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 Wuertemberg, 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 Koelnische 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. Vorwaerts 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, Koenigsberg, Breslau, with its Schlessische Zeitung, and the Rhine provinces and the steel and iron industries represented by the Rheinisch- Westfaelischer 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 cafes, 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 cafe 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 Blaetter, 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. "Koenigthum 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 Koelnischer 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 Buelow 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 Koeniggratz 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 oeffentlichen Frieden gefaehrdenden Weise verschiedene Klassen der Bevoelkerung gegeneinander oeffentlich aufreizt oder wer in gleicher Weise die Institute der Ehe, der Familie und des Eigentums oeffentlich 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 oekonomischen Kaempfe nicht fuehren und ihre oekonomische 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 role 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 Goetzen, 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 Elysees 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-role.

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, Duesseldorf, 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.