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mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have made the late war, and that Victorian England was much nearer to Germany. It was nearer to the Germany of Queen Victoria's time. That is quite true. England has gone on and become more European; her passion for individual freedom and self-expression has steadily developed, whilst Germany has remained submissively under the yoke of authority and discipline. Germany, with all her learning and her industry, her unstinted application, and her good parts, has become dull. There was an enormous amount of dulness, genuine uninspired dulness, in the Germans in the war. You can identify it now when you visit Germany in peace. LETTERS OF TRAVEL XII. FROM BERLIN (I) Old men and war-cripples as porters at the station, dirty streets encumbered by hawkers and their wares, strings of pitiful beggars shaking their hands and exposing mortified limbs--can this be Berlin, Berlin the prim, the orderly, the clean? Something has happened here in seven years, some sort of psychological change has been wrought in the mind of a people. Here, as in some Slav countries, there are laws and they are not kept, regulations and they are not observed. Unshaven men and ill-washed women on the streets, and dowdy, hatless girls with dirty hair crowding into cheap cinema theatres! A city that had no slums and no poor in 1914 now becoming a slum _en bloc_. And the litter on the roadways! You will not find its like in Warsaw. You must seek comparisons in the Bowery of New York or that part of the City of Westminster called Soho. The horse has come back to Berlin to make up for loss of motors, and needs more scavengers to follow him than the modern municipality can afford. Not that Berlin has broken down in any way. It is the same great hive of industrialism. Everyone is employed. More are employed than before. The leisured class is smaller. All the workshops and factories and offices are full. The shops display as many wares. There is evidence of an enormous overflowing productivity. Cheap lines of goods are run o
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