the more intimate parties of
those in court control. They are tolerated, not welcomed. Such people
are invited to the court ball, but never thought of, even, as guests
at the small supper party of, say, a court official later in the
evening. Prussia and Germany are still ruled socially and politically
by a small group of, roughly, fifty thousand men, eight thousand of
them in the frock-coat of the civilian official, and the rest in
military uniforms. Added to this must be named a few great financiers,
shipping and mining and industrial magnates, and great land-owners,
and less than half a dozen journalists, and as many professors.

According to the census there are in all only 720 persons in Berlin
with incomes of more than $25,000 a year, and 521 of these have
between $25,000 and $60,000 a year, leaving a very small number, indeed,
with incomes adequate, from an American point of view, for extravagant
social expenditure. Of these 200, probably not 50 are figures in the
social life of the capital. It may be seen at once, therefore, that
entertaining cannot be on a lavish or spectacular scale.

The minister of foreign affairs and the imperial minister of the
interior receive salaries of 36,000 marks, with 14,000 marks
additional for expenses. The Prussian ministers have the same. Other
ministers receive 30,000 marks and 14,000 additional for expenses. The
chancellor of the empire receives 36,000 marks and 64,000 additional
for expenses. The highest receivable pension is three-fourths of the
salary--not counting the additional sum for expenses, or, as it is
named, Repraesentationsaufwand -- after forty years of service. The
foreign ambassadors to the more expensive capitals, London, Paris,
Washington, Saint Petersburg, receive 150,000 marks a year. Where one
has seen something of the innumerable demands upon the income of a
foreign ambassador, one is the more amazed that a great democracy like
ours should so restrict the salaries of its representatives abroad
that only rich men dare undertake the duty. What could be more
undemocratic!

Germany is a rich, very rich, country in the sense that it has the
most intelligent, hardest-working, most fiercely economical, and the
most rationally and most easily contented population of any of the
great powers. But Germany is not rich in surplus and liquid capital as
compared with England, France, or America. It is the more to her
credit that her capital is all hard at work. There