at all times and above all things, a charitable
interpretation. Information, facts, are merely the raw material of
culture; sympathy is its subtlest essence.

There is a world of good humor, of cheerfulness, of contentment, of
domestic peace and happiness in Germany. There are courtesy,
politeness, even grand manners here and there. But these words mean
one thing to them, another thing to us, and it is that I am striving,
feebly enough to be sure, to make clear. May I beg the reader and the
student to follow me with this point clearly in mind? While I am
outlining with these painful details that their ways are not as our
ways, I am not denouncing their ways, but merely offering matter for
consideration and comparison.

A nation is most often punished for its faults by the exaggeration of
its qualities, and if, as it seems to me, Germany suffers like the
rest of us in this respect, it is none of my doing. It will be my
failure and the reader's failure, if we do not profit by watching
these qualities in ourselves, and in others festering into faults.
Woman's position and ambitions, the home, the amusements, and the
satisfactions of life, are very different in Germany from ours. I note
these as facts, not as inferiorities. I note, too, that in Germany, as
elsewhere, Hegel was profoundly right in his dictum, that everything
earned to its extreme becomes its contrary. Too much caution may
become a positive menace to safety; too much orderliness may result in
individual incapacity for sell-control; just as liberty rots into
license, and demos descends to a crown and sceptre and tyranny. I am
merely calling attention to this great law of national development,
that the exaggeration of even fine qualities is the road to the
punishment of our faults, in Germany, as in every other nation under
the sun.

It is only when you have had a peep into a small farmer's house in
Saxony, into the artisans' houses in the busy Rhine and Westphalia
country; spent a night in a peasant's house and stable, for they are
under the same roof, in the mountains of the South; and visited the
greater establishments of the large land-holder and the less
pretentious houses of the gentleman farmer, and the country houses,
big and little, in all parts of Germany, that you get anything of the
real flavor of Germany.

If, as Burke says, it is impossible to indict a whole nation, it is
even more difficult to fit a people with a few discriminating and
real