Our grandfathers and fathers, some of them, talked and read of Saint-Simon,
of Fourier, Robert Owen, Maurice Kingsley, and the Brook Farm
experiment, and believed, no doubt, that the dawn of the twentieth
century would have extracted at least some balm from these theories
for the healing of our social woes. They would rub their eyes in
amazement were they to awake in 1912 to find more armed men, more
ships of war, more fighting, more strikes and trade disputes, than
ever before. Above all, they would be puzzled to find the nation which
is most advanced in the application of the theory of state socialism
with the largest army, the heaviest taxation, and the second most
formidable fleet.

The library in which, as a small boy, I was permitted to browse, where
I read those wonderful Black Forest Stories and my first serious
novel, On the Heights, contained a bust of Goethe, and on the shelves
were Fichte, Freytag, Spielhagen, Strauss, and a miscellaneous
collection of German authors grave and gay, or perhaps melancholy were
a better word, for even now I should find it hard to point to a German
author who is distinctively gay. No visitor to that library, and they
numbered many distinguished visitors, American and foreign, from
Emerson and Alcott and George Macdonald to others less well known,
dreamed that the serene marble features of Goethe would be replaced by
the granite fissures of the face of Bismarck; and that Auerbach's
Black Forest Stories would be less known than Albert Ballin's fleet of
mercantile ships. As I dream myself back to that big chair wherein I
could curl up my whole person, and still leave room for at least two
fair-sized dogs, I see as in no other way the almost unbelievable
change that has come over Germany. The Black Forest Stories, Hammer
and Anvil, The Lost Manuscript, Werther, Fichte, Kant, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Strauss, Heine were Germany then; Bismarck, Ballin, and
Krupp are Germany now. Germany was Hamlet then; Germany is Shylock,
Shylock armed to the teeth, now.

No nation can change in one generation, as has Germany, by the natural
development of its innate characteristics; such a change must be
forced and artificial to take place in so short a time. This is not
only the internal danger to Germany itself, but the danger to all
those superficial observers who point to Germany as having solved
certain social and economic problems. She has not solved them by
healthy growth into better ways; she