with the most abominable manners to strangers.

The Englishman, for example, pops into his club to escape the world,
not to seek it there. The English club and the English home are
primarily for seclusion, not for companionship, and this
characteristic alone is wofully hard for the stranger to understand.
To the gregarious German, priding himself upon Gemuethlichkeit, loving
reunions, restaurants, his Stammtisch, formal and punctilious in his
politeness, unused to the ways of the world, but yet convinced that he
is now a great man politically and commercially, the Englishman is not
only an enigma but an insult. I am criticising neither. I have
received unbounded hospitality and friendliness from both. I have
ridden, fought, drunk, travelled, and lived with both, but for that
very reason I understand how horribly and continually they rub one
another the wrong way.

In the fundamental matter of morals the German looks upon the
Englishman as a hypocrite, and the Englishman looks upon the German as
rather unpolished and undignified. Berlin is open all night, London
closes at half-past twelve. The British Sunday is a gloomy suppression
of vitality, touched up here and there with preaching and hymn-singing,
and fringed with surreptitious golf; the German Sunday is a
national fair, with a blossoming of all kinds of amusements, deluged
with beer, and attended by whole families as their only relaxation
during the week.

The German licenses vice, lotteries, and gambling; the Englishman
refuses to recognize the existence of any of the three. The German
does not understand the Englishman's point of view in these matters,
which is that, though he knows these things to exist, and that he is
no better in actual practice than other men, he refuses to accept
these as his ideal. He denounces and passes judgment upon, and
punishes men and women, who go too far in their appreciation and
practice of apolausticism as a philosophy of life. He might have run
away from danger himself, but he none the less scorns the man who did
so. The shipwreck, the fire, the test of moral courage and endurance,
may have found him a coward, or weak, or a deserter, but he holds that
he must none the less measure the coward, the weakling, and the
deserter, not by his own possible weakness if put to the same tests,
but by his ideal of a courageous and straightforward Englishman. I
agree with him wholly and heartily. If our sympathy is to go out on
every occ