hotels and in apartments, and are mere passing visitors in their
own capital. They have, therefore, practically no influence upon
social life, and Berlin is merely the centre of the industrial,
military, official, and political society of Prussia. It is the
clearing-house of Germany, but by no means the literary, artistic,
social, or even the political capital of Germany, as London is the
English, or Paris the French, or as Washington is fast growing to be
the American, capital.

There is no training-ground for an accomplished or man-of-the-world
journalist, and the views and opinions of a journalist who is more or
less of a social pariah, and he still is that with less than half a
dozen exceptions, and of a man who begs for crumbs from the press
officials at the foreign or other government offices, are neither
written with the grip of the independent and dignified chronicler, nor
received with confidence and respect by the reader.

It may be a reaction from this negligence with which they are treated
that produces a quality, both in the writing and in the illustrations
of the German newspapers, which is unknown in America. Many of the
illustrated papers indulge in pictorial flings which may be compared
only to the scribbling and coarse drawings, in out-of-the-way places,
of dirty-minded boys. With the exception of the well-known Fliegende
Blaetter, Kladderadatsch, and one or two less representative, there is
nothing to compare with the artistic excellence and restrained good
taste of Life or Punch, for example.

There is one illustrated paper published in Munich, Simplicissimus,
which deserves more than negligent and passing comment. It has two
artists of whom I know nothing except what I have learned from their
work, Th. Th. Heine and Gulbransson. These men are Aristophanic in
their ability as draughtsmen and as censors, in striking at the
weaknesses, political, military, and official, of their countrymen.
Their work is something quite new in Germany, and worthy of comparison
with the best in any country. It is not elegant, it is Rabelaisian;
and though I have nothing to retract in regard to coarseness, and no
wish to commend the attitude taken toward German political and social
life, in fairness one is bound to call attention to the pictorial work
in this particular paper as of a very high order, and to recognize its
power. If Heine could have turned his wit into the drawings of
Hogarth, we should have had somethi