on in Mexico, and incipient
anarchy in Central America; as an emollient to this, Great Britain is
about to present a bust of the late King Edward to the Peace Palace at
the Hague! I can imagine myself saying "Pretty pussy, nice pussy," to
the wild-cats I have shot in Nebraska and Dakota, but I should not be
here if I had; and however small my value to the world I live in, I
estimate it as worth at least a ton of wild-cats.

I am bound, however, in fairness to call the attention of the unwary
dabbler in statistics to a point of grave importance in dealing with
German finances. The German Empire, so far as expenditure and income
are concerned, is merely an office, a clearing-house so to speak, for
the states which together make up the empire. The expenses of the
empire, for example, in 1910 were $757,900,000 and of the army and
navy, including extraordinary expenditures, $314,919,325; this does
not include pensions, clerical expenses, interest, sinking-fund, and
loss of productive labor, as did the figures on a preceding page. To
the ignorant or to the malicious, who quote these figures to bolster
up a socialist or pacifist preachment, this looks as though Germany
had spent one half of her grand total on the army and navy. But this
is quite wrong. In addition to the expenditures of this imperial
clearing-house called the German Empire, there was spent by the states
$1,467,325,000: the so-called clearinghouse bearing the whole burden
of expenses for army and navy, the separate states nothing except the
per capita tax, called the matriculation tax, of some 80 pfennigs. To
make this matter still more clear, as it is a constant source of error
not only to the foreigner but to the Germans themselves, the income of
the empire for 1910 was $757,900,000, the income of all the states
$1,463,150,000, or of the empire and the states combined
$2,221,050,000. In the same way the debt of the empire in 1910 stood
at $1,224,150,000, and the debt of the states of the empire at
$3,856,325,000, or a grand total outstanding indebtedness of all
Germany of $5,080,475,000.

Of late years the imperial expenditure of Great Britain, for example,
has amounted to some $935,000,000 a year; but various local bodies
spend also some $900,000,000 a year. Some of this is cross-spending,
but the grand total amounts to some $1,500,000,000 a year.

Before writing or speaking of Germany it is well to know at least what
Germany is. To pick up a hand-book an