me a hope that our air-forces would not
bomb Mainz, 'for Mainz', he said, 'is a sacred place to the
bibliographer'. According to a statement published in Cologne in 1499,
'the highly valuable art of printing was invented first of all in
Germany at Mainz on the Rhine. And it is a great honour to the German
nation that such ingenious men are to be found among them....And in the
year of our Lord 1450 it was a golden year, and they began to print, and
the first book they printed was the Bible in Latin: it was printed in a
large character, resembling the types with which the present mass-books
are printed.' Gutenberg, the printer of this Bible, never mentions his
own name, and the only personal note we have of his, in the colophon of
the _Catholicon_, printed in 1460, is a hymn in praise of his city:
'With the aid of the Most High, who unlooses the tongues of infants and
oft-times reveals to babes that which is hidden from learned men, this
admirable book, the _Catholicon_, was finished in the year of the
incarnation of our Saviour MCCCCLX, in the foster town of Mainz, a town
of the famous German nation, which God in his clemency, by granting to
it this high illumination of the mind, has preferred before the other
nations of the world.'

There is something not quite unlike modern Germany in that; and yet
these older activities of the Germans make a strange contrast with their
work to-day. It was in the city of Cologne that Caxton first made
acquaintance with his craft. Everywhere the Germans spread printing like
a new religion, adapting it to existing conditions. In Bavaria they used
the skill of the wood-engravers, and at Augsburg, Ulm, and Nuremberg
produced the first illustrated printed books. It was two Germans of the
old school, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who carried the art to
Italy, casting the first type in Roman characters, and printing editions
of the classics, first in the Benedictine monastery of St. Scholastica
at Subiaco, and later at Rome. They also cast the first Greek type. It
was three Germans, Gering, Kranz, and Freyburger, who first printed at
Paris, in 1470. It was a German who set up the first printing-press in
Spain, in 1474. The Germans were once the cherishers, as now they are
the destroyers, of the inheritance of civilization. I do not pretend to
explain the change. Perhaps it is a tragedy of education. That is a
dangerous moment in the life of a child when he begins to be uneasily
aware