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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NATIONALLIBERAL ZENTRUM SOCIALDEMOKRAT

Essen............ 25,937 42,832 40,503 Duisburg-Muehlheim 33,934 31,559 34,187 Saarbruecken...... 25,108 24,228 4,157 Bochum........... 42,257 37,650 64,833

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Two paradises are in one To live in Paradise alone."

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

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

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

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

would be warmly praised in Germany.

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

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

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

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

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

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



VIII "OHNE ARMEE KEIN DEUTSCHLAND"

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

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

"And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war."

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

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

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

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

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

Which I permit myself to translate into these two lines:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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