form in
London. Dogs, gun-cases, cartridge-boxes, men and maid servants,
trunks, bags, baskets, bunches of grouse, and the passengers seemed in
a chaotic huddle of confusion. In Germany at least twenty policemen
would have been needed to disentangle us. I was so torpid from having
been long Teutonically cared for, that I looked on momentarily
paralyzed. There was no shouting, not a harsh word that I heard; and
as I was almost the last to get away, I can vouch for it that in ten
minutes each had his own and was off. I had forgotten that such things
could be done. I had been so long steeped in enforced orderliness,
that I had forgotten that real orderliness is only born of individual
self-control. I forgot that I was back among the free spirits who
govern a quarter of the habitable globe and whose descendants are
making America; and even if here and there one or more, and they are
often recently arrived immigrants, are intoxicated by freedom and
shoot or steal like drunken men; I realized that I am still an
Occidental barbarian, thank God, preferring liberty, even though it is
punctuated now and then with shots and screams and thefts, to official
guardianship, even though I am thus saved the shooting, the screaming,
and the thieving.

In the nine years ending 1910, our Fourth of July
celebrations cost America in killed, 18,000; in wounded, 35,000; but
even that is better than the civic throttling of the German method. It
seems to be forgotten that the men who keep the world fresh with their
saline vigor, love risks as they love fresh air. They should be
curbed, but not strangled!

You read their history, you watch closely
their manners, you prowl about among them, in their streets, their
shops, their houses, their theatres; you accompany the crowds on a
holiday in the trains, in the forests, in the summer resorts, at their
concerts or their picnics, in their beer-gardens and restaurants, and
you soon see that the orderliness is all forced upon them from
without, and not due to their own knowledge of how to take care of
themselves.

In a recent volume by a distinguished German prison
official he writes that, after a careful study of the figures from
1882 to 1910, he has discovered that one person now living in every
twelve in Germany has been convicted of some offence. Doctor
Finkelnburg shows that the number of "criminals" in Germany is
3,869,000, of whom 3,060,000 are males, and 809,000 females. Every 43d
boy and e