ay be a booby in a drawing-room, and a
lamentable failure as an adviser in matters political and social. "As
a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from
his place." Germany has put some astonishing failures to her credit
through her belief that learning can take the place of common-sense,
and scholarship do the tasks of that intelligent and experienced
observation to which the abused word, worldliness, is given. Perhaps
it is as well that the German press declines to keep a social diary;
well, too, that it has no candidates for the office of society
Haruspex, whose ghoulish business it is to find omens and prophecies
in the entrails of his victims. In that respect, at any rate, both
society and the press in Germany are as is the salon to the scullery,
compared with ours. As for that little knot of illustrated weekly
papers in England, with their nauseating letter-press for snobs
inside, and their advertisements of patent complexion remedies and
corsets outside, there is nothing like them in Germany or anywhere
else, so far as I know. You may advertise your shooting-party, your
dance, or your dinner-party, and thus keep yourself before the world
as though you were a whiskey, a soap, or a superfluous-hair-destroyer,
if you please, and, alas, many there are who do so. At least Germany
knows nothing of this weekly auction of privacy, this nauseating
snobbery which is a fungus-growth seen at its strongest in British
soil.

I am bound, both by tradition and experience as an American, to
discover the reason for such conditions in the lack of fluidity in
social and political life in Germany. The industrials, the military,
the nobility, the civil servants, and to some extent the Jews, are all
in separate social compartments; and the political parties as well
keep much to themselves and without the personal give and take outside
of their purely official life which obtains in America and in England.

It is an impossible suggestion, I know, but if the upper and lower
houses of the empire, or of Prussia, could meet in a match at base-ball,
or golf, or cricket; if the army could play the civil service;
if the newspaper correspondents could play the under-secretaries; if
they could all be induced occasionally, to throw off their mental and
moral uniforms, and to meet merely as men, a current of fresh air
would blow through Germany, that she would never after permit to be
shut out.

Personal dignity is refr