p.... German women will show
their men the way to freedom. Doing more than their share of the
nation's work, they insist upon being heard, and their growing influence
is one of the greatest dangers to German autocracy in its present
predicament. As politicians German women have the advantage of not
having gone through the soul-destroying, brutalizing school of Prussian
militarism, and of not being burdened with the rigmarole of theory which
formed the content of German politics before the war. They can be
trusted to make a bee-line for the real obstacle to peace and
liberty--to eradicate the autocratic militaristic regime which enslaved
the German people in order to enslave the world."

Now that the way has been cleared by two men of affairs who have never
condescended to write fiction, I will give my own reasons for belief in
the German women, and also for the general plan of _The White Morning_.

I had an apartment for seven years in Munich and spent six or eight
months alternately in that delightful city and traveling in Europe,
passing a month or two in England, or returning for an equal length of
time to my own country. During that long residence in Germany I
naturally met many of its inhabitants, and of as many classes as
possible. German women do not tell you the history of their lives the
first time you meet them, not by any means; they are naturally secretive
and the reverse of frank. But they are human, and when you have won
their confidence they will tell you surprising things. The confidences I
received were for the most part from girls, and one and all assured me
they never should marry. Having grown up under one House Tyrant, for
whom they were not responsible, why in heaven's name should they
deliberately annex another? Far, far better bear with the one whose
worst at least they knew (and who could not live forever), than marry
some man who might be loathsome as well as tyrannical, and who, unless
there happened to be a war, might outlive them?

The idea in my novel of the four Niebuhr girls and their initial
rebellion was suggested to me by a family of Prussian junkerdom that I
met at a watering place in Denmark. The baroness was a charming woman
who used a moderate invalidism in a smiling imperturbable fashion to
insure herself a certain immunity from the demands of her autocratic
lord. The girls were lively, intelligent, splendidly educated. They were
in love with society and court functions, but dee