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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



VII THE DISTAFF SIDE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Am Ende hangen wir doch ab Von Kreaturen die wir machten"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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