ghter in the bargain, considered herself respectable enough.
More than this she acted in line with what appeared to be the
purpose of acquiring a sympathetic control of the morals as well as
the minds of the alien sojourner, the one being accompanied by a
pandering to his lower nature with the doors of vice flagrantly ajar
while the other armed his mentality with a Teutonized equipment and
outlook. To sap the will, to galvanize the mind as from a German
electric battery, palsied resistance to aggressive Germania. It was
of a piece with that propaganda which the world was not to wake up
to until almost too late.

These downright animal phases pointed the way logically, in Gard's
mind, to that obscenity which is interwoven in the German
civilization. He had first come across such evidence in leading
comic journals. The drawings and jests that did not leave much to
be filled out, adorned many a German page with an Adamic candor. It
divorced him from _Simplicissimus_ and _Ulk_, not that he was
squeamish or a Miss Priscilla, but he saw no fun in that sort of
thing.

He talked of it later with Anderson. Though there were pleasant
delusions in Anderson's mind about Germany before he arrived, it was
not his fault if few seemed to be left after his seven years. He
bluntly defined the limited German wit and humor as
characteristically born of the latrine.

Gard's two young friends did not refrain from talk in the key of
indecency. Their complacent revelation of the extent to which the
pornographic enters into the German scene, suggested an unclosed
Priapean volume whose companion in America is as a sealed book.
Kirtley heard that stores filled with obscene objects publicly for
sale were to be found on frequented thoroughfares in German cities.

He saw that Frau Bucher's insistence on a chaperone, which he had
regarded a silly, outworn conventionality, appeared most wise.
Germany was a poor place for an unguarded German girl.

This ran through his mind:

"Great Guns! What a country for me to study for the ministry, study
morality, best fit myself for life, as advised by Rebner and, it
seems--everybody!"

CHAPTER XVIII

THE NAKED CULT

The German, in all this physical aspect, is not a little like an
unabashed ape. Accordingly the foreigner in Deutschland is impressed
by the popular worship of the wide-hipped female. The Teuton can
leave little to be inferred but that he is more interested in the
magnet of her