every variation. They organized, if they did not invent, a method of education, using that word in its broadest sense, by which they reduced learning to a system as admirably classified as the best book of reference. In dealing with ideas, they usually became doctrinaires; in each German brain one idea and only one grew at a time, like the plant or flower in a pot. This promoted that single-mindedness which lies behind German thoroughness. It has its defects, of course; one sometimes is bored by doctrinaire companions; it leads to Philistinism "The Germans," said Goethe, "cannot cease to be Philistines"; 1 and there is always the danger that if the same bad idea be planted in the brains of nearly all the people of a oneideaed race, there will be uncurbed unanimity for evil when the idea is translated into action. Man and the Devil were joint occupants of the first garden, and the Devil has not yet lost his cunning as a horticulturist. Nevertheless, in dealing with facts, particularly with the facts 1 Eckermann, Conversations, p. 353.

of physics, chemistry, and philology, the erudite Germans made objectivity their standard, and strove to depersonalize themselves so completely that the faculty by which they observed might actually see the Ding an sich, - the thing in itself, - beyond the idea of it which alone enters human consciousness.

Foreigners sought the learning which the German universities gave, and they went in such increasing numbers, that from the last quarter of the century onward they literally swarmed at the chief institutions; and as these students were unusually hungry for knowledge, they devoured avidly what was offered them, becoming enthusiastic disciples of the German method and of the professors who taught it. Quite naturally, they looked back with affection upon the German environment amid which was planted their particular Tree of Knowledge. Note however, that until after 1870 the universities they most frequented were non-Prussian: so the Germans with whom they came into friendly relations were

not Prussians, but Saxons and Rhinelanders, Suabians and Bavarians.

Among these, far into the century, life seemed easy-going. Each State had its army and its police and its punctilio, but they had not yet been standardized to the rigid machine-like pattern of Prussia. Indeed, the other Germans still dared to regard Prussia as the more cultivated Greeks used to regard Macedonia, and they openly ridiculed Berlin and the Berliners. Little cities like Düsseldorf and Stuttgart, large cities like Dresden and Munich, cultivated the arts. There was good music everywhere, and even small towns maintained a theatre where not only the classic German dramas, but also translations of Shakespeare and Molière were produced.

The traveler from England or America found much to amuse him in the German beds and mysterious bedclothes; in the cooking, with its inexhaustible supply of ham, sausage, and sauerkraut; in the beer gardens, where the girth of the habitués swelled visibly, as they

poured down quart after quart of black or yellow beer: in the way in which men kissed each other on every occasion, and in their pompous taking off of hats and "having the honor" whenever they met. The foreigner noted also their porcelain stoves, on whose hospitable tops babies were kept from freezing on coldest nights, and the table manners, from which he inferred that it was easier for a learned German to discover a new asteroid or a new chemical element, than the use of a fork. In these and a hundred other superficial differences, not to mention the amazing costumes, the foreigner's sense of humor was constantly stirred.

But more serious aspects checkered his amusement. He wondered, especially if he came from America, at the extent to which German men had shifted the heavy burdens upon women. If he took a very early start, he saw from the window of his carriage the peasant women trudging out with great baskets on their backs to their work in the fields; and

at twilight he saw them trudging home, bent under the loaded baskets-while the men, carrying only a mattock or a scythe, smoking their porcelain-bowled pipes, plodded leisurely behind them. When he reached his pension he was startled-and at first he probably blushed to see his heavy trunk loaded on the back of a housemaid, who carried it up three or four flights of stairs to his room..And so he never became quite accustomed to the sight of a woman and dog harnessed together, drawing a cart of milk cans and stopping from house to house, while the husband delivered the milk to his customers. "We have never taken quite the same view of women that you Americans do," Bismarck said to an American.

But after all, the traveler of three- or fourscore years ago generally accepted the unpleasant or distressing conditions in a foreign country as part of the landscape for which he was not responsible; and his impression of Germany, as he saw it on the surface, was of a widespread, stolid contentment and of a sort