is just so much
less for luxury. The people in the streets; the shop-windows; the
scale of charges at places of public resort and amusement; the very
small number of well-turned-out private vehicles; the comparatively
few people who live in houses and not in apartments; the simplicity of
the gowns of the women, and their inexpensive jewelry and other
ornaments; the fewer servants; the salaries and wages of all classes,
point decisively to plain living on the part of practically everybody.
Let me say very emphatically, however, that this economy means no lack
of generosity. I doubt if there are people anywhere so restricted as
to means, and so delightfully hospitable at the same time. Berlin is
not as yet under that cloud that covers the new, uncultivated, and
rich society in America, that tyranny of money which makes men and
women fearful of being without it. Such people shiver at the bare
thought of losing what money will buy, for the shameful reason that
then there would be nothing left to them; and they are driven, many of
them, both in London and in New York, to any humiliation, often to any
degradation, to avoid it. They grossly overrate the value of money,
and they exaggerate the terrors of being without it.

Professor William James, who succeeded in analyzing what is at the
back of men's brains as well as anybody, writes: "We have grown
literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor
in order to simplify and save his inner life. We have lost the power
of even imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have
meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul,
the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do, and
not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment
irresponsibly -- the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting
shape. ... It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the
educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our
civilization suffers." They suffer from this malady less in Germany
than in America or in England. I should like to introduce such people
into dozens of households in Berlin; alas, they could not speak or
understand the moral or mental language there, where there is
everything that makes a home's heart beat proudly and peaceably,
except money. "La prosperite decouvre les vices, et l'adversite les
vertus."

These people need no tribute from me, and for their hospitality and