knife and still be an authority on
bridge-building; he may tuck his napkin under his chin preparatory to,
and as an armor against, the well-known vagaries of liquids, before he
takes his soup or his soft-boiled eggs, and still be an authority on
soap-making; he may wear a knitted waistcoat with a frock-coat to
luncheon, and be deeply versed in Russian history. He may have no
inkling of the traditions of fair play, or of the reticences of
courtesy, no shred of knightliness, and yet be a scholar in his way.
Indeed, in none of the other cultured countries does one find so many
men of trained minds, but with such untrained manners and morals. In
their hack of sensation-mongering, in their indifference to social
gossip, in their trustworthy and learned comments upon things
scientific, musical, theatrical, literary, and historical, they are as
men to school-boys compared to the American press. They have the utter
contempt for mere smartness that only comes with severe educational
training. They have the scholar's impatience with trivialities. They
skate, not to cut their names on the ice, but to get somewhere, and
the whole industrial and scientific world knows how quickly they have
arrived.

Our newspapers make a business of training their readers in that worst
of all habits, mental dissipation. The German press is not thus
guilty. Despite all I have written, I am quite sure that if I were
banished from the active world and could see only half a dozen
journals on my lonely island, one of them would be a German newspaper.
It may be that I have a perverted literary taste, for I can get more
humor, more keen enjoyment, out of a census report or an etymological
dictionary than from a novel. My favorite literary dissipation is to
read the works of that distinguished statistician at Washington, Mr.
O. P. Austin, the poet-laureate of industrial America, or the toilsome
and exciting verbal journeys of the Rev. Mr. Skeat. The classic
humorists do not compare with them, in my humble opinion, as sources
of fantastic surprises. This, perhaps, accounts for my sincere
admiration for that quality of scholarship, learning, and accuracy in
the German press. Nor does the possession of these qualities in the
least controvert the impression given by the German press of political
powerlessness, of social ignorance and incompetence, and of boorish
ignorance of the laws of common decency in international comment and
controversy. A great scholar m