e editor and owner of a great
newspaper should become an ambassador to England, as in the case of
Mr. Reid, is impossible in Germany. The character of the men who take
up the profession of journalism suffers from the lack of distinction
and influence of their task. Raymond, Greeley, Dana, Laffan, Godkin,
in America, and Delane, Hutton, Lawson, and their successors, Garvin,
Strachey, Robinson, in England, are impossible products of the German
journalistic soil at present.

There have been great changes, and the place of the newspaper and the
power of the journalist is increasing rapidly, but the stale
atmosphere of censordom hangs about the press even to-day. Freedom is
too new to have bred many powerful pens or personalities, and the
inconclusive results of political arguments, written for a people who
are comparatively apathetic, lessen the enthusiasm of the political
journalist. There are not three editors in Germany who receive as much
as six thousand dollars a year, and the majority are paid from twelve
hundred to three thousand a year. This does not make for independence.
I am no believer in great wealth as an incentive to activity, but
certainly solvency makes for emancipation from the more debasing forms
of tyranny.

Several of the more popular newspapers are owned and controlled by the
Jews, and to the American, with no inborn or traditional prejudice
against the Jews as a race, it is somewhat difficult to understand the
outspoken and unconcealed suspicion and dislike of them in Germany.
There is no need to mince matters in stating that this suspicion and
dislike exist. A comedy called "The Five Frankfurters" has been given
in all the principal cities during the last year and has had a long
run in Berlin. It is a scathing caricature of certain Jewish
peculiarities of temperament and ambition.

There is even an anti-semitic party, small though it be, in the
Reichstag, while the party of the Centre, of the Conservatives and the
Agrarians, is frankly anti-semitic as well. No Jew can become an
officer in the army, no Jew is admitted to one of the German corps in
the universities, no Jew can hold office of importance in the state,
and I presume that no unbaptized Jew is received at court. I am bound
to record my personal preference for the English and American
treatment of the Jew. In England they have made a Jew their prime
minister, and in America we offer him equal opportunities with other
men, and applaud him