he had a wife, he seemed altogether
so happily unmarried--was coming home. She had been away for three
weeks; not nearly long enough, you and I and others of our
self-depreciatory and self-critical country would think, to deserve an
evergreen garland round our door on coming back. He laughed when I
told him I had been afraid to come in lest I should disturb
retrospective obsequies.

"We are still so near, my dear Mees Chrees," he said, shrugging a fat
shoulder--he asked me what I was called at home, and I said you called
me Chris, and he said he would, with my permission, also call me
Chrees, but with Mees in front of it to show that though he desired to
be friendly he also wished to remain respectful--"we are still so near
as a nation to the child and to the savage. To the clever child, and
the powerful savage. We like simple and gross emotions and plenty of
them; obvious tastes in our food and our pleasures, and a great deal of
it; fat in our food, and fat in our women. And, like the child, when
we mourn we mourn to excess, and enjoy ourselves in that excess; and,
like the savage, we are afraid, and therefore hedge ourselves about
with observances, celebrations, cannon, kings. In no other country is
there more than one king. In ours we find three and an emperor
necessary. The savage who fears all things does not fear more than we
Germans. We fear other nations, we fear other people, we fear public
opinion to an extent incredible, and tremble before the opinion of our
servants and tradespeople; we fear our own manners and therefore are
obliged to preserve the idiotic practice of duelling, in which as often
as not the man whose honour is being satisfied is the one who is
killed; we fear all those above us, of whom there are invariably a
great many; we fear all officials, and our country drips with
officials. The only person we do not fear is God."

"But--" I began, remembering their motto, bestowed on them by Bismarck,

"Yes, yes, I know," he interrupted. "It is not, however, true. The
contrary is the truth. We Germans fear not God, but everything else in
the world. It is only fear that makes us polite, fear of the duel;
for, like the child and the savage, we have not had time to acquire the
habit of good manners, the habit which makes manners inevitable and
invariable, and it is not natural to us to be polite. We are polite
only by the force of fear. Consequently--for all men must have their
rel