all day, each quidlibet induitus. They have many of them a meal of meat, bread, and beer during the long pause between two of the acts, always provided for this purpose. Some of them bring little bags with their own provisions, and only buy a glass of beer. They are solemnly attentive, an educated and experienced audience there for a purpose, and not to be trifled with, the most competently critical audience in the world. I wonder as I look at them whether the fact that they have no backs to their heads, emphasized nowadays by the fact that many men wear their hair clipped close to the head, and no chins (the lack of chins in Germany is almost a national peculiarity) has any physiological or psychological relation to their prowess in, and love of, and critical appreciation of, the more nebulous arts: music, poetry, philosophy, and the serious drama.

They are as adamant in their observance of the rules in such matters. More than once I arrived at the opera a few minutes late, once four minutes late, the doors are closed and guarded, and I listen to the overture from the outside. At a concert led by the famous von Bülow half a dozen women come in after the music has begun, rustling, sibilant, and excited. The music stops, the great conductor turns to glare at them, and, referring to the geese which are said to have saved Rome by their hissing, thunders: “Hier ist kein Capitol zu retten!”

There are some forty thousand professional musicians in Germany. The town council of Berlin is now discussing gravely the sum to be allotted to the support of the Symphony Orchestra, and Charlottenburg is building an opera house of its own, and Spandau a theatre; and there has just been formed in Berlin a “Society of the German Artistes’ Theatre,” with a capital of $200,000, which is a project along the general lines of the Comédie Française. The discussions and arguments relating to these municipal expenditures, as I read them in the newspapers, are all based upon the assumption that the people have a right to good and cheap music, just as they have a right to good and cheap beer and bread.

At Düsseldorf one of the theatres, managed by a woman, and supported by the best people in the town, is not only a playhouse, but a school for actors, and a proving-ground for the drama. It is a treat indeed to attend the performances there. We have tried similar things in America, but with sad results. Fifty millionaires, no one of whom had ever read the text of a serious play in his life, build a temple for the drama, but there are no plays, no actors, no audience, nothing is accomplished. There is no critical body of real lovers of the drama, and there are no cheap seats, and there is still that fatuous notion that exclusiveness, except in the trifling matter of physical propinquity, can be bought with dollars.

The only impenetrably exclusive thing in the world is intellect, he is the only aristocrat left in these democratic days, and we are not devoting much attention as yet to his breeding. We do not realize that the only valuable democrat must be an aristocrat. “Culture seeks to do away with classes and sects; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely; nourished and not bound by them. This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality.”

In Germany there are more men of culture per thousand of the population than in any other land, but they rule the country not by “sweetness and light,” but by force. This seems at first a contradiction. It is not. Religion, life, and love are all savage things. Because we have known men who preach but do not believe; men who breathe and walk who have not lived; men who protest but who have not loved, we are prone to think of religion, life, and love as soft. We have conquered and chastened so much of nature: the air, the water, the bowels of the earth that we fool ourselves with thinking that culture also is tame, that religion, life, and love are tame too. Savage things they are! You may know them by that! If you find them nice, vivacious, amusing, amenable, be sure that they are forgeries.

This is the profound fallacy underlying the present-day economic peace propagandism, whose heaviest underwriter, Mr. Carnegie, is, by the way, an agnostic. While there is faith there will be fighting. Do away with either and society would crumble. What the Puritans did for us, the Prussians have done for Germany. They have fought, are fighting, and will fight for their faith. Though they have many unpleasant characteristics, this is their most admirable quality. They believe in an aristocracy of culture with a right to rule. Goethe said of Luther that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind by centuries, by calling in the passions of the multitude to decide on subjects that ought to have been left to the learned. This is a good example of imitation culture. This is very much the view that Mr. Balfour holds in regard to Cromwell. But Luther and Bismarck made Germany. The one taught Germany to bark, the other taught Germany to bite. The great deliverers of the world came, not to bring peace, but a sword.

When you leave the drab crowd in the streets, and enter the houses of the real rulers of Germany, the contrast between the aristocrat and the plebeian is nowhere so outstanding. I have seen no finer-looking specimens of mankind in face and figure and manner than the best of these men. If you stroll though the halls of the Krieges Academie, where the pick of the young officers of the German army, are preparing themselves for the examinations which admit a very small proportion of them, to appointments on the general staff, you will be delighted with the faces and figures, and the air of alertness and intelligence there. And you will find as fine a type of gentlemen, in face, manners, and figure, at their head as exists anywhere.

There are complaints that this Prussian aristocracy is socially exclusive, is given office both in the army and in civil life too readily; but what an aristocracy it is! These are the men whose families gave, often their all, to make Prussia, and then to make Germany. Service of king and country is in their blood. They get small remuneration for their service. There is no luxury. They spurn the temptations of money. Hundreds and hundreds of them have never been inside the house of a rich parvenu, nor have their women. They work as no other servants work, they live on little, they and their women and children; and you may count yourself happily privileged if they permit you the intimacy of their home life.

Officers and gentlemen there are, living on two thousand five hundred dollars a year, and most of them on much less, and their wives, as well born as themselves, darning their socks and counting the pfennigs with scrupulous care. These are the women whose ancestors flung themselves against the Roman foe, beside their husbands and brothers; these are the women who gave their jewels to save Prussia; these are the women, with the glint of steel and the light of summer skies braided in their eyes, who have taken their hard, self-denying part in making Prussia, and the German Empire. No wonder they despise the mere money-maker, no wonder they will have none of his softness for themselves, and hate what Milton calls “lewdly pampered luxury,” as a danger to their children. They know well the moral weapons that won for this starved, and tormented, and poverty-stricken land its present place in the world as a great power.

“And as the fervent smith of yore
Beat out the glowing blade,
Nor wielded in the front of war
The weapons that he made,
But in the tower at home still plied
His ringing trade;

“So like a sword the son shall roam
On nobler missions sent;
And as the smith remained at home
In peaceful turret pent,
So sits the while at home the mother
Well content.”

I, convinced democrat that I am, know very well that there are, and always have been, and always will be aristocrats, for there is no national salvation without them anywhere in the world. The aristocrats are the same everywhere, no matter what their distinctions of title, or whether they have none. They are those who believe that they owe their best to God and to men, and they serve. Likewise the plebeians are the same all over the world; whatever their presumptions or denials, they believe that they are here to get what they can out of God and men, and they take far more than they give.

Perhaps no feature of German life is so little known, so little understood, as this simple-living, proud, and exclusive caste, who have made, and still protect and guard, Prussia and Germany. They say: “We made Prussia and Germany, and we intend to guard them, both from enemies at home and from enemies abroad!” My admiration for these men and women is so unbounded, that I would no more carry criticism with me into their homes, than I would carry mud into a sanctuary.

They have done much for Germany, but the best, perhaps, of all is that they have made economy and simple living feasible and even fashionable; they have made talent aristocratic; they have insisted that social life shall be founded on service and breeding and ability. They will have no dealings with Herr Muller, the rich shopkeeper, but whatever name the distinguished artist, or public servant, or man of science, or young giant in any field of intellectual prowess may bear, he is welcomed. In general this welcome given by German society to talent holds good. There is, however, a society composed of the great landed proprietors, who live in the country, who come to Berlin rarely, and whose horizon is limited severely to their own small interests, their restricted circle, and by their provincial pride. They recognize nobody but themselves, for the reason that they know nobody and nothing else. There is an exclusiveness born of stupidity, just as there is an exclusiveness born of a sense of duty to one’s position and traditions in the world. One must recognize that this side of social life exists in Germany just as it exists in England, and France, and Austria, but it is fast losing its importance and its power.

One hears it lamented that society is changing, that the rich Jew and the rich gentile are received where twenty-five years ago the social portals were shut against them, and that many go to their houses who would not have gone not many years ago. My experience is too slender to weigh these matters in years; my contention is only that, from an American or English stand-point, their social life is notably simple, and still largely founded on merit and service, rather than upon the means to provide luxury.

Though there are thousands of people received at court each year, this does not mean that they are invited to the more intimate parties of those in court control. They are tolerated, not welcomed. Such people are invited to the court ball, but never thought of, even, as guests at the small supper party of, say, a court official later in the evening. Prussia and Germany are still ruled socially and politically by a small group of, roughly, fifty thousand men, eight thousand of them in the frock-coat of the civilian official, and the rest in military uniforms. Added to this must be named a few great financiers, shipping and mining and industrial magnates, and great land-owners, and less than half a dozen journalists, and as many professors.

According to the census there are in all only 720 persons in Berlin with incomes of more than $25,000 a year, and 521 of these have between $25,000 and $60,000 a year, leaving a very small number, indeed, with incomes adequate, from an American point of view, for extravagant social expenditure. Of these 200, probably not 50 are figures in the social life of the capital. It may be seen at once, therefore, that entertaining cannot be on a lavish or spectacular scale.

The minister of foreign affairs and the imperial minister of the interior receive salaries of 36,000 marks, with 14,000 marks additional for expenses. The Prussian ministers have the same. Other ministers receive 30,000 marks and 14,000 additional for expenses. The chancellor of the empire receives 36,000 marks and 64,000 additional for expenses. The highest receivable pension is three-fourths of the salary-not counting the additional sum for expenses, or, as it is named, Repräsentationsaufwand - after forty years of service. The foreign ambassadors to the more expensive capitals, London, Paris, Washington, Saint Petersburg, receive 150,000 marks a year. Where one has seen something of the innumerable demands upon the income of a foreign ambassador, one is the more amazed that a great democracy like ours should so restrict the salaries of its representatives abroad that only rich men dare undertake the duty. What could be more undemocratic!

Germany is a rich, very rich, country in the sense that it has the most intelligent, hardest-working, most fiercely economical, and the most rationally and most easily contented population of any of the great powers. But Germany is not rich in surplus and liquid capital as compared with England, France, or America. It is the more to her credit that her capital is all hard at work. There is just so much less for luxury. The people in the streets; the shop-windows; the scale of charges at places of public resort and amusement; the very small number of well-turned-out private vehicles; the comparatively few people who live in houses and not in apartments; the simplicity of the gowns of the women, and their inexpensive jewelry and other ornaments; the fewer servants; the salaries and wages of all classes, point decisively to plain living on the part of practically everybody. Let me say very emphatically, however, that this economy means no lack of generosity. I doubt if there are people anywhere so restricted as to means, and so delightfully hospitable at the same time. Berlin is not as yet under that cloud that covers the new, uncultivated, and rich society in America, that tyranny of money which makes men and women fearful of being without it. Such people shiver at the bare thought of losing what money will buy, for the shameful reason that then there would be nothing left to them; and they are driven, many of them, both in London and in New York, to any humiliation, often to any degradation, to avoid it. They grossly overrate the value of money, and they exaggerate the terrors of being without it.

Professor William James, who succeeded in analyzing what is at the back of men’s brains as well as anybody, writes: “We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. We have lost the power of even imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do, and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly - the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. ... It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.” They suffer from this malady less in Germany than in America or in England. I should like to introduce such people into dozens of households in Berlin; alas, they could not speak or understand the moral or mental language there, where there is everything that makes a home’s heart beat proudly and peaceably, except money. “La prospérité découvre les vices, et l’adversité les vertus.”

These people need no tribute from me, and for their hospitality and friendliness I can make no adequate return. I sigh to think that we in America know so little of them. Germany would not be where she is without them; and I offer them as an example to my countrymen, and to my countrywomen especially, as showing what self-sacrifice and simplicity, and loyal service can do for a nation in times of stress; and what high ideals and sturdy independence and contempt for luxury can do in the dangerous days of prosperity. Unadvertised, unheralded, keeping without murmuring or envy to their own traditions, they are here, as everywhere, the saviors of the world.

In this great city of Berlin it may seem that I have over-emphasized their part in the drama of the city’s life. Not so! They are the backbone of the municipal as of the national body corporate. It is no easy industrial progress, no increasing wealth and population, no military prowess, no isolated great leader that makes a nation or a city. It is the men and women giving the high and unpurchasable gift of service to the state; giving the fine example of self-sacrificing and simple living; giving the prowess won by years of hard mental and moral training; giving the gentle courtesy and kindly welcome of the patrician to the stranger, who lift a nation or a city to a worthy place in the world. Seek not for Germany’s strength first in her fleet, her army, her hordes of workers, nay, not even in her philosophers, teachers, and musicians, though they glisten in the eyes of all the world, for you will not find it there. It is in these quiet and simple homes, that so few Americans and Englishmen ever enter, that you will find the sweetness and the sternness, the indomitable pride of service, and the self-sacrificing loyalty that won, and that keep for Germany her place in the world.

VI “A LAND OF DAMNED PROFESSORS”

It can hardly be doubted that could Lord Palmerston have seen what I have seen of the changes in Germany, he would at least have placed the “damned,” in another part of his famous sentence. These professors have turned their prowess into channels which have given Germany, in this scientific industrial age, a mighty grip upon something more than theories. It may be dull reading to tell the tale of damned professordom, but it is to Germany that we must all go to school in these matters.

The American chooses his university or college because it is in the neighborhood; because his father or other relatives went there; because his school friends are going there; on account of the prestige of the place; sometimes, too, because one is considered more democratic than another; sometimes, and perhaps more often than we think, on account of the athletics; because it is large or small; or on account of the cost.

The German youth, owing to widely different customs and ideals, chooses his university for other reasons. If he be of the well-to-do classes, and his father before him was a corps student, he is likely to go first to the university, where his father’s corps will receive him and discipline him in the ways of a corps student’s life, and rigorous ways they are, as we shall see. Young men of small means, and who can afford to waste little time in the amusements of university life, go at once where the more celebrated professors in their particular line of work are lecturing.

Few students in Germany reside during their whole course of study at one university. The student year is divided into two so-called semesters. The student remains, say, in Heidelberg two years or perhaps less, and then moves on, let us say, to Berlin, or Göttingen, or Leipsic, or Kiel, to hear lectures by other professors, and to get and to see something of the best work in law, theology, medicine, history, or belles-lettres, along the lines of his chosen work.

One can hardly say too much in praise of this system. Many a medical, or law, or theological, or philosophical student, or one who is going in for a scientific course in engineering or mining, would profit enormously could he go from Harvard to Yale, or to Johns Hopkins, or to Princeton, or to Columbia, and attend the lectures of the best men at these and other universities. Many a man would have gone eagerly to Harvard to hear James in philosophy, Peirce in mathematics, Abbot in exegesis, or to read Greek with Palmer; or to Yale to have heard Whitney in philology in my day; or now, to name but a few, Van Dyke at Princeton, Sloane at Columbia, Wheeler at the University of California, Paul Shorey at Chicago, and many others are men whom not to know and to hear in one’s student days is a loss.

The German student is at a distinct advantage in this privilege of hearing the best men at whatever university they may be. The number of students, indeed, at particular German universities rises and falls in a large measure according to the fame and ability of the professors who may be lecturing there. One can readily imagine how such men as Hegel, or Ranke, or Mommsen, who lectured at Berlin; or Liebig or Döllinger, at Munich; or Ewald, at Göttingen; or Sybel, at Bonn; or Leibnitz or Schlegel, in their day, or Kuno Fischer, in my day, at Heidelberg, must have drawn students from all parts of Germany; just as do Harnack, and Schmidt, and Lamprecht, and Adolph Wagner, Schmoller, or Gierke, or Schiemann, or Wach, Haeckel, List, Deitsch, Hering, or Verworm, in these days. Though the German professors are somewhat hampered by the fact that they are servants of the state, and their opinions therefore on theological, political, and economic matters restricted to the state’s views, they are free as no other teachers in the world to exploit their intellectual prowess for the benefit of their purses. Each student pays each professor whose lectures he attends, and as a result there are certain professors in Germany whose incomes are as high as $50,000 a year.

Even in intellectual matters state control produces the inevitable state laziness and indifference. One could tell many a tale of professors who arrive late at their lecture-rooms, who read slowly, who give just as little matter as they can, in order to make their prepared work go as far as possible. Some of them, too, read the same lectures over and over again, year after year, quite content that they have made a reputation, gained a fixed tenure of their positions, and are sure of a pension.

There are twenty-one universities in Germany, with another already provided for this year in Frankfort, and practically the equivalent of a university in Hamburg. The total number of students is 66,358, an increase since 1895 of 37,791. Geographically speaking, one has the choice between Kiel, Königsberg, and Berlin in the north, Munich in the south, Strassburg on the boundaries of France, or Breslau in Silesia. At the present writing Berlin has 9,686 students, and some 5,000 more authorized to attend lectures, over half of them grouped under the general heading “Philosophy”; next comes Munich with 7,000, nearly 5,000 of them grouped under the headings “Jurisprudence” and “Philosophy”; then Leipsic with 5,000; then Bonn with 4,000; and last in point of numbers Rostock with 800 students. There are now some 1,500 women students at the German universities, but a total of 4,500 who attend lectures, and Doctor Marie Linden at the beginning of 1911 was appointed one of the professors of the medical faculty at Bonn, but the appointment was vetoed by the Prussian ministry.

In addition to the universities is the modern development of the technical high-schools, of which there are now eleven, one each in Berlin, Dresden, Braunschweig, Darmstadt, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Munich, Stuttgart, Danzig, Aix, and Breslau. These schools have faculties of architecture, building construction, mechanical engineering, chemistry, and general science, including mathematics and natural science. They confer the degree of Doctor of Engineering, and admit those students holding the certificate of the Gymnasium, Realgymnasium, and Oberrealschule. They rank now with the universities, and their 17,000 students may fairly be added to the grand total number of German students, making 83,000 in all, and if to this be added the 4,000 unmatriculated students, we have 87,000.

While the population of Germany has increased 1.4 per cent. in the last year, the number of students has increased 4.6 per cent. and of the total number 4.4 per cent. are women. Since the founding of the empire the population has increased from 40,000,000 to 65,000,000, but the number of students has increased from 18,000 to 60,000. The teaching staffs in the universities number 3,400, and in the technical high-schools 753, or, roughly, there are, in the higher-education department of Germany, nearly 90,000 persons engaged; as these figures do not include officials and many unattached teachers and students indirectly connected with the universities. There are in addition agricultural high-schools, agricultural institutes, and technical schools such as veterinary high-schools, schools of mining, forestry, architecture and building, commercial schools, schools of art and industry; a naval school at Kiel; a colonial institute at Hamburg, with sixty professors and tutors, where men are trained for colonial careers, and which serves also the purpose of distributing information of all kinds regarding the colonies; there are 400 schools which prepare for a business career, with 50,000 pupils, and the Socialists in Berlin maintain an academy for the instruction of their paid secretaries and organizers in the rudiments and controversial points of socialism, military academies at Berlin and Munich, besides some 50 schools of navigation, and 20 military and cadet institutions. There are also courses of lectures, given under the auspices of the German foreign office, to instruct candidates for the consular service in the commercial and industrial affairs of Germany.

At several of the universities evening extension lectures are given, an innovation first tried at Leipsic, where more than seven thousand persons paid small fees to attend the lectures in a recent year.

If one considers the range of instruction from the Volkschulen and Fortbildungsschulen up through the skeleton list I have mentioned to the universities, and then on beyond that to the thousands still engaged as students in the commerce and industry of Germany, as, for example, the technically employed men in the Krupp Works at Essen, or the Color Works at Elberfeld, to mention two of hundreds, it is seen that Germany is gone over with a veritable fine-tooth comb of education. There is not only nothing like it, there is nothing comparable to it in the world. If training the minds of a population were the solution of the problems of civilization, they are on the way to such solution in Germany. Unfortunately there is no such easy way out of our troubles for Germany or for any other nation. Some of us will live to see this fetich of regimental instruction of everybody disappear as astrology has disappeared. There is a Japanese proverb which runs, “The bottom of lighthouses is very dark.”

As early as 1717 Frederick William I in an edict commanded parents to send their children to school, daily in summer, twice a week in winter. Frederick the Great at the close of the Seven Years’ War, 1764, insisted again upon compulsory school attendance, and prescribed books, studies, and discipline. At the beginning of the nineteenth century began a great change in the primary schools due to the influence of Pestalozzi, and in the secondary schools owing to the efforts of Herder, Frederic August Wolf, William Humboldt, and Sünern. Humboldt was the Prussian minister of education for sixteen months. In 1809 he sent a memorial to the King, urging the establishment and endowment of a university in Berlin. He used his authority and his great influence to further higher and secondary education, and fixed the main lines of action which were followed for a century. He hoped that a liberal education of his countrymen would make for both an intellectual and moral regeneration, and emancipate the people from their sluggish obedience to conventionality. The schools then were part of the ecclesiastical organization and have never ceased to be so wholly, and until recently the title of the Prussian minister has been: “Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, Instruction, and Medical Affairs.” That part of the minister’s title, “Medical Affairs,” has within the last few months been eliminated.

The French Revolution, and the dismemberment of Prussia at Tilsit, put a stop to orderly progress. Stein and his colleagues, however, started anew; students were sent to Switzerland to study pedagogical methods; provincial school-boards were established, and about 1850 all public-school teachers were declared to be civil servants; and later, in 1872, during Bismarck’s campaign against the Jesuits, all private schools were made subject to state inspection. In Prussia to-day no man or woman may give instruction even as a governess or private tutor, without the certificate of the state.

This control of education and teaching by a central authority is an unmixed blessing. In Prussia, at any rate, the officials are hard-working, conscientious, and enthusiastic, and the system, whether one gives one’s full allegiance to it or not, is admirably worked out. Above all, it completely does away with sham physicians, sham doctors of divinity, sham engineers, and mining and chemical experts, sham dentists and veterinary surgeons, who abound in our country, where shoddy schools do a business of selling degrees and certificates of proficiency in everything from exegesis to obstetrics. These fakir academies are not only a disgrace but a danger in America, and here, as in other matters, Germany has a right to smile grimly at certain of our hobbledehoy methods of government.

The elementary schools, or Volkschulen, are free, and attendance is compulsory from six to fourteen; in addition, the Fortbildungsschulen, or continuation schools, can also be made compulsory up to eighteen years of age. There are some 61,000 free public elementary schools with over 10,000,000 pupils, and over 600 private elementary schools with 42,000 pupils who pay fees.

Under a regulation of the Department of Trade and Industry, towns with more than twenty thousand inhabitants are empowered to make their own rules compelling commercial employees under eighteen to attend the continuation schools a certain number of hours monthly, and fining employers who interfere with such attendance. It has even been suggested that this law be extended to include girls.

In Berlin this has already been put into operation, and this year some 30,000 girls will be compelled to attend continuation schools, where they will be taught cooking, dress-making, laundry work, house-keeping economy, and for those who wish it, office work. It will require some training even to pronounce the name of this new institution, which requires something more than the number of letters in the alphabet to spell it, for it has this terrifying title: Mädchenpflicht-fortbildungsschule.

The work in these Pflichtfortbildungsschulen, or compulsory continuation schools, is practical and thorough. The boys are from fourteen to eighteen years of age, and are obliged to attend three hours twice a week. Shopkeepers and others, employing lads coming under the provisions of the law, are obliged by threat of heavy fines to send them. The boys pay nothing. There are some 34,000 of such pupils under one jurisdiction in Berlin, and the cost to the city is $300,000 annually. The curriculum includes letter-writing, book- keeping, exchange, bank-credits, checks and bills, the duty of the business man to his home, to the city, and to his fellow business men, his legal rights and duties, and, in great detail, all questions of citizenship. Methods of the banks, stock exchange, and insurance companies are explained. The business man’s relations in detail to the post-office, the railways, the customs, canals, shipping agencies are dealt with. The investigation of credits and the general management from cellar to attic of what we call a “store” are taught, and lectures are given upon business ethics and family relations and morals.

In towns where factories are more common than shops there are schools similar in kind, as at Dortmund, for example, where you may begin with horse-shoeing in the cellar, and go up through the work of carpenter, mason, plumber, sign-painter, poster-designer, to the designing of stained-glass windows and the modelling of animals and men.

In the strictly agricultural districts of Prussia the number of courses open to those who work upon the land has steadily increased. In 1882 there were 559 courses of instruction and 9,228 pupils; in 1902, 1,421 such courses and 20,666 pupils; and in 1908, 3,781 courses and 55,889 pupils. About five per cent. of the cost of such instruction, which cost the state 566,599 marks in 1908, is paid by the fees of the pupils themselves.

To those interested in ways and means it may serve a purpose to say that the total cost of these elementary schools amounts to $130,715,250 a year, of which the various state governments pay $37,500,000 and local authorities the rest. In 1910 the city of Berlin spent $9,881,987 on its schools. The average cost per pupil is $13.50. In some of the towns of different classes of population that I have visited the number of pupils per 100 inhabitants stands as follows: Berlin, 11.1; Essen, 16.5; Dortmund, 16; Düsseldorf, 13.2; Charlottenburg, 9; Duisburg, 16.7; Oberhausen, 17.7; Bielefeld, 14.7; Bonn, 11.1; Cologne, 13.1.

There are 170,000 teachers in these elementary schools, of whom 30,000 are women. They begin with $250 a year, which is raised to $300 when they are given a fixed position. By a graduated scale of increase a teacher at the age of forty-eight (when he may retire) may receive a maximum of $725. A woman teacher’s salary would vary from $300 to $600 as the maximum. These figures are for Prussia. In other states of the empire, in Bavaria and Saxony, for example, the scale of salaries is somewhat higher.

The secondary schools are the well-known Gymnasien and Progymnasien, the Realgymnasien, and the Realschulen. Roughly the Gymnasien prepare for the universities, and the Realschulen for the technical schools. Admission to the universities and to any form of employment under the civil service demands a certificate from one or another of these secondary schools.

In 1890, two years after the present Emperor came to the throne, he called together a conference of teachers and in an able speech suggested that these secondary schools devote more time and attention to technical training. As a result of this, the certificates of the Realgymnasien and Realschulen are now received as equivalent to those conferred by the Gymnasien, where Latin and Greek are, as they were then, still paramount.

Of these secondary schools some are state schools; others are municipal or trade-supported schools; some are private institutions; but all are amenable to the rules, organization, and curricula approved by the state. All secondary and elementary teachers must meet the examinational requirements of the state, which fixes a minimum salary and contributes thereto. In the universities and technical high- schools all professors are appointed by the state, and largely paid by the state as well. In the year 1910 the German Empire expended under the general heading of elementary instruction $130,715,250. Prussia alone spent $60,424,325; Bavaria, $8,955,825 (though nearly $750,000 of this total went for building and repairs for both churches and schools); Baden, $4,176,075; Saxony, $4,573,250; the free city of Hamburg, $5,561,900. The total expenditures of the empire and of the states of the empire combined in 1910 amounted to $2,225,225,000; of this, as we have seen, more than $130,000,000 went for instruction and allied uses; $198,748,775 was the cost of the army; and $82,362,650 the cost of the navy, not counting the extraordinary expenditures for these two arms of the service, which amounted to $5,624,775 for the army, and $28,183,125 for the navy. The total expenditure of the Fatherland for schools, army, and navy amounted, therefore, to one- fifth of the total, or $416,108,225.

I have grouped these expenditures together for the reason, that I am still one of those who remain distrustful and disdainful of the Carnegie holy water, and a firm believer that the two best schools in Germany, or anywhere else where they are as well conducted as there, are the army and the navy. Even if they were not schools of war, they would be an inestimable loss to the country were they no longer in existence as manhood-training schools. This is the more clear when it is remembered that, according to the army standard, both the German peasant and the urban dweller are steadily deteriorating. In ten years the percentage of physically efficient men in the rural districts decreased from 60.5 to 58.2 per cent., and this decrease is even more marked in particular provinces. Infant mortality, despite better hygienic conditions and more education, has not decreased, and in some districts has increased; while the birth-rate, especially in Prussia and Thuringia, has fallen off as well. For the whole of Germany, the births to every thousand of the inhabitants were, in 1876, 42.63; in 1891, 38.25; in 1905, 34; and in 1909, 31.91. In Berlin the births per thousand in 1907 were 24.63 and in 1911 only 20.84.

The observer who cares nothing for statistics, who rambles about in the district of Leipsic, Chemnitz, Riesa, Oschatz, and in the mountainous district of southeast Saxony, may see for himself a population lacking in size, vigor, and health, noticeably so indeed. Education at one end turning out an unwholesome, “white-collared, black-coated proletariat,” as the Socialists call them; and industry and commerce, which even tempt the farmer to sell what he should keep to eat, at the other, are making serious inroads upon the health and well-being of the population.

The Chancellor, von Bethmann-Hollweg, speaking in the Reichstag February 11, 1911, said: “The fear that we may not be working along the right lines in the education of our youth is a cause of great anxiety to many people in Germany. We shall not solve this problem by shunning it!”

Many social economists hold that higher education is unfitting numbers of young men from following the humbler pursuits, while at the same time it is not making them as efficient as are their ambitions; and such men are recognized as the most potent chemical in making the milk of human kindness to turn sour. At a meeting of the Goethebund this year, advocating school reform, it was evident that many intelligent men in Germany were not satisfied with present methods of education, which were characterized as wasting energy in mechanical methods of teaching, and so robbing youth of its youth. It is beginning to be understood in Germany, as it has been understood by wise men in all ages, that “to spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humour of the scholar.” This commentary of Bacon should be on the walls of every school and university in Germany. An education can do nothing more for a man than to make him less fearful of what he does not know, and to save him from the vulgarity of being pre-empted wholly by the present, because he knows something of the past. You cannot educate a man to be a poet or a preacher or a pianist; that we know. We are only just discovering that the much-lauded technical education will not make him an engineer or a shipbuilder or an architect. You may give him the tools and the elementary rules, but the rest he must do himself. Nine-tenths of the technically educated men to-day are working for men who were liberally educated, or who educated themselves. Germany is producing a race of first-rate clerks and skilled mechanics, who are working hard to enrich the Jews.

In America, it is true, we have gone ahead along educational lines. In 1800, it is said, the average adult American had 82 days of school attendance; in 1900, 146 days. In the last quarter of a century our secondary schools have increased in number from 1,400 to 12,000; and during the last eighteen years the proportion of our youth receiving high-school instruction has doubled, and attendance at American colleges has increased 400 per cent. while the population increased by 100 per cent. But education is by no means so strenuous as in Germany. The hours are shorter, holidays longer, standards lower, and the emphasis far less insistent. A boy who has not the mental energy to pass the entrance examinations at Harvard, for instance, and proceed to a degree there, ought to be drowned, or to drown himself. I would not say as much of the requirements in Germany, for they are far more severe. Prince von Hohenlohe in his memoirs gives an account of a conversation between the Emperor, the Emperor’s tutor, and himself. The Emperor was regretting the severity of the examinations in the secondary schools, and it was replied to him that this was the only way to prevent a flood of candidates for the civil service!

There is another all-important factor in Germany bearing upon this point. A boy must have passed into the upper section of the class before the last, “Secunda,” as it is called, or have passed an equivalent examination, in order to serve one year instead of three in the army. To be an Einjähriger is, therefore, in a way the mark of an educated gentleman. The tales of suicide and despair of school-boys in Germany are, alas, too many of them true; and it is to be remembered that not to reach a certain standard here means that a man’s way is barred from the army and navy, civil service, diplomatic or consular service, from social life, in short. The uneducated man of position in Germany does not exist, cannot exist. This is, therefore, no phantom, but a real terror. The man of twenty-five who has not won an education and a degree faces a blank wall barring his entrance anywhere; and even when, weaponed with the necessary academic passport, he is permitted to enter, he meets with an appalling competition, which has peopled Germany with educated inefficients who must work for next to nothing, and who keep down the level of the earnings of the rest because there is an army of candidates for every vacant position. On the other hand, the industries of Germany have bounded ahead, because the army of chemists and physicists of patience, training, and ability, who work for small salaries provide them with new and better weapons than their rivals.

There are two sides to this question of fine-tooth-comb education. Its advantages both America and England are seeing every day in these stout rivals of ours; but its disadvantages are not to be concealed, and are perhaps doing an undermining work that will be more apparent in the future than now it is. The very fact that an alien, an oriental race, the Jews, have taken so disproportionate a share of the cream of German prosperity, and have turned this technical prowess to purposes of their own, is, in and of itself, a sure sign that there may be an educated proletariat working slavishly for masters whom, with all their learning and all their mental discipline, they cannot force to abdicate.

Strange to say, the federal constitution of 1871, which gave Germany its emperor, did not include the schools, and each state has its own school system, but in 1875 an imperial school commission was formed which has done much to make the system of all the states uniform.

The three classes of schools recognized as leading later to a university career are the Gymnasium, in which Latin and Greek are still the fundamental requirements; the Realgymnasium, in which Latin but no Greek is required; the Oberrealschule, in which the classics are not taught at all, but emphasis is laid upon modern languages and natural science. In addition to these there are the so-called Reformschulen, of very recent growth, which are an attempt to put less emphasis upon the classics, but without excluding them entirely from the course, and to pay more attention proportionately to modern languages, French in particular. There are in addition some four hundred public and one thousand or more private higher girls’ schools, with an attendance of a quarter of a million, all subject to state supervision.

If one were to make a genealogical tree of the German schools which educate the children from the age of six up to the age of entrance to the university, it might be described as follows: First are the Volkschulen, which every child must attend from six to fourteen. In the smaller country schools the children of all ages may be in one school-room and under one teacher; in another, divided into two classes; in another, into three or four classes; up to the large city schools, in which they are divided on account of their number into as many as eight classes. Next would come the Mittelschulen, where the pupils are carried on a year farther, and where the last year corresponds to the first year of the so-called Lehrerbildungsanstalten, or training schools for teachers. These again are divided into two, one called Praeparanda, the other Seminar, the former carrying the pupil on to his sixteenth year, the latter to the nineteenth year and turning him out a full-fledged Volkschule teacher, and giving him the right to serve only one year in the army.

If boy or girl goes on from the fourteenth year, the höhere Knabenschulen and the höhere Mädchenschulen take them on to the eighteenth or nineteenth year. Many boys go on till they have passed from the lower Secunda, next to the last class, which is divided into upper and lower Secunda, into the upper Secunda, when their certificate entitles them to serve one year only in the army, when they quit school. Many boys, too, intending to become officers, leave school at sixteen or seventeen and go to regular cramming institutions, where they do their work more quickly and devote themselves to the special subjects required. For boys intending to go on through the higher schools, there are schools taking them on from the age of nine, with a curriculum better adapted than that of the Volkschulen to that end.

In all these higher schools there is less attention paid to mere examinations, and more attention paid to the general grip the pupils have on the work in hand; and of the teaching, as mentioned elsewhere, too much cannot be said in its praise.

For those boys who finish their public schooling at the age of fourteen and then turn to earning their living, there are the continuation schools, which are in many parts of the country compulsory, and which are nicely adapted, according to their situation in shopkeeping cities, in factory towns, or in the country, to give the pupils the drilling and instruction necessary for their particular employment. The average amount of expenditure for these continuation schools is $6,250,000. In Prussia there are some 1,500 of these schools, with an average attendance of 300,000 pupils.

According to the last census the proportion of illiterates among the recruits for the army was 0.02 per cent. The number of those who could neither read nor write in Germany was, in 1836, 41.44 per cent.; in 1909, 0.01 per cent. If one were to name all the agricultural schools; technical schools; schools of architecture and building; commercial schools, for textile, wood, metal, and ceramic industries; art schools; schools for naval architecture and engineering and navigation; and the public music schools, it would be seen that it is no exaggeration to speak of fine-tooth-comb education.

I have visited scores of all sorts of schools all over Germany, from a peasant common school in Posen up to that last touch in education, the schools in Charlottenburg, the Schulpforta Academy, and such a private boys’ school as Die Schülerheim-Kolonie des Arndt-Gymnasiums in the Grünewald near Berlin, and the training schools for the military cadets. Through the courtesy of the authorities I was permitted, when I wished it, to sit in the class-rooms, and even to put questions to the boys and girls in the classes. From the small boys and girls making their first efforts at spelling to the young woman of seventeen who translated a paragraph of the “Germania” of Tacitus, not into German but into French, for me (a problem I offered as a good test of whether I was merely assisting at a prepared exhibition of the prowess of the class or whether the minds had been trained to independence), I have looked over a wide field of teaching and learning in Germany. If that young person was typical of the pupils of this upper girls’ school, there is no doubt of their ability to meet an intellectual emergency of that kind.

Of one feature of German education one can write without reservation, and that is the teaching. Everywhere it is good, often superlatively good, and half a dozen times I have listened to the teaching of a class in history, in Latin, in German literature, in French literature, where it was a treat to be a listener. I remember in particular a class in physical geography, another reading Ovid, another reading Shakespeare, and another reading Goethe’s “Hermann and Dorothea,” where I enjoyed my half-hour, as though I had been listening to a distinguished lecturer on his darling subject.

We know how little these men and women teachers are paid, but there is such a flood of intellectual output in Germany that the competition is ferocious in these callings, and the schools can pick and choose only from those who have borne the severest tests with the greatest success. The teaching is so good that it explains in part the amount of work these poor children are enabled to get through. School begins at seven in summer, at eight in winter. The course for those intending to go to the university is nine years; the recitation hours alone range from twenty-five to thirty-two hours a week; to which must be added two hours a week of singing and three hours a week of gymnastics, and this for forty-two weeks in the year. The preparation for class-work requires from two and a half to four hours more. It foots up to something like fifty hours a week!

At Eton, in England, the boys grumble because they only have a half-holiday every other day, and four months of the year vacation. It will be interesting to see which educational method is to produce the men who are to win the next Waterloo. No wonder that nearly seventy per cent. of those who reach the standard required of those who need serve only one year instead of three in the army are near-sighted, and that more than forty-five per cent. are put on one side as physically unfit. The increase in population in Germany is so great, however, and the candidates for the army so numerous, that the authorities are far more strict in those they accept than in France, for example. There is more manhood material for the German army and navy every year than is needed.

In the first year of the nine-years’ course in a Gymnasium the 25 hours a week are divided: religion, 3 hours; German, 4 hours; Latin, 8 hours; geography, 2 hours; mathematics, 4 hours; natural science, 2 hours; writing, 2 hours. In the last year: religion, 2 hours; German, 3 hours; Latin, 7 hours; Greek, 6 hours - Greek is begun in the fourth year; French, 3 hours - French is begun in the third year; history, 3 hours; mathematics, 4 hours; natural science, 2 hours.

In the first year in a Realgymnasium: religion, 3 hours; German, 4 hours; Latin, 8 hours; geography, 2 hours; mathematics, 4 hours; natural science, 2 hours; writing, 2 hours. In the last year of the course: religion, 2 hours; German, 3 hours; Latin, 4 hours; French - begun in third year - 4 hours; English - begun in fourth year - 3 hours; mathematics, 5 hours; natural science, 5 hours; drawing, 2 hours.

In the first year in an Oberrealschule: religion, 3 hours; German, 5 hours; French, 6 hours; geography, 2 hours; mathematics, 5 hours; natural science, 2 hours; writing, 2 hours. In the last year: religion, 2 hours; German, 4 hours; French, 4 hours; English - begun in the fourth year - 4 hours; history, 3 hours; geography, 1 hour; mathematics, 5 hours; natural science, 6 hours; free-hand drawing - begun in the second year - 2 hours.

It may be seen from these schedules where the emphasis is laid in each of these schools. So far as results are concerned, the pupils about to leave for the universities seemed to me to know their Latin, Greek, French, German, and English, and their local and European history well. Their knowledge of Latin and of either French or English, sometimes of both, is far superior to anything required of a student entering any college or university in America. I have asked many pupils to read passages at sight in Latin, French and English in schools in various parts of Germany and there is no question of the grip they have upon what they have been taught. I am, alas, not a scholar, and can only judge of the requirements and of the training and its results in subjects where I am at home; and I must take it for granted that these boys and girls are as well trained in other subjects where I am incapable of passing judgment. It is improbable, however, that the same thoroughness does not characterize their work throughout the whole curriculum. The examination at the end of the secondary-school period, called Abiturienten-examen, is more thorough and covers a wider range than any similar examination in America. It is a test of intellectual maturity. It permits no gaps, covers a wide ground, leaves no subject dropped on the way, and sends a man or woman to the university, with an equipment entirely adequate for such special work as the individual proposes to undertake.

It seemed to me that in many class-rooms the ventilation was distinctly bad, but here too I must admit an exaggerated love for fresh air, born of my own love of out-door exercise.

There are practically no schools in Germany like the public schools for boys in England, and our own private schools for boys, like Saint Paul’s, Groton, Saint Mark’s, and others, where the training of character and physique are emphasized. Here again I admit my prejudice in favor of such education. I should be made pulp, indeed, did I try to run through the boys of a fifth or sixth form at home, but, from the look of them, I would have undertaken it for a wager in Germany.

It is not their fault, poor boys. Practically the whole emphasis is laid upon drilling the mind. Moral and physical matters are left to the home, and in the home there are no fathers and brothers interested in games or sport, and in this busy, competitive strife, and with the small means at the disposal of the majority, there is no time and no opportunity. Boys and girls seldom leave home for distant boarding-schools. They go from home to school and from school home every day, and have none of the advantages to be gained from intercourse with men outside their own circles. It shows itself in a deplorable lack of orientation as compared with our lads of the same relative standing. In dress and bearing, in at-homeness in the world, in ability to take care of themselves under strange conditions or in an emergency, and in domestic hygiene they are inferior, and yet they are so competent to push the national military, industrial, and commercial ball along as men, that one wonders whether Bagehot’s gibe at certain well-to-do classes of the Saxons, that “they spend half their time washing their whole persons,” may not have a grain of truth in it.

Another feature of the school life which is prominent, especially in Prussia, is the incessant and insistent emphasis laid upon patriotism. In every school, almost in every class-room, is a picture of the Emperor; in many, pictures also of his father and grandfather. Even in a municipal lodging-house, where I found some tiny waifs and strays being taught, there were pictures of the sovereign, and brightly colored pictures of the war of 1870-71, generally with German personalities on horseback, and the French as prisoners with bandages and dishevelled clothing. This war, which began with the first movement of the German army on August 4, and on the 2d of September next Napoleon was a prisoner; this war, in which the German army at the beginning of operations consisted of 384,000 officers and men and which had grown during the truce to 630,000 on March 1; lost in killed and those who died from wounds 28,278, of whom 1,871 were officers; this war is flaunted at the population of Germany continually, and from every possible angle. We hear very little of our war of 1861-1865, that cost us $8,000,000,000 with killed and wounded numbering some 700,000. We do not find it necessary to feed our patriotism with a nursing-bottle.

At a kindergarten two tots, a boy and a girl, stood at the top of some steps while the rest marched by and saluted; they later descended and went through the motions of reviewing the others. They were playing they were Kaiser and Kaiserin!

Two small boys in a school-yard discussing their relative prowess as jumpers end the discussion when one says as a final word: “Oh, I can jump as high as the Kaiser!”

We have noted in another article how even police sergeants must be familiar with the history of the House of Hohenzollern.

I am an admirer of Germany and her Emperor, with a distinct love of discipline and a bias in favor of military training, and with an experience of actual warfare such as only a score or so of German officers of my generation have had; but I am bound to say I found this pounding in of patriotism on every side distinctly nauseating. Boys and girls, and men and women, ought not to need to be pestered with patriotism. We had a controversy in America some ten years before the Franco-German War, where in one battle more men were killed and wounded than in all the battles Prussia, and later Germany, has fought since 1860.

In the South, at any rate, we bear the scars and the mourning of those days still, but nobody would be thanked for pummelling us with patriotism. In the skirmish with Spain our military authorities were pestered with candidates for the front. Germany itself is not more a nation in arms than America would be at the smallest threat of insult or aggression. But we take those things for granted. If we have the honor to possess a medal or a decoration, the gentlemen among us wear it only when asked to do so, or perhaps on the Fourth of July.

Germany is even now somewhat loosely cemented together. Their leaders may feel that it is necessary to keep ever in the minds even of the children, that Germany is a nation with an Emperor and a victory over France, France in political rags and patches at the time, behind them.

They even carry this teaching of patriotism beyond the boundaries of Germany. The Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein zur Erhaltung des Deutschtums im Auslande, is a society with headquarters in Berlin devoting itself to the advancement of German education all over the world. The society was started privately in 1886, and is now partly supported by the state. It controls some sixteen hundred centres for the teaching of German and German patriotism, and German learning. There are such centres in China, South America, the United States, Spain, and elsewhere. They number 90 in Europe, 25 in Asia, 20 in Africa, 70 in Brazil, 40 in Argentina, and 100 in Australia and Canada. The society is instrumental in having German taught in 5,000 schools and academies in the United States to 600,000 pupils. The work is not advertised, rather it is concealed so far as possible, but it is looked upon as a valuable force for the advancement of German interests throughout the world.

In the schools, too, there is an enemy of which we know nothing, and that is the active propagandism of socialism, which is anti-military, anti-monarchical, and anti-status quo. Leaflets and books and pamphlets are widely distributed among the school children; many of the teachers are in sympathy with these obstructionist methods; and the authorities may feel that they must do what they can to combat this teaching. In Prussia, on every side, and in the industrial towns of Saxony, one sees the evidence of this impotent discontent expressing itself either openly or in surly malice of speech and manner. The streets of Berlin, and of the industrial towns, show this condition at every turn, and when the Reichstag closes with cheers for the Emperor, the Socialist members leave in a body before that loyal ceremony takes place.

We in America are brought up to believe that the best cure for such maladies is to open the wound, to give freedom of speech, to let every boy and girl and man and woman find out for himself his citizen’s path to walk in. We have no policemen on our public platforms, no gags in the mouths of our professors or preachers, no lurid pictures of battles, no plastering of the walls of our schools and seminaries with pictures of our rulers, and withal our German immigrants are perhaps our best and most patriotic citizens. In America they think less and do more, and for most men this is the better way. It makes life very complicated to think too much about it.

Self-consciousness is the prince of mental and social diseases, as vanity is the princess, and even self-conscious patriotism seems a little unwholesome, not quite manly, and often even grotesque. It is easy to say: “Dic mihi si fueris tu leo, qualis eris?” and if one is a person of no great importance, it is an embarrassing question to answer. In this connection I can only say that I should assume that my lionhood was taken for granted without so much roaring, bristling of the mane, and switching of the tail. It irritates those who are discontented, it positively infuriates the redder democrats, and it bores the children, and, worst of all, proclaims to everybody that the lion is not quite comfortable and at his ease. The German lion is a fine, big fellow now, with fangs, and teeth, and claws as serviceable as need be, and it only makes him appear undignified to be forever looking at himself in the looking-glass.

Whatever may be the right or wrong of these comparative methods of training, Germans trained in the investigation of such matters agree in telling me that the boys who come up to the universities, especially in the large cities and towns, are somewhat lax in their moral standards as regards matters upon which the puritan still lays great stress.

In Berlin particularly, where there are some thirty-five hundred registered and nearly fifty thousand unregistered women devoting themselves to the seemingly incompatible ends of rapidly accumulating gold while frantically pursuing pleasure, there is an amount of immorality unequalled in any capital in Europe. In the whole German Empire the average of illegitimacy is ten per cent. but in Berlin the average for the last few years is twenty per cent. Out of every five children born in Berlin each year one is illegitimate! It is questionable whether the increasing demands of the army and navy require such laxity of moral methods in providing therefor.

There is, however, a state church in Germany with its head in Berlin, and no doubt we may safely leave this matter in these better hands than ours. I beg to say that in mentioning this subject I am quoting unprejudiced scientific investigators, who, I may say, agree, without a dissenting voice of importance, that Berlin has become the classical problem along such lines. In the endeavor to compete with the gayeties elsewhere, a laxity has been encouraged and permitted that has won for Berlin in the last ten years, an unrivalled position as a purveyor of after-dark pleasures. Berlin not only produces a disproportionate number of such people as Diotrephes, in manners, but also a veritable horde of those who are like unto the son of Bosor.

After the sheltered home life and the severe discipline of the higher schools, a German youth is permitted a freedom unknown to us at the university. There is no record kept of how or where he spends his time. He matriculates at one or another of the universities, and for three, four, or, in the case of medical students, five years, he is free to work or not to work, as he pleases.

There are, however, three factors that serve as bit and reins to keep him in order. The final examination is severe, thorough, and cannot be passed successfully by mere cramming; very few of the students have incomes which permit of a great range of dissipation; and not to pass the examination is a terrible defeat in life, which cuts a man off from further progress and leaves him disgraced.

These are forces that count, and which prevail to keep all but the least serious within bounds. German life as a whole is so disciplined, so fitted together, so impossible to break into except through the recognized channels, that few men have the optimistic elasticity of mind and spirits, the demonic confidence in themselves, that overrides such considerations.

We in America suffer from a superabundance of men of aleatory dispositions, men who love to play cards with the devil, who rejoice to wager their future, their reputation, their lives, against the world. I admit a sneaking fondness for them. They are a great asset, and a new country needs them, but if we have too many, Germany has too few. They are forever crying out in Germany for another Bismarck. Whenever in political matters, in foreign affairs, even in their religious controversies, things go wrong, men lift their hands and eyes to heaven and say, “How different if Bismarck were here!” Bismarck and two of his predecessors as nation-builders were not afraid to throw dice with the world, and what “the land of damned professors” could not do, they did.

When the young men from the Gymnasium come into the freedom of university life, they toss their heads a bit, kick up their heels, laugh long and loud at the Philistine, but just as every German climax is incomplete without tears, so they too are soon singing: “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten dass ich so traurig bin!” the gloom of the Teutoburger Wald settles down on them, and they buckle to and work with an enduring patience such as few other men in the world display, and join the great army here who, bitted and harnessed, are pulling the Vaterland to the front.

The British Empire between 1800 and 1910 grew from 1,500,000 square miles to 11,450,000 square miles, and its trade from $400,000,000 to $11,020,000,000; not to mention the United States of America, now considered to be of noticeable importance, though we are universally sneered at by the Germans, to an extent that no American dreams of who has not lived among them, as a land of dollars, and, from the point of view of book-learning, dullards. But it is this, none the less, that Germany envies, and has set out to rival and if possible to surpass. No wonder the training must be severe for the athletes who propose to themselves such a task.

For a semester or two, perhaps for three, the German student gives himself up to the rollicking freedom of the corps student’s life. That life is so completely misunderstood by the foreigner that it deserves a few words of explanation.

I am not yet old enough to envy youth, nor sourly sophisticated enough to deal sarcastically or even lightly with their worship and their creeds, that once I shared, and with which lately I have been, under the most hospitable circumstances, invited to renew my acquaintance at the Commers and the Mensur.

One may be no longer a constant worshipper at the shrine of blue eyes, pink cheeks, flaxen hair, and the enshrouding mystery of skirts, which make for curiosity and reverence in youth; one may have learned, however, the far more valuable lesson that the best women are so much nobler than the best men, that the best men may still kneel to the best women; just as the worst women surpass the worst men in consciencelessness, brutal selfishness, disloyalty, and degradation. The female bandit in society, or frankly on the war-path outside, takes her weapons from an armory of foulness and cruelty unknown to men; just as the heroines and angels among women fortify themselves in sanctuaries to which few, if any, men have the key.

One returns, therefore, to the playground of one’s youth with not less but with more sympathy and understanding. Far from being “brutalizing guilds,” far from being mere unions for swilling and slashing, the German corps, by their codes, and discipline, and standards of manners and honor, are, from the chivalrous point of view, the leaven of German student life. In these days many of them have club-houses of their own, where they take their meals in some cases and where they meet for their beer-drinking ceremonies.

There is of course a wide range of expenditure by students at the German universities, whether they are members of the corps or not. At one of the smaller universities in a country town like Marburg, for example, a poor student, with a little tutoring and the system of frei Tisch - money left for the purpose of giving a free midday meal to poor students - may scrape along with an expenditure of as little as twenty dollars a month. A member of a good corps at this same university is well content with, and can do himself well on, seventy dollars a month. I have seen numbers of students’ rooms, with bed, writing-table, and simple furniture, perhaps with a balcony where for many months in the year one may write and read, which rent for sixty dollars a year. One may say roughly that at the universities outside the large towns, and not including the fashionable universities, such as Bonn or Heidelberg, the student gets on comfortably with fifty dollars a month. They have their coffee and rolls in the morning, their midday meal which they take together at a restaurant, and their supper of cold meats, preserves, cheese, and beer where they will. For seventy-five cents a day a student can feed himself.

The hours are Aristotelian, for it was Aristotle in his “Economics,” and not a nursery rhymer, who wrote: “It is likewise well to rise before daybreak, for this contributes to health, wealth, and wisdom.” “Early to bed and early to rise” is a classic.

At Bonn, a member of one of the three more fashionable corps spends far more than these sums, and his habits may be less Spartan. The ridiculous expenditure of some of our mamma-bred undergraduates, who go to college primarily to cultivate social relations, are unknown anywhere in Germany, for a student would make himself unpopularly conspicuous by extravagance. Two to three thousand dollars a year, even at Bonn, as a member of the best corps, would be amply sufficient and is considered an extravagant expenditure.

When the Earl of Essex was sent to Cambridge in Queen Elizabeth’s time, he was provided with a deal table covered with baize, a truckle-bed, half a dozen chairs, and a wash-hand basin. The cost of all this was about $25. When students from all over Europe tramped to Paris to hear Abelard lecture, they begged their way. They were given special licenses as scholars to beg. Learning then, as it is still in Germany, alone of all the nations, was considered to be a pious profession deserving well of the world. We do not even know the names of our scholars in America. How many Americans have heard of Gibbs, the authority on the fundamental laws regulating the trend of transformation in chemical and physical processes, or of Hill and his theory of the moon, or of Hale who explains the mystery of sun spots and measures the magnetic forces that play around the sun? How many Frenchmen know Pierron’s translation of Aeschylus, or Patin’s studies in Greek tragedies, or Charles Maguin, or Maurice Croiset, or Paul Magou or Leconte de Lisle? while in England the mass of the people not only do not know the names of their scholars, but distrust all mental processes that are super-canine.

The origin of the Landmannschaften, Burschenschaften, and the Corps among the students dates back to the days when the students aligned themselves with more rigidity than now, according to the various German states from which they came. The names of the corps still bear this suggestion, though nowadays the alignment is rather social than geographical. The Burschenschaften societies of students had their origin in political opposition to this separation of the students into communities from the various states. The originators of the Burschenschaften movement, for example, were eleven students at Jena. Sobriety and chastity were conditions of entrance, and “Honor, Liberty, Fatherland” were their watchwords. It was deemed a point of honor that a member breaking his vows should confess and retire from the society.

The societies of the Burschenschaften are still considered to have a political complexion and the corps proper have no dealings with them.

In any given semester the number of students in one of these corps varies from as few as ten, to as many as twenty-five, depending, much as do our Greek-letter societies and college clubs, upon the number of available men coming up to the university. Certain corps are composed almost exclusively of noblemen, but none is distinctly a rich man’s club.

An active member of a corps during his first two semesters may do a certain amount of serious work, but as a rule it is looked upon as a time “to loaf and invite one’s soul,” and little attempt is made to do more. Not a few men whom I have known, have not even entered a class-room during the two or three semesters of this blossoming period.

I have spent many days and nights with these young gentlemen, at Heidelberg, at Leipsic, at Marburg, at Bonn, and been made one of them in their jollity and good-fellowship, and I have agreed, and still agree, that “Wir sind die Könige der Welt, wir sind’s durch unsere Freude.”

They are by no means the swashbuckling, bullying, dissolute companions painted by those who know nothing about them. They may drink more beer than we deem necessary for health, or even for comfort; and they may take their exercise with a form of sword practice that we do not esteem, they may be proud of the scars of these imitation duels, but these are all matters of tradition and taste.

When one writes of eating and drinking, it is hardly fair to make comparisons from a personal stand-point. An adult of average weight requires each day 125 grams of proteid or building material, 500 grams of carbohydrates, 50 grams of fat. This equals, in common parlance, one pound of bread, one-half pound of meat, one-quarter pound of fat, one pound of potatoes, one-half pint of milk, one-quarter pound of eggs, assuming that one egg equals two ounces, and one-eighth pound of cheese. Divided into three meals, this means: for breakfast, two slices of bread and butter and two eggs; for dinner: one plateful potato soup, large helping of meat with fat, four moderate-sized potatoes, one slice bread and butter; for tea: one glass of milk and two slices of bread and butter; for supper: two slices of bread and butter and two ounces of cheese.

Plain white bread supplies more caloric, or energy, for the price than any other one food, and, with one or two exceptions, more proteid, or building material, than any other one food.

One to one and a half fluid ounces of alcohol is about the amount which can be completely oxidized in the body in a day. This quantity is contained in two fluid ounces of brandy or whiskey, five fluid ounces of port or sherry, ten of claret or champagne or other light wines, and twenty of bottled beer. All this means that a pint of claret, or two glasses of champagne, or a bottle of beer, or a glass of whiskey with some aerated water during the day will not hurt a man, and adds perhaps to the “agreeableness of life,” as Matthew Arnold phrases it. At any rate, this table of contents is a much safer standard of comparison, in judging the eating and drinking habits of other people, than either your habits or mine.

The German student probably drinks too much, and it is said by safe authorities in Germany that his heart, liver, and kidneys suffer; but he has been at it a long time, and in certain fields of intellectual prowess he is still supreme, and as we only drink with him now occasionally when he is our host, perhaps he had best be left to settle these questions without our criticism.

In general terms, I have always considered, as a test of myself and others, that a healthy man is one who lies down at night without fear, rises in the morning cheerfully, goes to a day’s serious work of some kind rejoicing in the prospect, meets his friends gayly, and loves his loves better than himself.

It is folly to maintain, that it does not require pluck and courage to stand up to a swinging Schläger, and take your punishment without flinching, and then to sit without a murmur while your wounds are sewn up and bandaged. I cannot help my preference for foot-ball, or base-ball, or rowing, or a cross-country run with the hounds, or grouse or pheasant shooting, or the shooting of bigger game, or the driving of four horses, or the handling of a boat in a breeze of wind, but the “world is so full of a number of things” that he has more audacity than I who proposes to weigh them all in the scales of his personal experience, and then to mark them with their relative values.

First of all, it is to be remembered that these Schläger contests between students are in no sense duels; a duel being the setting by one man of his chance of life against another’s chance, both with deadly weapons in their hands. These contests with the Schläger at the German universities, wrongly called duels, are so conducted that there is no possibility of permanent or even very serious injury to the combatants. The attendants who put them into their fighting harness, the doctors who look after them during the contest and who care for them afterward, are old hands at the game, and no mistakes are made.

There is no feeling of animosity between the swordsmen as a rule. They are merely candidates for promotion in their own corps who meet candidates from other corps, and prove their skill and courage auf die Mensur, or fighting-ground.

When a youth joins a corps he chooses a counsellor and friend, a Leibbursch, as he is called, from among the older men, whose special care it is, to see to it that he behaves himself properly in his new environment; he pledges himself to respect the traditions and standards of the corps, and to keep himself worthy of respect among his fellows, and among those whom he meets outside. A companionship and guardianship not unlike this, used to exist in the Greek-letter society to which I once belonged. He of course abides by the rules and regulations of the order. It is a time of freedom in one sense, but it is a freedom closely guarded, and there is rigid discipline here as in practically all other departments of life in Germany.

The young students, or Füchse, as they are called, are instructed in the way they should go by the older students, or Burschen, whose authority is absolute. This authority extends even to the people whom they may know and consort with, either in the university or in the town, and to all questions of personal behavior, debts, dissipation, manners, and general bearing. In many of the corps there are high standards and old traditions as regards these matters, and every member must abide by them. Every corps student is a patriot, ready to sing or fight for Kaiser and Vaterland, and socialism, even criticism of his country or its rulers, are as out of place among them as in the army or navy. They are particular as to the men whom they admit, and a man’s lineage and bearing and relations with older members of the corps are carefully canvassed before he is admitted to membership. Both the present Emperor and one of his sons have been members of a corps.

Let us spend a day with them. It is Saturday. We get up rather late, having turned in late after the Commers of Friday, when the men who are to fight the next day were drunk to, sung to, and wished good fortune on the morrow, and sent home early. The trees are turning green at Bonn, the shrubs are feeling the air with hesitating blossoms, you walk out into the sunshine as gay as a lark, for the champagne and the beer of the night before were good, and you sang away the fumes of alcohol before you went to bed. There was much laughter, and a speech or two of welcome for the guest, responded to at 1 A. M. in German, French, English, and gestures with a beer-mug, and punctuated with the appreciative comments of the company.

It was a time to slough off twenty years or so and let Adam have his chance, and the company was of gentlemen who sympathize with and understand the “Alter Herr,” and are only too delighted if he will let the springs of youth bubble and sparkle for them, and glad to encourage him to return to reminiscences of his prowess in love and war, and ready to pledge him in bumper after bumper success in the days to come. You might think it a carouse. Far from it.

The ceremony is presided over by a stern young gentleman, who never for a moment allows any member of the company to get out of hand, and who, when a speech is to be made, makes it with grace and complete ease of manner. Indeed, these young fellows surprise one with their easy mastery of the art of speech-making. Even the spokesman for the Füchse, or younger students, at the lower end of the table, rises and pledges himself and his companions in a few graceful words, with certain sly references to the possibility that the guest may not have lost his appreciation of the charms of German womankind, which the guest in question here and now, and frankly admits; but not a word of coarseness, not a hint that totters on the brink of an indiscretion, and what higher praise can one give to speech-making on such an occasion!

My particular host and introducer to his old corps is youngest of all, and though seemingly as lavish in his potations as any one, sings his way home with me, head as clear, legs as steady, eyes as bright, as though it were 10 A. M. and not 2 A. M., and as though I had not seemed to see his face during most of the evening through the bottom of a beer-mug.

That was the night before. The next morning we stroll over to the room where the Schläger contests are to take place. It is packed with students in their different-colored caps. Beer there is, of course, but no smoking allowed till the bouts are over.

I go down to see the men dressing for the fray. They strip to the waist, put on a loose half-shirt half-jacket of cotton stuff, then a heavily padded half-jerkin that covers them completely from chin to knee. The throat is wrapped round and round with heavy silk bandages. The right arm and hand are guarded with a glove and a heavily padded leather sleeve; all these impervious to any sword blow. The eyes are guarded with steel spectacle frames fitted with thick glass. Nothing is exposed but the face and the top of the head. The exposed parts are washed with antiseptics, as are also the swords, repeatedly during the bout. The sword, hilt and blade together, measures one hundred and five centimetres. There is a heavy, well-guarded hilt, and a pliable blade with a square end, sharp as a razor on both edges for some six inches from the end.

The position in the sword-play is to face squarely one’s opponent, the sword hand well over the head with the blade held down over the left shoulder. The distance between the combatants is measured by placing the swords between them lengthwise, each one with his chest against the hilt of his own weapon, and this marks the proper distance between them. When they are brought in and face one another, the umpire, with a bow, explains the situation. The two seconds with swords crouch each beside his man, ready to throw up the swords and stop the fighting between each bout. Two other men stand ready to hold the rather heavily weighted sword arm of their comrade on the shoulder during the pauses. Two others with cotton dipped in an antiseptic preparation keep the points of the swords clean. Still another official keeps a record in a book, of each cut or scratch, the length of time, the number of bouts, and the result. The doctor decides when a wound is bad enough to close the contest.

At the word “Los!” the blades sing and whistle in the air, the work being done almost wholly with the wrist, some four blows are exchanged, there is a pause, then at it again, till the allotted number of bouts are over, or one or the other has been cut to the point where the doctor decides that there shall be no more. We follow them downstairs again, where, after being carefully washed, the combatants are seated in a chair one after the other, their friends crowd around and count the stitches as the surgeon works, and comment upon what particular twist of the wrist produced such and such a gash.

I have seen scores of these contests, and during the last year as many as a dozen or more. There is no record of any one ever having been seriously injured; indeed, I doubt if there are not more men injured by too much beer than too much sword-play.

It is perhaps expected that the foot-ball player should sneer at bull-fighting; the boxer at fencing; the rider to hounds at these Schläger bouts; and that we game-players should say contemptuous things of the contests of our neighbors. Personally, if one could eliminate the horse from the contest, I go so far as to believe that even bull-fighting is better than no game at all. As for these Schläger contests, they seem to me no more brutal than our own foot-ball, which is only brutal to the shivering crowd of the too tender who have never played it, and not so dangerous as polo or pig-sticking, and a thousand times better than no contest at all.

I am not of those who believe that the human body and that human life are the most precious and valuable things in the world. They are only servants of the courageous hearts and pure souls that ought to be their masters. Without training, without obedience, without the instant willingness to sacrifice themselves for their masters, the human body and human life are contemptible and unworthy. I claim that it braces the mind to expose the body; that an education in the prepared emergencies of games and sport, is the best training for the unprepared emergencies with which life is strewn.

The most cruel people I have ever known were gentle enough physically, but they were hard and sour in their social relations, and often enough called “good” by their fellows. The disappointments, losses, sorrows, defeats, of each one of us, trouble, even though imperceptibly, the waters of life that we all must drink of; and to ignore or to rejoice at these misfortunes is only muddying what we ourselves must drink. I believe the hardening of the body goes some way toward softening the heart and cleansing the soul, and toward fitting a man with that cheerful charity that supplies the oil of intercourse in a creaking world of rival interests.

To see a youth swinging a sword at his fellow’s face with delighted energy; to see a man riding off vigorously at polo; to see a man hard at it with the gloves on; to see another flinging himself and his horse over a wall or across a ditch; to see a man taking his nerves in hand, to make a two-yard put for a half, when he is one down and two to play; to see these things without seeing that - perhaps often enough in a muddy sort of way - the soul is making a slave of the body, that courage is mastering cowardice, that in an elementary way the youth is learning how to give himself generously when some great emergency calls upon him to give his life for an ideal, a tradition, a duty, is to see nothing but brutality, I admit. Who does not know that the Carthaginians at Cannae were one thing, the Carthaginians at Capua another! I have therefore no acidulous effeminacy to pour upon these German Schläger bouts. I prefer other forms of exercise, but I am a hardened believer in the manhood bred of contests, and though their ways are not my ways, I prefer a world of slashed faces to a world of soft ones.

Prosit, gentlemen! Better your world than the world of Semitic haggling and exchange; of caution and smoothness; of the disasters born of daintiness; of sliding over the ship’s side in women’s clothes to live, when it was a moral duty to be drowned. Better your world than any such worlds as those, for

“If one should dream that such a world began
In some slow devil’s heart that hated man,
Who should deny it?”

Milton held that “a complete and generous education fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” It is my opinion that the Schläger has its part to play in this matter of education. A mind trained to the keenness of a razor’s edge, but without a sound body controlled by a steel will, is of small account in the world. The whole aim of education is, after all, to make a man independent, to make the intelligence reach out in keen quest of its object, and at its own and not at another’s bidding. An education is intended to make a man his own master, and so far as any man is not his own master, in just so far is he uneducated. What he knows, or does not know, of books does not alter the fact.

Much of the pharisaism and priggishness on the subject of education arises from the fact that the world is divided into two camps as regards knowledge: those who believe that the astronomer alone knows the stars, and those who believe that he knows them best who sleeps in the open beneath them. In reality, neither type of mind is complete without the other.

To turn from any theoretical discussion of the subject, it remains to be said that Germany has trained her whole population into the best working team in the world. Without the natural advantages of either England or America she has become the rival of both. Her superior mental training has enabled her to wrest wealth from by-products, and she saves and grows rich on what America wastes. Whether Germany has succeeded in giving the ply of character to her youth, as she folds them in her educational factories, I sometimes doubt. That she has not made them independent and ready to grapple with new situations, and strange peoples, and swift emergencies, their own past and present history shows.

It is a very strenuous and economical existence, however, for everybody, and it requires a politically tame population to be thus driven. The dangerous geographical situation of Germany, ringed round by enemies, has made submission to hard work, and to an iron autocratic government necessary. To be a nation at all it was necessary to obey and to submit, to sacrifice and to save. These things they have been taught as have no other European people. Greater wealth, increased power, a larger rôle in the world, are bringing new problems. Education thus far has been in the direction of fitting each one into his place in a great machine, and less attention has been paid to the development of that elasticity of mind which makes for independence; but men educate themselves into independence, and that time is coming swiftly for Germany.

“Also he hath set the world in their heart,” and one wonders what this population, hitherto so amenable, so economical, and so little worldly, will do with this new world. The temptations of wealth, the sirens of luxury, the opportunities for amusement and dissipation, are all to the fore in the Germany of to-day as they were certainly not twenty-five years ago. Ulysses, alas, does not bind himself to the mast very tightly as he passes these enchanted isles of modern luxury. “The land of damned professors” has learned its lessons from those same professors so well, that it is now ready to take a postgraduate course in world politics; and as I said in the beginning, some of our friends are putting the word “damned” in other parts of this, and other sentences, when they describe the rival prowess and progress of the Germans.

VII THE DISTAFF SIDE

Madame Necker writes of women: “Les femmes tiennent la place de ces lagers duvets qu’on introduit dans les caisses de porcelaine; on n’y fait point d’attention, mais si on les retire, tout se brise.”

When one sees women and dogs harnessed together dragging carts about the streets; when one sees women doing the lighter work of sweeping up leaves and collecting rubbish in the forests and on the larger estates; doing the gardening work in Saxony and other places; when one sees them by the hundreds working bare-legged in the beet-fields in Silesia and elsewhere throughout Germany; when one reads “Viele Weiber sind gut weil sie nicht wissen wie man es machen muss um böse zu sein,” and “Der Mann nach Freiheit strebt, das Weib nach Sitte,” two phrases from the German classics, Lessing and Goethe; when one recalls the shameless carelessness of Goethe’s treatment of all women; of how his love-poems were sometimes sent by the same mail to the lady and to the press; and the unrestrained worship of Goethe by the German women of his day; when one sees time and time again all over Germany the women shouldered into the street while the men keep to the sidewalk; when one sees in the streets, railway carriages, and other public conveyances, the insulting staring to which every woman is subjected if she have a trace of good looks, one realizes that at any rate Madame Necker was not writing of German women. Let me add that so far as the great Goethe is concerned, it is by no Puritan yard-stick that I am measuring him, but by the German’s own high standard which despises any mating of true sentiment with commercialism. “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis,” certainly applies to one’s affairs of the heart.

In the gallery at Dresden, where the loveliest mother’s face in all the world shines down upon you from Raphael’s canvas like a benediction, there is a small picture by Rubens, “The Judgment of Paris.” The three goddesses-induitur formosa est; exuitur ipsa forma est -have taken literally the compliment paid to a certain beautiful customer by a renowned French dressmaker: “Un rien et madame est habillée!” They are coquettishly revealing their claims to the Eve-bitten fruit which Paris holds in his hand. Paris and his friend are in the most nonchalant of attitudes. They could not be more indifferent, or more superior in appearance, were they dandies judging the class for costermonger’s donkeys at a provincial horse-show. The three most beautiful women in the world are squirming and posturing for praise, and a decision, before two as sophisticated and self-satisfied men as one will ever see on canvas or off it.

The same subject is treated by a man of the same breed, but of a later day, named Feuerbach, and his picture hangs, I think, in Breslau. Here again the supersuperiority of the male is portrayed.

In the Church of Saint Sebaldus at Nuremberg, there is a delightful mural painting which makes one merry even to recall it. The subject is the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are being lectured by an elderly man in flowing robes with a long white beard. His beard alone would more than supply Adam and Eve with the covering they lack. In an easy attitude, with neither haste nor anxiety, he is pointing out to them the error of their ways. He is as detached in manner as though he were Professor Wundt, lecturing to us at Leipsic on the fourth dimension of space. Adam is somewhat dejected and reclines upon the ground. Eve, unabashed, with nothing on but the apple which she is munching, is evidently in a reckless mood. She looks like a child of fifteen, with her hair down her back; the defiance of her attitude is that of a naughty little girl. The world-old problem is under discussion, but with an air of good humor and cheerfulness on the part of the lecturer, as though there were still time in the world, as though hurry were an undiscovered human attribute, as though possibly the world would still go on even if the problem were left unsolved, and this first leafy parliament adjourned sine die.

They were so much wiser than are we! They knew then that there would be other sessions of congress, and that it was not necessary to decide everything on that spring day of the year One. But here again in this picture it is the male attitude toward the woman that is of chief interest. Adam is plainly bored. What if the woman has broken into the sanctuary of knowledge, she will only be the bigger fool, he seems to say. As for the professor in the red robes, his easy, patronizing manner is indicative enough of his mental top-loftiness toward the woman question. You can almost hear him say as he strokes his beard: “Küche, Kinder, Kirche!”

From the fields of Silesia, where the beet industry is possible only because there are hundreds of bare-legged girls and women to single the beets, a process not possible by machinery, at a wage of from twenty-five to thirty cents a day, to these German paintings with their illustrations of the spiritual and moral attitude of the German man toward the German woman, one sees everywhere and among practically all classes an attitude of condescension toward women among the polite and polished; an attitude of carelessness bordering on contempt among the rude. Their attitude is like that of the Jews who cry in their synagogues, “Thank God for not having made me a woman!”

One can judge, not incorrectly, of the status of women in a country by the manners and habits of the men, entirely dissociated from their relations to women. When one sees men equipped with small mirrors and small brushes and combs, which they use in all sorts of public places, even in the streets, in the street-cars, in omnibuses, and in the theatres; when one opens the door to a knock to find a gentleman, a small mirror in one hand and a tiny brush in the other, preparing himself for his entrance into your hotel sitting-room; you are bound to think that these persons are in the childhood days of personal hygiene, as it cannot be denied that they are, but also that their women folk must be still in the Eryops age of social sophistication, not to put a stop to such bucolic methods of grooming. Even though the Eryops is a gigantic tadpole, a hundred times older than the oldest remains of man, this is hardly an exaggeration.

In no other country in the cultured group of nations is the animal man so naïvely vain, so deliciously self-conscious, so untrained in the ways of the polite world, so serenely oblivious, not merely of the rights of women but of the simple courtesy of the strong to the weak. It is the only country I have visited where the hands of the men are better cared for than the hands of the women; and this is not a pleasant commentary upon the question of who does the rough work, and who has the vanity and who the leisure for a meticulous toilet. One must not forget that regular and systematic cleansing of the person is a very modern fashion. As late as the early part of the nineteenth century, tooth-brushes were not allowed in certain French convents, being looked upon as a luxury. Cleanliness was not very common a century and a half ago in any country. In 1770 the publication of Monsieur Perrel’s “Pogonotomie, ou 1’Art d’apprendre à se raser soi-même,” created a sensation among fashionable people, and enthusiasts studied self-shaving. The author of “Lois de la Galanterie” in 1640 writes: “Every day one should take pains to wash one’s hands, and one should also wash one’s face almost as often!”

The copious streams of hot and cold water, turned into a porcelain tub at any time of the day or night; the brushes, and soaps, and towels, and toilet waters, and powders of our day were quite unknown to our not far-off ancestors. The oft-repeated and minute ablutions of our day are almost as modern as bicycles, and not as ancient as the railways. The Germans are only a little behind the rest of us in this soap and water cult, that is all.

In the streets and public conveyances of the cities, in the beer-gardens and restaurants in the country, in the summer and winter resorts from the Baltic to the Black Forest, from the Rhine to Bohemia, it is ever the same. They seat themselves at table first, and have their napkins hanging below their Adam’s apples before their women are in their chairs; hundreds of times have I seen their women arrive at table after they were seated, not a dozen times have I seen their masters rise to receive them; their preference for the inside of the sidewalk is practically universal; even officers in uniform, but this is of rare occurrence, will take their places in a railway carriage, all of them smoking, where two ladies are sitting, and wait till requested before throwing their cigars away, and what cigars! and then by smiles and innuendoes make the ladies so uncomfortable that they are driven from the carriage. Even eleven hundred years ago the German woman had rather a rough time of it. Charlemagne had nine wives, but he seems to have been unduly uxorious or unwearying in his infatuations. He made the wife travel with him, and all nine of them died, worn out by travel and hardship. There is a constancy of companionship which is deadly.

The inconveniences and discomfort of going about alone, for ladies in Germany, I have heard not from a dozen, but in a chorus from German ladies themselves. I am reciting no grievances of my compatriots, for I have seen next to nothing of Americans for a year or more, and I have no personal complaints, for these soft adventurers scent danger quickly, and give the masters of the world, whether male or female, a wide berth.

These gross manners are the result of two factors in German life that it is well to keep in mind. They are a poor people, only just emerging from poverty, slavery, and disaster; poor not only in possessions, but poor in the experience of how to use them. They do not know how to use their new freedom. They are as awkward in this new world of theirs, of greater wealth and opportunity, as unyoked oxen that have strayed into city streets. The abject deference of the women, who know nothing better than these parochial masters, adds to their sense of their own importance. It is largely the women themselves who make their men insupportable.

The other factor is the rigid caste system of their social habits. There is no association between the officers, the nobility, the officials, the cultured classes, and the middle and lower classes. The public schools and universities are learning shops; they do not train youths in character, manners, or in the ways of the world. They do not play together, or work together, or amuse themselves together. The creeds and codes, habits and manners of the better classes are, therefore, not allowed to percolate and permeate those less experienced. There is no word for gentleman in German. The words gebildeter and anständiger are used, and it is significant to notice that the stress is thus laid on mental development or upon obedience to formal rules. A man may be a very great gentleman and a true gentleman and not be a scholar. The late Duke of Devonshire cared more for horses than for books and pictures, and Abraham Lincoln was one of the greatest gentlemen of all time.

In Homburg one day I saw a tall, fine-looking, elderly man step aside and off the sidewalk to let two ladies pass. It was for Germany a noticeable act. He turned out to be a famous general then in waiting upon the Emperor. There are not a few such courtly gentlemen in Germany, not a few whose knightliness compares with that of any gentleman in the world. Alas for the great bulk of the Germans, they never come into contact with them, their example is lost, their leaven of high breeding and courtesy does not lighten the bourgeois loaf! In America and in England we are all threading our way in and out among all classes. We are much more democratic. Men of every class are in contact with men of every other, we play together and work together, and consequently the level of manners and habits is higher. This state of things is less marked in south Germany than in Prussia, but is more or less true everywhere.

But how can this be possible, I hear it replied, in that land where every officer clacks his heels together with a report like an exploding torpedo, ducks his head from his rigid vertebrae, and then bends to kiss the lady’s hand; and where every civilian of any standing does the same? I am not writing of the nobility and of the corps of officers in this connection. No doubt there are black sheep among them, though I have not met them. Of the many scores of them whom I have met, whom I have ridden with, dined with, romped with, drunk with, travelled with, I have only to say that they are as courteous, as unwilling to offend or to take advantage, as are brave men in other countries I know. I am writing of the average man and woman, of those who make up the bulk of every population, of those upon whom it depends whether a national life is healthy or otherwise.

The very stiffness of these mannerisms, the clacking of heels, the ducking of heads, the kissing of hands, the countless grave formalities among the men themselves, are all indicative of social weakness. They are afraid to walk without the crutches of certain formulae, of certain hard-and-fast rules, of certain laws that they worship and fall down before. Slavery is still upon them. Escaped from a bodily master they fly to the refuge of a moral and spiritual one. These formalities are prescribed forms which they wear as they wear uniforms; they are not the result of innate consideration.

Uniform-wearing is a passion among the Germans, and may be included as still another indication of the universal desire to take refuge behind forms, and laws, and fixed customs, the universal desire to shrink from depending upon their own judgment and initiative. They will not even bow or kiss a lady’s hand, without a prescription from a social physician whom they trust.

The German officials are always officials, always addressed and addressing others punctiliously by their titles. They do not throw off officialdom outside their duties and their offices as we do, but they glory in it. We throw off our uniforms as soon as may be; we feel hampered by them. This leads to a feeling on the part of the Germans that we are too free and easy, and not respectful enough toward our own dignity or toward theirs. We feel, on the other hand, that it is a farce to go to the every-day markets of life, whether for daily food or for daily social intercourse, with the bullion and certified checks of our official dignity; we go rather with the small change that jingles in all pockets alike, and is ready to be handed out for the frequent and unimportant buying and selling of the day and hour. We look upon this grallatory attitude toward life as artificial and hampering, and prefer to walk among our neighbors as much as possible upon our own feet.

I am not pretending to fix standards of etiquette. I can quite understand that when we grab the hand of the German’s wife and shake it like a pump-handle instead of bowing over it; that when we nod cheerfully to him in the street with a wave of the hand or a lifting of a cane or umbrella instead of taking off our hat; that when we fail to address both him and his lady with the title belonging to them, no matter how commonplace that title, we shock his prejudices and his code of good manners.

If there is a stranger, a lady, in the drawing-room before dinner the German men line up in single file and ask to be presented to her. If the lady is tall and handsome and the party a large one, it looks almost like an ovation. If you go to dine at an officers’ mess the men think it their duty to come up and ask to be presented to you. They wear their mourning bands on the forearm instead of the upperarm; they wear their wedding-rings on the fourth finger of the right hand; many of them wear rather more conspicuous jewelry than we consider to be in good taste.

The sofa, too, plays a rôle in German households and offices for which I have sought in vain for an explanation. Not even German archaeology supplies a historical ancestry for this sofa cult. It is the place of honor. If you go to tea you are enthroned on the sofa. Even if you go to an office, say of the police, or of the manager of the city slaughter-house, or of the hospital superintendent, you are manoeuvred about till they get you on the sofa, generally behind a table. I soon discovered that this was the seat of honor. Sofas have their place in life, I admit. There are sofas that we all remember with tears, with tenderness, with reverence. They have been the boards upon which we first appeared in the rôle of lover perhaps; or where we have fondled and comforted a discouraged child; or where we have pumped new ambitions and larger life into a weaker brother; or where we have tossed in the agony of grief or disappointment; or where we have waited drearily and alone the result of a consultation of moral or physical life and death in the next room. Indeed, this all reminds me that I could write an essay on sofas that would be poignant, touching, autobiographical, luminous, as could most other men, but this would not explain the position of the sofa in Germany in the least. “Travels on a Sofa”-I must do it one day, and perhaps, with more serious study of the subject, light may be thrown upon this question of the sofa in Germany.

Even at large and rather formal dinner-parties the host bows and drinks to his guests, first one and then another. At the end of the meal, in many households, it is the custom to bow and kiss your hostess’s hand and say “Mahlzeit,” a shortened form of “May the meal be blessed to you.” You also shake hands with the other guests and say “Mahlzeit.” In some smarter houses this is looked upon as old- fashioned and is not done. I look upon it as a charming custom, and think it a pity that it should be done away with.

Young unmarried girls and women courtesy to the elder women and kiss their hands, also a custom I approve. On the other hand, where a stalwart officer appears in a small drawing-room and seats himself at the slender tea-table for a cup of afternoon tea, holding his sword by his side or between his legs, that seems to me an unnecessary precaution, even when Americans are present, for many of us nowadays go about unarmed.

Except on official or formal occasions it seems a matter of questionable good taste to appear, say in a hotel restaurant, with one’s breast hung with medals or with orders on one’s coat or in the button-hole. Let ’em find out what a big boy am I without help from self-imposed placards seems to me to be perhaps the more modest way. The method in vogue in Japanese temples, where the worshippers jangle a bell to call the attention of the gods to their prayers or offerings, seems out of place where the god is merely the casual man in the street, in a Berlin restaurant.

At more than one dinner the soup is followed by a meat course, after which comes the fish. This does not mean that the dinners are not good. I fondly recall a dish of sauerkraut boiled in white wine and served in a pineapple. I may not give names, but the dinners of Mr. and Mrs. Fourth of December, of Mrs. Twenty-first of January, of Mr. and Mrs. Thirtieth of January, and of Mr. and Mrs. February First, and others rank very high in my gastronomic calendar. Do not imagine from what I have written that Lucullus has left no disciples in Germany. I could easily add a page to the list I have mentioned, and because we look upon some of these customs of the German as absurd is no reason for forgetting that he often, and from his stand-point rightly, looks upon us as boors. I like the Germans and I pretend to have learned very much from them. To sneer at superficial differences is to lose all profit from intercourse with other peoples. Goethe is right, “Uberall lernt man nur von dem, den man liebt!” The argument is only all on our side when we are impervious to impressions and to other standards of manners and morals than our own.

“Am Ende hangen wir doch ab
Von Kreaturen die wir machten”

are two lines at least from the second part of “Faust” that we can all understand.

It is sometimes thrown at us Americans that we love a title, and that we are not averse to the ornamentation of our names with pseudo and attenuated “Honorables” and “Colonels” and “Judge” and so on; and I am bound to admit the impeachment, for I blush at some of my be-colonelled and becaptained friends, and wonder at their rejoicing over such effeminate honorifics, especially those colonelcies born of clattering behind a civilian governor, on a badly ridden horse, a title which may be compared with that most attenuated title of all, that of a Texan, who when asked why he was called “colonel” replied, that he had married the widow of a colonel!

I prefer “Esqr.” to “Mr.” merely because it makes it easier to assort the daily mail; “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss” are so easily taken for one another on an envelope, and particularly at Christmas time this more distinctly legible title avoids, the deplorable misdirection of the secrets of Santa Claus; aside from that I am happy to be addressed merely by my name, like any other sovereign.

We are, too, somewhat overexcited when foreign royalties appear among us. “What wud ye do if ye were a king an’ come to this counthry?” asked Mr. Hennessy.

“Well,” said Mr. Dooley, “there’s wan thing I wuddent do. I wuddent r-read th’ Declaration iv Independence. I’d be afraid I’d die laughin’.”

In Germany not only are titles showered upon the populace, but it is distinctly and officially stated by what title the office-holder shall be addressed.

In a case I know, a certain lady failed to sign herself to one of the small officials working upon her estate as, let us say, “I remain very sincerely yours,” or its German equivalent; whereupon the person addressed wrote and demanded that communications addressed to him should be signed in the regulation manner. A lawyer was consulted, and it was found that a similar case had been taken to the courts and decided in favor of the recipient of wounded vanity.

In hearty and manly opposition to this attitude toward life is the example of Admiral X. He had served long and gallantly, and just before he retired a friend said to him: “I hear that they’re going to knight you.” “By God, sir, not without a court-martial!” was the prompt reply. Indeed, things have come to such a pass in England that the offer of a knighthood to a gentleman of lineage, breeding, and real distinction, has been for years looked upon as either a joke or an insult.

Not so among my German friends; they have a ravenous appetite for these flimsy tickets of passing commendation. At many, many hospitable boards in Berlin I have been present where no left breast was barren of a medal, and where the only medal won by participation in actual warfare, belonging to one of the guests, was safely packed away in his house. And as for the titles, there is no room in a small volume like this to enumerate them all; and the women folk all carry the titles of the husband, from Frau Ober-Postassistent, Frau Regierungs Assessor, up to the Chancellor’s lady, who, by the way, wears a title in her mere face and bearing. Not long ago I saw in a provincial sheet the notice of the death of a woman of eighty, who was gravely dignified by her bereaved relatives with the title, and as the relict of, a veterinary.

Upon a certain funicular at a mountain resort, where the cars pass one another up and down every twenty minutes, the conductors salute one another stiffly each time they pass.

Of the army of people with titles of Ober-Regierungsrat, Geheimer Regierungsrat, Wirklicher Geheimer Regierungsrat, Wirklicher Geheimer Ober-Regierungsrat, Wirklicher Geheimerat, who also carries the additional title of “Excellenz” with his title; Referendar, Assessor, Justizrat, Geheimer Justizrat, Gerichts-Assessor, Amtsrichter, Amtsgerichtrat, Oberamtsrichter, Landgerichtsdirector, Amtsgerichtspräsident, Geheimer Finanzrat, Wirklicher Geheimer Ober Finanzrat, Legationsrat, Wirklicher Geheimer Legationsrat, Vice Konsul, Konsul, General Konsul, Commercienrat, Wirklichercommercienrat, Staatsanwalt, Staatsanwaltschaftsrat, Herr Erster Staatsanwalt, where the “Herr” is a legal part of the title; of those who must be addressed as “Excellenz,” and in addition military and naval titles, and the horde of handles to names of those in the railway, postal, telegraph, street-cleaning, forestry, and other departments, one must merely throw up one’s hands in despair, and bow to the inevitable disgrace of being quite unable to name this Noah’s-ark procession of petty dignitaries.

In the department of post and telegraph a new order has gone forth, issued during the last few months, by which, after passing certain examinations, the employees may take the title of Ober-Postschaffner and Ober-Leitungsaufseher. After thirty years’ service the postman is dignified with the title of Ober-Briefträger. It is difficult to understand the type of mind which is flattered by such infantile honors. At any rate, it is a cheap system of rewards, and so long as men will work for such trumpery ends the state profits by playing upon their childish vanity. During the year 1912 more than 7,000 decorations were distributed, and some 1,500 of these were of the three classes of the Order of the Red Eagle. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reign of the present Emperor, in 1913, still another medal is to be struck, to be given to worthy officials and officers.

All the professions and all the trades, too, have their pharmacopoeia of tags and titles, and you will go far afield to find a German woman who is not Frau Something-or-other Schmidt, or Fischer, or Miller. Every day one hears women greeting one another as Frau Oberforstmeister, Frau Superintendent, Frau Medicinalrat, Frau Oberbergrat, Frau Apothekar, Frau Stadt-Musikdirektor, Frau Doktor Rechtsanwalt, Frau Geschäftsführer, and the like. All these titles, too, appear in the hotel registers and in all announcements in the newspapers. Even when a man dies, his title follows him to the grave, and even beyond it, in the speech of those left behind.

These uniforms and titles and small formalities do make, I admit, for orderliness and rigidity, and perhaps for contentment; since every man and woman feels that though they are below some one else on the ladder they are above others; and every day and in every company their vanity is lightly tickled by hearing their importance, small though it be, proclaimed by the mention of their titles.

It pleases the foreigners to laugh and sometimes to jeer at the universal sign of “Verboten” (Forbidden) seen all over Germany. They look upon it as the seal of an autocratic and bureaucratic government. It is nothing of the kind. The army, the bureaucracy, the autocratic Kaiser at the helm, and the landscape bestrewn with “Verboten” and “Nicht gestattet” (Not allowed), these are necessities in the case of these people. They do not know instinctively, or by training or experience, where to expectorate and where not to; where to smoke and where not to; what to put their feet on and what not to; where to walk and where not to; when to stare and when not to; when to be dignified and when to laugh; and, least of all, how to take a joke; how, when, or how much to eat, drink, or bathe, or how to dress properly or appropriately. The Emperor is almost the only man in Germany who knows what chaff is and when to use it.

The more you know them, the longer you live among them, the less you laugh at “Verboten.” The trouble is not that there are too many of these warnings, but that there are not enough! When you see in flaring letters in the street-cars, “In alighting the left hand on the left-hand rail,” when you read on the bill of fare in the dining-car brief instructions underlined, as to how to pour out your wine so that you will not spill it on the table-cloth; when you see the list of from ten to fifteen rules for passengers in railway carriages; when you see everywhere where crowds go and come, “Keep to the right”; when you see hanging on the railings of the canals that flow through Berlin a life-buoy, and hanging over it full instructions with diagrams for the rescue of the drowning; when you see over a post-box, “Aufschrift und Marke nicht vergessen” (Do not forget to stamp and address your envelope); when you see in the church entrances a tray with water and sal volatile, and the countless other directions and remedies and preventives on every hand, you shrug your Saxon shoulders and smile pityingly, if you do not stand and stare and then laugh outright, as I was fool enough to do at first. But you soon recover from this superficial view of matters Teutonic. In one cab I rode in I was cautioned not to expectorate, not to put my feet on the cushions, not to tap on the glass with stick or umbrella, not to open the windows, but to ask the driver to do it, and not to open the door till the auto-taxi stopped; one hardly has time to learn the rules before the journey is over.

In April, 1913, more laws are to come into effect for the street traffic. People may not walk more than three abreast; they may not swing their canes and umbrellas as they walk; they may not drag their garments in the street; they may not sing, whistle, or talk loudly in the street, nor congregate for conversation; there will follow, of course, a regulation as to the length of women’s dresses to be worn in the street, and no doubt the police commissioner, an amiable bachelor, will decree that the shorter the better. All these fussy regulations are ridiculous to us, but in reality they are horrible and give one a feeling of suffocation when living in Germany. In the days when everybody rode a bicycle, each rider was obliged to pass an examination in proficiency, paid a small tax, and was given a number and a license. Women who persisted in wearing dangerous hat-pins have been ejected from public vehicles.

After April 1, 1913, no shop in Berlin can advertise or hold a bargain sale without permission of the police. The changed prices must be affixed to the goods four days before the sale for inspection by the police, and only two such sales are permitted a year, and these must take place either before February 15, or between June 15 and August 1st. All particulars of the sale must be handed to the police a week in advance. In a carriage on the Bavarian railroad, a husband who kissed and petted his tired wife was complained of by a fellow- passenger. The husband was tried, judged guilty, and fined. There was no question but that the woman was his wife; thus there is no loop-hole left for the legally curious, and thousands of male Germans hug and kiss one another on railway-station platforms who surely ought to be fined and imprisoned or deported or hanged! All this may be a relic of Roman law. Cato dismissed Marilius from the Senate because he kissed his own wife by daylight in the presence of their own daughter.

Shortly after leaving Germany, I returned from a few weeks’ shooting in Scotland. We bundled out of the train onto the station platform in London. Dogs, gun-cases, cartridge-boxes, men and maid servants, trunks, bags, baskets, bunches of grouse, and the passengers seemed in a chaotic huddle of confusion. In Germany at least twenty policemen would have been needed to disentangle us. I was so torpid from having been long Teutonically cared for, that I looked on momentarily paralyzed. There was no shouting, not a harsh word that I heard; and as I was almost the last to get away, I can vouch for it that in ten minutes each had his own and was off. I had forgotten that such things could be done. I had been so long steeped in enforced orderliness, that I had forgotten that real orderliness is only born of individual self-control. I forgot that I was back among the free spirits who govern a quarter of the habitable globe and whose descendants are making America; and even if here and there one or more, and they are often recently arrived immigrants, are intoxicated by freedom and shoot or steal like drunken men; I realized that I am still an Occidental barbarian, thank God, preferring liberty, even though it is punctuated now and then with shots and screams and thefts, to official guardianship, even though I am thus saved the shooting, the screaming, and the thieving.

In the nine years ending 1910, our Fourth of July celebrations cost America in killed, 18,000; in wounded, 35,000; but even that is better than the civic throttling of the German method. It seems to be forgotten that the men who keep the world fresh with their saline vigor, love risks as they love fresh air. They should be curbed, but not strangled!

You read their history, you watch closely their manners, you prowl about among them, in their streets, their shops, their houses, their theatres; you accompany the crowds on a holiday in the trains, in the forests, in the summer resorts, at their concerts or their picnics, in their beer-gardens and restaurants, and you soon see that the orderliness is all forced upon them from without, and not due to their own knowledge of how to take care of themselves.

In a recent volume by a distinguished German prison official he writes that, after a careful study of the figures from 1882 to 1910, he has discovered that one person now living in every twelve in Germany has been convicted of some offence. Doctor Finkelnburg shows that the number of “criminals” in Germany is 3,869,000, of whom 3,060,000 are males, and 809,000 females. Every 43d boy and every 213th girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen has been punished by fine or imprisonment. This does not mean that the Germans are criminal or disorderly, but, on the contrary, it shows how absurdly petty are the violations of the law punished by fine or imprisonment.

Their whole history, from Charlemagne down until the last fifty years, is a series of going to pieces the moment the strong hand of authority is taken away from them. The German, and especially the Prussian policeman, has become the greatest official busybody in the world. No German’s house is his castle. The policeman enters at will and, backed by the authorities, questions the householder about his religion, his servants, the attendance of his children at school, the status of the guests staying in his house, and about many other matters besides. If one of his children by reason of ill health is taught at home, the authorities demand the right to send an inspector every six months to examine him or her, to be sure that the child is properly taught. The policeman is in attendance on the platform at every public meeting, armed with authority to close the meeting if either speeches or discussion seem to him unpatriotic, unlawful, or strife-breeding. Professors, pastors, teachers are all muzzled by the state, and must preach and teach the state orthodoxy or go! A young professor of political economy in Berlin only lately was warned, and has become strangely silent since.

The de-Germanizing of the German abroad is in line with this, and a constant source of annoyance to the powers that be. Buda-Pesth was founded by Germans in 1241, and now not one-tenth of the population is German. As the Franks became French, as the Long Beards became Italians, so the Germans become Americans in America, English in England, Austrian and Bohemian in Austria and Bohemia. It has been a problem to prevent their becoming Poles where the state has settled Germans for the distinct purpose of ousting the Poles.

In China, in South America, and even in Sumatra I have heard German officials tell with indignation of how their compatriots rapidly take the local color, and lose their German habits and customs and point of view.

One of the half dozen best-known bankers in Berlin has lamented to me that he must change his people in South America every few years, as they soon go to pieces there. Army officers came home from China indignant to find their compatriots there speaking English and unwilling even to speak German. Even as long ago as the time of the Thirty Years’ War a forgotten chronicler, Adam Junghaus von der Ohritz, writes: “Further, it is a misfortune to the Germans that they take to imitating like monkeys and fools. As soon as they come among other soldiers, they must have Spanish or other outlandish clothes. If they could babble foreign languages a little, they would associate themselves with Spaniards and Italians.” Wilhelm von Polentz, in his “das Land der Zukunft,” writes: “die Deutsch-Amerikaner sind für die alte Heimat dauernd verloren, politisch ganz und kulturell beinahe vollständig.”

Bismarck knew these people and the present Emperor knows these people, better than do you and I! Bismarck even insisted upon using the German text, and once returned a letter of congratulation from an official body because it was written in the Latin text. Even the Great Elector must have recognized this weakness when he said: “Gedenke dass du bist em Deutscher!” The present Kaiser lends his whole social influence to keep the Germans German. He will have the bill of fare in German, he prefers the dreadful word Mundtuch to napkin. His officers very often demand that the bill of fare in a German hotel shall be presented to them in German and not in French. And they are quite right to do so, and quite right to hang the German world with the sign “Verboten”; quite right to distribute titles and medals and orders, for the more they are uniformed and decorated and ticketed and drilled, and taken care of, the better they like it, and the more contented these people are. Overorganization has brought this about. Their theories have hardened into a veritable imprisonment of the will. They have drifted away from Goethe’s wise saying: “That man alone attains to life and freedom who daily has to conquer them anew.”

Let me refer again just here to the socialist propaganda, which seems to the outsider so strong here in Germany. Even this is far flabbier than it looks, as I have attempted to explain elsewhere. In such strong and out-and-out industrial centres as Essen, Duisburg-Mühlheim, Saarbrücken, and Bochum, where a vigorous fight has been made against socialism, the following are the figures of the last election in 1912 when the socialists largely increased their vote throughout other parts of Germany:

| NATIONALLIBERAL | ZENTRUM | SOCIALDEMOKRAT
Essen | 25,937 | 42,832 | 40,503
Duisburg-Mühlheim | 33,934 | 31,559 | 34,187
Saarbrücken | 25,108 | 24,228 | 4,157
Bochum | 42,257 | 37,650 | 64,833

I cite this example because it seems as though the growth of socialism in Germany were in direct contradiction to my argument that they are a soft, an impressionable, an amenable, and easily led and governed people.

State socialism as thus far put into practice in Germany is, in a nutshell, the decision on the part of the state or the rulers that the individual is not competent to spend his own money, to choose his own calling, to use his own time as he will, or to provide himself for his own future and for the various emergencies of life. And by the minute state control, they are rapidly bringing the whole population to an enfeebled social and political condition, where they can do nothing for themselves.

They have been knocked about and dragooned by their own rulers and, be it said and emphasized, they have received certain compensations and gained certain advantages, if nothing else an orderliness, safety, and care for the people by the state unequalled elsewhere in the world. But there is no gainsaying, on the other hand, that they have lost the fruits that are plucked by the nations of more individualistic training.

They have clean streets, cheap music and drama, and a veritable mesh of national education with interstices so small that no one can escape, and they are coddled in every direction; but they have no stuff for colonizers, and they have been not infrequently wofully lacking in stalwart statesmen, and leaders.

To deprive the worker of his choice of expenditure, by taking all but a pittance of it in taxation, is a dangerous deprivation of moral exercise. To be able to choose for oneself is a vitally necessary appliance in the moral gymnasium, even if here and there one chooses wrong. It is a curious trend of thought of the day, which proposes to cure social evils always by weakening, rather than by strengthening the individual.

Socialism is merely a moral form of putting a sharper bit in humanity’s mouth; when of course the highest aim, the optimistic view, is to train people to go as fast and straight and far as possible, with the least possible hampering of their natural powers by legislation. “Some men are by nature free, others slaves,” writes Aristotle, but whether this axiom can be accepted fully or not, it is undoubtedly true that you can first dragoon and then coddle a whole people, into a lack of independence and a shrinking from the responsibilities of freedom.

We are drugging the people ourselves just now with legislation as a cure for the evils of industrialism, but such legislation will only do what soporifics can do, they numb the pain, but they never bring health. What a forlorn philosophy it is! Men take advantage, rob and steal, we say, and to do away with this we give up the fight for fair play and orderliness and propose sweeping away all the prizes of life, hoping thus to do away with the highwaymen of commerce and finance. If there is no booty, there will be no bandit, we say, forgetting altogether the corollary that if there are no prizes there will be no prizemen! Neither God nor Nature gives anything to those who do not struggle, and both God and Nature appoint the stern task-master, Necessity, to see to it that we do struggle. Now come the ignorant and the socialists, demanding that the state step in and roll back the very laws of creation by supplying what is not earned from the surplus of the strong. Who cannot see anarchy looming ahead of this programme, for it is surely a lunatic negation of all the laws of God and Nature? They do not seem to see either in America or in England that state supervision carried too far leads straight to the sanction of all the demands of socialism and syndicalism. Legislation was never intended to be the father of a people, but their policeman. Overlegislation, whether by an autocrat or a democratic state, leads straight to revolution, to Caesarism, or to slavery.

In Germany the state by giving much has gained an appalling control over the minute details of human intercourse. I am no philosophic adviser to the rich; it is as the champion of the poor man that I detest socialism and all its works, for in the end it only leads backward to slavery. Every vote the workingman gives to a policy of wider state control is another link for the chains that are meant for his ankles, his wrists, and his neck. If the state is to take care of me when I am sick or old or unemployed, it must necessarily deprive me of my liberty when I am well and young and busy, and thus make my very health a kind of sickness. A year in Germany ought to cure any sensible workingman of the notion that the state is a better guardian of his purse and his powers than he is himself. A distinguished German publicist, criticising this overpowering interference of the state, writes: “Mir ist wohl bewusst dass diese Gedanken einst weilen fromme Wünsche bleiben werden: die Schatten lähmender Müdigkeit die fiber unserer Politik lagern, lassen wenig Hoffnung auf fröhliche Initiative. Allein immer kann und wird es nicht so bleiben.” And he ends with the ominous words: “Reform oder Revolution!”

One often hears the apostles of a certain kittenish humanitarianism, talking of the great good that would result if we in America would provide light wines and beer and music, and parks and gardens, for our people. They see the crowds of men and women and children flocking by thousands to such resorts in Germany, where they eat tons of cakes and Brödchens and jam, and where they drink gallons of beer and wine, and where they sit hour after hour apparently quite content. Why, Lord love you, ladies and gentlemen, our populace would never be content with such mild amusements! Fancy “Silver Dollar” Sullivan or “Bath-house” John attempting to cajole their cohorts in such fashion!

It may be a pity that our people are not thus easily amused, but, on the other hand, it means simply that our energy, our vitality, our national nervousness if you like, will not be so easily satisfied. Our disorderly nervousness, or nervous disorderliness, though it has been a tremendous asset in keeping us bounding along industrially and commercially, and though it gives an exhilarating, champagne-like flavor to our atmosphere, has cost us dear. If you will have freedom, you will have those who are ruined by it; just as, if you will have social and political servitude, you will have a stodgy, unindependent populace.

Only one out of sixty perpetrators of homicidal crime suffers the extreme penalty attaching to such crimes in America, and these figures, I admit, are a shocking revelation of supine justice and sentimental executive, as when politics can even bend our President to grant silly pardons, with baleful results upon the doings of other wealthy criminals. We use as large an amount of habit-forming drugs per capita as is used in the Chinese empire, so says Dr. Wright, who was commissioned by the State Department to gather facts on this subject. We import and consume 500,000 pounds of opium yearly, when 70,000 pounds, including its derivatives and preparations, should suffice for our medical needs. In the year 1910 no less than 185,000 ounces of cocaine were imported, manufactured, and consumed, although 15,000 ounces would supply every legitimate need. America collected $340,000,000 from tariff taxes in 1911, and $40,000,000 of this from tobacco and alcoholics.

My readers may look back to the title of this chapter and ask: What has all this to do with the status of women in Germany? I have told you in these few pages the whole secret. The men are not independent; what can you expect of the women! The men have, until very lately, had no surplus wealth or leisure, and have now, to all appearance, little surplus vitality or energy. Germany is getting to be a very tired-looking nation. One hears almost as little laughter in Germany as in India. Gayety and laughter are the bubbles and foam on the glass of life, proving that it is charged with energy. Do not believe me, although I have carefully watched many thousands of Germans in all parts of Germany taking their pleasure and their ease; come over and see for yourself! These thousands at their simple recreations are not gay. I grant the dangers we run by the opposite policy, but these are the results we have to fear from the German methods.

It is the men who must supply the leisure, the independence, the setting, the background for the women. All Europe says that our women are spoiled, that they are tyrants, that they treat us men badly, that they flout us, do not do their duty by us, and finally divorce us. We can afford to let them say it! We have given our women an independence that many of them abuse, it is true. We perhaps give them more than their share to spend, and more of luxury than is good for them; and all too many of the underbred among them paint and bejewel and begown themselves to imitate the lecherous barbarism of the too free. But one of the greatest ladies in Germany tells me, “I am never so flattered as when I am taken for an American!” I can pay her no handsomer compliment than to reply that she is worthy of the mistake. Our women revive the drooping dukedoms of England, and few will maintain that some of them at least are unsuited to the position. I have seen them in Germany as Frau Gräfin this or that, and not only their appearance but their house-keeping machinery, running noiselessly and accurately, proves that there is something more than dollars behind them.

One of the rare human beings whom I have known, who has at the same time the characteristics of the generous comrade, the good fellow, and the fine gentleman; who in moral courage in time of terrible strain, or in physical courage when one’s back is to the wall, never quailed, is an American woman; and thousands of my countrymen will say the same.

You cannot produce this type without freedom, without giving them opportunity, and taking the risks that are inherent in giving free scope to personal prowess. But they are not the women whom our blatant newspapers exploit, nor the women who buy the British aristocracy to launch them socially, nor the women who pervade the continental hotels and restaurants, nor the women whom as a rule the foreigner has the opportunity to meet. They are the women who have helped us to absorb the 21,000,000 aliens who have entered America since the Civil War; the women who stood behind us when we fought out that war for four years, leaving a million men on the fields of battle; the women who in the realm of housekeeping, to come down to practical levels, have revolutionized these duties and turned a drudgery into an art as have no other women in the world. The best answer the American can make to the luxurious lawlessness of some of our women, is to point to the house-keeping and home-making of his compatriots, not only at home but right here in Germany. Fifty years ago it could not have been said, but to-day there is no doubt in my mind that American house-keeping is the best in the world. In comfort, in the smooth running of the household machinery, in good food and drink, perhaps in too lavish and too luxurious hospitality, we are nowadays almost in a class by ourselves in matters of housewifery.

The English attitude of women toward men is somewhat that of comradeship, and once married the man’s comfort is looked after with some care; the American attitude of women toward men, in the more luxurious circles, is often, I admit, that of a spoiled child toward a gift-bringing uncle, and she permits him to worship her along the lines of a restricted rubric; but in Germany the subordination, the unquestioning and unthinking adulation, the blind acceptance of inferiority have not only softened the men but robbed the women of even sufficient independence to make them the helpmates that they try to be. There have been women of social and even political influence: Bettina von Arnim, Caroline Schlegel, Charlotte Stieglitz, Rahel Varnhagen, and lately Frau Lebin, who seems to have been a soothing adjunct of the Foreign Office. It is rather as admirers than as executives that they shine. Their attitude toward the great Goethe, and his nonchalant polygamy toward them, is difficult for us to understand and approve.

“The gentle Henrietta then,
And a third Mary next did reign,
And Joan and Jane and Andria;
And then a pretty Thomasine,
And then another Katherine,
And then a long et cetera.”

No real man is a misogynist, for not to like women is not to be a man. There are, however, many men, both in Germany and out of it, who greatly dislike sham women; that is, women who shirk their functional responsibilities. This form of dislike is a healthy instinct. Women are given the greatest and most inspiring of all tasks: to make men; and a woman who cannot make a man, by giving birth to one, or by developing one as son or husband, has failed more deplorably even than a man who cannot make a living. This task of theirs constitutes a superiority impossible to deny or to overcome. A woman, therefore, who craves man’s activities and standards is as foolish as though a wheat-field should long to be a bakery. Most healthy-minded men hold this view, though some of us may think that German men overemphasize it.

The coarse sentimentality of the lower classes has been noted, but it is not confined to them. The premarital relations of all but the most cultured and experienced, are marked by a mawkish sweetness which is all the more noticeable in contrast with the dull routine of saving and slaving which follows. She begins by being photographed sitting in her hero’s lap, and ends by sitting on the less comfortable chair to darn his socks and to tend his babies. There are women enthroned, and who deserve to be, in Germany as in other countries; but taken in the mass, speaking in hundreds of thousands, it is not an inaccurate picture to say that the women are not taken seriously in Germany except as mothers and servants.

The census of 1910 shows that there are 32,040,166 men in Germany and 32,885,827 women, or 845,661 more women than men. The number of men in proportion to the number of women is steadily increasing in Germany, showing that the habits of the men are more and more feminine, that the state provides for them and protects them, and that the women take good care of them.

In a virile state, where the men take risks, where they play hazardous games, where they travel and seek adventure, where they emigrate to seek new opportunities, the women will greatly outnumber the men. The excess of females in England and Wales in 1871 was 594,000; in 1881, 694,000; in 1891, 896,000; in 1911, 1,178,000. The United Kingdom has the largest surplus of women of leisure in the world, and just now they are taking advantage of their numerical superiority in the most delightful and comical feminine fashion. They are proving their right to assist in coercing others to obey the laws, by disobeying the laws themselves. By pouring vitriol on golf-greens, by pinning their defiance to these dishevelled greens with hair-pins, they propose to provoke the recalcitrant to recognition of their right to pin their names to seats in the House of Commons. It is all so sweetly feminine, that the stranger is astonished to hear such women dubbed unwomanly. Pray, what could be more womanly in England, than to pin a protest to a golf-green with a hair-pin!

The German army, which is in itself a school of hygiene for the man, where the death-rate is the lowest of any army in Europe, and the many provisions for the state care of the population, all go to coddle the men and protect them. The various forms of labor insurance alone in Germany cost the state over $250,000 a day, and if we include the amount expended in compensation in all its forms, the yearly bill of the state for the care of its sick, injured and aged, amounts to nearly $170,000,000. No wonder that between the care of a grandmotherly state, and the attentions of a subservient womankind, the male population increases. I sometimes question whether there is not something of the hot-house culture about this male crop. Certainly consumption and other diseases are very wide-spread. A very detailed and careful investigation of certain forms of weakness is being made by our Rockefeller Institute at this time, and if I am not mistaken in the results of what these investigations have thus far disclosed, it will be found that Germany has her full share of rottenness to deal with. To those who care to corroborate these hints with facts I recommend the reading of certain recent numbers of the hygienic Rundschau, a German technical magazine of repute.

There is a lack of vitality and elasticity, a stodgy, plodding way of working, much indulgence in gregarious eating and drinking, and very mild forms of exercise and holiday-making, comparatively little sport, almost no game-playing where boys and men hustle one another about as in foot-ball and polo, and very long hours of application, from the school-boy to the ministers of state, all of which tend to and do produce a physical lack of alertness, vivacity, and audacity in the men of practically all classes.

The way to see the people of a country is to stand by the hour in the large industrial towns and watch them as they go to and from their work; to watch them flocking in and out of railway stations, and at work in large numbers in the fields of Saxony, Silesia, and other parts of Prussia; to spend hours, and I admit that they are tedious hours, strolling through factories, ship-yards, mines, and offices, paying no attention to the talk of your guide, but studying the faces and physique of the men and women. Having done this, an impartial observer is bound to remark that industrial and commercial Germany is taking a tremendous toll for the rapid progress she has made. It may be no worse here than elsewhere, but neither has the problem of a healthy, happy, toiling population been satisfactorily solved here, though perhaps better here than elsewhere. I have heard the women and girls in factories singing at their work, but the bird is no less caged because it sings.

Men who ought to know better set an example of long hours of confinement at their work which is quite unnecessary. They tell you with pride that they are at it from eight or nine in the morning till seven and often till later at night. That is something that no sane man ought to be proud of. On investigation you find that in industrial and commercial circles, and in the offices of the state, men take two hours for luncheon and then return to work till nightfall. Two hours in the open air at the end of the day could be managed easily, but they do not want it. There is no vitality left for a game, for exercise, for a bath, and a change.

They drug themselves with work, and slip away to the theatre, to a concert, to a Verein or circle, unwashed, ungroomed, and physically torpid, and the great mass of the population, high and low alike, outside the army officers, look it.

The army officer’s career is dependent upon his mental and physical vigor. The cylinder is quickly handed him and the helmet taken away if he grows too fat and too slow physically and mentally. There is no nepotism, no favoritism, and on reaching a certain rank he goes, if he falls below the standard required, and consequently he keeps himself fit. But a huge bureaucracy, with its stupid promotions by years and not by ability, with its government stroke, and its dangling pensions, positively breeds lassitude, laziness, and dulness. You may see it on every hand in government offices, in the railway and postal services, where men are evidently kept on not for their fitness but by the tyranny of the system. High officials admit as much.

In the little state of Prussia the railways pay well and are well managed, but they are clogged to a certain extent by inefficient and unnecessary employees, and were the system spread over the United States the chaos in a dozen years would be almost irreparable, and even here the complaints are many and vigorous. Probably one male over twenty-five years of age out of every four is in government employ. This alone would account for the general air of lassitude which is one of the most noticeable features of German life. The Germans as a whole are beginning to look tired. It is a German, not an Italian or a Frenchman, the philosopher Nietzsche, who writes: “Seit es Menschen giebt, hat der Mensch sich zu wenig gefreut; das allein ist unsere Erbsünde.”

There has been a great change in the status of women in the last twenty-five years. The apophthegm of Pericles, or rather of Thucydides, “that woman is best who is least spoken of among men, either for good or evil,” is not so rigidly enforced. Increased wealth throughout Germany has left the German woman more leisure from the drudgery of the home. She is not so wholly absorbed by the duties of nurse, cook, and house-maid as she once was. But even to-day her economies and her ability to keep her house with little outside assistance are amazing. Some of the most delightful meals I have taken, have been in professional households, where small incomes made it necessary that wife and daughters should do most of the work.

The German professor has his faults, but in his own simple home, the work of the day behind him, his family about him at his well-filled but not luxurious board, with some member of the family not unlikely to be an accomplished musician and with his own unrivalled store of learning at your service, when he raises his glass to you, filled with his best, with a smile and a hearty “Prosit,” he is hard to beat as a host, to my thinking. Perhaps there is nothing like overindulgence to make one crave simplicity, and no doubt this accounts for the fact that the really great ones of earth are satisfied and happy with enough, and abhor too much.

They tell me that the Dienstmädchen is no longer what she used to be, but to my untutored eye her duties still seem to be as comprehensive as those of a Sioux squaw, and her performances unrivalled. As is to be expected, Germany is not blessed with trained servants. They are helpers rather than professional servants. In the scores of houses, public and private, where I have been a guest, only in one or two had the servants more than an alphabetical knowledge of what was due to one’s clothes and shoes. The servants are rigidly protected by the state: they must have so much time off, they cannot be dismissed without weeks of warning, and they themselves carry books with their moral and professional biographies therein, which are always open to the inspection of the police; and they must all be insured.

In many towns, and cities too, there are hospitals and bands of nurses who for a small annual payment undertake to take over and care for a sick servant. If the doctor prescribes a “cure” for your servant, away she goes at the expense of the state to be taken care of. Wages are very small as compared with ours. Ten dollars a month for a cook, five for a house-maid, ten for a man-servant, forty to fifty for a chauffeur, and of course more in the larger and more luxurious establishments; though a chef who serves dinners for forty and fifty in an official household I know is content with twenty dollars a month. A nursery governess can be had for twelve, and a well-educated English governess for twenty dollars a month. Even these wages are higher than ten years ago. To be more explicit, in a small household where three servants are kept the cook receives 30 marks, the maid-servant 25 marks, and the nursery governess 35 marks a month. In the household of an official of some means the man-servant receives 45 marks, the cook 30 marks, and the maid-servant 30 marks a month. When dinners or other entertainments are given, outside help is called in. In the household of a rich industrial, whose family consists of himself, wife, and four children, the man-servant receives 80 marks, the chauffeur 200, the cook 45, the lady’s maid 35, the house-maid 25, kitchen-maid 12, and the governess 30 marks a month.

I carry away with me delightful pictures of German households, big, little, and medium; and though it does not fit in nicely with my main argument, households whose mistresses were patterns of what a châtelaine should be. But I must leave that loop-hole for the critics, for I am trying only to tell the truth and to be fair, and not to be scientific or to bolster up a thesis.

I can see the big castle, centuries old, with its rambling buildings winging away from it on every side, and in the court-yard its regal-looking mistress positively garlanded with her dozen children. There is no sign of the decadence of the aristocracy here. We sit down twenty or more every day at the family luncheon. Tutors and governesses are at every turn. A French abbé, as silken in manner and speech as his own soutane, bowls over all my prejudices of creed and custom, as I watch him rule with the lightest of hands and the softest of voices a brood of termagant small boys; to turn from this to a game of billiards, and from that to the Merry Widow waltz on the piano, that we may dance. An aide-de-camp trained in India and a French abbé, I am convinced that these are the apotheosis of luxury in a large household. My Protestant brethren would, I am sure, throw their prejudices to the winds could they spend an evening with my friend, Monsieur l’Abbé! Nor Erasmus, nor Luther, nor Calvin would have had the heart to burn him. He is just as good a fellow as we are, knows far more, can turn his hand to anything from photography to the driving of a stubborn pony, knows his world as few know it, and yet is inviolably not of it. I have chatted with Jesuit priests teaching our Western Indians; I have travelled with a preaching friar in Italy on his round of sermonizing; I have seen them in South America, in India, China, and Japan, and I recognize and acclaim their self-denying prowess, but no one of them was a more dangerous missionary than my last-named friend among them, Monsieur l’Abbe!

“For ever through life the Curé goes
With a smile on his kind old face-
With his coat worn bare, and his straggling hair,
And his green umbrella-case.”

There was a profusion at this castle, a heartiness of welcome, a patriarchal attitude toward the countless servants and satellites, an acreage of roaming space in the buildings, that smacked of the feudalism back to which both the castle and the family dated. How many Englishmen or Americans who sniff at German civilization ever see anything of the inside of German homes? Very few, I should judge, from the lame talk and writing on the subject. Let us go from this mediaeval setting for modern comfort to a smaller establishment. Here a miniature Germania, with blue eyes and golden hair, presides, looking like a shaft of sunlight in front of you as she leads the way about the paths of her gloomy forest. In these, and in not a few other houses, there is little luxury, no waste, a certain Spartan air of training, but abundance of what is necessary and a cheery and frank welcome.

I sometimes think the Germans themselves lose much by their rather overdeveloped tendency to meet not so often in one another’s homes as in a neutral place: a restaurant, a garden, a Verein or circle, of which there is an interminable number. You certainly get to know a man best and at his best in his own home, and you never get to know a wife and a mother out of that environment; for a woman is even more dependent than a man upon the sympathetic atmosphere that frames her. I should be, after my experience, and I am, the last person in the world to say that the Germans are not hospitable; but there is much less visiting even among themselves, and much less of constant reception of strangers in their homes, than with us. Habit, lack of wealth, lack of trained servants, and a certain proud shyness, and in some cases indifference and a lack of vitality which welcomes the trouble of being host, account for this. No doubt, too, the old habit of economy remains even when there is no longer the same necessity for it, and saving and gayety do not go well together. In Geldsachen hurt die Gemüthlichkeit auf.

I should be sorry to spoil my picture by the overemphasis of details. The reader will not see what I have intended to paint, if he gets only an impression of caution, of economy, of sordidness and fatigue. No nation that gives birth to an untranslatable word like Gemüthlichkeit can be without that characteristic. The English words “home” and “comfort,” the French word “esprit,” and the German word Gemüthlichkeit have no exact equivalents in other languages. This in itself is a sure sign of a quality in the nation which bred the word. The difficulty lies in the fact that another language is another life.

The Germans are not cheerful as we are cheerful; they are not happy as we are happy; they are not free as we are free; they are not polite as we are polite; they are not contented as we are contented; and no one for a moment who is even an amateur observer and an amateur philologist combined would claim that the three words, love and amour and Liebe mean the same thing. No word in the English language is used so often from the pulpit as the word love, but this cannot be said of the use of amour in France or of Liebe in Germany. Nations pour themselves into the tiny moulds of words and give us statuettes of themselves. The Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, and the Teuton have filled these three words with a certain vague philosophy of themselves, a hazy composite photograph of themselves. No one writer or painter, no one incident, no one tragedy, no one day or year of history has done this. To us, love is the coldest, cleanest, as it is perhaps the most loyal of the three. L’amour sounds to us seductive, enticing, often indeed little more than lust embroidered to make a cloak for ennui. Liebe is to us friendly, soft, childlike.

The nations of the earth, close as they are together in these days, are worlds apart in thought. Each builds its life in words, and the words are as little alike as in the days of Babel; and thus it comes about that we misunderstand one another. We translate one another only into our own language, and understand one another as little as before, because we only know one another in translations, and the best of the life of each nation remains and always will remain untranslatable. No one has ever really translated the Greek lyrics or the choruses of Aeschylus, or the incomparable songs of Heine. Who could dream of putting the best of Robert Louis Stevenson into German, or Kipling’s rollicking ballads of soldier life into Spanish, or Walter Pater into Dutch, or Edgar Allan Poe into Russian! The one language common to us all, music, tells as many tales as there are men to hear. Each melody melts into the blackness or the brightness of the listener’s soul and becomes a thousand melodies instead of one. What does the moaning monotony of a Korean love-song mean to the westerner, or what does the Swan song mean to the Korean? Only God knows. We can never translate one nation into the language of another; our best is only an interpretation, and we must always meet the criticism that we have failed with the reply that we had never hoped to succeed. We are forever explaining ourselves even in our own small circles; how can we dare to suggest even, that we have made one people to speak clearly in the language of another? The best we can do is to give a kindly, a good-humored, and, at all times and above all things, a charitable interpretation. Information, facts, are merely the raw material of culture; sympathy is its subtlest essence.

There is a world of good humor, of cheerfulness, of contentment, of domestic peace and happiness in Germany. There are courtesy, politeness, even grand manners here and there. But these words mean one thing to them, another thing to us, and it is that I am striving, feebly enough to be sure, to make clear. May I beg the reader and the student to follow me with this point clearly in mind? While I am outlining with these painful details that their ways are not as our ways, I am not denouncing their ways, but merely offering matter for consideration and comparison.

A nation is most often punished for its faults by the exaggeration of its qualities, and if, as it seems to me, Germany suffers like the rest of us in this respect, it is none of my doing. It will be my failure and the reader’s failure, if we do not profit by watching these qualities in ourselves, and in others festering into faults. Woman’s position and ambitions, the home, the amusements, and the satisfactions of life, are very different in Germany from ours. I note these as facts, not as inferiorities. I note, too, that in Germany, as elsewhere, Hegel was profoundly right in his dictum, that everything earned to its extreme becomes its contrary. Too much caution may become a positive menace to safety; too much orderliness may result in individual incapacity for sell-control; just as liberty rots into license, and demos descends to a crown and sceptre and tyranny. I am merely calling attention to this great law of national development, that the exaggeration of even fine qualities is the road to the punishment of our faults, in Germany, as in every other nation under the sun.

It is only when you have had a peep into a small farmer’s house in Saxony, into the artisans’ houses in the busy Rhine and Westphalia country; spent a night in a peasant’s house and stable, for they are under the same roof, in the mountains of the South; and visited the greater establishments of the large land-holder and the less pretentious houses of the gentleman farmer, and the country houses, big and little, in all parts of Germany, that you get anything of the real flavor of Germany.

If, as Burke says, it is impossible to indict a whole nation, it is even more difficult to fit a people with a few discriminating and really enlightening adjectives. One word I dare to apply to them all, though I know well how different they are in the north and south and east and west, as diversified indeed as any nation in the world, and that is the word patient. They can stand longer, sit longer, eat longer, drink longer, work longer hours, and dream longer, and dawdle longer than any people except the Orientals. This custom may date back to far distant times. Sitting, in the Greek view, was a posture of supplication (Odyssey, XIV, 29-31). The Emperor himself sets the example. He is an indefatigable stander, if I may coin the word, and on horseback he can apparently spend the day and night without inconvenience. Their patient quarry work in archeology and in comparative philology laid the foundations for the new history-writing of Heeren and Mommsen; and their scholarship to-day is still of the digging kind. They seldom produce a Jebb, a Jowett, a Verrall, and never that type of scholar, wit and poet combined, a Lowell or an Arthur Hugh Clough. Indeed, with a suspicious self-consciousness the German professional mind inclines to be contemptuous of any learning that is not unpalatably dry. What men can read with enjoyment cannot be learning, they maintain.

I have visited half a dozen hospitals, and on one or two occasions been present at an operation by a famous surgeon. It is evident from the bearing of patients, nurses, and students that they are dealing with a less highly strung population than ours. Indeed, the surgeons who know both countries tell me that here in Germany they have more endurance of this phlegmatic kind. They suffer more like animals. Their patience reaches down to the very roots of their being.

On that delightful big fountain, in that paradise of fountains, Nuremberg, the statues of the electors and citizens picture men who were untroubled and cheerful, slow-moving, contented, patient; while the little figures on the guns are positively jolly. The only mournful figure on the whole fountain is a man with a book on his knees teaching a child. He is pallid, even in bronze, and his face is lined as he muses over the problem that has stumped the wisest of us: how to make a man by stuffing a child with books! It cannot be done, but we follow this will-o’-the wisp through the swamps of experience with the pitiable enthusiasm of despair.

Only liberty can make a man, and she is such a costly mistress that with our increasing hordes of candidates for independence we cannot afford her; so we go on fooling the people with mechanical education. But even this figure is patient!

The Germans are patient even with their food. What would become of them without the goose, the pig, the calf, and the duck, that meagre alimentary quartette? The country is white with home-raised geese, and yet they imported 8,337,708 in 1910, and 7,236,581 in 1911.

One of their most charming bits of classic art is the famous miniature statue of the Gooseman; and the real name of the great Gutenberg, who, by his invention of printing, did more than any other mortal to make it easy for the human race to acquire the anserine mental habits, and the anserine moral characteristics, was Gänsfleisch!

The goose is really the national bird of the German people. You eat tons of goose, and then you sleep beneath the feathers. The goose first nourishes you and then protects your digestion. The extraordinary make-up of the German bed must be laid to the door of the guilty goose. The pillows are so soft that your head is ever sinking, never at rest. Instead of easily applied blankets, that you can adapt to the temperature, you are given a great cloud of feathers, sewn in a balloon-like bag, which floats upon you according to your degree of restlessness, and leaves you for the floor, when in stupid sleepiness you endeavor to protect your whole person at once with its flimsy and wanton formlessness. As a rule the bed is built up at the head so that you are continually sliding down, down under the goose feathers, your nose and mouth are soon covered, and who can breathe with his toes!

They accumulate comfort very slowly. The wages are small and the satisfactions are small. On the street-cars the conductor is grateful for a tip of five pfennigs, and his daily customers are handed from the car-steps and respectfully saluted in return for this tiny douceur. When you dine or lunch at a friend’s house you are expected to leave something in the expectant palm of his servant who sees you out.

Women carry small parcels of food to the theatre, to the tea and beer gardens, and thus save the small additional expense. Many a time have I seen these thrifty housewives pocket the sugar and the zwiebacks and Brödchen left over. In the hotels, soap, paper, and common conveniences of the kind are taken, so I am told, not, I maintain, as a theft, but as an economy. We are in the habit of carrying our small change loose in a trousers pocket, but the German almost without exception carries even his ten and five pfennig pieces carefully in a purse. Outside many of the big shops is placed a row of niches where you may leave your unfinished cigar till you return. The economy thus illustrated shows a certain disregard, of a not altogether agreeable chance of interchangeability, that might even be dangerous to health. On the other hand, it is a wise precaution that marks beer-glasses and beer-jugs with a line, to show just how much beer you are entitled to. This puts the foam-stealing vendor at your mercy.

The entertainments, dinners, luncheons, teas, except among the small cosmopolitan companies who do not count as examples of German manners and customs, are very prolonged affairs. There is much standing about. At ten o’clock, having dined at half-past seven, beer, tea, coffee, sandwiches are brought in, and you begin the gastronomics over again on a smaller scale. There is no occasion when eating and drinking are not part of the programme. If you go to the play or the opera you may eat and drink there; if you go for a walk the goal is not a bath and a rub-down, but beer or chocolate and cakes.

I am not sure that there is not something in the theory that their soil has less iron in it, being so intensively cultivated, and that our food is consequently stronger than theirs; at all events, they eat more frequently and more copiously than we do. It seems to me that both the men and the women show it in their faces and figures. They are a heavy, puffy, tumbling lot after forty; and with my prepossessions on the subject I am inclined to put it down to irregular eating, to too much eating of soft and sweet food, too much drinking of fattening beverages, and much, much too little regular exercise, and to the fact that they are still infants in the matter of personal hygiene. Dressing-gowns, slippers, proper care of the teeth and hair, regular ablutions, changing of clothes, all these dozens of helps to health are patiently neglected. It is just as troublesome to take care of yourself, to groom your person, to be regular in your habits, and restrained and careful in your diet as to take proper care of a horse or a dog. It shows a rather high grade of persistent prowess in a man just to keep himself fit, to keep himself in working or playing health. Without the drilling they receive in the army in these matters, one wonders where this population would be.

The doggedness, the patience of the German is notable, but the alertness, vivacity, the energy easily on tap, these are lacking both among the men and the women, and, as it seems to me, for these easily apparent reasons. There are more rest-cures, rheumatism, heart, liver, kidney, anaemic cures in Germany, and to suit all purses, than in all Anglo-Saxondom combined, even if subject territories are included. In Saxony alone, which is not renowned for its cures, the number of visitors at Augustus Bad, Bad Elester, Hermanus Bad, Schandau, and some seven others has increased from 13,000 ten years ago to 30,000 in 1910.

Between 1900 and 1909, while the population of Germany increased 15 per cent., the days of sickness in the insurance funds increased 59 per cent. and the expenditure 95 per cent. Some alterations were made in the law between those years permitting a certain extension of the days of sickness, but an accurate percentage may be taken between the years 1905 and 1909. During those years the population increased by 7 per cent., the days of sickness by 17 per cent., and the expenditure out of the sick-funds by 32 per cent. The total cost of sickness insurance in 1900 was $42,895,000 and in 1909 $83,640,000. What will happen in Great Britain when sickness insurance comes into thorough working order is worthy of caricature. The way my Irish friends will play that game fills me with joy. It is an abominable harness to put on the Anglo-Saxon, and he has my very best wishes if he refuses to wear it tamely. It is only another piece of tired legislation that solves nothing. Even Germany would be a thousand times better off without it. This attempting to make pills and powders take the place of love one another, is merely the politician sneaking away from his problem. Of course, it is impossible to tell how many people are sick by being paid for it, probably not a small number. We all have mornings when we would turn over and stick to our pillows if we were sure of payment for doing so. The German apparently is the only person in the world who is happy, aegrescit medendo. The Germans keep going, we must all admit that, but at a slower pace, with less energy to spare, and with far less robust love of life.

If the men are patient, the women must be more so, and they are. The marriage service still reads: “He shall be your ruler, and you shall be his vassal.” The women are not only patient with all that requires patience of the men, but they are patient with the men besides, a heavy additional burden from the American point of view. Beethoven writes: “Resignation! Welch’ elendes Hülfsmittel! Und doch bleibt es mir das einzige übrige.” They take resignation for granted as we never do.

Some ten years ago only, was formed the Women’s Suffrage League in Germany. It was necessary to organize in the free city of Hamburg, because women were not allowed either to form or to join political unions in Prussia! It is only within a very few years that the girls’ higher schools have been increased and cared for in due proportion to the schools provided for the higher education of the boys. The first girls’ rowing club was organized at Cassel in 1911. Even now as I write there are protests and petitions from the male masters against women teachers in the higher positions of even these schools. In the discussions as to the proper subjects to be taught to the girls, who in 1912 began attending the newly constituted continuation schools for girls in Berlin, there is a strong party who argue that all of them should be taught only house-keeping and the duties pertaining thereto. To the great majority of German men, children and the kitchen are and ought to be the sole preoccupations of women, with occasional church attendance thrown in.

There have been enormous changes in the place women hold in the German world in the last thirty years. The Red Cross organization of the women throughout Germany is admirable and as complete and efficient as the army that it is intended to help; one can hardly say more. There are many private charities in Berlin and other cities, managed entirely by women, and doing excellent and sensible work; such as the kindergartens, the Pestalozzi-Froebelhaus for example, where four hundred children are taken care of daily and fifteen thousand ten-pfennig meals provided, besides classes for the young women students under the supervision of the Berliner Verein für Volkserziehung, with courses in the elements of law and politics and other matters likely to concern them in their activities as teachers, nurses, or charity helpers; the invalid-kitchens; the societies for looking after young girls; the work in the Temperance League; the Lette-Verein, one of the most sane and sensible institutions in the world for the training of girls and young women, where they turn out some two thousand girls a year trained in house-wifely economy; the wonderful and pitiful colony at Bielefeld, founded by one of Germany’s greatest organizers and saints, Pastor Bodelschwing, and now carried on by his equally able son, and aided largely by the sympathy and resources of women. Only another Saint Francis could have imagined, and produced, and loved into usefulness such an institution.

The summer colonies, called gartenlauben colonies, where the outlying and unused land on the outskirts of the cities is divided up into small parcels and rented for a nominal sum to the poorer working people of the city, constitute a most sensible form of philanthropy. You see them, each named by its proprietor, with a flag flying, with the light barriers dividing them, and with the small huts erected as a shelter, where flowers and fruits and vegetables are grown, often adding no small amount to income, and in every case offering the soundest kind of work and recreation. These colonies were started by a woman in France, and the idea worked its way through Belgium to Germany, and they are now supported and helped by the direct interest of the Empress. The woman who put this scheme into operation ought to have a monument! At Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin, on a plot lent by the city, there are thirteen of these colonies divided into over a thousand plots.

There are three-quarters of a million women in Germany who are independent owners and heads of establishments of different kinds, and some ten million who are bread-winners. Of the increase in the number of women students I have written in another chapter, and of their increasing participation in the political, economical, literary, and scholarly life of the nation there are many examples. Once or twice I have even heard them speak in public, and speak well, while if my memory serves me, this was practically unknown in my university days here. The problem of domestic apprenticeship is also being worked out by the women of Germany. In Munich, in Frankfurt-am-Main and elsewhere this most difficult and delicate question is being partially answered at least. Girls are apprenticed to families needing them, under the supervision of a committee of women. The girls and their families agree to certain terms, and the families agree also to teach them household duties, give them proper food, eight hours’ sleep, their Sunday out, and so on. The German women’s societies who have thus boldly tackled this problem are plucky indeed, and prove easily enough that there is a large and growing body of women in Germany, who have minds and wills of their own and great executive ability.

Let me suggest to some of our idle women that they pay a visit to the Hausfrauenbund at Frankfort and the Frauenverein-Arbeitererinnenheim at Munich, before they pass judgment upon this chapter. For I should be sorry to leave the impression that all the women of Germany are listless, oppressed, and without any feeling of civic responsibility.

All these things have been accomplished by women in Germany with far less sympathy from the men than they receive in America or in England. Cato wrote of women’s suffrage: “Pray what will they not assail, if they carry their point? Call to mind all the principles governing them by which your ancestors have held the presumption of women in check, and made them subject to their husbands. ... As soon as they have begun to be your equals they will be your superiors.” It is an older story than the unread realize, this of the rights of women. The bulk of Germany’s male population still hold to Cato’s view. It is not so much that they are antagonistic, except in the case of the teachers, where the women have become active competitors; they are in their patient way impervious. Nor can it be said that any very large number of the women themselves are eager for more rights; rather are they becoming restless because they receive so little consideration.

Their pleasures are simple and restricted, regular attendance at the theatre, at concerts, an occasional dinner at a restaurant to celebrate an anniversary, excursions with the whole family to a beer restaurant of a Sunday, and the endless meeting together for reading, sewing, and gossip - no German woman apparently but what belongs to a verein or circle, meeting, say, once a week.

The women and the men are gregarious. Vae soli is the motto of the race. They love to take their pleasures in crowds, and I am not sure that this does not dull the enthusiasm for personal rights and gratifications, and for individual supremacy and dignity. It is rare to find a German who would subscribe to Andrew Marvell’s misogynist lines:

“Two paradises are in one
To live in Paradise alone.”

It is typical of this love of being together that an independent member of the Reichstag, owing allegiance to no party, is called a Wilde, and this same word Wilde, or wild man, is applied to the student at the university who belongs to no corps or association of students. This love of being together, of touching elbows on all occasions, makes them more easily led and ruled. They hate the isolation necessary for independence and revolt.

Of the relations between men and women I long ago came to the conclusion that this is a subject best left to the scientific explorer. It is, however, open to the casual observer to comment upon the monstrous percentage of illegitimacy in Berlin, 20 per cent. or one child out of every five, born out of wedlock; 14 per cent. in Bavaria; and 10 per cent. for the whole empire. This alone tells a sad tale of the attitude of the men and women toward one another. There is a long journey ahead of the women who propose to lift their sisters on to a plane above the animals in this respect. In the matter of divorce Prussia comes fourth in the list of European nations. Norway, with the cheapest and easiest, and at the same time the wisest, divorce law in the world, has almost the lowest percentage of divorce. In 1910 there were 390 divorces out of 400,000 existing marriages, of which 14,600 had taken place that year. The percentage is thus only about 2 1/2 per year. The total per 100,000 of the population in Switzerland is 43; in France 33; in Denmark 27; and in Prussia 21. In industrial Saxony there are 32 and in Catholic Bavaria 13. The number of married people in Germany according to the last census shows an increase, the number of bachelors and widowed persons a decrease. Since 1871 the number of married persons has increased by 2 per cent. The birth rate shows a proportional decline. The problem that bothers all social economists is to the fore in Germany as elsewhere, for the people between sixty and seventy years of age number 14.65 per cent. of the population, while the young people under ten number only 11.12, and those between twenty and thirty 10.93 per cent. The birth rate therefore shows the same tendency as in France, England, and America. A recent investigation on a small scale seems to show that bureaucracy has a certain influence here. Of 300 officials questioned, only 10, or 312 per thousand, had more than two children. It is not an impossible, but certainly a laughable, outcome of state interference carried too far, should it result, in the state’s becoming an incubator for the unfit, in a country where the pensions for officers and employees of the state have risen from 50,000,000 marks in 1900 to 111,000,000 marks in 1911.

Even in higher circles in Germany there is a gushing idealism about the relations of the sexes. In their songs and sayings, as well as in their mythology, there is a laudation of love that is overstimulating. The lines of that inconsequential philosopher, that irresponsible moralist, that dreamy Puritan, Emerson,

“Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit and the Muse-
Nothing refuse”

would be warmly praised in Germany.

“I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more”

are lines more to our taste. Even love should have a deal of toughness of fibre in it to be worth much.

I must leave it to my readers to guess what I think of the German woman; indeed, it is of little consequence what any individual opinion is, if matter is given for the formation of an opinion by others. Truth cannot afford to be either gallant or merciless. There are women in Germany whom no man can know without respect, without admiration, without affection. There are the blue eyes, sunny hair, peach-bloom complexions of the north; there are the dark-eyed, black-haired, heavy-browed women of the Black Forest; there is often a Quakerish elegance of figure and apparel to be seen on the streets of the cities, and from time to time one sees a real Germania, big of frame, bold of brow, fearless of glance - patet dea!

But we can none of us be quite sure of the impartiality of our taste in such matters. Our baby fingers and our baby lips were taught to love a certain type of beauty. Our mothers wove a web of admiration and devotion from which no real man ever escapes; our maturer passions lashed themselves to an image from which we can never wholly break away; our sins and sorrows and adventures have been drenched in the tears of eyes that are like no other eyes; and consequently the man who could pretend to cold neutrality would be a reprobate.

The German looks to Germany, the Englishman to England, the Frenchman to France, as do you and I to America, for

“The face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.”

VIII “OHNE ARMEE KEIN DEUTSCHLAND”

Of every one hundred inhabitants of Germany, including men, women, and children, one is a soldier. There are, roughly, 65,000,000 inhabitants and 650,000 soldiers.

The American army is about equal in numbers to the corps of officers of Germany’s army and navy. To the American, as to almost every other foreigner, the German army means only one thing: war. We all hear one thing:

“And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war.”

I believe this is a half-truth, and dangerous accordingly. This army has been in existence for over forty years, and has done far more to keep the peace than any other one factor in Europe, except, perhaps, the British navy.

The German army protects the German people not only from external foes, but from internal diseases. It is the greatest school of hygiene in the world, on account of its sound teaching, the devotion, skill, and industry of its officers, the number of its pupils, and its widely distributed lessons and influence.

Culture taken by itself is livery business, and when combined with much beer and wine drinking, irregular eating and a disinclination for regular exercise, culture becomes a positive menace to health. Of this danger to the German, their own great man Bismarck spoke in the Abgeordnetenhaus in 1881: “Bei uns Deutschen wird mit wenigem so viel Zeit totgeschlagen wie mit Biertrinken. Wer beim Frühschoppen sitzt oder beim Abendschoppen und gar noch dazu raucht und Zeitungen liest, hält sich voll ausreichend beschäftigt und geht mit gutem Gewissen nach Haus in dem Bewusstsein, das Seinige geleistet zu haben.”

(“The Germans waste more time drinking beer than in any other way. The man who sits with his morning or his afternoon glass of beer beside him, and who, in addition, smokes and reads the newspapers, considers that he is much occupied, and goes home with a good conscience, feeling that he has fully done his duty.”)

“Jeden Feind besiegt der Deutsche:
Nur den Durst besiegt er nicht.”

Which I permit myself to translate into these two lines:

“The German conquers every foe,
Except his thirst, that lays him low.”

Even if the German army were not necessary as a policeman, it could not be spared as a physician by the German people. It is to be forever kept in mind that the German is brought up on rules; the American and the Englishman on emergencies. Emergencies provide a certain discipline of themselves, and our philosophy of civilization leaves it to the individual to get his own discipline from his own emergencies. We call it the formation of character. The German thinks this method a hap-hazard method, and burdens men with rules, and the army is Germany’s greatest school-master along those lines. We are inclined to think that it results in a machine-made citizen.

There are three classes of men who pick up the bill of fare of life and look it over: Civilization’s paralyzed ones, with no appetite, who can choose what they will without regard to the prices; the cautious, those with appetite but who are hampered in their choice by the prices; the bold, those with appetite and audacity, who rely upon their courage to satisfy the landlord. The Germans are only just beginning to look over the world’s bill of fare in this last lordly fashion, to which some of us have long been accustomed. I see no reason why they should not do so, though I see clearly enough the suspicion and jealousy it creates.

They have been swathed in “Forbidden” so long that their taste for daring was late in coming. Our colonies, small wars, punitive expeditions, and control over neighboring territories are not planned for far ahead; but the exigencies of the situations are met by the remedies and solutions of men fitted by their training in school, in sport, in social and political life for just such work, and who are the more efficient the more they do of it. We are inclined to do things, and to think them out the day after; while the German thinks them out the week before, and then sometimes hesitates to do them at all.

The German goes more slowly, perhaps more successfully, in commercial and industrial undertakings, but always with a chart in front of him, a pair of spectacles on his nose, and with no desire to take chances.

In the rough-and-tumble world, the American and the Englishman went ahead the faster; in a more orderly world, and commerce, industry, and war are all far more scientific or orderly than of yore, the German has come into his own and goes ahead very fast. He has not made friends and supporters as have the other two: first, because he is a new-comer; and also, I believe, because human nature, even when it is not adventurous itself, loves adventure, and has a liking for the man who is a law unto himself. Indeed, the Germans themselves have a sneaking fondness for such a one. At any rate there is far more imitation of American and English ways in Germany, than of German manners, customs, and methods in America or in England.

“Experiment is not sufficient,” writes Theophrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus; “experience must verify what can be accepted or not accepted; knowledge is experience.” For the moment, but it is probably not for long, we have the advantage in the knowledge bred of experience.

The German comes from the forest, loves the forest. “Kein Yolk ist so innig mit seinem Wald erwachsen wie das Deutsche, keines liebt den Wald so sehr.” (“No nation has grown up so at one with its forests as have the Germans; no other nation loves its forests as do they.”) He walks, and meditates, and sings in the forest, and nowadays goes to the forest with his skis, his snow-shoes, and his sled. Our great games are, many of them, personal conflicts, and attended by some personal risk, and demanding both discipline in preparing for them and severe discipline in the playing. Our love of the aleatory, of betting our belongings, our powers, our persons even, against life, is not commonly alive in Germany. The Germans are only just emerging into safety and confidence in themselves, and beginning cautiously to agree with us that

“He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.”

From these sombre forests came a race who still find it lonely to be alone, and they herd together still for safety as of old, and have no love of physical speculation. They are daring in thought and theory, but cautious in physical and personal matters. An office stool followed by a pension contents all too many men in Germany.

“Reden, Handeln, Tun und Wandeln
Zeigt der Menschen Wesen nicht.
Was im Herzen sie im Stillen
Fest verschliessen, stumm verhüllen,
Ist ihr richtigs Angesicht.”

An overwhelming majority of Germans believe that this is man’s real portrait; an overwhelming majority of Americans would not even understand it.

The German army is the antidote to this lack of physical discipline, this lack of strenuous physical life. The army takes the place of our West, of our games, of our sports; just as it takes the place of England’s colonies and public schools and games and sports. When looked at in this way, when its double duty is recognized, the enormous cost of it is not so material. The expense of the German army is not greater than our armies, plus what we spend for games and sport and colonial adventure.

Germany has 4,570 miles of frontier to guard, to begin with, and her total area is 208,780 square miles, or an area one fourth less than that of our State of Texas, with a population per square mile of 310.4. Of this population 1,000,000, roughly, are subjects of foreign powers. Five hundred thousand are from Austria-Hungary, 100,000 each from Finland and Russia, nearly 100,000 from Italy, some 17,000 Americans, and so on. In 1900 the population speaking German numbered 51,000,000.

This compact little country is the very heart of Europe, surrounded by Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and, across the North Sea, England. In the case of trouble in Europe, Germany is the centre. Nothing can happen that does not concern her, that must not indeed concern her vitally. She has fought at one time or another in the last hundred years with Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and England, and the various German states among themselves; or her soldiers have fought against their soldiers, whether or not the various countries named were geographically and politically then what they are now.

Russia’s population in 1910 was 160,748,000, and including the Finnish provinces, 163,778,800. Since 1897 the population of Russia has increased at the annual rate of 2,732,000. The boundaries between Russia and Germany are mere sand dunes, and by rail the Russian outposts are only a few hours from Berlin. France is only across the Rhine, and it is no secret that some months ago Great Britain had worked out a plan by which she could put 150,000 troops on the frontiers of Germany, at the service of France, in thirteen days. Germany’s ocean commerce must pass through the Straits of Dover, down the English Channel, within striking distance of Plymouth, Portsmouth, Dover, Brest, and Cherbourg. France, which has been looked upon as a somewhat negligible quantity, has taken on a new lease of life. When Napoleon died, in 1821, he left France swept clean of her fighting men, whose bones were bleaching all the way from Madrid to Moscow. France has recuperated and is almost another nation to-day from the stand-point of virility. She far surpasses Germany in literature, art, and science, and is taking her old place in the world. She led the way in motor construction, in field-artillery, in aviation, and now she is producing a champion middle-weight sparrer, and, marvel of marvels, has actually beaten Scotland at foot-ball! She has always had brains, and now her stability and virility are reviving. This has not passed unnoticed in Germany. No wonder Germany looks upon her navy as something more than a Winstonchurchillian luxury!

One may understand at once from this situation, and from her past history, that Germany has the sound good sense not to be influenced by the latest school of sentimentalists, who pretend to believe that the world is a polyglot Sunday-school, with converted millionaires as teachers therein; or, if not that, a counting-house, where all questions of honor, race, religion, love, pride, all the questions which bubble their answers in our blood, are to be settled by weighing their comparative cost in dollars. We do not realize how new is this word sentimental. John Wesley, writing of this word “sentimental” as used in Sterne’s “Sentimental Journey,” says: “Sentimental, what is that? It is not English, it is not sense, it conveys no determinate idea. Yet one fool makes many, and this nonsensical word (who would believe it) is become a fashionable one.”

Germany has been taught by bitter experiences, and harsh masters, that the ultimate power to command must rest with that authority which, if necessary, can compel people to obey. They recognize, too, the mawkish mental foolery of any plan of living together which ignores the part which physical force must necessarily play in any political or social life which is complete. They agree, too, as does every intelligent man in Christendom, that the appeal to reason is far preferable to an appeal to war. But, pray, what is to be done where there is no reason to appeal to? Are reasonable men to strip themselves of all armor, and suffer unreason to prevail?

An army or a fleet is no more an incitement to war among reasonable men, than a policeman is an incentive to burglary or homicide. An army is not a contemptuous protest against Christianity; it is a sad commentary on Christianity’s failure and inefficiency. An army and a fleet are merely a reasonable precaution which every nation must take, while awaiting the conversion of mankind from the predatory to the polite.

As yet the Germans have not been overtaken by the tepid wave of feminism, which for the moment is bathing the prosperity-softened culture of America and England. It is a harsh remedy, but both America and England would gain something of virility if they were shot over. We are all apt enough to become womanish, agitated, or acidulous, according to age and condition, when we are reaping in security the fields cleared, enriched, and planted by a hardy ancestry of pioneers. There were no self-conscious peace-makers; no worshippers of those two epicene idols: a God too much man, and a man too much God; no devotees of third-sexism, in the days of Waterloo and Gettysburg, when we had men’s tasks to occupy us.

We are playing with our dolls just now, driving our coaches over the roads, sailing our yachts in the waters, eating the fruits of the fields that have been won for us by the sweat and blood of those gone before. Germany has no leisure for that, no doll’s house as yet to play in, and she is perhaps more fortunate than she knows.

One can understand, too, that Germany has little patience with the confused thinking which maintains that military training only makes soldiers and only incites to martial ambitions; when, on the contrary, she sees every day that it makes youths better and stronger citizens, and produces that self-respect, self-control, and cosmopolitan sympathy which more than aught else lessen the chances of conflict.

I can vouch for it that there are fewer personal jealousies, bickerings, quarrels in the mess-room or below decks of a war-ship, or in a soldiers’ camp or barracks, than in many church and Sunday-school assemblies, in many club smoking-rooms, in many ladies’ sewing or reading circles. Nothing does away more surely with quarrelsomeness than the training of men to get on together comfortably, each giving way a little in the narrow lanes of life, so that each may pass without moral shoving. There are no such successful schools for the teaching of this fundamental diplomacy as the sister services, the army and the navy.

My latest visit to Germany has converted me completely to the wisdom of compulsory service. Nor am I merely an academic disciple. I have had a course in it myself, and were it possible in America I should give any boy of mine the benefit of the same training. In Germany, at any rate, no student of the situation there would deny that, barring Bismarck, the army has done more for the nation than any other one factor that can be named. Soldiers and sailors train themselves, and train others, first of all to self-control, not to war. It is a pity that “compulsory service” has come to mean merely training to fight. In Germany, at any rate, it means far more than that. Two generations of Germans have been taught to take care of themselves physically without drawing a sword.

It is rather a puzzling commentary upon the growth of democracy, that in America and in England, where most has been conceded to the majority, there is least inclination on their part to accept the necessary personal burden of keeping themselves fit, not necessarily for war, but for peace, by accepting universal and compulsory training. The only fair law would be one demanding that no one should be admitted to look on at a game of cricket, foot-ball, or base-ball who could not pass a mild examination in these games, or give proof of an equivalent training. That would be honorable democracy in the realm of sport.

There formerly existed in Bavaria a supplementary tax on estates left by persons who had not served in the active army. It was done away with at the formation of the empire. There is a proposal now to vote such an additional tax for all Germany, and a very fair tax it would be.

I am not discussing here the question of compulsory service in England. It is not difficult to see that part of England’s army must of necessity be a professional army, which can be sent here and there and everywhere, and that conscription would not answer the purpose, for compulsory conscription could hardly demand of its recruits that they should serve in India, in Canada, or in Bermuda or Egypt, for the length of time necessary to make their service of value. Conscription, too, on a scale to make an army serviceable against the trained troops of the Continent is out of the question. Therefore, so far as compulsory service for military duty only is concerned, I see no hope for it in England. But in a land of free men such as is, or used to be, England, and in America, compulsory service ought to be undertaken with pride and with pleasure, as a moral, not as a military, duty for the salvation of the country from internal foes, and as a nucleus around which could rally the nation as a whole in case of attack from external foes. Patriotism among us has come to a pretty pass indeed when the nation is divided into two classes: those growling against the taxation of their surplus; and those with their tongues hanging out in anticipation of, and their hands clutching for, unearned doles. And now, the more shame to us, must be added a third class who use public office for private profit. What if we all turned to and gave something without being forced to do so? Where would the “Yellow peril” and the “German menace” be then? We should have much less exciting and inciting talk and writing if our nerves and digestions were in better order. Nothing calms the nerves, increases confidence, and lessens the chance of promiscuous quarrelling better than hard work.

Even if what the German army has accomplished along these lines were not true, there can be no freedom of political speculation or experiment, no time to make mistakes and to retrieve the situation, when one is surrounded on all sides by overt or potential enemies. Germany must have a powerful army and fleet, must have a strong and autocratic government, or she is lost. “Ohne Armee kein Deutschland.” She can permit no silly, no stupid, no excited majority to imperil her safety as a nation. If Germany were governed as is France, where they have had nine new governments since the beginning of the twentieth century, and forty-four since the republic replaced the empire forty-one years ago — not counting six dismissals of the cabinet when the prime minister remained — or fifty changes of government in less than that number of years, Germany would have lost her place on the map. France remains only because, so far as defence is concerned, France is France plus the British fleet.

Political geography is the sufficient reason for Germany’s army and navy. Let us be fair in these judgments and admit at once, that if Japan were where Mexico is, and Russia where Canada is, and Germany separated from us by a few hours’ steaming, certain peace-mongers would have been hanged long ago, and our cooing doves of peace would have had molten tar mixed with their feathers. An Italian proverb runs, “It is easy to scoff at a bull from a window,” and we indulge in not a little of such babyish effrontery from our safe place in the world. Germany, on the other hand, looks out upon the world from no such safe window-seat; she is down in the ring, and must be prepared at all hazards to take care of herself. That is a reason, too, why Germany offers little resistance to the ruling of an autocratic militarism. The sailors and the stokers would rather obey captain and officers, however they may have been chosen for them, than to be sunk at sea; and nowadays Germany is ever on the high seas, battling hard to protect and to increase her commerce abroad, and to protect her huge industrial population at home. Germany can take no chances for the moment, for only “Wer sich regiert, der ist mit Zufall fertig.”

One wishes often that one’s lips were not sealed, one’s pen not stayed by the imperious demands of honor, to abstain from all mention of discoveries or conversations made under the roof of hospitality, for nothing could well be more enlightening than a description of a chat between the great war-lord of Germany and a leading pacifist: the one completely equipped with knowledge of the history, temper, and temperament of his people; the other obsessed by a fantastic exaggeration of the power and influence of money, even in the world of culture and international politics, and preaching his panacea in the land, of all others, where even now mere money has the least influence, all honor to that land!

Spinoza, the greatest of modern Jews, and the father of modern philosophy, writes: “It is not enough to point out what ought to be; we must also point out what can be, so that every one may receive his due without depriving others of what is due to them.” And in another place: “Things should not be the subject of ridicule or complaint, but should be understood.” Those who know little of the history of the development of Germany, and particularly of Prussia, cannot possibly understand another reason for the political apathy of the Germans and their pleased support of their army. It is this: they have been trained in everything except self-government, in everything except politics. Perhaps their governors know them better than we do. Their progress has come from direction from above, not from assertion from below. The art or arts of self-government, throughout their development as a nation, have been forcibly omitted from their curriculum. Every step in our national progress, on the contrary, has been taken by the people, shoulder to shoulder, breaking their way up and out into light and freedom. There is little or no trace of any such movement of the people in Germany, and there is little taste for it, and no experience to make such effort successful. We, who have profited by the teaching of this political experience, do not realize in the least how handicapped are the people who have not had it.

One hundred years ago half the inhabitants of Prussia were practically in the toils of serfdom. It was only by an edict of 1807, to take effect in 1810, that personal serfdom with its consequences, especially the oppressive obligation of menial service, was abolished in the Prussian monarchy. Caste extended actually to land. All land had a certain status, from which the owners and their retainers took their political position and rights. The edict of 1807 was in reality a land reform bill, and gave for the first time free trade in land in Prussia. It was vom Stein, a Bismarck born too soon, who induced Frederick William II, King of Prussia, and grandson of the Great Elector, to abolish serfdom, to open the civil service to all classes, and to concede certain municipal rights to the towns. But vom Stein was dismissed from the service of his weak-kneed sovereign on the ground that he was an enemy of France, and was obliged to take refuge in Russia. Like other martyrs, his efforts watered the political earth for a fruitful harvest.

It is well to know where we are in the world’s culture and striving when we speak of other nations. What were we doing, what was the rest of the world doing, in those days when the Hanoverian peasant’s son, Scharnhorst, and Clausewitz were about to lay the foundations of this German army, now the most perfect machine of its kind in the world? These were the days prepared for by Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Rousseau; by Pitt and Louis XV, and George III; the days of near memories of Wolfe, Montcalm, and Clive; days when Hogarth was caricaturing London; days when the petticoats of the Pompadour swept both India and Canada into the possession of England. These names and the atmosphere they produce, show by comparison how rough a fellow was this Prussia of only a hundred years ago. He had not come into the circle of the polite or of the political world. He was tumbling about, un-licked, untaught, inexperienced, already forgetful of the training of the greatest school-master of the previous century, Frederick the Great, who had made a man of him.

We were already politicians to a man in those days, and the Englishman Pitt was map-maker, by special warrant, to all Europe.

When the Prussians were serfs politically, our House of Representatives, in 1796, debated whether to insert in their reply to the President’s speech the remark that “this nation is the freest and most enlightened in the world.” It is true that this was at the time when Europe was producing Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Mozart, Haydn, Herschel, and about ready to introduce Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Heine, Balzac, Beethoven, and Cuvier; when Turner was painting, Watt building the steam-engine, Napoleon in command of the French armies, and Nelson of the British fleet; but this bombastic babble of ours harmed nobody then, and only serves to show what a number of intellectual serfs must have been members of that particular House of Representatives.

We have not overcome this habit of slapdash comparative criticism, for only the other day a distinguished American inventor left Berlin with these words as his final message: “We have nothing to learn from Germany.” But in the nineteenth century, where does the American of sober intelligence, if Lincoln be omitted, find a match for Bismarck as a statesman, Heine as a wit and song-writer, Wagner, Brahms, and Beethoven as musicians, Goethe as a man of letters and poet, the still living influence of Lessing and Winckelmann as critics, Fichte as a scholarly patriot, Hegel and Kant as philosophers, von Humboldt, Liebig, Helmholtz, Bunsen, and Haeckel as scientists, Moltke and Roon as soldiers, Ranke and Mommsen as historians, Auerbach, Spielhagen, Sudermann, Freytag, “Fritz” Reuter, and Hauptmann as novelists and dramatists, Krupp and Borsig as manufacturers, and the Rothschilds as bankers? Lincoln, Lee, Sherman, Jackson, and Grant may equal these men in their own departments, but aside from them our only superiority, and a very questionable superiority it is, lies in our trust-and-tariff-incubated millionaires. Let us try to see straight, if only that we may learn and profit by the superiority of others.

These explanations that I have given, historical, political, external, and internal, offer reasons worth pondering both why we do not understand Germany’s huge armament and why Germany looks upon it as a necessity.

However much the expenditure on fleet and army may be disguised, the burden is colossal. In the year 1878 the net expenditure, ordinary and extraordinary, for purposes of defence, for army and navy and all other military purposes whatsoever including pensions, amounted to 452,000,000 marks; in 1888, to 660,000,000 marks; in 1898, to 882,000,000 marks; and in 1908, to 1,481,000,000 marks.

The total expenses, net, of the empire in 1908 were 1,735,000,000 marks, showing that only 254,000,000 marks out of the grand total of 1,735,000,000 were spent for other than military purposes. As the army and navy now stand at a peace strength of some 700,000 men, and as these men are all in the prime of their working power, the loss in wages and in productive work may be put very conservatively at 600,000,000 marks, which brings the cost of the support of the military establishment of Germany up to 2,000,000,000 marks and more per annum, or $500,000,000.

Many Americans were dismayed when our total national expenditure reached the $1,000,000,000 point, and the Congress voting this expenditure was nicknamed the “Billion-dollar Congress.” What would we say of an expenditure of half a billion dollars for defence alone! With what admiration, too, must we regard 65,000,000 people, living in an area one quarter smaller than Texas, on a by-no-means rich or fertile soil, who can bear cheerfully the burden, each year, of half our total national expenditure, merely on the military and naval barricade which enables them to toil in peace and security.

Humanity has, indeed, made but a poor zigzag progress from the gorilla; Christianity, just now engaged in blessing the rival banners of warriors setting out for one another’s throats, has failed ignominiously to bring the wolf in man to baptism, when the central state of Christian Europe must arm to the teeth one in every eighteen of her adult male inhabitants, and spend half a billion dollars a year, to protect herself from assault and plunder.

If the hairy, skin-clad cave-dwellers, or the man who left us the Neanderthal skull, could have a look at us now, here in Berlin, in many ways the centre of the most enlightened people in the world, they would undoubtedly go mad trying to understand what we mean by the word “progress.” And yet we smile indulgently at the poor farmers in Afghanistan who till their fields with a rifle slung across their shoulders. What is Germany doing but that! And an enormously heavy rifle it is, costing just seven times as much as all other national expenditures together; in short, it costs seven marks of soldier to protect every one mark of plough. I admit frankly the horror and the absurdity of all this; but as an argument for disarmament, “it does not lie,” as the lawyers phrase it. It is a criticism, and an unanswerable one, of our failure as human beings to enthrone reason and to tame our passions; but it is a veritable call to arms to protect ourselves, not a reason for not doing so. Let the international gluttons overeat themselves till they are seriously ill; but it would be madness to starve ourselves in the meantime, and yet that is the grotesque logic of certain of our preachers of disarmament.

At the moment of writing there are 1,000,000 men at each other’s throats in the Balkans, there is a revolution in Mexico, and incipient anarchy in Central America; as an emollient to this, Great Britain is about to present a bust of the late King Edward to the Peace Palace at the Hague! I can imagine myself saying “Pretty pussy, nice pussy,” to the wild-cats I have shot in Nebraska and Dakota, but I should not be here if I had; and however small my value to the world I live in, I estimate it as worth at least a ton of wild-cats.

I am bound, however, in fairness to call the attention of the unwary dabbler in statistics to a point of grave importance in dealing with German finances. The German Empire, so far as expenditure and income are concerned, is merely an office, a clearing-house so to speak, for the states which together make up the empire. The expenses of the empire, for example, in 1910 were $757,900,000 and of the army and navy, including extraordinary expenditures, $314,919,325; this does not include pensions, clerical expenses, interest, sinking-fund, and loss of productive labor, as did the figures on a preceding page. To the ignorant or to the malicious, who quote these figures to bolster up a socialist or pacifist preachment, this looks as though Germany had spent one half of her grand total on the army and navy. But this is quite wrong. In addition to the expenditures of this imperial clearing-house called the German Empire, there was spent by the states $1,467,325,000: the so-called clearinghouse bearing the whole burden of expenses for army and navy, the separate states nothing except the per capita tax, called the matriculation tax, of some 80 pfennigs. To make this matter still more clear, as it is a constant source of error not only to the foreigner but to the Germans themselves, the income of the empire for 1910 was $757,900,000, the income of all the states $1,463,150,000, or of the empire and the states combined $2,221,050,000. In the same way the debt of the empire in 1910 stood at $1,224,150,000, and the debt of the states of the empire at $3,856,325,000, or a grand total outstanding indebtedness of all Germany of $5,080,475,000.

Of late years the imperial expenditure of Great Britain, for example, has amounted to some $935,000,000 a year; but various local bodies spend also some $900,000,000 a year. Some of this is cross-spending, but the grand total amounts to some $1,500,000,000 a year.

Before writing or speaking of Germany it is well to know at least what Germany is. To pick up a hand-book and to quote therefrom the figures relating to the German Empire, as though these covered Germany, as is often done, is as accurate and helpful to the inquirer, as though one should take the figures of the New York clearing-house as accurate descriptions of the total and detailed business of all the New York banks and trust companies. A clearing-house is merely a piece of machinery for the adjustment of differences between a host of debtors and creditors. The comparative cost of the German army and navy can only be figured properly against the income and expenditure of the total wealth of all Germany. And all Germany is something more than the German Empire, which in certain respects is only a book-keeper, an adjuster of differences.

“Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?
Ist’s Preussenland? Ist’s Schwabenland?
Ist’s wo am Rhein die Rebe blüht?
Ist’s wo am Belt die Möve zieht?
O nein! O nein! O nein!
Sein Vaterland muss grösser sein.

“Des ganze Deutscbland soil es sein!
O Gott vom Himmel, sieh’ darein,
Und gib uns rechten deutschen Muth;
Dass wir es lieben treu und gut!
Des soil es sein! des soil es sein!
Des ganze Deutschland soll es sein!”

The official title of the sovereign is not Emperor of Germany, or Emperor of the Germans, but German Emperor. Thus the territorial rights of other heads of states are safeguarded. Even the popularity of the first Emperor, who wished to be named Emperor of Germany and who disputed with Bismarck for hours over the question, could not bring this about, and he was proclaimed at Versailles merely German Emperor.

However heavy the burden of armament may be, we must be careful to put such expenditure in its proper perspective and in its proper relations, not only to the German Empire, which for official, clerical, and statistical matters is quite a different entity, but to “das ganze Deutschland.” The German Empire is the clearinghouse, the adjutant, the executive officer, the official clerk, the representative in many social, financial, military, and diplomatic capacities of Germany; but it is not, and never for a moment should be confused with, what all Germans love, and what it has cost them blood and tears and great sacrifices to bring into the circle of the nations, the German Fatherland!

In 1910 the total funded debt of the empire amounted to 4,896,600,000 marks, and the debt in 1912 had risen to 5,396,887,801 marks. In the six years ending March, 1911, Germany’s debt increased by $415,000,000.

In 1910 the funded debt of Germany (empire and states) was $4,896,600,000; of France $6,905,000,000; of England $3,894,500,000, and of Russia $4,880,750,000. It is a curious psychical and social phenomenon that, though we are as suspicious as criminals of one another’s good faith in keeping the peace, we are veritable angels of innocence in trusting one another financially, for back of these huge debts we keep in ready money, that is, gold, to pay them: Germany at the present writing $275,000,000 in the Reichsbank; France $640,000,000 in the Bank of France; England a paltry $175,000,000 in the Bank of England; and Russia $625,000,000 in the Bank of Russia. We all live upon credit, an elastic moral tie which seems to be illimitably stretchable, and both a nation’s and an individual’s wealth is measured not by what he has, but by what he is, that is to say, by his character or credit. It is startling to find how we distrust one another along certain lines and how we trust one another along others. The total amount of gold in these four countries would just about pay the interest at four per cent. for two years on their total indebtedness!

From what we have seen of the proportion of expenditure that goes to military purposes, it cannot be denied that Germany is increasing her liabilities at an extraordinary rate, and largely for purposes of protection. In the last two years the interest on her increased debt alone, at four per cent., amounts to $5,000,000; while the interest at four per cent. upon military expenditures of all kinds amounts to the tidy sum of $20,000,000 per annum. The German, however, faces these facts and figures, not as a matter of choice, not as a matter of insurance wholly, but as a hard necessity. It is what the delayed conversion of the world is costing him, not to speak of what it costs the rest of us. He is surrounded by enemies; he is not by nature a fighting man; his whole industrial and commercial progress and his amassed wealth have come from training, training, training; and he sees no alternative, and I am bound to say that I see none either, but a nation trained also to defence, cost what it may.

The last German estimates (1912) balance with a revenue and expenditure of $671,222,605. The naval expenditure is put at $114,306,575; the army expenditure is put at $192,627,080. Both the army and navy are being largely increased. In the year 1916 the strength of the navy is expected to be about 79,000 men, and of the army and navy combined 767,000. In the last ten years two nations have almost doubled their naval personnel: Germany has increased hers from 31,157 to 60,805, and Austria-Hungary from 9,069 to 17,277. In Great Britain the increase has been about one seventh, and this one seventh is about equal to the present strength of Austria.

The gross naval expenditure, estimated, of the United States for 1912 amounts to $132,848,030, and the number of men 63,468. The gross naval expenditure of Great Britain, estimated, for the same year is put at $224,410,235, and the number of men 134,000. The gross naval expenditure of Germany is put at $114,306,575, which includes $489,235 for air-ships and experiments therewith, the number of men 66,783. France proposes to spend, plus an addition due to operations in Morocco, $90,000,000, number of men 58,404; and Japan $44,309,145, number of men 49,389. Two new corps have been voted for the German army, to be numbered 24 and 25; one is for the Russian frontier, with head-quarters at Allenstein, and the other for the French frontier, with head-quarters at Sarrebourg or Mulhouse. A German army corps on a war footing comprises about 52,000 men, with 150 guns and 16,000 horses. The reader should notice, as a reminder of the still latent jealousies of the different states of the German Empire, that the three army corps raised in Bavaria are not numbered consecutively, twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three, but one, two, and three!

To the American the pay of the German troops, officers and men, is ludicrously small. It is evident that men do not undertake to fit themselves to be officers, and to struggle through frequent and severe examinations to remain officers, for the pay they receive. A lieutenant receives for the first three years $300 a year, from the fourth to the sixth year $425, from the seventh to the ninth year $495, from the tenth to the twelfth year $550, and after the twelfth year $600 a year. A captain receives from the first to the fourth year $850, from the fifth to the eighth year $1,150, and the ninth year and after $1,275 a year. Of one hundred officers who join, only an average of eight ever attain to the command of a regiment. In Bavaria and Würtemberg, promotion is quicker by from one to three years than in Prussia. In Prussia promotion to Oberleutnant averages 10 years, to captain or Rittmeister 15 years, to major 25 years, to colonel 33 years, and to general 37 years. It would not be altogether inhuman if these gentlemen occasionally drank a toast to war and pestilence!

A commanding general, or general inspector of cavalry or field artillery, receives $3,495; a division commander, or inspector of cavalry, field and heavy artillery, $3,388; a brigade commander, $2,565; commander of a regiment, or officer of the general staff of the same rank, $2,193. There are various additions to these sums for travelling, keep of horses, house-rent, and the like. All soldiers and officers travel at reduced rates on the railways, and are allowed a certain amount of luggage free. It is a commentary upon the three nations, that in Germany the soldier receives a reduced rate when travelling, in England the golfer pays a reduced rate, and in America, until lately, the politicians were given free passes. One could almost produce the three countries from that limited knowledge.

At the cadet school at Gross Lichterfelde there are a thousand pupils. They are taught riding, swimming, dancing, French, English, mathematics, and of course receive technical military instruction. The fee is $200, but for the sons of officers, and according to their means, the fees are reduced to $112, $75, and even as low as $22, and in some deserving cases no fee at all is charged.

There is no professional army in Germany, as in England and in America. Every German who is physically fit must serve practically from the age of seventeen to forty-five. Those in the infantry serve two years; those in the cavalry and horse artillery and mounted rifles, three years. About forty-eight per cent. who are examined are rejected as unfit, not necessarily because they are incapable of service, but because the expense of training all is too great. These men receive 40 pfennigs a day, 27 pfennigs being deducted for their food.

There are some 40,000 men who join the army voluntarily for a term of two or three years, and who re-enlist and become non-commissioned officers, and if they remain twelve years they are entitled to $200 on leaving the service, and head the lists of candidates for the railway, postal, police, street-cleaning, and other civil services. Some 10,000 men who have passed a certain examination serve only one year and are entitled to certain privileges.

Each man in the infantry serves 2 years in the active army, 5 years in the active reserve, 5 years in the first division of the Landwehr, 6 years in the second division of the Landwehr, and 6 years in the Landsturm. Colonel Gädke calculates that Germany has now under arms not less than 714,000 soldiers and sailors, and that 4,800,000 can be put into the field if wanted out of the 6,000,000 who have done service with the colors. Out of this enormous total, practically none, according to the last census, is illiterate. Our American census of 1910 gives the number of men of militia age in New England as 1,458,900, and in the whole country 20,473,684.

Promotion from the ranks, as we understand it, is practically unknown. The German officers pass through the ranks, it is true, as part of their education at the beginning of their military career, but those who do so join in the beginning as candidates for commissions, and have been provisionally accepted by the commander and officers of the regiment they propose to join, as must every candidate for a commission in the German army. If the candidate is not wanted, it is hinted to him that this is the case, and he must go elsewhere, as this decision is final. Every German regiment’s officers’ mess is thus in some sort a club.

Officers are supplied from the cadet corps, and from those who join the ranks as candidates for commissions. All cadets must pass through a war-school before obtaining a commission. Of these there are 10 in Prussia, Würtemberg, and Saxony, and 1 at Munich in Bavaria. They there receive their commissions as second lieutenants. There are 9 Prussian schools, the Hauptkadettenanstalt at Gross Lichterfelde, and 8 Kadetten-Häuser; and 1 at Dresden and 1 at Munich. Some of these I have visited, and been made at home with the greatest courtesy and hospitality. These German cadet schools are to a great extent charitable institutions for the sons of officers and civilian officials. The charges range, as I have indicated above, from $200 a year to nothing at all.

There are in addition schools of musketry, a school for instruction in machine-gun practice, instruction in infantry battalion practice, a school of military gymnastics, of military equitation, officers’ riding-schools, a military technical academy at Charlottenburg, where officers may study the technical engineering and communication services, an artillery and engineer school at Munich, a field-artillery school of gunnery, a foot-artillery school of gunnery, a cavalry telegraph school, and the staff colleges.

Of technical military matters I know nothing. I have some experience in handling horses in harness and under saddle, and on subjects with which I am familiar I venture to pass judgments in the class-room. I have visited many of these class-rooms, and listened to the teaching and lectures in French, English, strategy, and political geography, and kindred topics, and if the rest of the instruction is on a par with what I heard there is no criticism to be made. I may not say where, but one of the instructors in French was a real pleasure to listen to.

The courses and examinations which lead up, in the Kriegesakademie, or staff college, to the grade of fitness for the general staff, or the technical division of the general staff, or administrative staff work, or employment as instructors, are of the very stiffest. An officer who succeeds in reaching such proficiency, that he is sent up to the general staff must be a very blue ribbon of a scholar in his own field.

The quarters, the food, the training, are Spartan indeed at the cadet schools, but how valuable that is, is shown in the faces, manners, physique, and general bearing of the picked youths one sees at the Kriegesakademie in Berlin. No one after seeing these fellows would deny for a moment the value of a sound, hard discipline. The same may be seen at our own West Point, where the transformation of many a country bumpkin, into an officer and a gentleman, in four years is almost unbelievable.

The truth is that most of us suffer from lack of discipline, and the intelligent men of every nation will one day insist that, if the state is to meddle in insurance and other matters, it must logically, and for its own salvation, demand compulsory service; not necessarily for war, but for social and economic peace within its own boundaries. It is a political absurdity that you may tax individuals to provide against accident and sickness to themselves, but that you may not tax individuals by compulsory service to provide against accident and sickness to the state. There can be nothing but ultimate confusion where the state pays a man if he is ill, pays him if he is hurt, pays him when he is old, and yet does not force him to keep well, and thus avoid accident and a pauper’s old age by obliging him to submit to two or three years’ sound physical training. Whether the training is done with a gun or without it matters little. Most men of our breed like to know how to kill things, so that a gun would probably be an inducement.

The more one knows of the severe demands upon the officers of the German army and of their small pay, the more one realizes that if they are not angels there must be some further explanation of their willingness to undertake the profession. First of all, the Emperor is a soldier and wears at all times the soldier’s uniform. Further, he gives from his private purse a small allowance monthly to the poorer officers of the guard regiments. A German officer receives consideration on all sides, whether it be in a shop, a railway-carriage, a drawing-room, or at court.

To a certain extent his uniform is a dowry; he expects and often gets a good marriage portion in return for his shoulder-straps and brass buttons; and in every case it gives him a recognized social position, in a country where the social lines are drawn far more strictly than in any other country outside of Austria and India. This constant wearing of the sword is no new thing. Tacitus, who would have been an uncompromising advocate of compulsory service had he lived in our time, writes: “A German transacts no business, public or private, without being completely armed. The right of carrying arms is assumed by no person whatever till the state has declared him duly qualified.” It is the recognized occupation of the nobility, and, in very many families, a tradition. In the army of Saxony, on January 1, 1911, out of every hundred officers of the war ministry, of the general commands, and of the higher staff, 44.33 per cent. were noblemen; of the officers of the infantry, 26.19 were noblemen; of the cavalry, 60.92 were noblemen; and of the officers of the entire army, all arms, 24.98 were noblemen.

It is worth chronicling in this connection, for the benefit of those who wish a real insight into German social life, that few people discriminate between the old nobility, or men who take their titles from the possession of land and their descendants, and the new and morbidly disliked nobility, who have bought or gained their patents of nobility, as is done often enough in England, by profuse contributions to charity or to semi-political and cultural undertakings favored by the court, or by direct contributions to party funds, by valuable services rendered, or by mere length of service. This new nobility, anxious about their status, satisfied to have arrived, jealous of rivals, are the dead weight which ties Germany fast to bureaucratic government and to a policy of no change. They represent, even in educated Germany, a complacent mediocrity; indignant at rebuke, indifferent to progress, heedless of experience, impatient of criticism, haters of haste, and jealous of superiority. Even Bismarck, the creator of this bureaucracy, lamented the insolence and bad manners of the state servants.

The essential and ever-present quality of the real aristocrat and of a real aristocracy is, of course, courage. It may dislike change, but it is not afraid of it. The real gentleman, of course, does not care whether he is a gentleman or not. The characteristic of an artificial, tailor-made aristocracy is timidity and a shrinking from change. This new nobility, created because it is carefully charitable, or serviceable, or long in office, is not only in possession of the civil service, but occupies high posts in the army and navy. While not minimizing its value, it is everywhere maintained in Germany that it acts as a bulwark against progress. They are a nobility of office-holders, and they partake of the qualities and characteristics of the office-holder everywhere. They sometimes forget the country in the office; while the older nobility, which made Germany, despises the office except as an instrument or weapon to be used for the welfare of the country. The political pessimism in Germany to-day is caused by, and comes from, this army of the new nobility.

Americans and English both write of Germany, and speak of it, as being in the grip of a small group of aristocrats. Not at all; it is in the shaky and self-conscious control of men whose patents of nobility were given them with their office, a titled bureaucracy, in short. Let us prove this statement by running through the list of the chief officers of the state. Of the officials of the German Empire: the chancellor’s grandfather, Bethmann-Hollweg, was a professor, and afterward minister of education; the secretary of state’s father was plain Herr Kiderlein-Wächter; the under-secretary of state is Herr Zimmermann; the secretary of the interior is Herr Delbrück; of finance, Herr Wermuth; of justice, Herr Lisco; of the navy, von Tirpitz, who was recently ennobled; the postmaster is Herr Kraetke. Not one of these officials of the empire is of the old nobility!

Of the 11 ministers of the kingdom of Prussia, the minister for agriculture, von Schorlemer; for war, von Heeringen; for education, von Trott zu Solz; and for the interior, von Dallwitz, are of the old nobility; but the other 7 ministers are not. Of the 12 Oberpräsidenten, men who rule the provinces, 6 are noblemen; of the 37 Regierungspräsidenten, 14 are of the nobility, 23 are not. This should dispose finally of the frequently heard assertion that Germany and Prussia are ruled by a small group of the landed nobility and that there is no way open to the talents. It is fair to say that a very small and intimate court group do have a certain influence in naming the candidates for these posts, but they are too wily to keep these positions for themselves.

I suppose we all like, in a childish way, to wear placards of our prowess in the form of orders and decorations, but the evening attire of this bureaucratic nobility often looks as though there had been a ceramic eruption, a sort of measles of decorations. Men’s breasts are covered with medals, stars, porcelain plaques, and their necks are hung with ribbons with a dangling medallion, all distributed from the patriarchal imperial Christmas-tree for every conceivable service from cleaning the streets to preaching properly on the imperial yacht. Men collect them as they would stamps or butterflies, and some of them must be very expert.

The officers and the officials who are recognized as giving their services as a family tradition, as a patriotic service, or out of sheer love of the profession of arms, are rather liked than disliked, and give a tone and set a standard for all the rest. Both these officers and their men are respected. Of no German soldier could it be written:

“I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but ’adn’t none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-’alls,
But when it comes to fightin’, Lord! they’ll shove me in the stalls.”

On the contrary, every effort is made to keep the army pleased with itself and proud of itself. The chancellor of the empire is always given military rank; officers are not allowed to marry unless they have, or acquire by marriage, a suitable income; the dignity of the officer is upheld and his pride catered to; officers are made to feel that they are the darlings of the Fatherland by everybody from the Emperor down.

This artificial stimulant goes far to keep them contented, and the fact that the scale of comfortable living in Germany was twenty years ago far below, and is even now not equal to, that of the equivalent classes with us makes the task easier. They have not been taught to want the things we want, and are still satisfied with less. And back of and behind it all is the feeling among the leaders, that the army furnishes no small amount of the patriotic cement necessary to hold Germany together. Ulysses lashed himself to the mast as he passed the sirens of luxury and leisure, and for the German Ulysses the army supplies the cords. It is not the foreign student of German life alone who notices that the Germans, even now, seem to be tribal rather than national. The best friends of Germany in Germany also recognize this weakness, comment upon it, and favor every possible expedient to overcome it.

I admit frankly my admiration for this Spartan three quarters of a million of soldiers and sailors, and their officers. It offers a splendid example of patriotism, of disregard for the weakening comforts, luxuries, and fussy pleasures that absorb too much of our vitality; and of disdain for the material successes, which in their selfish rivalry, breed the very industrial distresses which are now our problems. At least here is a large professional body whose aims, whose way of living, and whose earnings prove that there can be a social hierarchy not dependent upon money. It is one of the finest lessons Germany has to teach, and long may she teach it.

That is distinctly the side of the army that I know and approve without reserve. Of its value as a fighting force it would be ridiculous, in my case, to write. I have read and heard scores of criticisms and comments from many sources, and they range from those who claim that the German army is unbeatable, even if attacked from all sides, to those who maintain that it is already stale and mechanical.

The war of 1866, when Prussia represented Germany, lasted thirty-five days; the war against Denmark lasted six months and twelve days; the war against France lasted six months and nine days. Thirty-six German cavalry regiments did not lose a man during the whole campaign of 1870-1871; and the Sixth Army Corps was hardly under fire. There has been no long, practical, and therefore decisive test of the army. Of the transport and commissary services during the French war, when Germany toward the end of it had 630,000 men in the field, certainly we, with the deplorable mismanagement and scandal of our Spanish war, and the British with the investigations after the Egyptian campaign fresh in memory, have nothing to say, except that it was wholly admirable and beyond the breath of suspicion of greed, thievery, or political chicanery. There was no rotten leather, and no poisoned beef.

Officers, too, in the French war, were called upon to do their duty and to obey, and no individual brilliancy which interfered with the general plan was condoned or pardoned, no matter how highly placed the relatives or how influential the connections of the offender. A distinguished general, after a successful and heroic victory, who had been tempted into a bloody battle against orders, was called before his superiors, told that the first lesson the soldier had to learn was obedience, and sent home! A brother of the chief of staff went into the war a captain and came back a captain!

I am wondering what our underpaid, unnoticed regulars in the army and navy would have to say, were they free to speak, of the conduct of our last martial escapade with Spain, by our press and by our politicians. There would be no stories of the German kind, I am sure, and no single record of an influential civilian who did not get all the glory that he deserved. My impulsive countrymen are always manufacturing heroes and saviors, but fortunately the crosses upon which they crucify them are erected almost as fast as the crowns are nicely fitted and comfortable, so that there is little danger of permanent tyranny. What Richelieu said of the French applies to some extent to ourselves: “Le propre du caractère français c’est que, ne se tenant pas fermement au bien, il ne s’attache non plus longtemps au mal.”

During and after the Franco-German war there was no cheap heroism, no feminine excitability producing litters of heroes; no slobbering, osculatory advertising; no press undertaking the duties of a general staff, which in our Spanish war almost completely clouded the real heroism and patriotism that were in evidence. There were no newspaper-made heroes, hastening back to exchange cheap military glory for votes and delicious notoriety. For all of which, gentlemen, let us thank God, and give praise where it is due.

The army, too, is an interesting commentary upon the changes that are so rapidly taking place in Germany, from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation. Of every 100 recruits that presented themselves there were passed as fit, in 1902, for the First Army Corps, of those from the country 72.76; of those from the towns 63.88; in 1910 these figures had fallen to 67.24 and 53.66. In the Second Army Corps the recruits passed as fit, from the towns, had fallen from 60.74 in 1902 to 50.42 in 1910. In the Fifth Army Corps, of recruits from the towns the percentage of those passed fell from 60.07 to 46.13. In the Sixth Army Corps the percentage fell from 50.14 to 43.83. In the Sixteenth Army Corps from 67.50 to 58.80. In the Eighteenth Army Corps the recruits from the towns passed as fit had fallen from 60.46 in 1902 to 46.58 in 1910. The average for the whole empire, of those from the towns passed as fit, had fallen from 53.52 in 1902 to 47.87 in 1910. The First Army Corps has its head-quarters at Königsberg, and recruits from that neighborhood; the Second Army Corps has its head-quarters at Stettin, and recruits from Pomerania; the Fifth Army Corps has its headquarters at Posen, and recruits from Posen and Lower Silesia; the Sixth Army Corps has its head-quarters at Breslau, and recruits from Silesia; the Sixteenth Army Corps has its headquarters at Metz, and recruits from Lorraine; the Eighteenth Army Corps has its head-quarters at Frankfurt-am-Main, and recruits from that neighborhood. These figures are enough to make my point, without giving the statistics for all the twenty-three corps, which is, that in spite of the precautions taken, the German recruit, especially from the towns, in whatever part of the country, is losing vigor and stamina.

Even this hard-and-fast arrangement of a bureaucratic government with a military backbone does not solve all the problems. When one sees, however, the German school-boy, and the German recruit during the first weeks of his training, in the barracks and out, and I have watched thousands of them, and then looks over this same material after two or three years of training, it is hard to believe that they are the same, and that even these hard-working officers have been able to bring about such a change.

Of the charges of brutality and severity I only know what the statistics tell me, that in an army of over 600,000 men there were some 500 cases brought to the notice of the superior officers last year. In 1911 there were 12,919 convictions for crimes and misdemeanors and 578 desertions. Of the 32,711 common soldiers in the Saxon army in 1911, 30 committed suicide; in 1909, 29; in 1905, 24; in 1901, 36; that is to say, roughly, one man per thousand. Of the why and wherefore I cannot say, but Saxony is a peculiarly overpopulated section of Germany, and the population is overdriven; and the German everywhere is a dreamy creature compared with us, of less toughness of fibre either morally or physically, and no doubt, here and there, under-exercising and over-thinking make the world seem to be a mad place and impossible to live in. Indeed, it is no place to live in for the best of us if we take it, or ourselves, too seriously. The German army is an educated army, as is no other army in the world, and there are the diseases peculiar to education to combat. A mediocre ability to think, and a limited intellectual experience, coupled with a craving for miscellaneous reading, breed new microbes almost as fast as science discovers remedies for the old ones.

Bismarck’s words, “Ohne Armee kein Deutschland,” meant to him, and mean to-day, far more than that the army is necessary for defence. It is the best all-round democratic university in the world; it is a necessary antidote for the physical lethargy of the German race; it is essential to discipline; it is a cement for holding Germany together; it gives a much-worried and many-times-beaten people confidence; the poverty of the great bulk of its officers keeps the level of social expenditure on a sensible scale; it offers a brilliant example, in a material age, of men scorning ease for the service of their country; it keeps the peace in Europe; and until there is a second coming, of a Christ of pity, and patience, and peace, it is as good a substitute for that far-off divine event as puzzled man has to offer.

It is silly and superficial to look upon the German army only as a menace, only as a cloud of provocations in glittering uniforms, only as a helmeted frown with a turned-up moustache. It is not, and I make no such claim for it, an army or an officers’ corps of Puritans or of self-sacrificing saints, but it does partake of the dreamy, idealistic German nature, as does every other institution in Germany. Though, as a whole, it is a fighting machine, the various parts of it are not imbued with that spirit alone. The uneasy pessimism of the dreamer, which distrusts the comfortable solutions of the business-like politicians, and leaders, in their own and in other countries, is as noticeable in the army as in all other departments of German life.

“And all through life I see a cross,
Where sons of God yield up their breath;
There is no gain except by loss,
There is no life except by death,
There is no vision but by faith;
Nor glory but by bearing shame,
Nor justice but by taking blame.”

There have been many, and there are still, soldiers who hold that creed. There are not a few of them in Germany.

IX GERMAN PROBLEMS

A great nation like Germany must have characteristics, anxieties, problems, and responsibilities, some of which are peculiar to itself. The individual must be of small importance who has not problems and burdens of his own arising from his environment, position, work, and his personal relations with other men; as well as problems of temper, temperament, health, education, and traditions peculiar to himself.

Wise men recognize two things about every other man: that he has his own problems, and that no one else thoroughly understands either another man’s handicaps or his advantages; and that the only way to judge him is not to go behind the returns, but to note how he lives with these same problems. They are there, there is no doubt about that; the question is, does he smile or scowl? does he work away toward a solution, or allow himself to be swamped by them? do they dominate him, or he them? has he that sun of life, vitality, sufficient to burn away the fog, or does he live and die in a moist, semi-impenetrable fog, in which he flounders timidly and rather aimlessly about, always rather discouraged, rather in the dark, and lamentably damp in person and in spirits? The only fair test of a man’s life is his living of it, and the same is true of a nation.

Of Germany’s history, traditions, and temperament I have written. No one can fail to note the chief characteristics: their gregariousness, their melancholic and subjective way of looking at life, their passion for music. It is more what they think, than what they do or see, that gives them pleasure. They agree with Erasmus, that “it is a foolish error to believe that happiness is dependent upon things; it is dependent entirely upon one’s opinion of them.” The indefinite has no terrors for them, they delight indeed in the indefinable. They have done little in great sculpture and architecture, or the founding and ruling of colonies, as compared with their supreme achievements in music, in philosophy, in lyric poetry.

The art of music, which moves one greatly toward nothing in particular; which supplies sounds but not a language for the mysteries of feeling; which easily carries a sensitive soul away from its sorrows or drowns it in tears, and all without offering a semblance of a practical solution; which orchestrates a greater fury, a more poignant jealousy, a sweeter note of bird, a harsher clang of weapons, than any human energy can even imagine to exist; this art with which marching soldiers sing away their fatigue, but not really; with which disconsolate lovers wing their hopes, but not really; with which the pious pipe themselves to heaven, but not really; with which, by strings and beaten skins, organ-pipes and blowing brass, an anaesthesia of ecstasy is produced, leaving one only the weaker against the dourness and doggedness of the devil; with which men and women hymn themselves home to God, only to lose Him when they leave the threshold of His house; which choruses from a thousand throats patriotism, defiance, self-confidence, but arms none of them with any useful weapon; which with drums and brass can send any lout to heroism without his knowing why; this art which burns up the manhood of its devotees - who ever heard of a great tenor who was a great man, or even of a great musician for more than half of whose life one must needs not apologize? - this art flourishes in Germany not without reason, and not for nothing.

In a ragged school in the neighborhood of Posen where the children could hardly speak German they could sing; in a public school in Charlottenburg fifty boys, aged between eight and fifteen, sang the part-song known to every college man in America, “On a Bank Two Roses Grew,” as well as a college glee club; those who know Bayreuth, or have attended a musical festival, or listened to one of the great clubs of male voices, or heard the orchestras and military bands, will not deny the delights of music in Germany. In Berlin there is not a hall suitable for a musical recital that is not engaged a year, sometimes more, in advance.

In the beautiful Golden Hall of the castle of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, at Schwerin, I have attended a concert given by the Grand Duke’s own orchestra, where the selections were all compositions of former leaders or members of the orchestra, dating back over a period of two hundred years. For centuries in this particular grand duchy music and the theatre, supported and guided by the sovereign, have offered a school of entertainment and instruction to the people. At this present writing, special trains are run to Schwerin from the surrounding country districts, and the people for miles around subscribe for their seats for the whole winter, and attend the theatre and certain concerts as regularly as children go to school. It sounds oddly to the ears of an American to hear criticism to the effect, that there are more high-class music and more classical plays than the people have either time or money for. Here is a population which is actually overindulging in culture. We complain of too little; here they complain of too much. It makes one wonder whether any of the problems of social life are satisfactorily soluble; whether indeed it be not true that even the virtues carried to an extreme do not become vices. Philanthropy in more than one city in America is spending time, money, and energy to bring about this very enthusiasm for music and the more intellectual arts which, it is maintained, here in Schwerin at least, has gone too far.

These problems are not so easy of solution as the ignorant and the inexperienced think. Imagine the inhabitants of Hoboken, New Jersey; of Lynn, Massachusetts; of Kalamazoo, Michigan; of Bloody Gulch, Idaho, spending too much time and money listening to the music of Palestrina and Bach, or to the plays of Shakespeare; and yet what money and energy would not be spent by certain enthusiasts for the arts did they think such a result possible! And, after all, it might prove not a blessing, but a danger.

Whenever or wherever you are in the company of Germans you notice their pleasure and their keen interest in the subjective, rather than in the objective side of life. It is from within out that they are stirred, not as we are, by outside things working upon us. They are still the dreaming, drinking, singing, impulsive Germans of Tacitus. Titus Livius, Plutarch, and Machiavelli, all maintained that the successive invasions of the Germans into Italy were for the sake of the wine to be found there. Plutarch writes that “the Gauls were introduced to the Italian wine by a Tuscan named Arron, and so excited were they by the desire for more that, taking their wives and children with them, they journeyed across the Alps to conquer the land of such good vintages, looking upon other countries as sterile and savage by comparison. Even if this be not history, it is an impression; and at any rate, from that day to this the Germans have agreed with the dictum of Aulus Gellius: “Prandium autem abstemium, in quo nihil vini potatur, canium dicitur: quoniam canis vino caret.” When the Roman historian first came into contact with them he notes, that their bread was lighter than other bread, because “they use the foam from their beer as yeast.”

Tacitus writes of them: “The Germans abound with rude strains of verse, the reciters of which, in the language of the country, are called ‘Bards.’ ”

I visited a private stable in Bavaria, as well ordered and as well kept as any private stable in America or in England, and the head coachman was a reader of poetry; and though he had received numerous offers of higher wages in the city, declined them, giving as one reason that the view from the window of his room could not be equalled elsewhere! Where can one find a stable-man in our country who reads Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe, or who ever heard of William James and Pragmatism? I may be doing an injustice to the stable-men of Boston, but I doubt it.

There are scores of pages of notes to my hand, recounting similar if not such startling examples of the German temperament among high and low. Musical, melancholic, gregarious, subjective, these are their true characteristics, but the superficial among us do not see these things because they are hidden behind the great army, the new navy and mercantile marine, the factories, the increased commercial values, the strenuous agricultural and industrial pushing ahead of the last thirty years. But they are there, they represent the German temperament, they are the internal character of Germania, always to be taken into account in judging her, or in wondering why she does this or that, or why she does it in this or that way.

“As imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

This is what the purely subjective mind is ever doing, and when it is carried too far it is insanity. The individual no longer sees things as they are, but he sees others and himself in strange, horrible, or ludicrous shapes.

Barring Japan, I suppose Germany yields more easily to the temptation of the subjective malady of suicide than any other country. In Saxony, for example, the rate was lately 39.2 per 100,000 of the population, in England and Wales 7.5. During the five years ending with 1908 there were for every 100 suicides among males in the United States 136 in Germany, and for every 100 suicides of females 125 in Germany. In Vienna, and for racial purposes this is Germany, 1,558 persons killed themselves in 1912. Children committing suicide because they have failed in their examinations is not uncommon in Germany; in America and in England the teachers are more likely to succumb than the children. We do not commit suicide in America from any sense of shame at our intellectual shortcomings - what a decimating of the population there would be if we did! - it is more apt to be caused by ill health consequent upon a straining chase for dollars. In Prussia during the five years, 1902-1907, divorce increased from 17.7 to 20.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, and suicide from 20 to 30.7.

If the observer does not take this difference of temperament into account, he does not realize how new and strange it is to find Germany these days, making its first and strongest impression upon the outsider by its industrial progress. The more intelligent men in Germany are beginning to see the dangers to real progress in such feverish devotion to industry, and to recognize that the life of the population is absorbed too largely by science, finance, and commerce. To see so much of the intelligence of the nation exercising itself in material researches, to see such undue fervor in calculations of self- interest, does not leave an enlivening impression. Such an ideal of life is paltry in itself and involves grave dangers in the future. It is a long stride in the wrong direction since Hegel wrote of Germany as “the guardian of the sacred fire of intellect.”

Out of this temperament has grown the self-consciousness, the uneasy vanity, the “touchiness” which has made Germany of late years the despair of the diplomats all over the world. She has become a chameleon-like menace to peace everywhere in the world. What she wants, what will offend her dignity, when she will feel hurt, what amount of consideration will suffice, when she will change color to match a changed situation, and in what color she will choose to hide her plans or to make manifest her demands, no man knows. She will not see things as they are, but always as an exhalation from her own mind. As one of her own poets has written: “Deutschland ist Hamlet.”

At this present moment she does not see either England or America as they are, quite peaceably disposed toward her but she sees them, and persists in seeing them, as they would be were Germany in their place. She is forever looking into a mirror instead of through the open window. “The mailed fist,” “the rattling of the sabre,” “the friend in shining armor,” “querelle allemande,” are all phrases born in Germany in the last thirty years.

She even sees herself a little out of focus, and though I admit her precarious position in the heart of Europe, she exaggerates the necessity for her autocratic military government to meet the situation. That philosophical and literary radical Lord Morley, now wearing a coronet, in the land where logic is a foundling and compromise a darling, writes: “A weak government throws power to something which usurps the name of public opinion, and public opinion as expressed by the ventriloquists of the newspapers is at once more capricious and more vociferous than it ever was.” This, strange to say, is exactly the opinion of the German autocrats, who maintain that no democracy can be a strong military power. It remains for England, and perhaps later America, to prove her wrong.

The sovereign lady Germania, being of this temper and disposition, of this psychological make-up, let us look at her dealings with certain embarrassing problems in her own household. The over-stimulation of ill-regulated mental activity as the result of regimental education is one of the minor problems. Some fourteen million dollars worth of cheap and nasty literature is peddled by the agents of certain publishing houses, and sold all over Germany to those recently taught to read but not trained to think; and this, it is to be remembered, is still a land of low wages, of strict economies, and of small expenditures on books. For Germany that is an enormous sum and represents a very wide-spread evil. I recognize that it is not only in Germany, but in France, England, and America, that the ethically hysterical have assumed that modesty and health and common-sense are characteristics of the intellectually mediocre. That the neglect of all, and the breaking of some, of the Ten Commandments is essential to the creation of art or literature, or necessary to a courageous freedom of living, is a contention with which I agree less and less the more I know of art, literature, and life. But, as I have remarked elsewhere in this volume, the Strindbergs and Wildes and Gorkis are having their day in Germany just now, and beneath this again is this large distribution of the lawless and sooty literature, frankly intended as a debauch for the gutter-snipe and his consort. Even the coarse, and in no line squeamish, Rabelais wrote that, “Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme.”

There is but a puny barrier against this, for the statistical year-book of German cities gives the number of public libraries in forty-two cities as 179. Twenty-seven of these cities gave an annual support to 114 of these libraries of only $64,847! According to the figures of Herr Ernest Schultze, in 1907 the forty largest German cities, with a population of 11,380,000, had public libraries containing a sum total of 807,000 volumes. In the year 1906-1907, 5,437,000 volumes were taken out and 1,607,476 persons frequented the public reading-rooms, and in these forty-two cities $280,095 were contributed from private sources for such library purposes. In 1910 Germany had in some 400 cities, each of more than 10,000 inhabitants, about 650 public libraries and reading-rooms, with together about 3,250,000 volumes.

Berlin has thirty public libraries with 231,300 volumes; the number of books taken out in 1910 was 1,655,000. Hamburg has one public library with 100,000 volumes, of which 1,364,000 were taken out. Breslau has 7 libraries and 4 reading-rooms, with 75,578 volumes. Leipzig has 7 libraries and 3 reading-rooms, with 42,100 volumes. Munich has 6 libraries and 26,671 volumes. Cologne has 7 libraries and 6 reading- rooms, with 24,898 volumes.

The smallest library is in the village community of Dudweiler, in the Rhine province, which contains 132 volumes for the 22,000 inhabitants.

There were 14,941 books published in Germany in 1880, 18,875 in 1890, 24,792 in 1900, and 31,281 in 1910.

There were 13,470 books published in America in 1910, 9,209 of them by American authors.

There were 10,914 books published in England in 1911, of which 2,384 were new editions. Of this number 2,215, which includes 933 new editions and 40 translations, were fiction; religion, 930; sociology, 725; science, 650; geography, 601; biography, 476; history, 429; technology, 525. In 1820, there were only 26 novels published in England.

Of the 31,281 books published in Germany in 1910, 4,852 dealt with education and juvenile literature; 4,134, belles-lettres; 3,215, law and political economy; 2,510, theology; 2,082, commerce and industry; 1,981, medicine; 1,884, philology and literary history; 1,480, geography, including maps; 667, military science and equestry; 1,030, agriculture and forestry; 1,750, natural science and mathematics; 1,108, engineering and construction; 1,254, history and biography; 981, art; and 668 on philosophy and theosophy.

There were some 9,000 writers of books in America in 1910, or one author in 10,000 of the population, already more than enough; there were some 8,000 in Great Britain, or one author in about 5,500 of the population; while in Germany there are over 31,000 writers, or one author in every 2,097 of the population, including men, women, and children of all ages, an unreasonable and disastrous proportion. If we estimate the number of adult males of Germany at 14,000,000, the number who voted at the last election, then there was one author to every 450, a most unhealthy proportion, and bearing out exactly what has been said of the German temperament and constitutional bias. Furthermore, this accounts for the fact that Germany imports some 700,000 agricultural laborers each year to garner the food harvests, for which she has not sufficient recruits, and who, by the way, take out of the country each year some $35,000,000 in wages. Twenty per cent. of the miners in Westphalia are foreigners, eight per cent. of them Italians, and there are nearly half a million foreigners employed as common laborers in the various industries of Germany.

Wherever one travels now in the world, he finds that most courageous and self-sacrificing of all the pioneers, the missionary: American, British, French, Italian. The best of them, on the plains of North America, in the destructive climate of India, in China, in all the islands of all the seas, are, whatever their creed, soldiers of whom we are all proud; for they fight not only against the overwhelming prejudice of those whom they seek to save, but against the widespread prejudice of their own people, and against the well-founded suspicion and contempt aroused by their own black sheep. I have found them, here a Jesuit, there a Presbyterian, winning my friendship and my admiration, despite fundamental differences of belief about many things. There are few Germans among them! Even in this field Germany produces theological controversialists whom we have all studied, orthodox and destructive, but few pioneers, and practically no Augustines or Loyolas, Wesleys or Booths, Livingstones or Stanleys. Columba, an Irish refugee, founded on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, a mission station, whence went missionaries and preachers to the conversion not only of England, but of the tribes of Germany. It was only in the sixth century that the Franks, only in the ninth century that the Saxons, and only in the tenth century that the Danes became Christians.

Neither at home nor abroad are her successes those which deal with men by winning their allegiance, their submission, their loyalty, or their respectful regard. She is pre-eminent in the things of the mind, in subjective matters, and in her regimental dealings with, and arrangements for, the inanimate side of life.

As an example on the credit side of her governing is the very complete and successful system of land-banks, introduced by Frederick the Great and since modelled somewhat upon the French methods, which have protected the farmer from usury, insured him money at low rates for improvements, for the purchase of tools, cattle, and fertilizers, and enabled him to do, by sensible co-operation, what would have been impossible for him as an individual. So successful has been this co- operation between the banks and the united farming communities that it were well worth a chapter of description were it not that, through the initiative of President Taft and the able and industrious assistance of our officials in Europe, among whom our ambassador in Paris, Mr. Herrick, may be mentioned as untiring, there will shortly appear a complete exposition and explanation of the scheme, available for those of my countrymen interested in the matter. Or if they will journey to Ireland they may see there what Sir Horace Plunkett has done to revolutionize, and against tremendous odds, agriculture. And, be it noted, it has been done, with emphatic warnings against the modern fallacy of leaning upon state aid. It is estimated that our farmers would be saved between $20,000,000 and $40,000,000 a year in interest alone were we to adopt similar methods of loaning to the land-owners. The Preussische Centralgenossenschaftskasse, or Central Bank of Co-operative Associations, has revolutionized, one may here use the word without exaggeration, agricultural methods, throughout Prussia and Germany.

In Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa there are 5,000,000 acres of land in wheat, which is practically the size of Germany’s wheat acreage, but Germany produces 140,000,000 bushels of wheat off her parcel of land; while the wheat raised on the same area in these three States is only 55,000,000 bushels.

France and Minnesota each plant 16,000,000 acres in wheat, but France produces 324,000,000 bushels and Minnesota 188,000,000 bushels. In round numbers we support 90,000,000 people on 3,000,000 square miles of land, and we could support 150 per square mile just as easily as 30, and even then there would be not even a fraction of the density of population of Denmark, 178; the Netherlands, 470; France, 189; Saxony, 830; England and Wales, 405.6. The average wheat yield of our country is about 14 bushels per acre in good years, it might just as well be 25; the average cotton yield is about four-tenths of a bale per acre, and four times that amount could be raised as easily.

In 1900, 10,500,000 people were engaged in agriculture in America, or 35.7 per cent. of the population; as over against 37.7 in 1890 and 44.3 in 1880. Of these 10,500,000, 5,700,000 were owners, renters, or overseers, or 56 per cent., and only 4,500,000 were actual farm laborers; and more than half of these, or 2,350,000, were members of the family, leaving only some 2,000,000 actual agricultural wage-earners, or employable agricultural laborers. Five-eighths of these were under twenty-five years of age, and of the white regular workers only one-tenth were over thirty-five years of age. This shows how unstable is the foundation of our agricultural prosperity, the chief asset of plenty and contentment of our country. Mr. Get-Rich-Quick has moved on to the shifting and more exciting opportunities of the cities, where poor human nature, aided and abetted by weak philanthropy, and demagogic fishing for votes by eleemosynary legislation, provides him with a mild form of riotous living, and a fatted calf of doles in case of accident, sickness, penury, or old age.

In our American cities of over 8,000 inhabitants the increase in population from 1790 to 1900 has been from 3.4 per cent. to 33 per cent. In cities of 2,500 and over the increase from 1880 to 1900 has been from 29.3 per cent. to 40.2 per cent. In the State of New York the farming population is smaller than ever before, and in parts of New England it is smaller than one hundred years ago. In 1909 there were 15,000 deserted farms with a total of 1,130,000 acres. The average size of farms in the United States in 1850 was 212 acres; in 1890, 121 acres. Wages in the reaping season on fruit, grain, and cotton farms are enormous, running to four and five dollars a day. We are behind every country in Europe except Russia, in our agricultural methods. Some day the American people will discover, may it not be too late, that the tall talk and highfalutin boastings of the politicians and alien journalists in their midst do nothing to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before.

Germany may not have solved this problem, indeed no nation which offers undue legislative alleviation for human frailty will ever solve it, but at least she has not shirked the problem, and presents for our enlightenment a scheme in full and smooth working order.

In dealing with German problems it is fair to give examples where her methods have been wholly and entirely successful. The man who does not know one tree or shrub from another cannot travel in trains, motor-cars, or afoot without remarking the neatness, symmetry, and the flourishing condition of the forests. In these matters Germany so far surpasses us that we may be said to be merely in a kindergarten stage of development. As early as 1783 a German traveller, Johann David Schoepf, was distressed to see the waste of valuable wood in America. He tells of a furnace in New Jersey which exhausted a forest of nearly 20,000 acres in twelve to fifteen years, and goes on to prophesy the grave danger to America unless coal is discovered and used instead of wood.

The public forests in America contain about nine per cent. of the total land area and about twenty-five per cent. of the forest area of the country. In Germany the state owns about 40 per cent. of the forests, and nearly 70 per cent. of the forest area is under state control. The total forest area of the empire is 34,569,800 acres, and two-thirds bear pine, larch, and red and white fir. In a recent year the Federal States made a net profit of $38,250,000 from public lands and forests, and the entire profit from the German forests was estimated at $110,000,000. When one remembers that Germany is less than the size of Texas, and that from her forests alone, in one year, she received an income equal to more than one-tenth of our total national expenditure for that same year, the fact of our childish wastefulness is brought home to us, and makes a patriot feel that a Gifford Pinchot should be given a free hand. I can only write of the subject as one technically entirely ignorant, but that Germany is a university of forestry is not only attested by the demand for her teachers in India, and in America, and elsewhere in the world, but by the condition of the forests themselves all over Germany, which no traveller, from America at any rate, can fail to notice without surprise and delight.

Germany, like the rest of us, has been obliged to face the various social problems that arise from original sin, but which vote-getters are pleased to ascribe to industrial progress. In our country, with a population of some thirty to the square mile, while in the kingdom of Saxony the density of the population is 830.6 to the square mile, it is hard to believe that we suffer from overcrowding so much as from overindulgence, wastefulness, and fussy legislation. None the less, we have 42 institutions for the feeble-minded, 115 schools and homes for the deaf and blind, 350 hospitals for the insane, 1,200 refuge houses, 1,300 prisons, 1,500 hospitals, and 2,500 almshouses. We have 2,000,000 annually who are cared for in homes and hospitals, 300,000 insane and feeble-minded, 160,000 blind or deaf, 80,000 prisoners, and 100,000 paupers in almshouses and out, and we spend each year about $100,000,000 in taking care of them. We are as wasteful and careless in these matters as we have been until very lately in our forestry methods.

In the early days of the empire Germany undertook to deal with these social problems. The German Empire took over some of the principles of socialism, but retained, and retains absolutely, the power of applying those principles. Bismarck himself admitted that his advocacy of the industrial insurance laws was selfish. “My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.” Whatever else may have resulted, discontent, whether well-founded or not, is not now under discussion, has not been lessened. In 1912 more than one-half of the electors voted “discontented” as over against the less than one-half who voted “contented.” The mass of the people may be better clothed, better fed, better housed, better cared for in sickness and in old age, than formerly, but they are not satisfied. No state can go much further than Germany has gone along the lines of state interference, guidance, and control of the personal affairs of its people, and nothing is more surprising about the whole matter than the general acceptance in America and in England of such legislation as having proved altogether successful. I doubt if any intelligent German considers these various pension schemes as altogether successful. I can vouch for it that many German statesmen make no such claims in private, whatever they may say in public.

Some of the barren figures, needing no comment, are of interest in this connection. The cost of insurance in Germany has risen to over $500,000 a day, the total cost of state insurance exceeding $250,000,000 a year at the present time, a fairly heavy tax upon small employers. In 1909, of 422,076 decisions by the industrial unions, 76,352 were appealed against, and of the 100,000 arbitration judgments, 22,794 were appealed against. So difficult is it to settle to the claimant’s satisfaction the amount of salve necessary for his particular wound when, as is true in these cases, the salve is a grant of money for a longer or shorter period!

In 1886 there were, roughly, 100,000 accidents reported and 10,000 compensated, but as they became more thoroughly acquainted with the game, the figures rose in 1908 to 662,321 accidents and 142,965 compensations.

The vast increase of the claims for trifling injuries is shown by the fact that in twenty years from 1888 to 1908, despite the increase of the total compensation from $1,475,000 to $38,715,000, the average compensation per accident fell from $58.50 to $38.83. In the two years 1907 to 1909 the number of members of those state-insured increased by 380,819, while the days of sickness increased by 26,219,632! The cost of sickness insurance alone rose from $42,895,000 in 1900 to $83,640,000 in 1909. The Workmen’s Compensation Act in England costs, for management, commission, legal and medical fees, $20,000,000 a year, while the compensation paid out was $13,500,000. The insurance companies calculate that for every $500 of compensation, the employers have paid $750!

It is becoming increasingly evident that the logical result of state charity, or call it state insurance to avoid controversy, over a large field, and including millions of beneficiaries and claimants, is that the army of officials, the expenses of administration, and the payments themselves must sooner or later break the back of the state morally, politically, and financially. It rapidly increases parasitism among the receivers; makes a powerful though indifferent army of state servants of the distributers; and loses financially to the state far more in expense of administration, and loss of useful labor of the army of civil servants, than it gains by the loss to the state of individual incapacity resulting in pauperism and invalidism, which must be cared for. To put it briefly, it is far more dangerous to the state to tell the individual that he shall be taken care of than to tell him that he must shift for himself. As for the effect upon the individual, it is a lowering medicine, making the patient gradually dependent upon the drug, and bringing him finally to the incurable invalidism of surly apathy. To change Patrick Henry’s fiery peroration slightly: Give me liberty or in the end you give me moral and political death.

Students of the various forms of this modern political nostrum, of getting rid of the fools who are rich by deceiving the fools who are poor, will remember the decree of the Provisional Government of the French Republic in 1848: “This Government undertakes to guarantee the existence of the workman by work. It undertakes to guarantee work to every citizen.” On March 9 public works were started and 3,000 men employed. March 15 saw 14,000 on the pay-rolls, most of them unoccupied because there was no suitable work. Those not working received “inactivity pay” of a franc a day. The end of April saw 100,000 on the pay-rolls. In May a minister ventured to suggest that it was the workman’s duty to work! There were murmurs of disapproval, but the public treasury was nearing bankruptcy, and on June 22 an order was promulgated, that all of these workmen between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five were to enlist in the army. An insurrection followed this order that workmen should work, and 3,000 citizens were shot down in the streets, and another 3,000 were sent to penal colonies in Algeria. The French are a logical people. The state promised suitable work; that always means, from the point of view of the worker, agreeable work, and not too fatiguing at that. Of course, no such thing is possible, and the end was riot, murder, and penal servitude. The state can no more provide suitable and agreeable methods of livelihood for its citizens, than it can provide them with a duty-loving, unenvious, and honest disposition. As I have remarked elsewhere, the only thing that stands between state socialism and the instant solution of all our social problems is human nature! This mongrel demand for an artificial equality, is worse, because more degrading than any tyranny of church or state even. Every man wants superiority and distinction for himself, he only wants equality, invisibility, and inarticulateness for others.

When some such system as this is put to work in Ireland, I shall envy every physician in Ireland, for he will live in a joyous round of farces such as the world has never provided before for the lovers of the humorous. Already Ireland, with only 701,620 electors, out of a total of 8,058,025 in the United Kingdom, is represented in the House of Commons by 103 members out of the total of 670; and out of the 935,000 old-age pensioners on the lists at the beginning of 1912, Ireland had 202,810, and was drawing $12,943,000 out of the total paid of $59,445,500, while the total population of Ireland was 4,368,599, and of the rest of the United Kingdom 40,533,557! Further, as an example of the slight value of education in the game of politics, out of the 41,710 illiterate voters in the United Kingdom, Ireland has 22,515. Long life to Ireland for her gallant attack upon humbuggery with humbuggery! And this is, too, the little island that sent the Wellesleys, the Pallisers, the Moores, the Eyres, the Cootes, the Napiers, the Wolseleys, and Roberts to fight England’s battles, and half the officers and privates who conquered India; which in the Seven Years’ War furnished Austria with her best generals (Brown, Lacy, O’Donnell), and whose exiles, called the “Wild Geese,” flocked to the standard of Washington in 1776. This is proof positive that they are not naturally a parasitic race.

Even in Germany, where there is not a tithe of the impish humour that exists in Ireland, the Socialists have so misused the immense bureaucracy that must carry on the mere clerical work of insurance, that a new law passed the Reichstag in June, 1911, containing several hundred amendments. Employers must now pay one-half instead of one-third of the sickness insurance premiums, which gives them one-half instead of one-third of the management authority.

The management had degenerated into a mere game of politics, with the Socialists in such disproportionate control that they were rapidly turning the insurance machinery into a well-organized body for the exploitation of their own political doctrines; and the employer and the state were helpless. It is, therefore, amusing to the man on the spot to find certain English writers offering as proof of the success of the insurance laws the fact that the Socialists, who once opposed, are now satisfied with them. Of course they are satisfied with them. They have had a war-chest and weapons put into their hands such as they have never had before. Nor have these detailed parchment solutions of social questions done away with all the tramps, poor, sick, and destitute. Over a million persons passed through the municipal night shelters in Berlin during the last year; and there are still admittedly some 5,000 tramps in Germany. The vicious circle is in evidence in Germany as elsewhere. It might be possible to regulate men’s earning power by legislation, but even when this colossal task is done, there must follow the regulation of the spending power to make it complete. What conceivable legislative regulation can efface the difference between what A, B, and C will get out of five dollars once they have them! That is the real problem, but no one proposes a solution of it. A will use his five dollars to make him more powerful, B will use his in dissipation, and C will lose his. How is that to be regulated? And without that regulation you will have rich men and tramps all over again.

In urban and rural districts containing over 10,000 inhabitants, some $40,000,000 was expended for sick and poor relief, and this does not include the hundreds of districts with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants for which there are no figures. Even the wholly admirable Elberfeld system of charity, known all over the world to charity-workers, which is, briefly, investigation of cases by voluntary workers personally and privately, and each dealing with a small number, has not solved the problem. There were 1,537 strikes in Germany in 1909, and 2,109 in 1910. In 1910, 8,269 industrial plants were affected, in which 372,119 persons were employed, and 2,209 plants were obliged to shut down entirely. There were as many as 154,093 persons on strike at the same time. In 1910 there were also 1,121 lock-outs, affecting 10,381 plants and 314,988 persons.

Here again, as in the case of the temperament of the German people, one must look deeper than the average traveller has the time or the necessary experience back of him to do, in order to see and to sift the facts. Scores of travellers have told me: “I have never seen a tramp, a beggar, a drunken man in Germany.” I can only reply that I have seen tramps at large, and colonies of them besides; that I have seen hundreds of the poverty-stricken and diseased; that there are more than thirty drunkards’ homes in Germany; and that between 1879 and 1901 the number of persons under treatment for alcoholism had increased from 12,000 to 65,000, an increase of 500 per cent.; the cases of heart disease and rheumatism increased by 600 per cent.; while the total population had increased 33 per cent. There are 125,000 patients admitted to the public and private lunatic asylums of Germany, and there are accommodations in public and private hospitals for 1,300,000 in-patients passing through them in the year; in 1909, 544,183 persons were tried before the courts of first instance and convicted, of whom 49,697 were between twelve and eighteen years of age; and in the same year there were 183,700 illegitimate births and 14,225 suicides, or 22.3 per 100,000 of the population. The poor law authorities state that the cost to the empire of alcoholism in all its forms of poverty, crime, and disease amounts to some $13,000,000 a year. In 1910 Germany consumed 1,704 million gallons of malt liquors, the United States, 1,851 million gallons; of beer we consumed 20.09 gallons and Germany 26.47 gallons per capita. Germany’s drink bill even ten years ago was $560,000,000 for beer, $140,000,000 for spirits, and $125,000,000 for wine. There is a wine, beer, or spirit dealer in Berlin for every 157 of the inhabitants, men, women, and children. It has always been the avowed policy of autocracies to atone for the lack of political freedom by lax regulations in regard to moral matters. The citizen is imprisoned for insulting the state, but he may insult his own person by dissipation up to any limit, this side of disorderliness in public. Drinking, gambling, and other forms of vice are provided for the citizens of Berlin comfortably and, comparatively speaking, cheaply. Lotteries are sanctioned by all the states, and they use this incentive to the worst form of gambling for all sorts of purposes, from repairing churches to building patriotic monuments, and replenishing the treasury.

This is by no means an attack upon Germany or upon German methods in these matters; probably both in America and in England we are worse off in these respects than are they, but unprejudiced people will agree that it is high time to learn that not even German methods have solved these complicated and heatedly argued questions of social reform. Germany, due to its compactness and well-drilled and subservient population, should succeed if any nation can, for social legislation has never been in stronger or wiser hands or more admirably and honestly administered. In America such opportunities offered to the on-politics-living big and little bosses would lead swiftly to anarchy. We have laws enough now, but the baser politicians protect our city tramps, our gunmen, our decadents, our incendiaries against our elected magistrates, in order that they may keep ready to hand, and increase, the raw material of a purchasable vote, by the domination and protection of which they keep themselves in power. That is the whole secret of our municipal misgovernment wherever it exists, and also the reason for our barbarous crimes. We have a cowed magistracy seeking re-election from the manipulators of the purchasable voters.

The truth is that the Sacculina method of social reform is nowhere a success, certainly not in Germany. The Sacculina is a crustacean. It attaches itself in the form of a simple sac to the crab, into which its blood-vessels extend. It loses its power of locomotion and its limbs disappear. It lives at the expense of the crab; activity is not necessary, and it becomes the highest type of parasite, with no organs except ovaries and blood-vessels. It can propagate, but has lost all power or desire to do anything else. We have succeeded in producing no small number of people of the Sacculina type by playing social and political crab for them, and we are on the way to produce more, until the crab is exhausted and the Sacculina is shaken into the water to sink or swim for himself. “Charity causes half the suffering she relieves, but she can never relieve half the suffering she causes.

Compulsory insurance was tried in the practical and economical Swiss city of Basle and given up, because it was found that each year it was the same small class who reaped the benefit of the insurance. The crab gained nothing and the Sacculina became rapidly impotent. Basle, if I mistake not, will have imitators, inclined to the philosophy of Frederick the Great, who was surely no enemy to rational progress, but who once said: “Depuis bien longtemps je suis convaincu qu’un mal qui reste vaut mieux qu’un bien qui change.”

A good deal of modern legislation is due to fatigue, and some of the rest to ill-founded apprehension, that unless there is a change of some kind the masters of the legislators will discharge them, because they do not furnish enough novelties. In the meantime nobody is bold enough to proclaim to the restless ones, seeking ever some new thing, that there is nothing original except what has been forgotten. The originality of such students of history, and panderers to majorities, as the leaders of the discontented in England, Germany and in America, dates back to about the time of the fall of Pericles and the Athenian republic.

The cry of “discontent” has become a fetich among unthinking politicians. We are all, thank God, discontented, and a poor lot we should be if we were not. The workingman’s discontent has been over-emphasized, for the reason that what he demands is material, ponderable, for sale, easy to see, and not far out of the reach of one’s hand. He wants more rooms, more meat, more tobacco, more beer, more leisure. I am glad he does want them, and let me say just once, in answer to my detractors along these lines, that the workingman has no heartier champion than am I. I applaud his discontent just as I cherish my own, for “it is precisely this that keeps us all alive!” It is just because I wish him well that every ounce of my influence and experience are his, to open his eyes to the demagogues who fatten upon him, fool him, rope him, throw him and brand him, as they have done in Germany, as they are attempting to do in England, and as they will shortly begin to do in America. State socialism means slavery for him, with an army of officials living on him. He will be given so much bread, and beer, and meat, and tobacco; so much music, theatre, and literature; and there will grow up an army whose business it will be to keep him in order, and to cut him down if he revolts, as was done by the police in one of the suburbs of Berlin not long ago. The German workman is already so entangled in the ropes of insurance, so harried by petty officials, so branded by the police, and he has permitted to increase such a host of guardians, that revolt or revolution is practically impossible. Counting the army, navy, and officials, there are said to be three million officials, great and small in Germany; and there are fourteen million electors, or, roughly, one policeman to every five adults. And those three million policemen, armed with lethal and legal weapons, are inflexibly and unalterably for no change. Does the workingman ever stop to think that those officials draw salaries amounting to something like $1,200,000,000 a year, and is he still fool enough to think that he does not pay those salaries to these slave-drivers! I have said that the population is well fed, well clothed, and well looked after. Of course they are. No slave-owner so maltreats his slaves that they cannot work for him! But is man fed by bread alone, even in the sugared form of music and theatricals?

If the socialist Pygmalion ever succeeds in bringing his statue to life, how she will scorn him, hate his suffocating environment, wish for the wealth and softness he cannot give, desert him, begging to return to her marble tomb again.

Long life to discontent, say I; but is the workingman such a fool that his eyes are not opened when a man of Bismarck’s way of thinking, when an autocrat like the Emperor have favored state socialism! Does he not see that socialism is the neatest hangman of them all to strangle his discontent! Does he not see the demagogue gradually assuming the features and the powers of the tyrant! Tyranny is not alone the prerogative of an aristocracy. “It is the place of a court to make its servants insignificant. If the people should fall into the same humor, and should choose their servants on the same principles of mere obsequiousness and flexibility, and total vacancy and indifference of opinion in all public matters, then no party of the state will be sound, and it will be vain to think of saving it.” Thus writes Burke, the champion of our American revolt against his own country. The electors, now so flattered by the smooth phrases of their tyrants disguised as liberators, will one day be aghast to find themselves in a veritable house of correction paid for from their own savings. They will have learnt then, at last, that you cannot get rid of the fools who are rich by deceiving the fools who are poor; and corporalism will be found to be a harsher, fussier, a more meddlesome and a more indifferent tyrant than even feudalism.

Even at the Krupp works at Essen, and the various branches elsewhere, where there is the most elaborate combination of Lady Bountiful and successful business anywhere in the world, men are not satisfied. If they are not contented there, then nowhere in this world will the workingman be contented. The Krupp business employs some 70,000 persons. In the particular Essen works, for a hundred years, there has never been a strike, though others of their employees elsewhere have used the strike. Though the Cadburys and Levers and Taylors, in England, the Armours, the United States Steel Corporation, the National Cash Register Company, the Procter and Gamble Company, the General Electric Company, and others in America, and the famous and successful adoption of co-operation in Monsieur Godin’s iron foundry at Guise, in France, have worked along the lines of recognition of their workmen’s right to participate in the profits, there is nothing on such an elaborate scale as at Essen, under the regime of the Krupps.

From 1904 to 1910 the Krupps spent, for beneficial institutions of all kinds, $14,250,000, or 56 per cent. of the dividends during that time. I have passed many hours at Essen, and seen thoroughly, from cellar to attic, this truly noble institution for the comfortable and safe guardianship of men, women, and children who are at the same time factors in a huge and successful industrial enterprise. There are schools, technical schools, hospitals, convalescent homes, a library with 71,000 volumes, theatre, orchestra, band, lectures, concerts, pension and insurance funds, lodgings for bachelors, tenements and dwellings for married people, separate cottages for widows and widowers too old for work, and every opportunity, with a high rate of interest, for saving. There is in existence a co-operative store, as well managed as the co-operative stores at Tuxedo Park, and with much the same system of rebates. There are bathing facilities, gymnasium, a boat club, a system of providing hot meals from a central kitchen, reading-rooms and smoking-rooms. There is invested, not including the value of the land, which has risen enormously in value, over $12,500,000 in houses for the working-people, the return on the money being about 2 3/4 per cent. It would require volumes - indeed, two bulky volumes were issued last year by the company to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Krupp works - to describe merely the machinery for making the people comfortable.

In 1851 the Krupps exhibited at the exposition in London the first cannon made of cast steel; now they turn out more shells and shrapnel in a week than were used at the whole battle of Königgrätz (Sadowa), which lasted from eight o’clock in the morning till four o’clock in the afternoon on July 3, 1866. The queen of this, the greatest factory of destructive agencies in the world, is a gentle Madonna-faced lady who might well pose for a statue of peace, and whose loveliness is a mirror of the countless and untiring benefactions with which the people who work here are surrounded. Both the powers and the people of Germany may well be proud of the Krupps, for if sane beneficence were to be raised to the rank of statehood this great colony would well deserve the honor. The gross profits for the last year were $9,000,000, half of which was written off and the rest devoted to the reserve, to dividends, and to contributions to the invalid and pension funds of the employees, which now amount to $9,500,000. The employees also have on deposit with the management $8,700,000. The contribution of the Krupps to the workmen’s state-insurance fund amounted, in 1910, to $1,320,000. The Krupp family is rich, but what would their wealth have been had they practised the gobbling and juggling financial methods of — ; but I will not pillory my own countrymen by name, for, after all, our political methods have made them, and not they themselves.

The German manufacturer has been at a disadvantage, too, for several reasons, and this may well be noted as one of Germany’s problems. She has not the deposits of coal that have made England rich, nor the wonderful soil of America, from which alone we take $9,000,000,000 every year, nor France’s population, now at a standstill, and which can feed itself off its own soil. She has been a large borrower of capital to finance her enormous expansion of industry and commerce, and, above all, the gold supply of the world, which in the last resort is the foundation of credit, is not in her hands, nor can it be so long as British and American fleets keep the ocean highways over which that gold travels.

The world’s gold output in 1911 was $493,100,000; of this $177,600,000 came from the Transvaal; $100,350,000 from the United States; $63,600,000 from Australia; $42,300,000 from Russia; $23,300,000 from Mexico; $35,600,000 from Rhodesia, India, and Canada; and $15,650,000 from Central and South America, or $458,000,000, of the total output of $493,100,000, from countries which in time of war would be unlikely to ship gold to Germany. More than one half the output comes from the British Empire alone. To those who are satisfied with the easy answer to the reason for the increased cost of living, that the output of gold has increased, it must be puzzling to learn that of the total output, in round numbers, of $500,000,000, $150,000,000 is used in the arts and manufactures and $150,000,000 goes to India, where it is buried and hoarded, and $100,000,000 is retained in the United States for currency and other purposes. In spite of the fact that the gold output of the world doubled between 1890 and 1897, and nearly doubled again between 1897 and 1911, money is dear, and is likely to be so long as present conditions last.

The reason for the higher cost of living is to be found in the movement of the population, from the dulness of the plough to the sprightliness of the cinematograph. This choice every freeman has a right to make for himself, but the trouble arises when the politician comes forward and pays his admission to the cinematograph entertainment, out of the public funds, in order to get his vote. The man who does not leave the plough under those conditions is either a fool or a saint, and the percentage of the growth of cities is a fair measure of their relative numbers. The increased cost of living is the result, not of too much gold, but of too little labor on the land, and this is due, in turn, to the voluptuous rhetoric of the political street-walkers, whose promises of pleasure are as illegitimate as they are impossible of fulfilment. A debtor nation like Germany is highly sensitive to these conditions, and just as she is overcoming, by her splendid success as a manufacturing nation this problem, she is met by increased and ever-increasing rivalry. America, in 1901, exported $466,000,000 of manufactures; in 1891 only $188,000,000; but in 1911, $910,000,000; and in 1912, $1,021,753,918. We now have in America 225,000 manufacturing plants employing 6,000,000 people, with an annual pay-roll of $3,500,000,000 and producing every twelve months $15,000,000,000 worth of goods. The total value of exports and imports of Japan thirty years ago was $30,000,000, or 87 cents per capita; in 1911 the figures were $480,000,000, or $10 per capita. England during the years 1911 and 1912 surpassed all previous figures both for exports and imports. Germany’s rivals, it is thus seen, have not been idle.

The agricultural population of Germany in 1850 was 65 in the 100; it is now less than one third. In 1911, after a bad year for the farmers, Germany was obliged to pay out some $200,000,000 more than usual for food. The total loans of the German banks on industrial securities rose from $107,000,000 in 1890 to $632,000,000 in 1910, and bankers themselves admit that Germany has fallen into the error of seeking and accepting credit far beyond the value of the capital that they have to work with. Still more dangerous is the fact that 55 per cent. of the savings-bank moneys of Germany is locked up in mortgages. In 1907, 217 new companies were formed in Germany, issuing $62,050,900 in securities; in 1909, 179 new companies issued $54,929,450 of securities; in 1910, 186 new companies issued $57,437,700 of securities. In 1910, 340 companies increased their capital by $142,657,200. In 1910 there were 5,295 companies in Germany with a nominal capital of $3,680,979,400. It is estimated that since 1895 there has been invested in industrial companies in Germany $1,200,000,000. It is to be said also that since 1897 German agricultural production has doubled, German industrial production increased sevenfold, and Germany is said to have $4,750,000,000 in her savings-banks. The value of imports for home consumption, exclusive of the precious metals, in 1911 was $2,386,200,000; the value of the exports of home produce, exclusive of the precious metals, was $2,025,450,000. It is a quaint result of her temperament and her good forestry, that Germany sells $25,000,000 worth of toys a year; she is veritably the workshop of Santa Claus, and many more than 25,000,000 children would bless her did they know.

German financiers affirm that she can stand alone financially, while others assert that one sixth of her capital, I have heard it placed at one third, is borrowed from France and England. It is certain at least that the American panic of 1907, and the recent war in the Near East, have seriously embarrassed Germany financially.

As Germany can only feed, even in good harvest years, forty-eight or forty-nine millions of her people, a large proportion of her profits from industry must necessarily go to the purchase of food for the other sixteen or seventeen millions. The consumption of meat has increased among all classes in Germany, and both the demands of the individual and of the state have increased with the increased wealth of the country. In Prussia alone the number of those subject to income tax has increased from 2,400,000 in 1892 to 6,200,000 in 1912; but the taxes have increased as well, or from $800,000,000 to $1,675,000,000.

In the endeavor to increase the manufacturing output and to find new markets German credit has been stretched to a dangerous tenuity. While the war feeling was at its height the Kölnische Zeitung, a conservative and able journal, wrote: “In case of war both France and Germany will be obliged to borrow; but it is certain that the credit of Germany cannot as yet be compared with the credit of France: this is a strong guarantee of peace.

Wermuth, said by impartial judges to be the ablest secretary of the treasury the German Empire has had in a quarter of a century, resigned in 1912, on the general ground that he would not be responsible for the finances of the empire, if it was proposed to continue the constant increase of national expenditure, by a constant increase of borrowing, and an ever-increasing amount of interest-bearing liabilities. He must have smiled to himself when an Imperial issue at four per cent. put out in February, 1913, was not only not over-subscribed but not even all taken.

Unlike the French, who invest their savings small and large in national loans, the Germans neglect even their own national loans, preferring the higher returns for their investments from the innumerable industries launched in modern Germany; so pronounced is this form of investment, that a director of the Deutsche Bank has warned his countrymen, that every month’s profits are no sooner gained than they are put out again in new enterprises, either by the individuals themselves, or by the banks in which they are deposited. As a result, the liquid capital at the disposal of Germany is dangerously out of proportion to her borrowings and her working capital. It shows a fine confidence in the future, and it proves what needs no proof: the immense industrial and commercial progress, and the immense sea-carrying trade of Germany. Germany is like a man with $1,000 in the bank to check upon, but doing business with $100,000 of borrowed capital, upon which he must pay interest, and out of which he must take his running expenses. Such a one has no provision for a bad year, and must depend upon more credit in case of trouble; and in the case of Germany, it may be added, his personal and family expenses have largely increased. The German imperial debt had increased during the first twenty-two years of the present Emperor’s reign, or from 1888 to 1910, by $1,040,000,000, and of that sum some $650,000,000 were added in the ten years from 1900 to 1910, when Germany was building her fleet.

Between the years 1905 and 1910 the total export trade of Germany increased by $408,225,000, but the whole of the increase was due to the heavier forms of manufactures: machinery, iron ware, coal-tar dyes, iron wire, steel rails, and raw iron. The increasing competition is shown by the fact that during those same years her exports of the finer manufactures, such as cotton and woollen goods, clothing, gold and silver ware, porcelain, maps, prints, and the like, actually decreased by $66,975,000!

I am not maintaining for a moment that these problems are peculiar to Germany, but merely that, owing to the rapid progress, they are aggravated, and that to point out Germany as a model of successful achievement, along these and other lines, in order to bolster up political cure-alls at home, is a betrayal of crass ignorance of the general internal situation of the country, and once such prejudiced pleaders are found out, the rebound will go too far the other way. That were a pity, too, for we have much to learn from Germany.

The $30,000,000 in gold in the Julius Tower at Spandau, called the war-chest, and the income from railroads, forests, and mines, are to be put down on the other side of the ledger, but as a year’s war, it is calculated, would cost France, England, or Germany some $2,300,000,000 each, these sums are of negligible importance.

The Prussian railways cost $2,250,000,000, and are now valued at twice that sum, and pay an average of seven per cent. on the invested capital. Maintenance costs are included in the total annual expenses, and there is no, so it is claimed, actual depreciation. Of the net revenue of $157,330,417 in 1909, about $55,000,000 are transferred to the state revenue, out of which all charges of the state, including interest on bonds, are paid. The rest is used for new construction, sinking funds, reserve funds, and so on.

The report of the Interstate Commerce Commission of 1909- 1910 states that there are nearly $19,000,000,000 of railway capital outstanding in America. There are 240,438 miles of single track in the United States; 59,000 locomotives, 35,000 for freight, and a total of 2,290,000 cars of all kinds; and the railways carried in one year 971,683,000 passengers and 1,850,000,000 tons of freight. In 1910, 386 persons were killed, but, what is often forgotten, more than one half the total accidents were due to stealing rides and trespassing on the tracks. The railways in the United States are our largest purchasers by far, and for every dollar they earn 42 cents is spent in wages, 26 cents for material, raw or manufactured, before anything is given out for interest on loans or dividends.

A first-class ticket in Germany is taxed 16 per cent. on the price of the ticket; a second-class ticket, 8 per cent.; a third-class ticket, 4 per cent.; the fourth-class ticket, nothing. Crowded and uncomfortable travelling in Germany is cheap; comfortable travelling in Germany is very dear indeed. The herding of people in the fourth- class carriages in Germany resembles our cattle-cars rather than transportation for human beings. Such conditions would not be tolerated in America, but against these state-owned railways there is no redress. No luggage, except hand luggage, is carried free. Not once, but many times in Germany, my first-class ticket found me no accommodation, and often in changing from the main line to a branch line not even a first-class compartment. Shippers in the coal and iron districts, when I was there, complained bitterly that there were not enough freight-cars, that their complaints were smothered in bureaucratic portfolios, and that private enterprise in the shape of proposals to build new lines was disregarded. The tyranny of Prussia extends even into the railway field. The Oderberg-Wien line was built to avoid using the Saxon state railway lines, was a spite railway in fact. Here again there was no redress, no one to appeal to against the autocrat.

In a debate in the Reichstag, in January, 1913, there was much complaint that the Prussian government was conducting the railways with the least possible outlay, thus saving money for the state, but hampering the industrial interests of the country. It was stated that there were not enough engines or freight-cars, there was an inadequate staff, and that as a consequence, the loss to the coal industry had been $11,500,000 and to the coal-miners $3,375,000.

On the state-owned railways of the west of France the break-down is ludicrously complete, and the people are staggered by the official estimates that it will require at least $100,000,000 to put them in decent running order.

In twenty years the American railways have practically been rebuilt, with heavier rails, better bridges, more permanent stations, and so on; while twenty years ago it cost a passenger 2.165 cents to travel a mile, to-day it costs him 1.916 cents. We need a lot of bustling about abroad before we realize how much we have to be grateful for at home!

Probably the most costly and the most troublesome of Germany’s problems is her conquered provinces: Hanover, Schleswig-Holstein, Alsace-Lorraine, and Poland. Hanover, which was taken by Prussia and her king deposed, is nowadays a minor matter of the relations between courts, individuals, and families, which may be said to be settled by the arranged marriage between the Kaiser’s charming daughter and the heir to the Duke of Cumberland, whose ancestors were kings of Hanover.

The Danes, on the other hand, in the northern part of these provinces, still resist Prussianization. They keep to themselves and their language, send their children to school in Denmark, and resist all attempts at social and racial incorporation. They are troublesome, as an independent and surly daughter-in-law might be troublesome. Alsace-Lorraine and Posen, on the contrary, are outspoken and potentially dangerous foes in Germany’s own household.

In 1872 Bismarck said: “Alsace-Lorraine will be placed on an equality with the other German states, ... so that the people may be induced to forget, in a comparatively short time, the trouble and distress of the war and of annexation.” In 1912, a loyal Alsatian German writes: “Das Elsass, dies jungstgeborene Kind der deutschen Völkerfamilie, braucht etwas mehr Liebe.” Forty years of Prussian rule have not fulfilled the promise of Bismarck. This same Alsatian writer continues: “In short, we are approaching ever nearer to the condition of the citizens of all the other German States, as Baden, Saxony, Bavaria, where they are also not always of one mind with the higher ruling powers.”

It is difficult for the American, who, no matter what particular State he lives in, is first of all a citizen of the United States, to understand this jealousy and, in some quarters, bitter dislike of Prussia. If the State of New York had sixty million of our ninety million population, and if the governor of New York were also perpetual President of the United States, commanded the army and navy, controlled the foreign policy, and appointed the cabinet ministers, who were responsible to him alone, we could get an approximate idea of how the people of Virginia, Massachusetts, Illinois, and California would feel toward New York. This is a rough-drawn comparison with the situation in Germany. If, in addition, we had the Philippine Islands where Maine is, and Cuba where Texas is, it is easy to recognize the consequent complications.

We should remember this picture in dealing with this German problem, which, at any rate, from the point of view of kindly feeling and successful adoption of these foreign peoples into the German family, has been a dire failure. The miserable failure of the Germans in Southwest Africa, their inconclusive war with the Herreros, and the absolute break-down of Prussian methods with the natives, is scarcely more typical than the failure in Alsace-Lorraine and Poland. The Prussian belief in sand-paper as an emollient must be by now rudely shaken.

At last a constitution has been given the two conquered provinces. The governor is to be advised by a parliament, but the government is not responsible to the parliament, which is composed of two houses. The upper house has thirty-six members, eighteen of whom are nominees of the Emperor and eighteen from the churches, universities, and principal cities. The lower house is to be elected by popular franchise. Three years’ residence in the same place entitles a man to a vote, but every voter over thirty-five years of age has two votes, and every voter over forty-five has three votes.

This, as an American can appreciate, has not been received with enthusiasm, and their conduct has been so provoking that the Emperor, during a recent visit, scolded the people, in an interview with the mayor of a certain town, and, what caused great amusement among the enemies of Prussia, threatened to incorporate them into Prussia, as had been done with Hanover, if they were not better behaved. This, of course, was seized upon as an admission that to be taken into the Prussian family was of all the hardships the most dreadful. The socialist journal Vorwärts spoke of Prussia as “that brutal country which thus openly confesses its dishonor to all the world.” Herr Scheidemann asked in the Reichstag, if Prussia then acknowledged herself to be a sort of house of correction, and “has Prussia, then, become the German Siberia?” In 1911 the Reichstag gave the provinces three votes in the Federal Council.

Metz, it is said, is more French than ever, and thousands troop across the boundaries on the anniversary of the French national holiday, to celebrate it on French soil. The conquered provinces are kept in order, but the French language, French customs, French culture, are still to the fore, and so far as loyalty, affection, or a change of mind and heart is concerned the conversion is still incomplete. The inhabitants have been baptized Germans, but very few of them have taken voluntarily, their first communion of nationalization.

“On changerait plutôt le coeur de place,
Que de changer la vieille Alsace.”

The German, Karl Lamprecht, in his valuable history of contemporary Germany, is more hopeful of the situation than are other writers and observers. Professor Werner Wittich maintains that the best of the intellectual side of life in Alsace is impregnated with French culture and traditions; and even German officers long stationed in the two conquered provinces admit the stubborn allegiance of the people to French customs, habits, beliefs, and traditions. But however that may be, and it is admittedly a question that different prejudices and hopes will answer differently, there is no denial on the part of any one, high or low, that the Prussian bureaucratic mandarins have made no progress in winning the affection or the voluntary loyalty of the people. The Prussian has had recourse to the advice given by Prince Billow, “if you cannot be loved, then you must be feared.” A friend who is only a friend, an ally who is only an ally, a servant who only serves you because he is afraid of you, is not only an uncomfortable but a dangerous factor in any establishment, whether domestic or national. Corporalism, begun by Frederick the Great and fastened upon Germany by Bismarck, has had its successes. I recognized them, indeed, on returning to Germany after twenty-five years, as astounding successes, but they have their weak side too. A barracks can never be the ideal of a home, nor a corporal the ideal of a guide, philosopher, and friend. Their own philosopher Nietzsche writes: “the state is the coldest of all cold monsters.”

Joseph de Maistre, writing of the Slav temperament, says: “Si on enterrait un désir Slave sous une forteresse, il la ferait sauter.” Germany has some reason to believe that this is true.

In the northeast of Germany live some 3,000,000 Poles under Prussian supervision and laws, and ruled by a Prussian governor. There are some 7,000,000 or 8,000,000 Poles divided between Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia, and behind these are 165,000,000 Russians. The boundary between this mass and Germany is one of sand; and the railway journey from Posen to Berlin, is a matter of only four hours. If we were in Germany’s shoes, we should probably take some pains to be well guarded in that quarter. We should, however, do it in quite another fashion. We should, if possible, turn over the inhabitants to their own governing, as England has done in South Africa, as we have tried to do in Cuba, and as we would do gladly in the Philippines, if every intelligent man who knows the situation there, were not assured that robbery, murder, and license would follow on the heels of our departure; and that instead of doing a magnanimous thing we should be shirking our responsibilities in the most cowardly fashion. It is bad enough to know, that we have such cynical political sophists in Congress, that they would even suffer that catastrophe to innocent people in the Philippines, if they thought it would make them votes at home.

Prussia does not recognize such methods of ruling. Corporalism is their only way, and, where the people are fit to govern themselves, a very bad and humiliating way, for the Eden of the bureaucrat is the hell of the governed. If the Germans approve it for themselves, it is not our business to comment; but where these methods are applied to foreign peoples, we both anticipate and applaud their failure.

The insurrections in Russian and Austrian Poland, had their echoes in Posen, and since 1849 Prussia has tried in every way to substitute Germans for Poles, in the country, and to make the German language predominant in the churches, schools, and in the administration. The Poles have resisted, emphasizing their resistance in 1867, when they were included in the North German Federation, and again in 1871, when they were included in the new German Empire.

The Emperor William I, in 1886, said: “The increasing predominance of the Polish over the German element in certain provinces of the east makes it a duty of the government to guarantee the existence and the development of the German population.” Since 1871 the Poles have increased so much faster than the Germans that there is danger of complete extermination of the German population. In 1902 the grandson of William I, the present Emperor, said at Marienburg: “Polish arrogance is unbearable, and I am obliged to appeal to my people to defend themselves against it, for the preservation of their national well-being. It is a question of the defence of the civilization and the culture of Germany. To-day and to-morrow, as in the past, we must fight against the common enemy.” This speech of the Emperor was made at Marienburg, a fine old town, once very prosperous, and in the days of the Wars of the Roses playing a conspicuous part with the other Hanseatic towns. This town was also the head and seat of the Teutonic Order, and it was this Teutonic Order which, in 1230, began the work of converting the then heathen Prussians, along lines not unlike those of the Prussian Ansiedlungskommission of to-day.

Prussia has attempted to solve this question by establishing a government in the province, pledged to the introduction of the German language, and so far as possible of German manners and customs. This has been met with fierce opposition, and never have I heard in the colonies of other countries, except in Korea, under the present Japanese administration, such fanatical hatred, expressed in words, as I have heard in Posen. If you dislike Prussia, do not attempt to revile her yourself; rather go to Posen and hear it done in a far more satisfying way.

The religious question enters largely into the matter, and the ignorant Poles are even taught that the Virgin Mary, or the “Polish Queen,” will not understand their intercessions if they are not made in the Polish language. In 1870 there was one Polish newspaper in Germany, to-day there are 138.

From 1886 to 1910 the Ansiedlungskommission or committee of colonization, have spent $170,896,325, and have received $51,863,175, leaving a net expenditure of $119,033,150. This large expenditure has resulted in the settlement upon the land of 18,507 families, or about 111,000 persons. The total number settled is now 131,000 persons. Each male adult German settler has cost the state something over $32,000! This is probably the most extravagant colonization scheme ever attempted in the world.

But even this expenditure has not brought success, and for a very interesting reason. Again the Germans have been remarkably successful in their dealings with the inanimate, but the Arcana imperii are still hidden from them. They have redeemed the land, taught the Poles, as well as the German settlers, how to farm successfully; largely increased the output of grain, fruit, pigs, calves, chickens, geese, and eggs, for which Germany spends several hundred millions a year abroad; and seen to it that the breed of cows, pigs, horses, chickens, and geese is kept at a high standard. But now the Poles will sell no more land. They have profited, not been ruined, by what has come out of the belly of the Trojan horse! The commission is at a standstill, and it is now proposed to enforce the Prussian law of 1908 for the expropriation of Polish estates. This law was overwhelmingly defeated in the Reichstag in February, 1913, but the Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg declared that it was an affair of Prussia, with which the Reichstag has nothing to do, and the sand-paper of the Prussian bureaucracy will probably be rubbed upon the Polish wound anew.

This attempt to build a line of moral and intellectual forts, supplemented by German settlers, on the land between Russia and Prussia, and to stop the inrush of the Slavic population, has ample excuse behind it. It is undoubtedly in case of war a serious danger to Germany to leave herself unguarded there. As to what will come of the social and racial questions, prophecy alone can answer, and I have far too much imagination to venture upon prophecy. The care and thoroughness with which the work is done is beyond all praise, but it is as difficult to make your brother love you by taking thought thereon, as it is to add a cubit to one’s stature by the same method.

Professor Ludwig Bernhard, while regretting that this attempt at Germanization has not succeeded, admits that Prussian methods are hopeless in such matters. They have, on the contrary, awakened national feeling, encouraged the forming of agricultural societies, and strengthened the Bank of Posen, which has become the financial citadel of opposition. Professor Bernhard goes so far as to say that he doubts if even the putting into force of the expropriation law of 1908 will bring about any better results. To an American this lack of unity seems to be perhaps of exaggerated importance. Wir brauchen nicht diese Nordlichter (We do not need these northern luminaries), is a phrase of a certain Bavarian official, and in lower or louder tones one hears the phrase all over Germany outside of Prussia, and loudest of all in these conquered provinces.

To legislate men into mechanical relations with one another may keep the peace temporarily, but it is not a final solution of the intricate problem of living together in our huddled civilization. The day has gone by when we could rule men without gaining at least their respect, and if possible their affection. Prussia’s stiffness and newness as a governing power; her lack of a high moral or religious tone, for there is a rapidly increasing tendency there to agree with the writer during the French Revolution: la question de dieu man que d’actualité; her hard and inflexible methods, make her a churlish neighbor and an arrogant master. In forty years Prussia has accomplished great things despite these disadvantages of temperament, of tradition, and despite these external dangers and problems. She is learning now that there are not only individuals but whole peoples who say, as William the Conqueror said to the Pope: “Never have I taken an oath of fealty, nor shall I ever do so.

X “FROM ENVY, HATRED, AND MALICE”

It has always been considered sound doctrine among Christians that they should love one another. Vigorous exponents of the doctrine, however, have ever been few in numbers. As the world gets more crowded, and we find it more and more difficult to make room for ourselves, and to get a living, we find antagonisms and defensive tactics, occupying so much of our time and energy that loving one another is almost lost sight of. It has been found necessary even among those of the same nation to legislate for love. We call such laws, with dull contempt for irony, social legislation. In Germany, and now in England, the modern sacrament of loving one another consists in licking stamps; these stamps are then stuck on cards, which bind the brethren together in mutual and adhesive helpfulness.

With nations the problem is not so easily and superficially solved; because no one body of legislators and police has jurisdiction over all the parties concerned. As a result of this just now in Europe, wisdom is not the arbiter; on the contrary, prejudices, passions, indiscretions, and follies on the part of all the antagonists preserve a certain dangerous equipoise.

After you have seen something and heard a great deal of these antagonisms between nations; read their newspapers; talked with the protagonists and with their rulers, and with the responsible servants of the State; discussed with professors and legislators these questions; and listened to the warriors on both sides, you are somewhat bewildered. There are so many reasons why this one should distrust that one, so many rather unnatural alliances for protection against one another, so much friendship of the sort expressed by the phrase, “on aime toujours quelqu’un contre quelqu’un,” so much suspicious watching the movements of one another, that one is reminded of the jingle of one’s youth:

“There’s a cat in the garden laying for a rat,
There’s a boy with a catapult a-laying for the cat,
The cat’s name is Susan, the boy’s name is Jim.
And his father round the corner is a-laying for him.”

Even to the youngest of us, and to the most inexperienced, this betokens a strained situation. The first and most natural result is that each nation’s “watchmen who sit above in an high tower,” whether they be the professionals selected by the people or merely amateur patriots, are forever crying out for greater armaments.

At the time of the Boxer troubles in China, when Germany sent some ships to demand reparation for the murder of her ambassador in Peking, she had only two ships left at home to guard her own shores. When all England was exasperated by the Boer telegram sent by the Kaiser, or, if the truth is to be told, by his advisers, the late Baron Marshal von Bieberstein and Prince Hohenlohe, to President Kruger, official Germany lamented publicly that she lacked a powerful navy. Only a week after the Boers declared war the Kaiser is reported to have said: “Bitter is our need of a strong navy.” Germany has noticed, too, not without suspicion, that -

In 1904 England had 202,000 tons of warships in the Mediterranean and none in the North Sea.

In 1907 England had 135,000 tons of warships in the Mediterranean and 166,000 tons in the North Sea.

In 1909 England had 123,000 tons of warships in the Mediterranean and 427,000 tons in the North Sea.

In 1912 England had 126,000 tons of warships in the Mediterranean and 481,000 tons in the North Sea.

At last accounts England had 50,000 tons of war-ships in the Mediterranean and 500,000 tons in the North Sea.

There has been a steady increase of the navy in Germany. In 1900 the tonnage of war-ships and large cruisers over 5,000 tons was 152,000; in 1911 it was 823,000. The number of heavy guns in 1900 was 52; in 1911 it was 330. The horse-power of engines in 1900 was 160,000; in 1911 it was 1,051,000. The naval crews in 1900 numbered 28,326; in 1911, 57,353; and in 1913 the German naval personnel will consist of 3,394 officers and 69,495 men. Between 1900 and 1911 the tonnage of the British fleet increased from 215,000 to 1,716,000; of the German fleet from 152,000 to 829,000.

In ten years British naval expenditure has increased from $172,500,000 to $222,500,000; in Germany the expenditure has jumped from $47,500,000 to $110,000,000; in America the increase is from $80,000,000 to $132,500,000. Out of these total sums Great Britain spends one third, America one fifth, and Germany one half on new construction.

Germany has a navy league numbering over one million active and honorary members; a periodical, Die Flotte, published by the league with a circulation of over 400,000. This league not only educates but excites the whole nation by a vigorous campaign which never ceases. It takes its members on excursions to seaports to see the ships; it holds exhibitions throughout the country with pictures and lecturers; it supports seamen’s homes, and helps to equip boys wishing to enter the navy; it lends its encouragement to the two school-ships which are partly supported from public funds; it sees to it that war-ships are named after provinces and cities, creating a friendly rivalry among them; and lately, out of its surplus funds, it has presented a gun-boat to the nation.

The leading spirit of this organization is Admiral von Tirpitz, at present the German secretary of the navy and probably the most dangerous mischief-maker in Europe. In addition to this work a campaign is waged in the press for the increase of the navy, in which a number of experts are engaged. I have been told by Germans who ought to know, but who deprecate this exciting campaigning, that the press is so largely influenced by Admiral von Tirpitz and his corps of press-agents and writers, that it is even difficult to procure the publication of a protest or a reply. Indeed, were it my habit to go into personal matters, I could offer ample proof of this contention, that the opponents of naval expansion are cleverly shut out of the press altogether.

Wilhelmshafen, the naval station on the North Sea, has been fortified till it is said to be impregnable; the same has been done for Heligoland, and the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser have also been strongly fortified. At Kiel are the naval technical school, an arsenal, and dry and floating docks, and the canal itself is being widened and deepened to meet the needs of the largest ships of war.

When it is remembered that the beginnings of all this date back only to 1898, when the first navy bill was passed through the Reichstag with much difficulty, and only after the Emperor and his ministers had brought every influence to bear upon the members, Germany is certainly to be congratulated upon her success. Nor is she to be blamed for remembering, and regretting, that the two most important harbors used by her trade are Antwerp and Rotterdam, the one in Belgium, the other in Holland.

The Kielerwoche, or Kiel Regatta, has grown from the sailing-matches of a few small yachts into one of the best-managed, most picturesque, and gayest yachting weeks in the world. Indeed, from the stand-point of hospitality, orderliness, imposing array of shipping, and good racing and friendliness to the stranger, I am not sure that it is equalled at either Newport or Cowes. Were I writing merely from my personal experience, I should declare unhesitatingly that it is the most splendid and best-managed picnic on the water that one can attend, and lovers of yachts and yachting should not fail to see it. This Kielerwoche, too, has, and is intended to have, an influence in teaching the Germans to aid and abet their Emperor and his ministers in making Germany a great sea power.

When a nation for more than a hundred years has been quite comfortably safe from any fear of attack because she has been easily first in commerce, wealth, industry, and in sea power, it comes as a shock, even to a phlegmatic people, to learn that they are being rapidly overhauled commercially, financially, industrially, and as a fighting force on the sea; and all this within a few years.

England with her money subsidies, with her troops, and with her navy has heretofore provided against Continental aggression by the diplomatic philosophy of a balance of power. She has arranged her alliances with Continental powers so that no one of them could become a menace to herself. She did so against the Spain of Charles V, the France of Louis XIV, the France of Napoleon, the Russia of the late Czar, and now against the Germany of William II. The France of the great Napoleon, in attempting to complete the commercial isolation of England by compelling Russia to close her ports to her, buried herself in snow and ice on the way back from Moscow, and delivered herself up completely a little later at Waterloo. That was the nearest to success of any attempt to break through the doctrine of the balance of power.

In the year 800 A. D. the Catholic Church, which took over the Roman supremacy to translate it into a spiritual empire, accepted a German Emperor, Charlemagne, as her man-at-arms. One hundred and fifty years later she accepted still another, Otto I. This partnership was called the Holy Roman Empire. It has been noted, but is still misunderstood, that the difference between the Catholic Church before and after the Reformation was very marked. The Catholic Church claimed to be not only a system of belief but a system of government. Infallibility was to include secular as well as religious matters, and the church strove to rule as a secular emperor and as a spiritual tyrant. To-day Roman Catholicism is a sect, one among many; Roman Catholics themselves would be the last to consent to any temporal universal power.

The Protestants, too, were at first inclined to the methods of Rome. Luther teaches intolerance, and Calvin burns a heretic and writes in favor of the doctrine: Jure gladii coercendos esse hereticos. The real reformation only came when we had reformed the reformers, but it was that spiritual and political legacy from Rome that the Teuton world, including ourselves, fought to nullify.

There was no successful revolt against this curious spiritual Caesarism until the son of a Saxon miner named Luther married out of monkdom, burnt the Pope’s commands on a bonfire, and plunged all Europe first into a peasants’ war, followed by a dividing of Europe between a Protestant union and a Catholic league, and then a thirty years’ war, which destroyed two thirds of the population of what is now Germany. After three hundred years of disunion and hatreds, Prussia united their country by a cement of blood and iron, and in the last forty years has made out of her the most powerful nation on the continent of Europe.

It is only very lately that any of us have realized what has happened. So little attention has been paid to the matter that there is no sufficient and worthy history of Germany in English. More than we realize, Germany is a new factor in politics, a new rival in commerce, a new knight in the tournament lists. This accounts, in no small degree, for the uneasiness Germany causes in the world.

Forty years ago Germany was known to a few students as having supplied us with music, mythology, and a certain amount of enchanting literature; scholarship along certain lines; and work in philosophy that a few in America and in England were studying. As a knight in shining armor, demanding a place at the council-board of nations, and ready to resent any passing over of her claims to recognition in the discussion and settlement of international politics, she is a newcomer.

One of the chief causes for the restlessness, particularly in England, the heart of the greatest empire in the world, is that this new-comer must be made room for at the table, received with courtesy, and consulted. Another individual has married into the family, and must gradually find her place there. Of all nations in the world, England is the slowest to make new friends and acquaintances, and easily the most awkward in doing so. She is a good friend when you know her, but with the most abominable manners to strangers.

The Englishman, for example, pops into his club to escape the world, not to seek it there. The English club and the English home are primarily for seclusion, not for companionship, and this characteristic alone is wofully hard for the stranger to understand. To the gregarious German, priding himself upon Gemüthlichkeit, loving reunions, restaurants, his Stammtisch, formal and punctilious in his politeness, unused to the ways of the world, but yet convinced that he is now a great man politically and commercially, the Englishman is not only an enigma but an insult. I am criticising neither. I have received unbounded hospitality and friendliness from both. I have ridden, fought, drunk, travelled, and lived with both, but for that very reason I understand how horribly and continually they rub one another the wrong way.

In the fundamental matter of morals the German looks upon the Englishman as a hypocrite, and the Englishman looks upon the German as rather unpolished and undignified. Berlin is open all night, London closes at half-past twelve. The British Sunday is a gloomy suppression of vitality, touched up here and there with preaching and hymn-singing, and fringed with surreptitious golf; the German Sunday is a national fair, with a blossoming of all kinds of amusements, deluged with beer, and attended by whole families as their only relaxation during the week.

The German licenses vice, lotteries, and gambling; the Englishman refuses to recognize the existence of any of the three. The German does not understand the Englishman’s point of view in these matters, which is that, though he knows these things to exist, and that he is no better in actual practice than other men, he refuses to accept these as his ideal. He denounces and passes judgment upon, and punishes men and women, who go too far in their appreciation and practice of apolausticism as a philosophy of life. He might have run away from danger himself, but he none the less scorns the man who did so. The shipwreck, the fire, the test of moral courage and endurance, may have found him a coward, or weak, or a deserter, but he holds that he must none the less measure the coward, the weakling, and the deserter, not by his own possible weakness if put to the same tests, but by his ideal of a courageous and straightforward Englishman. I agree with him wholly and heartily. If our sympathy is to go out on every occasion, to the man who failed to come up to the mark of noble manhood, just because we feel that we might under like circumstances have failed too, then we give up the code of honor altogether, and our ideals droop to the level from which we fight and pray to be preserved.

We pass judgment upon the coward, upon the failure, upon the man who has not mastered his life and life itself, unhesitatingly. It is hard to do, it looks as though one were without pity and without sympathy. Not so; it is because we have great sympathy, and I hope unending pity, and a growing charity, and constant willingness to lend a hand; but to condone failure is to commit the selfish and unpardonable cowardice of not judging another that you may not be forced to judge yourself too harshly. That is far from being hypocrisy. Indeed, in these days it is one of the hardest things to do, so fast are we levelling down socially and politically and even morally. It looks like an assumption of superiority when, God knows, it is only a timorous attempt on our part not to lose our grip on the ideals that help to keep us out of the dust and the mud. But he who lets others off lightly in order that he may not be thought to have too high a standard himself, or because he fears that he may one day fail himself, such a one is the coward of cowards, the candidate for the lowest place in hell; and well he deserves it, for he helps to lower the standard of manhood, and he tarnishes the shield of honor of the whole race. Let them call us hypocrites till they strangle doing so, for when we lower our standards because we fear that we cannot live up to them ourselves, all will be lost. To be mild with other men, because we distrust ourselves, is a poisonous sympathy that rots away the life of him who receives it, and of him who gives it, and ends in a slobbering charity which must finally protect itself by tyranny and cruelty. Not infrequently in dealing with individuals and with subject nations it is senseless cruelty to be over-kind.

This sneer of Saxon hypocrisy, of “Perfide Albion,” is seldom explained to other people by men of our race, and we Americans and Englishmen have taken little pains to make it clear. We should not be surprised, therefore, if we are misunderstood. We have been easily first so long that we have neglected the explanation or the defence of ourselves to others.

The Germans, too, have something of the same indifference. A most sympathetic observer of German manners and customs, and a man for whose honesty and gentleness I have the highest esteem, Père Didon, remarked of the Germans: “J’ai essayé maintes fois de découvrir chez l’Allemand une sympathie quelconque pour d’autres nations; je n’y ai pas réussi.”

I call attention again to the important point, that it has been difficult to manufacture an all-round German patriotism. As a consequence patriotism in Germany is more than a sentiment, it is a theory, a doctrine, a theme to which statesmen, philosophers and poets, and rulers devote their energies. The German looks upon his nation not only as a people, but as a race, almost as a formal religion; hence perhaps his hatred of the Jew and the Slav, and his difficulties with all foreign peoples within his borders. In order to build up his patriotism the German has been taught systematically to dislike first the Austrians, then the French, now the English; and let not the American suppose that he likes him any better, for he does not. This patriotism, once developed, was drawn on for funds for an army, then for a navy. At the present time there must be some explanation offered, and the explanation is fear of England, dislike of British arrogance. In one of his latest speeches the Kaiser said: “We need this fleet to protect ourselves from arrogance”; that, of course, means, always means, British arrogance.

From the moment a child goes to school, by pictures on the walls, by an indirect teaching of history and geography, he is led on discreetly to find England in Germany’s way. At the present writing German school children, and German students, and German recruits are imbued with the idea that Germany’s relations with England are in some sort an armistice. This poisonous teaching of patriotism has produced wide-spread enmity of feeling among the innocent, but this enmity has built the navy. And now that in certain quarters it is found desirable to soothe and calm this feeling, it proves to be more difficult to subdue than it was to arouse. The monster that Frankenstein called up devours its own creator. Now that England can no longer be the enemy, because Germany’s greatest present and future danger is from the Slav races, there are evidences that the German state is teaching the dog not to bark at England any more.

Germany has not neglected England, but of late she has paid her the wrong kind of attention. Erasmus, the scholar-rapier, as Luther was the hammer, of the Reformation, visits England and writes: “Above all, speak no evil of England to them. They are proud of their country above all nations in the world, as they have good reason to be.”

Kant, the German philosopher, on his clock-like rounds in Königsberg, knew something of England and writes of her: “Die englische Nation, als Volk betrachtet, ist das schätzbarste Ganze von Menschen im Verhältniss unter einander; aber als Staat gegen fremde Staaten der verderblichste, gewaltsamste, herrschsüchtigste und kriegerregendste von allen.”

(“The English, as a people, in their relations to one another are a most estimable body of men, but as a nation in their relations with other nations they are of all people the most pernicious, the most violent, the most domineering, and the most strife-provoking.”)

Another German, something of a scholar, something of a philosopher, but a wit and a singer, Heine, visited England, and, as he handed a fee to the verger who had shown him around Westminster Abbey, said: “I would willingly give you twice as much if the collection were complete!” To him Napoleon defeated was a greater man than the “starched, stiff” Wellington; and the “potatoes boiled in water and put on the table as God made them” and the “country with three hundred religions and only one sauce were a constant source of amused annoyance. The German professors and students, who in the early part of the nineteenth century lauded English constitutional liberty to the skies and made a god of Burke, have soured toward England since.

“What does Germany want?” asked Thiers of the German historian Ranke. “To destroy the work of Louis XIV,” was the reply. Professor Treitschke and his successor in the chair of history at Berlin, Professor Delbrück, have been outspoken in their denunciation of England. Mommsen, Schmoller, Schiemann, Zorn of Bonn, and his colleague there, von Dirksen, Professor Dietrich Schaefer, Professor Adolph Wagner, and many other scholars have been, and are, politicians in Germany, and none of them friendly to England, to France, or to America. Bismarck himself remarked of these gentlemen: “Die Politik ist keine Wissenschaft, wie viele der Herren Professoren sich einbilden, sie ist eben eine Kunst” (“Politics is not a science as many professorial gentlemen fancy; it is an art”); and again: “Die Arbeit des Diplomaten, seine Aufgabe, besteht in dem praktischen Verkehr mit Menschen, in der richtigen Beurtheilung von dem, was andere Leute unter gewissen Umständen wahrscheinlich thun werden, in der richtigen Erkennung der Absichten anderer; in der richtigen Darstellung der seinigen” (” The work of the diplomat, his chief task, indeed, consists in the practical dealing with men, in his sound judgment of what other people would probably do under certain circumstances, in his correct interpretation of the intentions and purposes of other people, and in the accurate presentation of his own”).

He began his political life in 1862 with the phrase: “Die grossen Fragen können durch Reden und Majoritätsbeschlüsse nicht entschie den werden, sondern durch Eisen und Blut” (“The great questions cannot be decided by speeches and the decisions of majorities, but by iron and blood”).

It is a well-known professor who writes: “Denn die einzige Gefahr, die den Frieden in Europa und damit den Weltfrieden droht, liegt in den krankhaften übertreibungen des englischen Imperialismus” (“The only danger to the peace of Europe, and that includes the peace of the world, lies in the morbid excesses of British imperialism”). Another quotation from the same pen reads: “So far as other perils to the British Empire are concerned, they are of much the same character, but the empire suffers too from the selfish policy of English business, which, in order to create big business, does not hesitate to interfere with the declared policy of the state.” Then follows the statement that English traders have smuggled guns to the Persian Gulf.

Professor Zorn writes: “The possibility that while our Emperor was seeking rest and refreshment in Norwegian waters and enjoying the beauties of the Norwegian landscape, English ships were lying in readiness to annihilate German ships.” It is hard to believe that such lunatic lies can come from the pen of a professor in good standing.

“Ohne zu übertreiben kann man sagen dass heute nur der allerkleinste Teil der deutschen Presse geneigt ist, den Engländern Gerechtigkeit widerfahren zu lassen, bei Behandlung allgemeiner Fragen sich auch einmal auf den englischen Standpunkt der Betrachtung wenigstens zeitweise zu versetzen. England ist fur viele ‘der’ Feind an sich, und em Feind dem man keine Rücksichten schuldet.”

(“It is no exaggeration to say that nowadays only the tiniest minority of the German press is inclined to do justice to the English by at least occasionally looking at questions from the British point of view. England is for many the enemy of enemies and an enemy to whom no consideration is due.”) Thus writes one of the cooler heads in the Kölnische Zeitung.

Doctor Herbert von Dirksen, of Bonn, writing of the Monroe Doctrine, says: “By what right does America attempt to check the strongest expansion policy of all other nations of the earth?” During the Boer war Germany was showered with post-cards and caricatures of the English. British soldiers with donkey heads marched past Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales; the venerable Queen Victoria is pictured plucking the tail feathers from an ostrich which she holds across her knees; the three generals, Methuen, Buller, and Gatacre, take off their faces to discover the heads of an ass, a sheep, and a cow; Chamberlain is depicted as the instigator of the war, with his pockets and hands full of African shares; a parade of the stock-exchange volunteers depicts them as all Jews, with the Prince of Wales as a Jew reviewing them; the Prince of Wales is pictured surrounded by vulgar women, who ask, “Say, Fatty, you are not going to South Africa?” to which the Prince replies, “No, I must stay here to take care of the widows and orphans!” English soldiers are depicted in the act of hitting and kicking women and children.

In the war with Denmark in 1864 the Austrian navy met with a disaster at sea. A German publicist even then wrote: “I was grieved at the demonstrations of joy about this in the English Parliament. It was not sympathy with the Danes but petty spite and malice at the defeat of a foreign fleet. But at the same time it is a consolatory proof that the English are afraid of the future German navy.” This quotation is interesting as showing how far back the quarrel dates.

It would be merely a question of how much time one cares to devote to scissors and paste to multiply these examples of Germany’s journalistic and professorial state of mind. It is unfortunate that some of this writing in the press is done by those who are often in consultation with the Emperor, and on some political subjects his advisers. I have suggested in another chapter that Germany suffers far more from the theoretical and book-learned gentlemen who surround the Emperor than from his indiscretions. In more than one instance his indiscretions were due to their blundering. Their knowledge of books far surpasses their knowledge of men, and nothing can be more dangerous to any nation than to be counselled and guided by pedants rather than by men of the world. This projecting a world from the gaseous elements of one’s own cranium and dealing with that world, instead of the world that exists, is a danger to everybody concerned.

“Bedauernswert sei es allerdings, dass wir in unserem politischen Leben nicht mit gentlemen zu thun haben, dies sei aber em Begriff der uns überhaupt abgehe,” writes Prince Hohenlohe in his memoirs. (“It is of all things most to be regretted that in our political life we do not have gentlemen to deal with, but this is a conception of which we are totally deficient.”)

A daring colonial secretary, speaking in the Reichstag of certain scandals in the German colonies, said bluntly: “A reprehensible caste feeling has grown up in our colonies, the conception of a gentleman being in England different from that in Germany.”

When Lord Haldane came to Berlin, on his mission to discover if possible a working basis for more friendly relations between the two countries, his eyes were greeted in the windows of every book-shop with books and pamphlets with such titles as “Krieg oder Frieden mit England,” “Das Perfide Albion,” “Deutschland und der Islam,” “Ist England kriegslustig,” “Deutschland sei Wach,” “England’s Weltherrschaft und die deutsche Luxusflotte,” “John Bull und wir,” and a long list of others, all written and advertised to keep alive in the German people a sense of their natural antagonism to England.

During the last year the “Letters of Bergmann” brought up again the controversy, that should have been left to die, over the treatment of the Emperor Friedrich by an English surgeon.

In discussing Senator Lodge’s resolution before the United States Senate, on the Monroe Doctrine, the German press spoke of us as “hirnverbrannte Yankees,” “bornierte Yankeegehirne” (“crazy Yankees,” “provincial Yankee intellects”); and the words “Dollarika,” “Dollarei,” and “Dollarman” are further malicious expressions of their envy, frequently used. The Germans are persistently taught that there are neither scholars nor students in America or in England. One worthy writes: “Die Engländer lernen nichts. Der Sport lässt ihnen keine Zeit dazu. Man ist hinterher auch zu müde.”

I am always very glad, when I happen to be in Europe, that I belong to a nation that can afford to take these flings with the greatest good-humor. As the burly soldier replied when questioned in court as to why he allowed his small wife to beat him: “It pleases her and it don’t hurt I.”

This struggle for recognition as a great nation, to be received on equal terms by the rest of us, has upset the nerves of certain classes in Germany, and among them the untravelled and small-town-dwelling professor.

I am a craftsman in letters myself, in a small way, but I am no believer that books are the only key to life, or the only way to find a solution for its riddles and problems. Life is language, and books only the dictionaries; men are the text, books only the commentaries. Books are only good as a filter for actual experiences. A man must have a rich and varied experience of men and women before he can use books to advantage. Life is varied, men and women many, while the individual life is short; wise men read books, therefore, to enrich their experience, not merely as the pedant does, to garner facts. “J’étudie les livres en attendant que J’étudie les hommes,” writes Voltaire. “Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life,” writes Stevenson.

Montgolfier sees a woman’s skirt drying and notices that the hot air fills it and lifts it, and this gives him the idea for a balloon.

Denis Papin sees the cover lifted from a pot by the steam, and there follow the myriad inventions in which steam is the driving power.

Newton, dozing under an apple-tree, is hit on the head by a falling apple, and there follows the law of gravitation.

Franklin flies a kite, and a shock of electricity starts him upon the road to his discoveries.

Archimedes in his bath notices that his body seems to grow lighter, and there follows the great law which bears his name.

These are the foundation-stones upon which the whole house of science is built, and no one of them was dug out of a book. Charlemagne could not read, and Napoleon, when he left school for Paris, carried the recommendation from his master that he might possibly become a fair officer of marines, but nothing more! A capital example of the ability of the man of books to measure the abilities of the man of the world.

Reading and writing are modern accomplishments, and we grossly exaggerate their importance as man-makers. That, it has always been my contention, is the fatal fallacy of modern education, and you may see it carried to its extreme in Germany, for men who have not lived broadly are merely hampered by books. It is as though one studied a primer with an etymological dictionary at his side. Germans are renowned writers of commentaries, but you cannot deal with men and with life by the aid of commentaries. Exegesis solves no international quarrels, and the mastery of men is not gained with dictionaries and grammars.

We are all prone to forget the end in the means, for the end is far away and the means right under our noses. We all recognize, when we are pulled up short and made to think, that, after all, the arts and letters, religion and philosophy and statecraft, are for one ultimate purpose, which is to develop the complete man. Everything must be measured by its man-making power. Ideas that do not grow men are sterile seed. Men who do not move other men to action and to growth are not to be excused because they stir men to the merely pleasant tickling of thinking lazily and feeling softly. Thus Lincoln was a greater man than Emerson; Bismarck a greater than Lessing; Cromwell a greater than Bunyan; Napoleon a greater than Corneille and Racine; Pericles greater than Plato; and Caesar greater than Virgil.

The man who only makes maps for the mind is only half a man, until his thinking, his influence, his dreams and enthusiasms take on the potency of a man and come into action. Even if men of action do evil, as some of those I mention have done, they have translated theories into palpable things that permit men to judge whether they be good or bad; and the really great artists, thinkers, and saints are as fertile as though they were female, and gave birth, to living things. Their thinking is a form of action. The real test of successful organization is the thoroughness of the thinking behind it; on the other hand, the only test of thinking is the success of the thought in actual execution, and the Germans often take this too much for granted. We really know and hold as an inalienable intellectual possession only what we have gained by our own effort, and with a certain degree of actual exertion. People who have never worked out their own salvation always join, at last, that large class in the body politic who don’t know what they want, and who will never be happy till they get it.

When it comes to dealing with inanimate things, books of rules are invaluable. Hence, in chemistry, physics, archaeology, philology, exegesis, the Germans have forged ahead; their intellectual street-cleaning is unsurpassed; but the ship of state needs not only men to take observations and to read charts, but men to trim the sails to the fitful breezes, the blustering winds, the tempests and the changing currents of life. They must know, too, the methods, the manners, the habits of other men who sail the seas of life. It is just here that the German fails; he lacks the confidence of experience, and bursts into bluster and bravado. He is a believer in vicarious experience, and is as little likely to be saved by it, in this world at least, as he is by vicarious sacrifice.

His imagination does not make allowances for either England or America. He does not see, for example, that the Monroe Doctrine is not open for discussion for the simple reason that America has announced it as American policy; just as Prussia took part three times in the dismemberment of Poland; just as Prussia pounced upon Silesia; just as Germany took Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig-Holstein and Frankfort, and held the ring while Austria-Hungary bagged Bosnia and Herzegovina, and by the word of her Emperor, promised to do the same thing for Russia, when Japan declared war against her. We have decided that we will have no European sovereignty in South America, and this side war, that is the end of the matter, call it the Monroe Doctrine or what you will. It only makes for uneasiness and bad temper to discuss it. It is the national American policy. It may be right or wrong theoretically, but international law has nothing to do with it. The German professors who discuss it from that stand-point, are beating the air and raising a dust in the world’s international drawing-room.

This German mania for translating facts back into philosophy and then dancing through a discussion of theories is not understood, much less appreciated, by the rest of the world. We can never get on if we are to introduce the discussion of the lines of every new battle-ship by arguments as to the sea-worthiness of the ark. Those of us who control a quarter of the habitable globe, and the inhabitants thereof, are much too busy to discuss the legal aspects of the land-grabbing of the Pharaohs. Geography is not metaphysics, but it is wofully hard for the professorial mind to grasp this.

“Given a mouse’s tail, and he will guess
With metaphysic quickness at the mouse.”

In much the same way German statesmen and the German press do not understand, or do not care to understand, that British statesmen when they speak in the House of Commons, or when they go to the country asking increased appropriations for the navy, must give some reason for their request. There is only one reason, and that is that there is a growing navy across the North Sea, which, whether now it is or is not a menace, may be a menace to their ship-fed island, and they must have ships and men and guns enough to guard the sea-lanes which their food-laden ships must sail through.

They may be awkward sometimes in their expression of this self-evident fact, they may call their own fleet a necessity and the other fleet a luxury, but that is a negligible question of verbal manners; the fact remains that their fleet is, and all the world knows it is, and it is laughable to discuss it, the prime necessity of their existence.

As long as we Christians have given up any shred of belief in Christian ethics, as applicable to international disputes, we must live by the law of the strongest. We do not bless the poor in spirit, but the self-confident; we do not bless the meek, but the proud; we do not bless the peace-makers, but those who urge us to prepare for war; we do not bless the reviled and the persecuted and the slandered, but those who revolt against injustice and tyranny; we do not approve the cutting off of the right hand, but admire the mailed fist; and it is only adding to the confusion to raise millions for war ourselves, and then to present a handsomely bound copy of the Beatitudes to our rivals.

I shall be wantonly misunderstood if these reflections be taken as a criticism of Germany. This situation involves Germany in censure no more than other nations. It is only that Germany shows herself to be somewhat childish and peevishly provincial, in girding at an unchangeable situation, either in South America or in the North Sea.

This is not altogether Germany’s fault. She is suffering from growing pains, and from grave internal unrest. She is only just of age as a nation, and her constitution is so inflexible that it is a constant source of irritation. She is governed by an autocracy, and the two strongest parties numerically in her Reichstag are the party of the Catholics and the party of the Socialists. She has built up a tremendous trade on borrowed capital, and every gust of wind in the money market makes her fidgety. Her population increases at the rate of some 800,000 a year, but her educational system produces such a surplus of laborers who wish to work in uniforms, or in black coats and stiff collars, that there is a dearth of agricultural laborers, and she imports 700,000 Hungarians, Poles, Slays, and Italians every year to harvest her crops.

This same system of education has taught youths to think for themselves before either the mental or moral muscles are tough enough, with the result that she is the agnostic and materialistic nation of Europe, and her capital the most licentious and immoral in Europe.

This is the result of secular education everywhere. Freedom of thought, yes, but not freedom of thought any more than freedom of morals, or freedom of manners, or political freedom, in extreme youth; that only makes for anarchy political, mental, and moral.

There is much undigested, not to say indigestible, republicanism about just now in China and in Portugal, for example; just as there are materialism and agnosticism in Germany and in France, not due to super-intellectualism but to juvenile thinking. The Chinese are just as fit for a republic - an actual republic is still a long way off - as are callow German youths, and notoriety-loving French students, for freedom to disbelieve and to destroy. No country can long survive a majority of women teachers in the public schools, together with no Bible and no religious teaching there. I have no prejudices favoring orthodoxy, but I have a fairly wide experience which has given me one article of a creed that I would go to the stake for, and that is that it is of all crimes the worst to give freedom political, moral, or religious to those who are unprepared for it.

Germany’s taste in literature, once so natural and healthy, has become morbid, and Sudermann and Gorky and Oscar Wilde, and the rest of the unhealthy crew who swarm about the morgues, the dissecting-rooms, and the houses of assignation of life, the internuntiata libidinum, the leering conciliatrices of the dark streets, are her favorites now. There is no surer sign of mental ill-health than a taste for lowering literature, an appetite for this self-dissecting, this complacent, self-contemplating form of intellectual exercise.

This is no heated assault on German culture. It is a natural phase of development. Youthful candidates for worldliness all go through this pornocratic stage. “The impudence of the bawd is modesty, compared with that of the convert,” writes the Marquis of Halifax. The German professor and the German bourgeois in their Rake’s Progress are only a little more awkward, a little more heavy-handed, a little coarser in speech, than others, that is all. The period of twenty-five years during which I have known Germany has developed before my eyes the concomitants of vast and rapid industrial and commercial progress, and they are: a love of luxury, a great increase in gambling, a materialistic tone of mind, a wide-spread increase of immorality, and a tendency to send culture to the mint, and to the market-place to be stamped, so that it may be readily exchanged for the means of soft living. These internal changes account to some extent for her restless external policy. A man’s digestion has a good deal to do with the color of the world when he looks at it. There is more yellow in life from biliousness, than from the state of the atmosphere.

Aside from these domestic causes there is no reason why Germany should take a sentimental or pious view of these questions of international amity. Her own history is development by war. “Any war is a good war when it is undertaken to increase the power of the state,” said Frederick the Great. “Nur das Volk wird eine gesicherte Stellung in der Welt haben, das von kriegerischen Geiste erfüllt ist” (“Only that nation will hold a safe place in the world which is imbued with a warlike spirit”) writes Germany’s great military philosopher Clausewitz.

We took Cuba and the Philippines; England took India, Hong Kong, and Egypt; Japan took Korea and southern Manchuria; Italy took Tripoli; France took Fez; Russia took Finland and northern Manchuria; Austria-Hungary took Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Prussia and Germany have a long list, including Silesia, Poland, Hanover, and Alsace-Lorraine. Austria-Hungary tears up the Berlin treaty; France, Germany, and Spain tear up the Algeciras treaty; Italy tears up the treaty of Paris; and it is part of the game that we should all hold up our hands, avert our faces, and thank God that we are not as other men are, when these things are done. The justifications of these actions are all of the most pious and penitent description. We were forced to do so, we say, in order to hasten the bringing in of our own specially patented and exclusive style of the kingdom of heaven, but outside of perhaps India and Egypt, and the Philippines, it would be hard to find to-day any trace of the promised kingdom. Germany, for example, had nine per cent. of Moroccan trade, the total of Moroccan trade with all countries only amounted to $27,500,000 a year, and she was compelled to interfere for the protection of her traders, forsooth! The outcome of the business, after an exciting situation lasting for months, was that Germany got a slice of territory from France, mostly swamps, which reaches from the Congo to the Atlantic Ocean, and reported to be, by her own engineers, uninhabitable.

It is the pleasant formula of polite statesmen and politicians to say, that it is a pity that Germany came into the world competition a hundred years too late, when the best colonies had been parcelled out among the other powers. This is a superficial view of the case, and misses the real point of the present envy, hatred, malice, and uncharitableness. Germany does not want colonies, and has no ability of the proper kind, and no willing and adventurous population to settle them, if she had. Prussia’s dealing with aborigines is a subject for comic opera.

Germany came into the modern world as a dreamer, as a maker of melodies, as a singer of songs, as a sort of post-graduate student in philosophy and in theoretical, and later applied science. She introduced us to classical philology, to modern methods of historical research, to the comparative study of ethnic religions, to daring and scholarly exegesis, to the study of the science of language. She discovered Shakespeare to the English; Eduard Mätzner and Eduard Müller, and German scholars in the study of phonetics, have written our English grammars and etymological dictionaries for us, and helped to lay the foundations for knowledge of our own language. Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, one need not mention more, attempted to pass beyond the bounds of human experience and to formulate laws for the process; Schleiermacher, maintaining that Christian faith is a condition of devout feeling, a fact of inward experience, an object which may be observed and described, had an unbounded influence in America, and many are the ethical discourses I have listened to which owed more to Schleiermacher than to their authors. Humboldt, Liebig, Bunsen, Helmholtz, Johannes Müller, Von Baer, Virchow, Koch, Diesel, even the British and American man in the street, with little interest in such matters, knows some of these names; while Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are symbols of revolt, whose names are flung into an argument by many who only know their names, but who fondly suppose that the one stands for despair and suicide, and the other for the joy and unbridled license of the strong man.

Reckoning by epochs, it was only yesterday that Germany said to the world: “No more of this!”

“Hang up philosophy!
Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,
Displant a town, reverse a prince’s doom,
It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more!”

Of a sudden our scholar threw off his gown and cap, and said: “I propose to play base-ball and foot-ball with you, I propose to have a hand in the material spoils of life, I propose to have a seat at the banquet and to propose toasts and to be toasted!” Faust of a sudden left his gloomy, cobwebby laboratory, flung a fine cloak over his shoulders, stuck a dandy feather in his cap, buckled on a rapier, and began roistering with the best of us. We sneered and smiled at first, let us be frank and admit it. We did not think much of this new buck. We had little fear that the professor, even if he took off his spectacles and slippers and dressing-gown, and exchanged his pipe for a cigarette, would cut much of a figure as a lover. He was new to the game, we were old hands at it, but the first thing we knew he had given the world’s mistress, France, a scolding, and flung her into a corner, a cowering heap of outraged finery; and she has only been safe ever since in the rôle of a sort of mistress of England on board- wages.

A new cock in the barn-yard is never received with great cordiality. He must win his place and his power with his beak and his spurs. We all of us had enough to do before this fellow came along. We are a little jealous of him, we are all uneasier because he is about, and he has done so well at our games, now that he has indeed hung up philosophy, that we are not even sure that it is safe to take him on in a serious match. We have endeavored, therefore, to keep him occupied with his own neighbors, to whom we have extended our best wishes and our moral backing, which is known as keeping the balance of power in Europe.

But a new Germany has come into the world. Germany nowadays has a large class, as have the rest of us, who belong to that increasing number of extraordinary people who want money without even knowing how to get on without it. The only satisfactory test of the right to wealth is the ability to get on without it. One of modern civilization’s most dangerous pitfalls is the subversive doctrine that all men shall have wealth, even before they have proved their ability to do without it. Germany is gradually arriving at this puny stage of culture, whose beginnings may be said to date from that ominous year for culture, 1492, when Lorenzo di Medici died and Columbus discovered America!

During all this time statesmen have insisted that there is no good reason why Germany and England should not be on good terms; gentlemen of various trades and professions from both countries, speaking halting English or embarrassed German, as the case may be, cross each other’s boundaries, comment upon the beauties of the respective countries, and overeat themselves in ponderous endeavors to appear cordial and appreciative. Mayors and aldermen swap stories and compliments over turtle and sherry, or over sauerkraut and Johannisberger; bands of students visit Oxford or Heidelberg, and there is a chorus of praise of Goethe from one side, of Shakespeare from the other; and all the while there is an unceasing antiphonal of grimaces and abuse in the press. Not even when Germany exports her latest stage novelties to London, and pantomimic platitudes are dandled under colored lights, does the turmoil of martial talk cease. Not even Teutonic lechery, in the guise of Reinhartian art, dressed in nothing but silence, and making faces at the British censor on the boards of the music-halls, avails anything.

Of course all this is nuts to the irresponsible journalists, to the manufacturers of powder, guns, and ships, and to politicians and diplomats out of employment; but it is hard on the taxpayer, who has no dividends from manufacturers of lethal weapons and ships, nor from newspapers, and no notoriety from the self-imposed jobs of the unofficial diplomats.

Perhaps of all these factors the press, in its wild gamble to make money out of sensationalism, is most to blame. The press, for the sake of gain, has soiled and soured the milk of human kindness by exposing it, carelessly and unceasingly, to the pathogenic dangers of the dust of the street and the gutter. It is wholly unfitting and always demoralizing when the priest, the politician, and the journalist turn their attention to private gain. Any one of these three who makes a great fortune out of his profession is damned by that fact alone. The only payment, beyond a living, that these three should look to is, respect, consideration, and the honor of serving the state unselfishly and wisely. The world will be all the happier when there are no more Shylocks permitted in any of these professions.

Germany is autocratic, philosophical, and continental; England is democratic, political, and insular. It is hopeless to suppose that the great mass of the people of one country will understand the other, and, for this is the important point, it is wholly unnecessary.

We get on best and with least friction with people whom we do not understand in the least. A man may have known and liked people with whose aims, opinions, employment, creeds he has the smallest sympathy. One may mention such diverse personalities as John L. Sullivan, the prize-fighter, Cardinal Rampolla, Mr. Roosevelt, Doctor Jameson, the Kaiser, President Diaz of Mexico, numerous Jew financiers, Lord Haldane the scholar-statesman, and a long list of professors, pious priests, sportsmen, and idlers, not to speak of Hindus and Mohammedans, Japanese and Chinese, and half a dozen Sioux chiefs. With these gentlemen, a few of many with whom one may have been upon such pleasant terms that they have even confided in him and trusted him with their secrets, one may have passed many pleasant hours. It probably never entered such a man’s head to wonder whether they liked him, and he never discussed with them the question of his liking for them. We get on by keeping our own personalities, prejudices, and creeds intact. There is no other way.

Other men will give even a more diverse list of friends and acquaintances, and never for a moment dream that there is any mystery in being friends with all. Nothing is ever gained by flattery. To the serious man flattery in the form of sincere praise makes him more responsible and only sadder, because he knows how much he falls below what is expected of him, and what he expects of himself. Lip-flattery makes a real man feel as though his sex had been mistaken, he feels as though he had been given curling-tongs instead of a razor for his morning toilet. These pompous flatteries that pass between Germany and England to-day, make both sides self-conscious and a little ashamed to write and to speak them, and to hear and applaud them.

America and England are shortly to celebrate the signing of the treaty of Ghent, which marks a hundred years of peace between the two nations. We have not been without opportunities to quarrel. We have whole classes of people in America who detest England, and in England there are not a few who do not conceal successfully their contempt for America, but we have had peace, and since England, at the time of our war with Spain, said “Hands off!” to the powers that wished to interfere, there has been a great increase of friendly feeling. But there has been little or no flattery passing back and forth. We have sent ambassador after ambassador to England who were almost more American than the Americans. Phelps and Lowell and Hay and Choate and Reid were all American in name, in tradition, in their successes, and in their way of looking at life. By their learning, their wit, and their criticisms, by their writing and speaking, by their presentation of the claims to greatness of our great men, by their unhesitating avowal in public and in private of their allegiance to the ideals of the republic they served, they have made clear the American point of view. Above all, they have shown their pride in their own country by acknowledging and praising the great qualities of England and the English. There has been no fulsome flattery, no bowing the knee to foreign idols, and what has been the result? The American ambassador for years has been the most popular diplomatic figure in Great Britain. An increasing number of Englishmen even, nowadays, know who Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln were, and our understanding of one another has grown rapidly out of this frank and manly attitude. We were jealous and suspicious a hundred years ago, as are England and Germany to-day, but we have changed all that by our attitude of good-humored independence, and by eliminating altogether from our intercourse the tainted delicacy of compliment, and the canting endearments of the diplomatic cocotte. We have emphasized our differences to the great benefit of the fine qualities that we have and cherish in common.

The individual Protestant does not dislike the individual Papist, half so much as he dislikes his neighbor in the next pew, who refuses Sunday after Sunday to repeat the service and the creed at the same pace as the others, and hence to “descend into Hell” with the rest of the congregation. The Sioux chief was far more annoyed by his neighbor of the same tribe in the next-door reservation than he was by me. The pugilist scorned “Tug” Wilson, a brother fisticuffs sovereign, but had no feeling against his parish priest. Theological protagonists are notoriously bitter against one another, but we have all found many of them amiable companions ourselves. It is the fellow next door, who wears purple socks, or who parts his hair in the middle, or who wears his coat-sleeves longer than our tailor cuts ours, or who eats his soup with a noise, or who has damp hands, or talks through his nose, who irritates us and makes us wish occasionally for the unlimited club-using freedom of the stone age. It is your first cousin with incurable catarrh, and a slender income who is too much with you, and who spoils your temper, not the anarchist orator who threatens your property and almost your life.

“What do these Germans want?” asked a distinguished cabinet minister of me. “They want consideration,” I replied, “which is the most difficult thing in the world for the Englishman to offer anybody.” “But, you don’t mean to say,” he continued, “that they really want to cut our throats on account of our bad manners?” I cannot phrase it better, nor can I give a more illuminating illustration of the misunderstanding. That is exactly the reason, and the paramount reason, why nations and why individuals attempt to cut one another’s throats. Whatever the fundamental differences may have been that have led to war between nations, the tiny spark that started the explosion has always been some phase of rudeness or bad manners.

Counting my school-days, I can remember about a dozen personal conflicts in which I have engaged, with pardonable pleasure. Not one of them was a question of territory, or religious difference, or of racial hatred; indeed, the last one was due to being shouldered in the street when my equanimity was already disturbed by a lingering recovery from a feverish cold.

It is, after all, the little differences that count. If politically and socially Germany were a little more sure of herself, if she were not ever omnia tuta timens Dido; and if England were not as ever quite so sure of herself, I believe intercourse between them would be less strained.

“The little gnat-like buzzings shrill,
The hurdy-gurdies of the street.
The common curses of the will-
These wrap the cerements round our feet.”

The smothered voice, the tepid manner, the affected and hesitating under-statement, of a certain middlish class of English men and women, and, alas, their American imitators, who are striving toward their comical interpretation of the Vere de Vere manner, are the promoters of guffaws in private, and uneasiness in public, between nations, to a far greater extent than the bold individualist, whose voice and manners, good or bad, are all his own. It is these small attritions that wear us down, and produce a sub-acid dislike between nations as between individuals. It is these that prepare the ground for a fine crop of misunderstandings.

But are we not to know our neighbors the English, the Germans, the French? I for one consider that not to know German and Germany, for example, is nowadays not to be fully educated. Most of us, however, have had our nerves unstrung by the speeding-up process that has gone on all over the world of late. We have lost somewhat the power to know people and to let them alone at the same time. Goethe, one of the coolest and wisest of men, maintains: “Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality. One would not be pleased if old friends were to lay aside certain peculiarities.”

We should at least give every man as fair a chance to receive our good opinion as we give a picture. We should put him in a good light before we criticise him. We should take time enough to do that to other nations, as well as to individuals. I have always had much sympathy for a certain Roman general. He was blind, and a painter who painted him with two large eyes, he rebuked; another painter, who painted him in profile, he rewarded.

It is, after all, something of an art to know people, so that the knowledge is serviceable, so that you can depict them to yourself and to others, not as they are as opposed to you, but as they are as a complement and help to you.

“No human quality is so well wove
In warp and woof, but there’s some flaw in it;
I’ve known a brave man fly a shepherd’s cur,
A wise man so demean himself, drivelling idiocy
Had wellnigh been ashamed on’t. For your crafty,
Your worldly-wise man, he, above the rest,
Weaves his own snares so fine, he’s often caught in them.”

He who does not make allowances for weaknesses and differences in his study of human affairs is still in the infant class. It is a grave danger to every state that critics, smart or shallow, with their tu quoque weapons, their silly ridicule, their emphasis upon differences as though they were disasters, their constant failure to recognize the value of certain weaknesses, their stupidity in not painting great men who happen to be blind, in profile, and their harping upon the flaws, and their neglect of the fine texture of human qualities that are strange to them, that these critics are not muzzled, or, if that is impossible, disregarded.

They make it appear that amicable relations between nations are next to impossible. If you escape one danger of offending, you are sure to give offence in some other way, they seem to say. They are hysterical in their self-consciousness, “as if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him, or went in the house and leaned his hand on the wall and a serpent bit him.” Sir Edward Grey writes on this subject: “I sometimes think that half the difficulties of foreign policy arise from the exceeding ingenuity of different countries in attributing motives and intentions to the governments of each other. As far as I can observe, the press of various countries is much more fertile in inventing motives and intentions for the governments of the different countries than the foreign ministers of these countries are themselves. Foreign governments and our own government live from hand to mouth and have fewer deep plans than people might suppose. There is an old warning that you should not spend too much time in looking at the dark cupboard for the black cat that is not there, and I think if sometimes we were a little less suspicious of deep design or motive that the affairs of the world would progress more smoothly.”

The trouble lies in our undertaking the impossible, to the neglect of the obvious and the possible. The basic fact of nationality is a preference for our own ways, customs, and habits over those of other people. If the Chinese and Japanese, the Servians and Albanians, the English and the Germans liked one another as well as they like their own, there would be no nationalism to protect or to preserve. Such racial and traditional liking of nation for nation is impossible of achievement. No journeyings, speechifyings, banquets, or compliments will bring it about. On the contrary, I am not sure that it is not these very differences which cheer us and give us a new flavor in our pleasure in living, when we cross the Atlantic, the Channel, or the Rhine. What we should strive for is not social and racial absorption, but social and racial difference and distinction, with that pride in our own which makes for patience in the understanding of others.

It is the petty, self-conscious American who hates the English, the provincial Englishman who hates the German, the socially insecure German who hates the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the American. Those of us who are poised, secure, satisfied, and at bottom proud of our race, our breeding, and our country, are neither irritable nor irritating in the matter of international relations. We have enough to do, and let others alone. Let us dine one another, criticise one another in the effort to improve ourselves, praise one another where the praise serves to establish our own ideals; but let us give up this forced and awkward courting by banquets, deputations, and conferences. Let us study the great art of leaving one another alone. This is a time-hallowed doctrine. The greatest of all satirists and critics of manners knew this secret of successful intercourse with one another. One of the characters in the “Frogs” of Aristophanes is made to say: “Don’t come trespassing upon my mind; you have a house of your own.” Propinquity does not necessarily entail intimacy; as the world grows smaller, more and more people think so, perhaps often enough only to escape from themselves, a favorite form of elopement these days. Some men are fed by solitude and starved by too much companionship, and the same is true of nations. You cannot control others till you have learned to control yourself, or save another till you yourself are saved, and most of us had better be about that business.

It is England’s business to know just now, and to some extent ours, how many ships Germany is building and how many men she has in training to man them; but it is not in the least anybody’s business to question her motives or to attempt to dictate her policy. It is our business to shut up, and to build ships and to train men according to our notions of what is necessary for safety in case of an explosion. We should be about our father’s business, not about our brother’s business.

It is shallow thinking and lack of knowledge of the men and women of stranger countries, and above all that terrible itching to be doing something, which lead to these futile excursions and this silly talk.

Can anything be more maudlin than to suppose that international sensitiveness, that commercial rivalries, that tariff discriminations, that territorial misunderstandings, are to be soothed and smoothed away, by dissertations upon how much we owe to one another in matters of culture? Think what we owe to Goethe and Lessing, to Spinoza and Kant, to Heine and Mozart and Wagner and Beethoven, reiterates the Englishman; think what we owe to Shakespeare and Milton, to Byron and Shelley and Scott, to Lister and Newton, answers the German! Who can go to war with the countrymen of Racine and Molière and Pascal and Montesquieu and Descartes? repeats the friend of France; and by others are trumpeted the fraternal relations that we ought to cultivate with the countrymen of Dante, or of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. This is phantom friendship, and we all know in our heart of hearts, that we would fight any or all of them at the drop of a handkerchief, if they hurt our feelings, ruffled our national pride, or maltreated in a foreign land the meanest of our racial brothers. Straining after such artificial bonds of union is as irritating as it is unreal.

Germany has few heartier admirers of Bismarck than am I; England has few franker friends of her great gentlemen in peace and war than am I; I have read and profited by French literature far more than from anything America has produced; if I can write so that here and there a brother has profited therefrom, I owe it to the Frenchmen I have studied; but these are all nothing as compared with my heart’s real allegiances. There is a gulp in my throat when I dream of that weary, misunderstood, but patient and humble peace-maker, who held the scales between the millions of my own countrymen, shooting and stabbing one another to death fifty years ago. No other man can be quite like him to me; he remains my master of men, as is Lee my ideal of the Happy Warrior. I understand the grim humor in his sad eyes, I love that lined face, cut from the granite of self-control, that tamed volcano face, seamed and scarred by the lava of his trials and his tears; I can see how the illuminating and conciliatory anecdotes were his relief from the pain of an aching heart; my muscles harden and my nerves tingle as I recall the puppet politicians and fancy self-advertising warriors who crucified him slowly. The country and the people that Lincoln believed in, I must believe in and fight for too. Washington was an Englishman and baptized us, but Lincoln was an American who officiated at our first communion as a united people.

I ask no Englishman, no German, no Frenchman to agree with me, but I ask them to leave me alone with my dead, to leave me in peace with my living problems, to force no artificial friendships upon me, and thus to let our respect for one another increase naturally.

Has the Englishman, has the German, no sanctuaries to be left undisturbed; no heart-strings that are not to be fumbled at by busy fingers; no personal dignities to be shrouded from investigations; no sweet silences of sorrow that are barred to foreign mourners? If he have not, then all this clamor at the doors of national privacy is well enough; but let them remember that when nations lose their dignity and their racial pride, there is sure to follow the squabbling and the jealousy, the rough speech and vulgar manners, of the domestic circle, in the same plight of spiritual shamelessness. The best that any of us learn is to be a little more patient, a little more charitable, a little more careful of the dignity of others in our own homes, or abroad, and then the light goes out!

XI CONCLUSION

Criticism is temptingly easy when it consists, as it so often does, in merely noting what is different, or what is not there. Helpful criticism I take to be the discovery of what is there, and its revelation, with an examination of its history, its truth, and its value. That kind of criticism is close to creation itself, and few there are sufficiently self-sacrificing to endow and to train themselves to undertake it.

It makes life very complicated to think too much about it, but to take a step further, and to attempt to apply logic to life, that way madness lies. It is of the very essence of life that things are never as they ought to be, but only as they can be for the time being. We may be optimistic enough to believe that this is a good world, but it is none the less true that unbending virtue seldom receives the temporal rewards for which most of us are striving, and with which alone most of us are content. We are forced to doubt, therefore, the goodness which finds life easy and comfortable, and since we must still at all hazards be charitable in our judgments of one another, we become, most of us, opportunists in morals.

In dealing with the men, manners, affairs, and the soul of a stranger people, therefore, one must use what experience, knowledge, good-humor, and impartiality one has, without assumption of superiority, without making high demands, and without ceasing to be at least as opportunist as we are at home. Because things are different, they are not necessarily better or worse, and if certain things are not there, it is perhaps because they do not belong there. Above all, we should refrain from applying a stern logic to the life of another country which we never use in measuring our own.

The whole north of Germany is a flat, barren plain, with the Elbe, the Oder, the Weser flowing west and north. The north of Germany on a raised map looks like a vast sea-shore, and so it is. To the south a great river, the Rhine, pierces its way from Frankfort through a beautiful gorge in the mountains, and has its source near that of the Danube. Barbarossa called this river, “that royal street.” This sea-shore is cultivated and populous; this river has been made a great commercial highway. Cologne, one hundred and fifty miles from the sea, is now a seaport; Strasburg, three hundred miles inland, can receive boats of six hundred tons; and the tributary river, the Main, has been deepened so that now Frankfort receives steamers from the Rhine. Three quarters of the through trade of Holland is German water-borne trade. Now the Dortmund-Ems canal, which is one hundred and sixty-eight miles long, and can be used by ships of a thousand tons, gives an outlet, via the Rhine, at Emden. All this is the work of a patient, persistent, and economical people working under great natural disadvantages.

As compared with America this is an unfruitful land, and, as I have noted, surrounded on all sides by powerful enemies. In 1902 Traugott Müller estimated the value of Germany’s production of wheat, potatoes, vegetables-the products of the gardens and the fields, in short-at $605,000,000; the production of beef, mutton, pork at $669,500,000; of the dairies at $406,000,000; of cotton, sugar, alcohol, wine, and wood at $322,000,000; or a total of $2,002,000,000. The United States is seventeen times as large, but by no means seventeen times as productive.

Germany, again, is divided into a number of states, all, with the exception of Prussia, with its population of 40,000,000 out of the total of 65,000,000, comparatively small. These states are not merely divided by legal and geographical lines, but by traditions, different ruling families, religion, tastes, habits, and manners, and even geologically. Bernhard Cotta, writing of Germany, says: “Geologically there is a Spain, an England, a Sweden, a Russia, a France, but no Germany.” They are different individuals, not different members of the same family. They have been cemented together by coercion.

Over this whole country for three hundred years have swept all the fighting men of Europe. Until 1870 it was a tournament ground for the Swedes, Russians, French, Dutch, Belgians, Italians, Hungarians, English, and the various German states. It was shot over, till it is a wonder that there are any young birds, not to speak of old cocks and hens left, to begin with over again.

A feature of the political situation, which scarcely enters into political calculations in America, is the sharp division between Protestants and Catholics, with a political party of Catholics numbering one fourth of the total members, in the Reichstag. In 1905 there were 37,646,852 Protestants and 22,109,644 Catholics in Germany, the Roman Catholics being in a majority in Baden, Bavaria, and Alsace-Lorraine. In the past these religious differences have entailed all the most repulsive features of war, waged to the point of extermination. “Lieber Rom als Liberal,” is still a punning war-cry marking the dislike of Rome and the fear of Socialism.

With us religion has become largely an organized attempt, using charity as patronage, to reconcile piety and plenty, with the result that with the exception of the Catholic Church dealing with the lately arrived immigrants, and the Methodists and Baptists dealing with the ignorant masses, black and white, in the South, religion in the sense of an organized church has little hold upon the people, especially in the large cities.

In America the indifference to religion is the result of suspicion. The congregations are too largely black-coated and white-collared, and the lay officers of the churches much too solemnly sleek and serenely solvent to attract the weak, the unfortunate, the sorrowing, and the sinner. The mere appearance of the congregation in a prosperous Protestant church in an American city is a mockery of Christianity. Any man who preaches to men who can own a seat in God’s house is a craven opportunist. Until the doors of the churches are open all the week, and the seats in the churches free, to claim that the Christ is there is little short of blasphemy. It is no wonder that those who need Him most, never dream of seeking for Him in these ecclesiastical clubs.

In Germany half-baked thinking, following upon, and as the result of, the barracks and corporal methods of education, have turned the Protestant population from the churches. The slovenly and patchy omniscience of the partly educated, leads them to believe that they know enough not to believe. Renan, though a doubter himself, saw the weakness of this form of disbelief when he wrote: “There are in reality but few people who have a right not to believe in Christianity.”

The people living upon this ethnographical chess-board have been for centuries rather tribal than national, and are still rather philosophical than political, rather idealistic than practical, rather dreamy than adventurous. To organize this population for self-support and self-defence, to ignore differences, racial and religious, to stamp out the jealousies of small rulers, required severe measures, and we are all learning to-day that democracies are seldom severe with themselves. A tyrannical autocracy, led by the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck, produced from this welter of discord the astonishing results of to-day.

We have to-day, in an area of 208,780 square miles, 5,604 square miles representing the lately conquered territory of Alsace-Lorraine, a population of 64,903,423, of whom 1,028,560 are subjects of foreign powers. To defend this area there are to be, according to figures estimated even as this volume goes to press, a million men under arms in the army and navy. Their enormous progress in trade, in industry, in shipbuilding, is set out in full in every year-book, for the curious to ponder. In so short a time, on so poor a soil, in such a restricted space, with such a past of distress and disaster, and dealing with such conflicting interests, a like success in nation-building is unparalleled.

Industrial and martial beehive though it would seem to be, there are provided for the native and the foreigner feasts of music, of art, and of study that cost little. There are quiet streams, lovely, lonely walks, and quaint towns that are nests of archaeological interest. In Weimar, in Stuttgart, in Schwerin, in Düsseldorf, in Karlsruhe, not to mention Munich, Leipsic, Dresden, Berlin, Frankfort, Hamburg, there are centres of culture. The best that the mind of man creates is still spread out there as of yore for whomsoever will to partake, but ever in less abundance and with less enthusiasm. And these names are a mere fraction of the number of such places.

The rivalries between the states is now to a large extent an elevating rivalry of culture, dotting the map of Germany with resting-places for the curious, the scholarly, or the sentimental traveller. You may have plain living and high thinking in scores of the cities and towns of Germany, and you will be considered neither an outcast nor an eccentric; indeed, you will find no small part of the population your companions.

You may stroll for miles on the banks of that tiny stream the Zschopau, and expect to see sprites and nymphs, so hidden are its windings; and where in all the world will a handkerchief cover an Ulm, an Augsburg, a Rothenburg, Ansbach, Nuremberg, Würzburg, with their wealth of associations?

The Fugger family, of Augsburg, tell us again that there is nothing new in the world. Five hundred years ago they were millionaires. One of these Fuggers had a voice even in the election of Charles V, and we are still hard at it trying to keep our Fuggers from meddling in politics. Another Fugger, Marcus by name, wrote a capital book on the horse in the sixteenth century, and at the last horse-show at Olympia, in 1912, a Fugger came over from Germany and took away the first prize for officers’ chargers. So far flung was their fame as money-lenders that usury was called “Fuggerei”!

Heirs of great houses got out of hand then as now, and Duke Albert III of Bavaria married Agnes Bernauer, the barber’s daughter, and even the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria ran off with Fräulein Welser. One citizen of Augsburg fitted out a squadron to take possession of Venezuela, which had been given him by the Emperor Charles V. For some reason the squadron did not sail; Lord Salisbury and President Cleveland could have told this adventurous Augsburger that he was better off at home!

Bishop Boniface, of Würzburg, was an Englishman, and his father was a wheelwright. He put cart-wheels in his coat-of-arms, and they have remained to this day in the arms of the town, a fine reminder to snobbery that ancestry only explains, it cannot exalt.

“Pigmies are pigmies still, though perch’d on Alps,
And pyramids are pyramids in vales.”

The atmosphere in these towns is one of repose. They are still wise enough to know that the miraculous improvements in speed brought about by steam and electricity have not shortened the journey of the soul to heaven by one second. They know that Socrates on a donkey really goes faster than Solly Goldberg in his sixty-horse-power motor-car. They are suspicious of the new cosmopolitan creed, that successful advertising endows a man with eternal life. Countless political quacks have been caricatured, advertised, and cinematographed into familiarity, but wise men still read Plato and Aristotle. The penny press has not convinced them that popularity is immortality; they recognize popularity as merely glory paid in pennies. They partake to some extent of the patience of the Oriental. They suspect, as most men of wide intellectual experience do, that the man who cannot wait must be a coward at bottom, afraid of himself, or of the world, or of God.

This is wholly true of many Germans, despite the clang of arms, the noise of steam-hammers, the shrieking locomotives, the puffing steamers, the clinking of their gold, and the shouting of their pedlers, now scattered all over the world. It is this combination, in the same small area, of noise and repose; of political subserviency at home and sabre-rattling abroad; of close organization at home and colonizing inefficiency abroad; of moral and intellectual freedom, one might almost call it moral and intellectual anarchy these days, and at the same time submission to a domestic and social tyranny unknown to us, that makes even a timid author feel that he is discovering the Germans to his countrymen, so little do they know of this side of German life.

They are not at all what the Americans and the English think they are. They want peace, and we think they want war. The huge armaments are intended to frighten us, just as were the grotesquely ugly masks of the Chinese warriors. They intend to frighten us all with their 850,000 soldiers, their great fleet, their air-ships and aeroplanes, and when they go to Agadir again they hope to be able to stay there till their demands are granted. They are the last comers into the society of nations and they mean to insist upon recognition. But this demand is an artificial one so far as the great mass of Germans is concerned. It is the Prussian conqueror, and the small class, officer, official and royal, representing that conqueror, who are determined upon this course. They have unified Germany, they have made the laws and forced obedience to them; and the heavily taxed, hard-driven, politically powerless people are helpless.

Nowhere has socialistic legislation been so cunningly and skilfully used for the enslavement of the people. No small part of every man’s wages is paid to him in insurance; insurance for unemployment, for accident, sickness, and old age. There is but faint hope of saving enough to buy one’s freedom, and if the slave runs away he leaves, of course, all the premiums he has paid in the hands of his master. A general uprising is guarded against by a redoubtable force of officials, officers, and soldiers, whose very existence depends upon their defence of and upholding of the state under its present laws and rulers.

Our grandfathers and fathers, some of them, talked and read of Saint-Simon, of Fourier, Robert Owen, Maurice Kingsley, and the Brook Farm experiment, and believed, no doubt, that the dawn of the twentieth century would have extracted at least some balm from these theories for the healing of our social woes. They would rub their eyes in amazement were they to awake in 1912 to find more armed men, more ships of war, more fighting, more strikes and trade disputes, than ever before. Above all, they would be puzzled to find the nation which is most advanced in the application of the theory of state socialism with the largest army, the heaviest taxation, and the second most formidable fleet.

The library in which, as a small boy, I was permitted to browse, where I read those wonderful Black Forest Stories and my first serious novel, On the Heights, contained a bust of Goethe, and on the shelves were Fichte, Freytag, Spielhagen, Strauss, and a miscellaneous collection of German authors grave and gay, or perhaps melancholy were a better word, for even now I should find it hard to point to a German author who is distinctively gay. No visitor to that library, and they numbered many distinguished visitors, American and foreign, from Emerson and Alcott and George Macdonald to others less well known, dreamed that the serene marble features of Goethe would be replaced by the granite fissures of the face of Bismarck; and that Auerbach’s Black Forest Stories would be less known than Albert Ballin’s fleet of mercantile ships. As I dream myself back to that big chair wherein I could curl up my whole person, and still leave room for at least two fair-sized dogs, I see as in no other way the almost unbelievable change that has come over Germany. The Black Forest Stories, Hammer and Anvil, The Lost Manuscript, Werther, Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Strauss, Heine were Germany then; Bismarck, Ballin, and Krupp are Germany now. Germany was Hamlet then; Germany is Shylock, Shylock armed to the teeth, now.

No nation can change in one generation, as has Germany, by the natural development of its innate characteristics; such a change must be forced and artificial to take place in so short a time. This is not only the internal danger to Germany itself, but the danger to all those superficial observers who point to Germany as having solved certain social and economic problems. She has not solved them by healthy growth into better ways; she has suppressed them, strangled them, suffocated them.

The heroes and heroines of my Black Forest Stories have been rudely stuffed into the uniforms of officials, soldiers, factory hands, and Red Cross nurses. The toy-shops have been developed, on borrowed capital, into ship-building yards and factories for guns and ammunition. The dreamer in dressing-gown and slippers has been forced into the cap and apron of the workman. The small sovereigns have been frightened into allegiance to the war lord, whose shadow falls upon every corner of Germany.

In this new scheme of things it soon became evident, that the individual was incompetent to take care of himself along lines best suited to the plans of his new conqueror, therefore part of his earnings were taken from all alike to provide against accident, sickness, unemployment, and old age, and thus bind him fast to the chariot of his warrior lord. Germany, having given up the belief that the salvation of her own soul was of prime importance, became suspiciously concerned about the souls and bodies of the people. We are all to some extent following her example. The wise among us are sad, the capitalist and his ally the demagogue are seen everywhere all smiles, rubbing their hands, for the more people are made to believe that they can be, and ought to be, taken care of, the more the machinery is put into their hands, the more plunder comes their way, the more indispensable they are.

The great majority of people who write or speak of Germany applaud this situation; let me frankly say, what everybody will be saying in twenty-five years, I deplore it. It is a purely artificial, incompetent, and dreary solution. Even Hamlet were better than Shylock.

Fortunately there is also a large and increasing class in Germany who distrust the situation. They point to the fact that technical education is producing an army of dingy artisans, who turn out the cheap and nasty by the million, an education which chokes idealism and increases the growing flippancy in matters of faith and morals; they sneer, and well they may, at the manufactured art, the carpenter’s Gothic architecture, the sickly literature, the decaying interest in scholarship; they find fewer and fewer candidates for exploration and colonization; they rankle under the series of diplomatic ineptitudes since Bismarck; they see France, Russia, and England antagonized and leagued against them, and their own allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy, in a confused state of squabble with their neighbors; they are nervous and disquieted by the financial and industrial conditions; they condemn whole-heartedly the political caste system by which much of the best material in Germany is barred from the councils and the diplomatic and executive activities of the nation; there are not a few who would welcome an inconclusive war that would, they think, put an end to this system, and make the ruler and the officials responsible to the people; they wish to open the doors of this governmental, legislative, educational, industrial hot-house, and give the nation a chance to grow naturally in the open air.

The policy of making other people afraid of you must have an end, the policy of making others respect and like you can have no end. There is no question which is the natural law of national development. Neither for the individual nor for a nation is it wholesome to increase antagonisms and to lessen the conciliatory points of contact with the world.

Many of the weaknesses, much of the strength of Germany are artificial. They have not grown, they have been forced. The very barrenness of the soil, the ring of enemies, the soft moral and social texture of the population, have, so their little knot of rulers think, made necessary these harsh, artificial forcing methods.

The outstanding proof of the artificiality of this civilization is its powerlessness to propagate. Germans transplanted from their hothouse civilization to other countries cease to be Germans; and nowhere in the world outside Germany is German civilization imitated, liked, or adopted. The German is nonplussed to find the Pole in the East, the Frenchman in the West, the Dane in the North, scoffing at his alte Kultur, as he calls it, and he is irritated beyond measure by the German from America, who returns to the Vaterland to criticise, to sneer, and to thank God that he is an American, not a German citizen. Germans become English citizens, no Englishmen become Germans; millions of Germans have become Americans, no Americans become Germans. No other population would be amenable to the Prussian methods that have made Germany, nor is there anywhere in the world a people demanding Prussian methods, while there are millions under the Prussian yoke who hate it.

The German rhetoric to the effect that Germany is to save the world by Teutonizing the world, is laughable. Prussia is the ventriloquist behind this half-hearted boast.

Werther, and Faust, and Lohengrin, are far more real than those scarecrows autocracy, bureaucracy, and militarism, triplets of straw, premature births, not destined to live, of which Germany boasts to-day as the most precocious children in the world. They are just that, precocious children, teaching the pallid religion of dependence upon the state and enforcing the anarchical morality of man’s despair of himself. Our descendants will have Werther and Faust and Lohengrin, as the companions of their dreams at least, when that autocracy shall have been blown to the winds, when that bureaucracy shall have dried up and wasted away, when that exaggerated militarism shall be but bleaching bones and dust.

Who has not lived in Germany as a house of dreams, seen the Valkyrie race by, heard the swan song, wept with Werther and with Marguerite, smiled cynically with Mephistopheles, languished with the Palm Tree and the Pine of Heine; who has not sat at the feet of Germany as a philosopher, and traced the very fissures of his own brain in following thinking into thought; but who in all the world longs for this new Germany of the barracks, the corporal and the pedler? Germania as a malicious vestal clad in horrid armor and making mischief in the world is a very present danger; Germania with a torch lighting the world to salvation is a phantom, a ghost, seen by hasty and nervous observers, who rush out to proclaim an adventure that may excite a passing interest in themselves. Her methods to-day are solution by suffocation; no wonder those of us who loved her in our youth see in her a ghost to-day. I am thankful that I was her pupil when she had other things to teach, when she wore other robes, when she was modest, and not snatching at the trident of Neptune, nor clutching at the casque of Mars.

“Wir wissen zu viel, wir wollen zu wenig,” became the national complaint, and Germany has attempted to transform herself. She has succeeded in the transformation, but the transformation is not a success. Even that learned English friend of Germany, Lord Haldane, does not see, or will not see, that a people thinking themselves into action, instead of developing into action naturally, through action, must suffer from the artificiality of the process. Lord Haldane applauds their thought-out organization in industrial, commercial, and military matters, but he fails to mention the squandering of individual capacity and energy that has resulted in Germany’s growing dependence upon a wooden bureaucracy. Organization is only good as a means; it is stupefying as an end. Germany has organized herself into an organization, and is the most over-governed country in the world. What every democracy of free men wants is not as much, but as little, organization as possible compatible with economical administration of industry, the army, the navy, and the affairs of the state. You can think out a game of chess, but you cannot think out life ahead of the living of it without cramping it and finally killing it. Life is to live, not to think, after all. Neither a nation nor an individual has ever thought out the way to power. This is where the metaphysician invariably fails when he mistakes thinking for living, when he mistakes organization, which can never be more than a mould for life, for life itself. To plan an army is not to produce one, however good the plan; even to plan a campaign, once you have an army, is to court disaster unless there is a living man to thrust the plan aside when the emergencies arise that make up the whole of life, but have nothing to do with organization.

If all men were tailors, or lawyers, or farmers, or miners, then we could think out an organization into which they would fit, but unfortunately for the metaphysician, all men are not categories; all men are men! In like manner, if all men were cases, then government by lawyers would be successful, but men and women are neither categories nor cases. It is purely fantastic, the mere reasoned confusion of the philosopher, to point to Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel and their successors as the originators of Germany’s progress. If Germany had developed along those lines, she would be something quite different from what she is. The Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and Bismarck made Germany, and her philosophers and pedants are only responsible for the softness that made it possible. Metaphysicians and lawyers have their place, but they will inevitably ruin any people whom they are permitted to govern.

The reader will perhaps look back through these pages to discover a contradiction. He will seem to find evidence that Germany’s position in the world called for just this present Germany, which is a factory town with a garden attached, surrounded by an armed camp. I deny the contradiction. I have tried to analyze and to give the reasons for Germany’s development along these meretricious and disappointing lines, but I am the last to admit that the outcome is satisfactory, or that the rest of the world should look to Germany to point out the way of salvation. A steaming orchid-house is not the place to go to learn to grow the fruits of the earth in their due season for the nourishment of a free people. You will find some brilliantly colored flowers there, in the gay uniforms of the artificial tropics, but they shrink and shrivel in the open air. They have been trained to grow luxuriantly in this stifling atmosphere, but they feed no one, please no one, who will not consent to live in a glass house with them.

Because a people is blindfolded, its preachers and pedagogues gagged, its officials subservient, is all the more reason why they should be easily led, but no reason at all for supposing that they will lead anybody else.

I have said here and there that I have learned much, and that we all have much to learn from Germany. I permit myself to repeat it. She has shown us that the short-cut to the governing of a people by suppression and strangulation results in a dreary development of mediocrity. She has proved again that the only safety in the world for either an individual or a nation is to be loved and respected, and in these days no one respects slavery or loves threats.

From an American point of view, any sacrifice, any war, were better than the domination of the Prussian methods of nation-making. No nation should be by its traditions and its ideals more ready to arm itself, and to keep itself armed if necessary for years, against the possibility of the transference of such methods to the American continent than the United States of North America.

“Theuer ist mir der Freund, doch auch den Feind kann ich nützen,”
Zeigt mir der Freund, was ich kann, lehrt mir der Feind was ich soll,”

writes Schiller.

We Americans have much to learn from both our friends and our enemies. We have both in Germany, and we should cultivate the temper of mind which profits by the encouragement of our friends and the criticism of our foes.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GERMANY AND THE GERMANS FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW ***

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Table of Contents

- GERMANY AND THE GERMANS

- FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

- CONTENTS

- INTRODUCTION

- GERMANY AND THE GERMANS

- FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

- I THE CRADLE OF MODERN GERMANY
- II FREDERICK THE GREAT TO BISMARCK
- III THE INDISCREET
- IV GERMAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE PRESS
- V BERLIN
- VI “A LAND OF DAMNED PROFESSORS”
- VII THE DISTAFF SIDE
- VIII “OHNE ARMEE KEIN DEUTSCHLAND”
- IX GERMAN PROBLEMS
- X “FROM ENVY, HATRED, AND MALICE”
- XI CONCLUSION

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE