s a student at Goettingen, and the man of
whom he spoke with warm affection all his life, was the American
historian Motley.

The German soldiers in our Civil War were numbered by the thousands.
We have many ties with Germany, quite enough, indeed, to make a bare
enumeration of them a sufficient introduction to this volume.

On more than one occasion of late I have been introduced in places,
and to persons where a slight picture of what I was to meet when the
doors were thrown open was of great help to me. I was told beforehand
something of the history, traditions, the forms and ceremonies, and
even something of the weaknesses and peculiarities of the society, the
persons, and the personages. I am not so wise a guide as some of my
sponsors have been, but it is something of the kind that I have wished
and planned to do for my countrymen. I have tried to make this book,
not a guidebook, certainly not a history; rather, in the words of
Bacon, "grains of salt, which will rather give an appetite than offend
with satiety," a sketch, in short, of what is on the other side of the
great doors when the announcer speaks your name and you enter Germany.

GERMANY AND THE GERMANS

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

GERMANY AND THE GERMANS FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

I THE CRADLE OF MODERN GERMANY

Eighty-one years before the discovery of America, seventy-two years
before Luther was born, and forty-one years before the discovery of
printing, in the year 1411, the Emperor Sigismund, the betrayer of
Huss, transferred the Mark of Brandenburg to his faithful vassal and
cousin, Frederick, sixth Burgrave of Nuremberg. Nuremberg was at one
time one of the great trading towns between Germany, Venice, and the
East, and the home later of Hans Sachs. Frederick was the lineal
descendant of Conrad of Hohenzollern, the first Burgrave of Nuremberg,
who lived in the days of Frederick Barbarossa (1152-1189); and this
Conrad is the twenty-fifth lineal ancestor of Emperor William II of
Germany. It is interesting to remember in this connection that when we
count back our progenitors to the twenty-first generation they number
something over two millions. When we trace an ancestry so far,
therefore, we must know something of the multitude from which the
individual is descended, if we are to gather anything of value
concerning his racial characteristics. The solace of all genealogical
investigation is the infallible discovery, that the gr