Augustus the Strong may be shut up
in Dresden for insulting a predecessor of the present King.

Every year the nobles of the Central Empires hold a convention at
Frankfort, where the means are discussed by which their
privileges may be preserved. No newspaper prints an account of
this Convention of the highest Caste.

The German peasants, as far as I have seen, are not so much under
the dominion of feudal tradition as are the peasants in Austria
and Hungary.

I was shooting once with a Hungarian Count who stationed me in
one corner of a field to await the partridges, which driven by
the beaters were expected to fly over my head and as I stood
waiting for the beaters to take up their positions two peasant
girls walked past me. One of them, to my surprise, caught hold of
my hand, which she kissed with true feudal devotion. As a guest
of the Count I was presumably of the noble class and therefore
entitled by custom and right to this mark of subjugation. And it
became quite a task in walking through the halls of the castle to
dodge the servants, all of whom seemed anxious to imprint on me
the kiss of homage.

Thackeray in the "Fitzboodle Confessions" gives a most amusing
account of life in one of these small, sleepy, German courts and
relates how he left Pumpernickel hurriedly, by night, after the
court ball where he had discovered not only that his German
fiancee had eaten too much, but that she had a taste for bad
oysters.

All of these small kings and princes are jealous of the King of
Prussia and of his position of German Emperor and show their
jealousy by avoiding Berlin.

In October, 1913, when in London on my way to Germany, I met the
young Grand Duke of Mecklenburg Strelitz in the Ritz Hotel where
he was dining with an English earl and his beautiful wife. As I
happened to have a box for the Gaiety Theatre, we all went there
together and paid a visit to George Grossmith behind the scenes
and talked with Emmy Wehlen, the Austrian actress, who was
appearing in the comic opera then running. But in all the time
that I was in Germany I never once saw or heard of the young
Grand Duke who rules the subjects of his duchy with autocratic
rule without even the semblance of a constitution.

Formerly our minister used to be accredited to some of these
courts and, on inquiring informally through a friend, I learned
that the American Minister is still accredited to Bavaria on the
records of the Bavarian Foreign Office