but could not sell it if any one
else made it outside, or vice versa.
Nearly all this mass of useless restriction on trades and business,
which palsied all effort in Bavaria, is removed. Persons are free to
enter into any business they like. The system of apprenticeship
continues, but so modified as not to be oppressive; and all trades
are left to regulate themselves by natural competition. Already
Munich has felt the benefit of the removal of these restrictions,
which for nearly a year has been anticipated, in a growth of
population and increased business.
But the social change is still more important. The restrictions upon
marriage were a serious injury to the state. If Hans wished to
marry, and felt himself adequate to the burdens and responsibilities
of the double state, and the honest fraulein was quite willing to
undertake its trials and risks with him, it was not at all enough
that in the moonlighted beergarden, while the band played, and they
peeled the stinging radish, and ate the Switzer cheese, and drank
from one mug, she allowed his arm to steal around her stout waist.
All this love and fitness went for nothing in the eyes of the
magistrate, who referred the application for permission to marry to
his associate advisers, and they inquired into the applicant's
circumstances; and if, in their opinion, he was not worth enough
money to support a wife properly, permission was refused for him to
try. The consequence was late marriages, and fewer than there ought
to be, and other ill results. Now the matrimonial gates are lifted
high, and the young man has not to ask permission of any snuffy old
magistrate to marry. I do not hear that the consent of the maidens
is more difficult to obtain than formerly.
No city of its size is more prolific of pictures than Munich. I do
not know how all its artists manage to live, but many of them count
upon the American public. I hear everywhere that the Americans like
this, and do not like that; and I am sorry to say that some artists,
who have done better things, paint professedly to suit Americans, and
not to express their own conceptions of beauty. There is one who is
now quite devoted to dashing off rather lamp-blacky moonlights,
because, he says, the Americans fancy that sort of thing. I see one
of his smirchy pictures hanging in a shop window, awaiting the advent
of the citizen of the United States. I trust that no word of mine
will injure the sale of the moonlights.
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