pment along these meretricious and disappointing
lines, but I am the last to admit that the outcome is satisfactory, or
that the rest of the world should look to Germany to point out the way
of salvation. A steaming orchid-house is not the place to go to learn
to grow the fruits of the earth in their due season for the
nourishment of a free people. You will find some brilliantly colored
flowers there, in the gay uniforms of the artificial tropics, but they
shrink and shrivel in the open air. They have been trained to grow
luxuriantly in this stifling atmosphere, but they feed no one, please
no one, who will not consent to live in a glass house with them.

Because a people is blindfolded, its preachers and pedagogues gagged,
its officials subservient, is all the more reason why they should be
easily led, but no reason at all for supposing that they will lead
anybody else.

I have said here and there that I have learned much, and that we all
have much to learn from Germany. I permit myself to repeat it. She has
shown us that the short-cut to the governing of a people by
suppression and strangulation results in a dreary development of
mediocrity. She has proved again that the only safety in the world for
either an individual or a nation is to be loved and respected, and in
these days no one respects slavery or loves threats.

From an American point of view, any sacrifice, any war, were better
than the domination of the Prussian methods of nation-making. No
nation should be by its traditions and its ideals more ready to arm
itself, and to keep itself armed if necessary for years, against the
possibility of the transference of such methods to the American
continent than the United States of North America.

"Theuer ist mir der Freund, doch auch den Feind kann ich nuetzen,
Zeigt mir der Freund, was ich kann, lehrt mir der Feind was ich soll,"

writes Schiller.

We Americans have much to learn from both our friends and our enemies.
We have both in Germany, and we should cultivate the temper of mind
which profits by the encouragement of our friends and the criticism of
our foes.

End of Project Gutenberg's Germany and the Germans, by Price Collier

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