similar
predicament in Germany, as anywhere else.

But with the Englishman and the American, both temperament and
environment permit youthfulness to last longer. The German must soon
get into the mill and grind and be ground, and he is by temperament
more easily caught and put into the uniform of a constantly correct
behavior. As for us, we are all boys still at thirty, many of us at
fifty, and some of us die ere the school-boy exuberance has all been
squeezed or dried out of us. Not so in Germany. One sees more men in
Germany who give the impression that they could not by any possibility
ever have been boys than with us. They begin to look cramped at
thirty, and they are stiff at fifty, as though they had been fed on a
diet of circumspection, caution, and obedience. They are drilled early
and they soon become amenable, and then even indulgent, toward the
drill-master.

This German people have not developed into a nation, they have been
squeezed into the mould of a nation. The nation is not for the people,
the people are for the nation. "By the word Constitution," writes Lord
Bolingbroke, "we mean, whenever we speak with propriety and exactness,
the assemblage of laws, institutions, and customs derived from certain
fixed principles of reason, directed to certain fixed objects of
public good, that compose the general system by which the community
hath agreed to be governed." The Germans have no such constitution,
for the community was scarcely consulted, much less hath it agreed to
the general system by which it is governed.

Of course, in every nation its affairs are, and must be, conducted by
officials. That is as true of America as of Germany. The fundamental
difference is that with us these official persons are executive
officers only, the real captain is the people; while in Germany these
official persons are the real governors of the people, subject to the
commands of one who repeatedly and publicly asserts that his
commission is from God and not from the people. This puts whole
classes of the community permanently into uniform, and the wearers of
these uniforms are almost afraid to laugh, and would consider it
sacrilege to romp.

Caution is a very puny form of morality. "He that observeth the wind
shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap." It is
as true politically as of other spheres of life that "he or she who
lets the world or his own portion of it choose his plan of life for
him ha