cial purposes this is Germany,
1,558 persons killed themselves in 1912. Children committing suicide
because they have failed in their examinations is not uncommon in
Germany; in America and in England the teachers are more likely to
succumb than the children. We do not commit suicide in America from
any sense of shame at our intellectual shortcomings -- what a
decimating of the population there would be if we did! -- it is more
apt to be caused by ill health consequent upon a straining chase for
dollars. In Prussia during the five years, 1902-1907, divorce
increased from 17.7 to 20.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, and suicide from
20 to 30.7.

If the observer does not take this difference of temperament into
account, he does not realize how new and strange it is to find Germany
these days, making its first and strongest impression upon the
outsider by its industrial progress. The more intelligent men in
Germany are beginning to see the dangers to real progress in such
feverish devotion to industry, and to recognize that the life of the
population is absorbed too largely by science, finance, and commerce.
To see so much of the intelligence of the nation exercising itself in
material researches, to see such undue fervor in calculations of self-
interest, does not leave an enlivening impression. Such an ideal of
life is paltry in itself and involves grave dangers in the future. It
is a long stride in the wrong direction since Hegel wrote of Germany
as "the guardian of the sacred fire of intellect."

Out of this temperament has grown the self-consciousness, the uneasy
vanity, the "touchiness" which has made Germany of late years the
despair of the diplomats all over the world. She has become a
chameleon-like menace to peace everywhere in the world. What she
wants, what will offend her dignity, when she will feel hurt, what
amount of consideration will suffice, when she will change color to
match a changed situation, and in what color she will choose to hide
her plans or to make manifest her demands, no man knows. She will not
see things as they are, but always as an exhalation from her own mind.
As one of her own poets has written: "Deutschland ist Hamlet."

At this present moment she does not see either England or America as
they are, quite peaceably disposed toward her but she sees them, and
persists in seeing them, as they would be were Germany in their place.
She is forever looking into a mirror instead of through the open