foreign language who has ever got as
far as Exercise IV. in a primer. For as soon as he can put a
sentence together at all he finds that the words used in abstract or
philosophical discussions are almost the same in all nations. They are
the same, for the simple reason that they all come from the things that
were the roots of our common civilisation. From Christianity, from
the Roman Empire, from the mediaeval Church, or the French Revolution.
"Nation," "citizen," "religion," "philosophy," "authority," "the
Republic," words like these are nearly the same in all the countries in
which we travel. Restrain, therefore, your exuberant admiration for the
young man who can argue with six French atheists when he first lands at
Dieppe. Even I can do that. But very likely the same young man does not
know the French for a shoe-horn. But to this generalisation there
are three great exceptions. (1) In the case of countries that are not
European at all, and have never had our civic conceptions, or the old
Latin scholarship. I do not pretend that the Patagonian phrase for
"citizenship" at once leaps to the mind, or that a Dyak's word for "the
Republic" has been familiar to me from the nursery. (2) In the case of
Germany, where, although the principle does apply to many words such
as "nation" and "philosophy," it does not apply so generally, because
Germany has had a special and deliberate policy of encouraging the
purely German part of its language. (3) In the case where one does not
know any of the language at all, as is generally the case with me.

.....

Such at least was my situation on the dark day on which I committed my
crime. Two of the exceptional conditions which I have mentioned were
combined. I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German. I
knew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which hold
our European civilisation together--one of which is "cigar." As it was a
hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort of beer-garden, and
ordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the lager, and paid for
it. I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it, and walked away, gazing
rapturously at the royal outline of the Taunus mountains. After about
ten minutes, I suddenly remembered that I had not paid for the cigar. I
went back to the place of refreshment, and put down the money. But the
proprietor also had forgotten the cigar, and he merely said guttural
things in a tone of query, asking me, I suppose