to the fore in the Germany of to-day as they were certainly not
twenty-five years ago. Ulysses, alas, does not bind himself to the
mast very tightly as he passes these enchanted isles of modern luxury.
"The land of damned professors" has learned its lessons from those
same professors so well, that it is now ready to take a postgraduate
course in world politics; and as I said in the beginning, some of our
friends are putting the word "damned" in other parts of this, and
other sentences, when they describe the rival prowess and progress of
the Germans.

VII THE DISTAFF SIDE

Madame Necker writes of women: "Les femmes tiennent la place de ces
lagers duvets qu'on introduit dans les caisses de porcelaine; on n'y
fait point d'attention, mais si on les retire, tout se brise."

When one sees women and dogs harnessed together dragging carts about
the streets; when one sees women doing the lighter work of sweeping up
leaves and collecting rubbish in the forests and on the larger
estates; doing the gardening work in Saxony and other places; when one
sees them by the hundreds working bare-legged in the beet-fields in
Silesia and elsewhere throughout Germany; when one reads "Viele Weiber
sind gut weil sie nicht wissen wie man es machen muss um boese zu
sein," and "Der Mann nach Freiheit strebt, das Weib nach Sitte," two
phrases from the German classics, Lessing and Goethe; when one recalls
the shameless carelessness of Goethe's treatment of all women; of how
his love-poems were sometimes sent by the same mail to the lady and to
the press; and the unrestrained worship of Goethe by the German women
of his day; when one sees time and time again all over Germany the
women shouldered into the street while the men keep to the sidewalk;
when one sees in the streets, railway carriages, and other public
conveyances, the insulting staring to which every woman is subjected
if she have a trace of good looks, one realizes that at any rate
Madame Necker was not writing of German women. Let me add that so far
as the great Goethe is concerned, it is by no Puritan yard-stick that
I am measuring him, but by the German's own high standard which
despises any mating of true sentiment with commercialism. "Beatus ille
qui procul negotiis," certainly applies to one's affairs of the heart.

In the gallery at Dresden, where the loveliest mother's face in all
the world shines down upon you from Raphael's canvas like a
benediction, there is a small