stiff collars, that there is a dearth of agricultural laborers,
and she imports 700,000 Hungarians, Poles, Slays, and Italians every
year to harvest her crops.

This same system of education has taught youths to think for
themselves before either the mental or moral muscles are tough enough,
with the result that she is the agnostic and materialistic nation of
Europe, and her capital the most licentious and immoral in Europe.

This is the result of secular education everywhere. Freedom of
thought, yes, but not freedom of thought any more than freedom of
morals, or freedom of manners, or political freedom, in extreme youth;
that only makes for anarchy political, mental, and moral.

There is much undigested, not to say indigestible, republicanism about
just now in China and in Portugal, for example; just as there are
materialism and agnosticism in Germany and in France, not due to
super-intellectualism but to juvenile thinking. The Chinese are just
as fit for a republic -- an actual republic is still a long way off --
as are callow German youths, and notoriety-loving French students, for
freedom to disbelieve and to destroy. No country can long survive a
majority of women teachers in the public schools, together with no
Bible and no religious teaching there. I have no prejudices favoring
orthodoxy, but I have a fairly wide experience which has given me one
article of a creed that I would go to the stake for, and that is that
it is of all crimes the worst to give freedom political, moral, or
religious to those who are unprepared for it.

Germany's taste in literature, once so natural and healthy, has become
morbid, and Sudermann and Gorky and Oscar Wilde, and the rest of the
unhealthy crew who swarm about the morgues, the dissecting-rooms, and
the houses of assignation of life, the internuntiata libidinum, the
leering conciliatrices of the dark streets, are her favorites now.
There is no surer sign of mental ill-health than a taste for lowering
literature, an appetite for this self-dissecting, this complacent,
self-contemplating form of intellectual exercise.

This is no heated assault on German culture. It is a natural phase of
development. Youthful candidates for worldliness all go through this
pornocratic stage. "The impudence of the bawd is modesty, compared
with that of the convert," writes the Marquis of Halifax. The German
professor and the German bourgeois in their Rake's Progress are only a
little more awkward