he ideas got from England--like
the aniline dyes--or from France--like the Wassermann tests--and
seldom credited to their sources. So poor grew the academic tone at
Berlin that a Munich professor declined an offer of promotion thither.

For forty years German school children and university students sat in
the thickening fumes that exhaled from Berlin, spread everywhere by
professors chosen at the fountainhead. Any professor or editor who
dared speak anything not dictated by Prussia, for German credulity to
write down on its slate, was dealt with as a heretic.

Out of the fumes emerged three colossal shapes--the Super-man, the
Super-race and the Super-state: the new Trinity of German worship.

X

Thus was Germany shut in from the world. Even her Socialist-Democrats
abjectly conformed. China built a stone wall, Germany a wall of the mind.

To assert that any great nation has in these modern days deliberately
built around herself such a wall, may seem an extreme statement, and I
will therefore support it with an instance--only one instance out of
many, out of hundreds; it will suffice to indicate the sort of
information about the world lying outside the wall that Germany has
carefully prepared for the children in her schools. I quote from the
letter of an American parent recently living in Berlin, who placed his
children in a school there: "The text books were unique. I suppose there
was not in any book of physics or chemistry that they studied an
admission that a citizen of some other country had taken any forward
step; every step was by some line of argument assigned to a German. As
you might expect, the history of the modern world is the work of German
Heroes. The oddest example, however, was the geography used by
Katherine. (His daughter, aged thirteen.) This contained maps indicating
the Deutsche Gebiete (the German "spheres of influence" in foreign
lands) in striking colors. In North and South America, including the
United States and Canada, there are said to be three classes of
inhabitants--negroes, Indians and Germans. For the United States there
is a black belt for negroes and a middle-west section for Indians; but
the rest is Deutsche Gebiete. Canada is occupied mainly by Indians. The
matter was brought to my attention because one of Katherine's girl
friends asked her whether she was of negro or Indian blood; and when she
replied she was neither her friend pointed out that this was impossible
for she