f his themes affords constant pleasure to
the reader. He proceeds as steadily toward his climax as the builder
does toward the highest point of his roof. He had learned much about
climaxes, so he tells us himself, from Walter Scott, who was the first
to see the importance of a great final or concluding effect.

We have touched as yet merely on externals. Elegance of style,
orderliness of arrangement, consecutiveness of thought alone would
never have given Freytag his place in German literature. All these had
first to be consecrated to the service of a great idea. That idea as
expressed in _Debit and Credit_ is that the hope of the German nation
rests in its steady commercial or working class. He shows the dignity,
yes, the poetry of labor. The nation had failed to secure the needed
political reforms, to the bitter disappointment of numerous patriots;
Freytag's mission was to teach that there were other things worth
while besides these constitutional liberties of which men had so long
dreamed and for which they had so long struggled.

Incidentally he holds the decadent noble up to scorn, and shows how he
still clings to his old pretensions while their very basis is
crumbling under him. It is a new and active life that Freytag
advocates, one of toil and of routine, but one that in the end will
give the highest satisfaction. Such ideas were products of the
revolution of 1848, and they found the ground prepared for them by
that upheaval. Freytag, as Fichte had done in 1807 and 1808,
inaugurated a campaign of education which was to prove enormously
successful. A French critic writes of _Debit and Credit_ that it was
"the breviary in which a whole generation of Germans learned to read
and to think," while an English translator (three translations of the
book appeared in England in the same year) calls it the _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_ of the German workingman. A German critic is furious that a
work of such real literary merit should be compared to one so flat and
insipid as Mrs. Stowe's production; but he altogether misses the
point, which is the effect on the people of a spirited defense of
those who had hitherto had no advocate.

Freytag has been called an opportunist, but the term should not be
considered one of reproach. It certainly was opportune that his great
work appeared at the moment when it was most needed, a moment of
discouragement, of disgust at everything high and low. It brought its
smiling message and remained to