d consequently he keeps himself
fit. But a huge bureaucracy, with its stupid promotions by years and
not by ability, with its government stroke, and its dangling pensions,
positively breeds lassitude, laziness, and dulness. You may see it on
every hand in government offices, in the railway and postal services,
where men are evidently kept on not for their fitness but by the
tyranny of the system. High officials admit as much.

In the little state of Prussia the railways pay well and are well
managed, but they are clogged to a certain extent by inefficient and
unnecessary employees, and were the system spread over the United
States the chaos in a dozen years would be almost irreparable, and
even here the complaints are many and vigorous. Probably one male over
twenty-five years of age out of every four is in government employ.
This alone would account for the general air of lassitude which is one
of the most noticeable features of German life. The Germans as a whole
are beginning to look tired. It is a German, not an Italian or a
Frenchman, the philosopher Nietzsche, who writes: "Seit es Menschen
giebt, hat der Mensch sich zu wenig gefreut; das allein ist unsere
Erbsuende."

There has been a great change in the status of women in the
last twenty-five years. The apophthegm of Pericles, or rather of
Thucydides, "that woman is best who is least spoken of among men,
either for good or evil," is not so rigidly enforced. Increased wealth
throughout Germany has left the German woman more leisure from the
drudgery of the home. She is not so wholly absorbed by the duties of
nurse, cook, and house-maid as she once was. But even to-day her
economies and her ability to keep her house with little outside
assistance are amazing. Some of the most delightful meals I have
taken, have been in professional households, where small incomes made
it necessary that wife and daughters should do most of the work.

The German professor has his faults, but in his own simple home, the
work of the day behind him, his family about him at his well-filled
but not luxurious board, with some member of the family not unlikely
to be an accomplished musician and with his own unrivalled store of
learning at your service, when he raises his glass to you, filled with
his best, with a smile and a hearty "Prosit," he is hard to beat as a
host, to my thinking. Perhaps there is nothing like overindulgence to
make one crave simplicity, and no doubt this accounts