bill for two
persons of a little over a dollar. The Broedchen, or rolls, seem to be
everywhere of uniform size and quality, and the butter always good.

Paris is fast losing its place as the home of good all-round eating as
compared with Berlin. Of course, New York for geographical reasons,
and also because the modern Maecenas lives there, is nowadays the
place where Lucullus would invite his emperor to dine if he came back
to earth; but I am not discussing the nectar and ambrosia classes, but
the beer, bread, and pork classes, and certainly Berlin has no rival
as a provider for them.

After all our study of statistics, of figures, of contrasts, I am not
sure that we arrive at any very valuable conclusions. American
working-classes work ever shorter hours, gain higher wages, but they
are indubitably less happy, less rich in experience, less serene than
the Germans. This measuring things by dollars, by hours, by pounds and
yard-sticks, measures everything accurately enough except the one
thing we wish to measure, which is a man's soul. We are producing the
material things of life faster, more cheaply, more shoddily, but it is
open to question whether we are producing happier men and women, and
that is what we are striving to do as the end of it all. Nothing is of
any value in the world that cannot be translated into the terms of
man-making, or its value measured by what it does to produce a man, a
woman, and children living happily together. Wealth does not do this;
indeed, wealth beyond a certain limit is almost certain to destroy the
foundation of all peace, a contented family.

A shady beer-garden, capital music, and happy fathers and mothers and
children, what arithmetic, or algebra, or census tells you anything of
that? The infallible recipe for making a child unhappy, is to give it
everything it cries for of material things, and never to thwart its
will. We throw wages and shorter hours of work at people, but that is
only turning them out of prison into a desert. No statistics can deal
competently with the comparative well-being of nations, and nothing is
more ludicrous than the results arrived at where Germany is discussed
by the British or American politician. Whatever figures say, and
whatever else they may lack, they are better clothed, better fed and
cared for, and have far more opportunities for rational enjoyment, and
a thousand-fold more for aesthetic enjoyment, than either the English
or the Americans.