The Germans and the Americans

THE surprises of the last year, with all their unexpected side issues, have accustomed the world to read about Germany and America in the same newspaper paragraph. Alarming reports have come from Samoa and from the Philippines, and more than once serious conflicts have seemed near. All this, however, is politics : why should a student of psychology concern himself with it? But may we not be deceiving ourselves if we think that the trouble really has been in the harbors of Manila and Apia? Has it not been rather the mental state of the two nations that was the only possible source of any danger ? If a big wave had swallowed the Philippines and a volcano had pulverized Samoa, would anything have been changed so long as the emotional attitude of the two peoples had remained the same ? At present no cloud is on the horizon, but any day may bring a change; the object of quarrel is insignificant, and the mental attitude everything. If Americans and Germans like each other, the whole of China will be too small to cause a conflict; but if there is antipathy between them, the tiniest rock in the ocean may suffice to bring on a war which shall set the globe ablaze. Does not that give an excuse to the psychologist who, far as he is from the mysteries of politics, ventures to take an impartial view of this interesting emotional situation ?

To live up to all the opportunities of scholarly display which this chapter of social psychology offers, I ought to go back to the sixteenth century, or at least to Frederick the Great, whose enthusiasm for the American struggle for independence furnishes plenty of material for all those who like such an introduction. But from then till now the time is so long, and my space here is so short, that it may perhaps be better to ask what the situation was yesterday. I think it was decidedly better than it is to-day, and the day before yesterday it was perfect. Of course I do not mean that the two nations then loved each other dearly, but there was not the slightest tendency toward mutual dislike and not the remotest reason for friction. The Germans of a generation ago did not look much beyond the ocean in any case, and the German imagination pictured the land rather than the nation, — the land where gold was lying in the streets, and where every newcomer still found the chance of a free life. The American as a special type of man had not been discovered ; neither favorable nor unfavorable information about him was diffused, simply because nobody asked for it. On the American side it was somewhat different. Millions of German immigrants had poured into the land, and had become an honest and most industrious part of the population. Moreover, while they were bringing the spirit of the German working classes, thousands of young Americans were going abroad to bring home the spirit of educated Germany. German music and German philosophy, German joyousness and German university spirit, came to these shores; and yet, just as the American land of gold and liberty remained to the imagination of the German something far and strange, so the Teutonic land of thinkers and poets remained to the American imagination remote and vague. No one thought of comparison or of rivalry, because the two worlds seemed of different dimensions.

But all this has changed overnight: the dreamy German and the adventurous American are sitting close together on the same bench, feeling that they must be either friends or foes. Wonderfully as the cables and twin-screw steamers have diminished the distance in space between the two peoples, the diminution of the inner mental distance has been still more surprising and unexpected on both sides. Germany has become strong, rich, and powerful, and its politics have turned into realistic paths. On the other hand, the United States, since the country has come to maturity economically, has put its gigantic resources into the service of education and art and science. They are both thus moving in the same sphere, and the question is merely, Will they move shoulder to shoulder, or be ever at variance ? Their feelings and emotions, even their moods, will decide about that: how do they feel to-day ?

No sincere observer can deny that the two peoples do not like each other. It is not real hate nor even animosity which separates them ; it is a kind of antipathy, a half-ethical, half-æsthetie aversion. It would be superficial and wrong to deny this feeling, and to maintain that their dislike means commercial rivalry; both are too fair and broad-minded — indeed, I may say, too idealistic — to dislike each other on account of wheat and sugar and pork ; they might struggle about the tariff, but tariff struggles become noisy and undignified affairs only because the masses lack mutual respect. They do not like each other because they do not regard each other as gentlemen : the American thinks the German servile and reactionary, narrow-minded and narrow-hearted ; the German thinks the American greedy and vulgar, brutal and corrupt. As long as the people feel like that, all the diplomacy of the two governments can merely apply plasters to the wounds, but can never thoroughly heal them. Only one course is open for an organic improvement: the two nations must learn to understand each other and to feel the inner accord of their real natures, or at least to overcome hostile prejudices.

Caricature of the Germans is popular from the Atlantic to the Pacific; it is not necessary to seek it in the comic papers, for the editorials of the great newspapers furnish as good a supply ; and the funny German in a second-class American theatre is much less amusing than that absurd creature which in parlor gossip and club talk is quite seriously substituted for the inhabitant of the fatherland. An American who has never been abroad invited me, the other day, to a German luncheon. I had to work my way through a series of so-called German dishes, which I had never tasted or smelled before ; and when finally imported sauerkraut appeared, and I had to confess that I had never tried the stuff in my life, and had never seen any one else eating it, my host assured me that I did not know anything about Germany : it was the favorite dish of every Prussian. The habits of this Prussian sauerkraut eater are well known. He goes shabbily dressed, never takes a bath, drinks beer at his breakfast, plays skat, smokes a long pipe, wears spectacles, reads books from dirty loan libraries, is rude to the lower classes and slavishly servile to the higher, is innocent of the slightest attempt at good form in society; considering it as his object in life to obey the policeman, to fill blanks with bureaucratic red tape, and to get a title in front of his name. Most of this genus fill their time with training parade step in the barrack courts; the others either make bad lyrical poems, or live immoral lives, or sit in prison on account of daring to say a free word in politics. But their chief characteristic comes out in their relations to women and to the government. With calculating cruelty, they force women to remain uneducated and without rights; in marriage they treat them like silly playthings or servant girls; a woman with intellectual or aesthetic interests is, like everything which suggests progress, a horror to their minds. And lastly, their government: it is hard to understand why, but it is a fact that they insist on living without any constitution, under an absolute autocrat, and it is their chief pride that their monarch is an irresponsible busybody, whose chief aim is to bother his patient subjects.

This is the “Dutchman” in American eyes ; but how does the Yankee look in the imagination of my countrymen ? In the German language the adjective “American” is usually connected with but three things. The Germans speak of American stoves, and mean a kind of stove which I have never seen in this country ; they speak of American duels, and mean an absurd sort of duel which was certainly never fought on this continent ; and finally, they speak of American humbug, and mean by it that kind of humbug which flourishes in Berlin just as in Chicago. But the American man is of course very well known. He is a haggard creature, with vulgar tastes and brutal manners, who drinks whiskey and chews tobacco, spits, fights, puts his feet on the table, and habitually rushes along in wild haste, absorbed by a greedy desire for the dollars of his neighbors. He does not care for education or art, for the public welfare or for justice, except so far as they mean money to him. Corrupt from top to toe, he buys legislation and courts and government ; and when he wants fun, he lynches innocent negroes on Madison Square in New York, or in the Boston Public Garden. He has his family home usually in a sky scraper of twenty-four stories ; his business is founded on misleading advertisements ; his newspapers are filled with accounts of murders, and his churches swarm with hypocrites.

It is true that on both sides of the ocean there are some who know a little better; but if the millions who enjoy the New York Journal and the Berliner Lokalanzeiger have such character sketches in mind, how small is the influence on public opinion of that little set which relies on the New York Evening Post and the Nationalzeitung! And even these best classes, are they really so much freer from prejudice ? After all, the American clings to the belief that the German is reactionary and subservient, without a manly desire for freedom and independence, — that his Emperor is a crank, and the average subject no gentleman ; while the American remains to German eyes dollar-thirsty and corrupt, vulgar and selfish, — on the whole, also, no gentleman. So when an English cable agency sends news to Germany that the Americans have fallen upon the poor Cubans to fill the pockets of Senators, and are killing in the Philippines mostly women and children, and sends news to America that the Germans slyly interfere with the navy in Mahila, or sell arms to the Filippinos, or stir up the Samoans, is it surprising that the worst finds the readiest belief, and that public opinion in both countries cries, “ How dare they, the rascals ! ”

That which alone seems surprising is that the brambles of prejudice can grow so exuberantly while the ocean steamers are crowded, going and coming. The hundreds of students who go yearly to German universities, the thousands of American sight-seers who go every summer on pilgrimages from Heidelberg to Cologne, the millions of German immigrants who have been poured into this country, and the billions of newspaper pages which are printed on both sides every year, — are they all unable to disseminate the truth ? But we cannot deny that the psychological conditions are more favorable to the survival of the false view, in spite of the blessed work of the Associated Press. The Americans who cross the ocean cannot see much of Germany and cannot teach much about America. A friend assured me once that there is only one classification of Americans which it is worth while to make, — those who have been abroad and those who have not. I cannot agree with him. I have met many whose minds have spanned the world, though they have never left the New England states ; and many more who have strolled over the whole of Europe, and yet are as narrow and provincial as if they had never looked over the fence of their own back yards. A man may heartily enjoy the architecture of Nürnberg or Hildesheim, the paintings of Dresden, the operas of Baireutli, the scenery of the Black Forest, and the uniforms of the lieutenants of the guard, and yet leave the country with all the absurd prejudices which he carried there. We are inclined by psychological laws to perceive merely that which we expect to perceive ; we do not voluntarily suppress the remainder, but it does not exist for us at all. Germany has no freedom : thus the most harmless policeman on the street corner appears to be a tyrant, and brings before the mind of the traveler the terrors of mediævalism. And when the bicycles must have a number by day and a lantern by night, who can help thinking sentimentally of the free home over the sea, where every body has the liberty to run over his fellow ; and where the landlady gives chops for breakfast, and not eggs alone; and where plenty of blankets, not feather beds, await you ; and where ice water flows and mince pies abound. The little differences trouble the stranger and they swell in his imagination, while every good thing that does not fit with his anticipations fades away and is soon forgotten. Very few Americans come into a sufficiently intimate contact with the real German life to get their traditional errors eradicated.

But the usual Europe trotter, on the other hand, does not help much to propagate the belief in American culture. He goes his way quietly, and no one will blame him for enjoying the view from Heidelberg Castle down to the Neckar Valley without making a speech for the glory of his country. He remains unobserved ; but when a puffed-up parvenu from the West comes along, with noisy manners, he is observed, and he alone, though one among scores, is then “ the American;” and if he puts his feet on the table in the hotel corridor, there are certainly a dozen men in the neighborhood who will never after relinquish the opinion that all Americans are hopelessly vulgar and disgusting.

The Germans who travel to America either are on a journey or have come to stay. The first group contains few : they go, for the most part, from New York through Florida and the City of Mexico to San Francisco, and through the Yellowstone Park, Chicago, and Quebec back to Hoboken. If they have done that in six months, they write only one or two magazine articles about the Americans ; but if they have succeeded in doing it in six weeks, then they write a book, and a big one. They have of course seen everything: they have shaken hands with the President, have witnessed a prize fight at an athletic club, visited the stockyards and the Indian schools, studied polygamy in Utah and the Chinese quarters in San Francisco; they have even met some one in the Pullman car who knew all about the silver question and the next presidency. And when they have added their own experiences in the barber shops and in the barrooms, the book will contain all that Germans can desire to know about America. They have not the remotest idea that this nation can show greater achievements than its hotels and railways. They have seen all the Baedeker stars, and do not guess that the tourist attractions of this country represent its real energies much less than do those of Europe. Europe, with its relics of history and art, may speak to the eye ; America speaks to the understanding ; whatever national life is here apparent to the eye is mostly but an imitation of Europe. The traveler is accustomed to open his eyes only, and to close his ears ; he descants for the thousandth time on the Rocky Mountains and Niagara, but he does not learn anything about the inner life, with its mountains of accomplishment and its cataracts of problems. There are plenty of excellent German monographs about special economical features of American life which can be studied from the outside ; the studies on the more internal functions of education or religion are much more superficial, and nothing which really analyzes the inner man with full understanding has ever been carried home by the German traveler. He is too rare a guest to add anything by his appearance here to American ideas about the Germans. He remains the more unobserved because there is no lack of German nature already at hand to be inspected under the most various conditions; for New York and Chicago have each more Germans than any German city except Berlin. Thus only the Germans who live here are able to represent their native country in the New World, and to take back to Germany true ideas about the inner American life. How has it happened that even these millions have not dispelled the dense fog of Continental ignorance about the Yankees ? How has it happened that the real America is still as undiscovered by the educated German as if Columbus had never crossed the ocean ?

The German immigrant can justly claim to be a respectable and very desirable element of the American population : he has stood always on the side of solid work and honesty ; he has brought skill and energy over the ocean, and he has not forgotten his music and his joyfulness ; he is not second to any one in his devotion to the duties of a citizen in peace and in war, and without his aid many of America’s industrial, commercial, and technical triumphs would be unknown. But all that does not disprove the fact that he is somewhat unfit to judge fairly the life which surrounds him. First, he belongs almost always to a social stratum in which the attention is fully absorbed by the external life of a country, and which is without feeling for the achievements of its mental life ; he was poor in his fatherland, and lives comfortably here, and thus he is enthusiastic over the material life, praises the railroads and hotels, the bridges and mills, but does not even try to judge of the libraries and universities, the museums and the hospitals. On the other hand, he feels socially in the background ; he is the “ Dutchman,” who, through his bad English, through his habits and manners, through his tastes and pleasures, is different from the majority, and therefore set apart as a citizen of second rank, — if not slighted, at least kept in social isolation. On the side of the German, the result of this situation is an entire ignorance of the AngloAmerican life : he may go his way here for thirty years without ever breaking bread at the table of any one outside of the German circle ; he may even have become rich, and yet he is not quite in the social current. His ignorance is therefore too easily coupled with unfairness ; the German who feels himself slighted tends to minimize the effect of the unfriendly attitude of the Anglo-American by sharp and contemptuous criticism : everything which seems strange is in his talk distorted into a defect, and every real weakness grows to a vice. Of course, there are not a few exceptions, not a few who are fully received, even if we disregard that less worthy class which buys recognition by disavowal of the fatherland, of whom some, in the interest of city politics, are said to be ambitious of becoming Irishmen. The large mass, however, continues in that social separation which makes its judgment an odd mixture of ignorance as to the inner life, unfairness as to the personal qualities, and blind admiration for the wealth and economic greatness of this country. In such a form the gossip of a hundred thousand family letters and saloon conversations pours into Germany, and naturally reinforces there, through that which it praises almost as much as through that which it blames, the feeling of antipathy toward the United States. And worst of all, in this atmosphere live nearly all those journalists, from the editor to the penny-a-liner, who fill the eight hundred German-American newspapers and supply most of the papers in Germany.

These men are not only unfit to judge Americans ; they are also, unfortunately, unfit to correct the traditional ideas of Americans about Germans. If they lived up to their highest duty, they would work out in themselves the noblest type of German character, in order to impress Americans with the best of the German nature, and thus make moral conquests for their old home. But this they have not done. Wbile the fine generation of 1848 has gradually passed away, no new set has come in which has felt itself called upon to add to the glory of the fatherland ; and it is bad enough that they themselves are satisfied to praise honesty and obedience to law as their virtues instead of feeling them a matter of course. What characterizes the German at home, the tendency to idealism and the desire for intellectual life, has evaporated ; the artisan or the farmer, whose highest wish at home would have been to send his son to the gymnasium, and perhaps even to the university, is here glad if his boy becomes a clever business clerk as quickly as possible. It seems as if he imitated by preference the bad features of his surroundings, and sought to unite American weaknesses to German defects. The exceptions merely confirm the rule that the average German - American stands below the level of the average German at home. This is hardly a result of the bad quality of the immigrants ; on the contrary, the factors which determine the individual to cross the ocean make it probable that, in most cases, the stronger and more energetic personalities seek the wider field of a new country ; the lowering of tlie average must be the result of the new conditions of life, and not of the selection of the material.

It seems, then, that the German-Americans have done but little to make the Germans understand America better, and perhaps still less to make the Americans understand the real Germans ; they have given little help toward awakening in the two nations the feeling of mutual sympathy ; and yet, as we have said, this alone is the way for an organic improvement of their political relations. If they had lived up to their duties in the last twenty years as they did in the fifties and sixties, the branches of the Teutonic race would have been united by a more cordial feeling, and many occurrences of the last two years would have been impossible.

The superficial observer may perhaps be inclined to think that, instead of avoiding the bad feelings, it is just as well simply to suppress the outer effects of these feelings. It is this defective logic which made it possible, lately, for the West to witness a gigantic German movement, starting with a mass meeting of protest in Chicago and spreading over wide districts, — a movement which is easy to explain, hard to excuse, and still harder to correct. Its occasion was the Anglo-American alliance. Under favorable emotional conditions this alliance would contain in itself the possibility of a general Teutonic unity as against the Romanic and Slavic nations, the strong and healthful nations against the decadents ; but under the pressure of prejudices and dislikes it may be turned against Germany. To change the feelings and remove the prejudices, therefore, would be the wise policy of the friends of Germany. To protest against the alliance in threatening language, and to force on the administration a break with England by means of the weight of two and a half million German voters, would be the short-sighted policy of those who believe they cure an evil by suppressing its external symptoms. Just this the statesmen of the Windy City have insisted upon doing. The slight possible advantages of a political combination would be too dearly bought by the increase of bitter feelings which might at any date bring up more threatening complications than an alliance between the United States and England ; and while the movement has gained the enthusiasm of the Irish politicians on account of their animosity to England, this very sympathy has helped to increase the irritation instead of curing it.

No, it is the duty of the German-Americans, if they think not only of their personal position as American citizens, but of the relations between the two countries, to keep away from every demonstration which sharpens the bad feelings between the two nations, and to be mediators in their disputes. They must embody in themselves the best side of the German spirit, and they must open the eyes of Germans at home to what is best in the American nature. They alone have seen both countries with loving eyes and loyal hearts, and they ought therefore to be able to do justice to the true intentions of both parties. In their hands is the flag of truce. Their work must of course be futile if they ignore the facts and tell fairy tales about the two countries. What is needed is nothing but the truth, freed from the traditional phrases of short-sighted prejudices.

Not as a discussion, but as an illustration, I may perhaps be allowed to point out a few such prejudices which strike me as an impartial observer. Take, for instance, the traditional German opinion that the Americans have no idealism, but are selfish realists. The belief that Americans have no spark of idealism in their souls has done more harm to the relations of Continental nations with the United States than any protective tariff or any commercial competition ; it has surrounded every act of America with a fringe of selfishness and meanness by which even the most harmless action becomes repugnant to sound feelings, and by which the most guileless man is made a prey to the newspapers of Europe. Granted that an American action can never have idealistic motives, it is not difficult to distort daily occurrences and historical events so that everything appears disgusting to a country which believes itself to have a prior claim upon every sort of idealistic feeling, and this emotion of the crowd then becomes the spring of political reactions. I think this attitude is utterly groundless. More than that, I think the true American is an idealist through and through. I perceive, to be sure, that his idealism is often loose and lax and ineffective, but it remains idealism, nevertheless, and he deceives himself when he poses as a realist, like his English cousin. What most quickly misleads is, doubtless, his consuming interest in money-making, together with the sharp struggle for existence, the gigantic scale of his undertakings, his hasty impulsive movements, his taste for strong sensational stimuli, his spoils politics, and the influence of corporations upon his legislation. But is not all that merely the surface view ? The American is not greedy for money; if he were, he would not give away his wealth with such a liberal hand, and would not put aside all the unidealistic European schemes of money-making which exclude individual initiative, as, for instance, the pursuit of dowries. The American runs after money primarily for the pleasure of the chase. In a country where political conditions have excluded titles and orders and social distinctions in general, money is in the end the only means of social discrimination, and financial success becomes thus the measurement of the ability of the individual and of his power to realize himself in action. That the struggle for existence is sharper here than in Europe is simply a fairy tale. In a country where the greatest enterprises are undertaken in the service of charity, and where the natural resources of the land are inexhaustible, even the lowest classes do not struggle for existence, but, seen from the Continental standpoint, merely for comfort: of this the lyrical character of the discussions of social problems here compared with their dramatic character in Germany gives the fullest evidence.

The manners and tastes of individuals are also easily misinterpreted. Those hasty, pushing movements look like an overflow of realistic energies, but they are simply the outcome of a lack of coordination and adjustment. The quiet movements of the Englishman are expressions of strength and energy; the hasty movements of the Yankee and his motor restlessness, manifested in the use of rocking-chairs and chewing-gum, are mere imperfections of the motor coordinating centres, an inability to suppress and to inhibit. In the same way, the demand for strong stimuli is not at all a symptom of over-irritation, as those usually claim it to be who consider American life a nerve-wearing clash of selfish energies. No, it is only insufficient training through the lack of aesthetic traditions. While over-irritation would demand that the stimuli grow stronger and stronger, experience shows that they soften and become more refined from year to year, stamping to-day as vulgar the acknowledged pleasure of yesterday. But the most amusing misunderstanding arises when the American himself thinks that he proves the purely practical character of his life by the eagerness with which he saves his time, on the ground that time is money. It strikes me that, next to the public funds, nothing is so much wasted here as time. Whether it is wasted in reading the endless newspaper reports of murder trials or in sitting on the baseball grounds, in watching a variety show or in lying in bed, in waiting for the elevator or in being shaved after the American fashion, in attending receptions or in enjoying committee meetings, is quite unessential. The whole scheme of American education is possible only in a country which is rich enough not to need any economy of time, and which can therefore allow itself the luxury of not asking at what age a young man begins to earn his own living. The American shopkeeper opens his store daily one hour later than the German tradesman, and the American physician opens his office three years later than his German colleague of equal education. This may be very good, but it is a prodigality of time which the Germans would be unable to imitate.

Still another prolific source of European comment is the anti - idealistic character of American politics ; but the critics overlook certain essential points when they deduce from it the intellectual state of the average citizen. They do not understand that, for economic reasons, the newspapers, for instance, have a function here very different from that in Germany. The German paper is the tutor of the public, the American paper is its servant. It is not fair simply to compare them, and to consider them as mirrors of their readers. Moreover, the critics overlook the fact that the machine politicians themselves are not the representative men of this country. The same complex historical reasons which have made the party spoils system and the boss system practically necessary forms of government have often brought representatives of very vulgar instincts into conspicuous political places ; but that does not mean that the higher instincts are absent. And finally, it must be considered that politics, in the narrower sense of the word, problems of government and of international relations, which occupy the central place in European public life, have been here, at least in the last thirty years, entirely in the background as compared with economic questions. These economic questions, the tariff or silver or trusts, naturally appeal to the selfish interests of different groups, and schemes and methods which would be low if applied to controversies genuinely political do not exclude idealism if applied to economic struggles. Wherever such and similar factors are eliminated, the American in politics proves himself the purest idealist, the best men come to the front, the most sentimental motives dominate, and almost no one dares to damage his cause by appealing to selfish instincts. Recent events have once more proved that beyond question. Whatever the Senators and sugar men may have thought about it, the people wanted the Cuban war for sentimental reasons ; and if the uninformed Continental papers maintain that the desire for war had merely selfish reasons, they falsify history. Is not the whole debate over expansion carried on with highly idealistic arguments on both sides ? Did not even the Anglo-American alliance get hold of the nation when the masses found an idealistic halo for it, discovering that those Englishmen whom they wanted to fight two years before were of the same blood and the same traditions as themselves ? Is it not entirely sentimental to use Washington’s Farewell Address to-day as a living argument with which to determine practical questions ? Even the most natural selfish and practical instinct can be overcome, with the typical American, by a catchy sentimental argument.

This high spirit of the individual in politicsrepeatsitself much more plainly in private life, where helpfulness and honesty seem to me the most essential characteristics of the American. Helpfulness shows itself in charity, in hospitality, in projects for education or for public improvements, or in the most trivial services of daily life ; while silent confidence in the honesty of one ’s fellow men controls practical relations here in a way which is not known in cautious Europe, and could not have been developed if that confidence were not justified. Add to it the American’s gratefulness and generosity, his humor and his fairness ; consider the vividness of his religious emotion, his interest in religious and metaphysical speculation, his eagerness always to realize the best results of science, and the purity of the relations of the sexes ; in short, look around everywhere without prejudice, and you cannot doubt that behind the terrifying mask of the selfish realist breathes the idealist who is controlled by a belief in ethical values. Undeniably, every one of these characteristics may develop into an absurdity : gratitude may transform the capture of a merchant vessel into a naval triumph, speculative desire may run into the blind alleys of spiritualism, fairness may lead to the defense of the most cranky schemes, and the wish for steady improvements may chase the reformer from one fad to another; and yet it is all at bottom the purest idealism. Whenever I have written about America for my German countrymen, I have said : “ You are right to hate that selfish, brutal, vulgar, corrupt American who lives in your imagination ; but the true American is at least as much an idealist as yourself, and Emerson comes nearer representing his spirit than do the editorial writers of the New York Journal.”

To-day I am writing for American readers only, and they would not show that fairness which I have just praised if they allowed me to prove the fallacy of prejudices merely when the prejudices exist on the other side, and not when they are themselves at fault. I may therefore be permitted to touch at least one of the many preconceived ideas with which the Americans regard the German nation. I choose, as one case among many, the settled opinion that the Germans, the poor suffering subjects of Emperor William, have no liberty ; that the men oppress the women, the higher classes oppress the lower classes, the nobility oppresses tlie people, the army oppresses the civilians, and the Emperor oppresses all together. It must seem to the American newspaper reader as if India and Russia and Turkey had combined to invent the machinery of German civilization, in which the soldiers are tortured, the laborers imprisoned, the radicals treated as criminals, the women treated as slaves or as dolls, and the king treated as infallible. To be sure, such a text is not unknown in Germany itself; the orators of the Social Democratic party would heartily applaud it, but it would not be the most effective party cry of the demagogues if the spirit of freedom were not the deepest element of the German nature, and the warning that their freedom is threatened the most exciting stimulus. Those, however, who do not wish for a distortion of the facts are sure that there is no people under the sun with more valuable inner freedom than the Germans, who, since Luther and Kant, have started every great movement toward freedom, and who would not have been at the head of the world of science for centuries had not freedom of thought been their life element, and the German university the freest place on earth.

Moreover, if I consider the outer forms of life, I do not hesitate to maintain that Germany is even in that respect freer than the United States. The right to insult the President, and to cross the railroad tracks where it is dangerous, and to ignore the law if a great trust stands behind one, is not freedom, but lack of social development, the survival of a lower civilization, a pseudo - freedom whose symptoms, fortunately, are disappearing from year to year in this country, also. Freedom is not absence of limitations, not licentiousness ; freedom and duty are never in opposition, but demand each other. The social intercourse of the well-mannered is not less free than that of ill-bred men, though they obey many more rules, and the expression of thought is not less free when we obey the laws of good language ; no, it is freer than the expression of those who speak slang. That people is freest whose forms of life secure the fullest possible development of each individual, and only the highest differentiation of social prescriptions can bring such true freedom, not the liberty of the primeval forest. Germans live under more complicated and systematized rules than Americans, and for this very reason they have greater freedom than is possible in the less restrained rush of American life.

The most typical case is, of course, that of the political government. The American takes it for granted that the republican state form represents a higher level than the monarchical one, and that therefore the German who comes to these shores must feel as if he were coming out into the fresh air from a prison. But if I say that I have never been a more thoroughgoing monarchist than during my stay in America, I can really not claim to be an exception. The educated Germans at home feel that it is with the monarchy as with the church. Too many men are adherents of the church from low motives, from fear and superstition and laziness. When such narrow-minded persons become freethinkers and reject the church,they manifest individual progress ; but that does not mean that destructive skepticism represents the highest possible relation to the church, and that to become an adherent of the church means falling back to the lower stage. On the contrary, the step from skeptical enlightenment to an ethical belief is in every respect progress : it is the step from rationalism to idealism, from the thinking of the preKantian eighteenth century to the postKantian nineteenth century, from materialism to idealism in philosophy. The church can thus stand for the lowest and for the highest, and those who are in the middle, and have not yet reached the last stage may well think that the highest is below their level. Just this manifoldness of stages, we maintain, characterizes the forms of states. To be sure, the mob is monarchical from low motives, and those who hold, with the logic of the eighteenth century, that the business of the state must be in the hands of a man whom the majority has selected certainly represent a higher moral stratum than those who support the throne from selfishness and laziness and cowardice. But again a higher standpoint is possible. The state is not really understood if it is looked upon simply as the psychophysical mechanism which, from a naturalistic point of view, it appears to be. Seen from an historical point of view, the state becomes a system of teleological relations, in which, not causes and effects, but duties and ideals are at work, and where, not the products of intellectual calculation, but the symbols of historical emotions are the centres acknowledged. The belief in monarchy means the belief in symbols which characterizes historical thinking as over against naturalistic thinking. And a monarch as the historical symbol of the emotional ideals of a nation, wholly outside of the field of political struggles and elections, needs that symbolic protection against reproach which appears, seen from a purely materialistic point of view, as a ridiculous punishment of lesemajesté. The same is true of all the symbolic values which radiate from the centre; the titles and degrees and decorations representing social differentiation seem childish to an eye which sees the world merely as a naturalistic mechanism, but invaluable to the eye which traces the outlines of the historical spirit in the world. Without differentiation there can be no complicated social life ; until the stage of symbolic thinking is reached, quantitative differences must furnish the tags, and money furnish the only standard. But the flag is more than a piece of cloth, and the higher development of symbols means a higher civilization. The American who, from the standpoint of his naturalistic thinking, looks down contemptuously on the German social and political organization hinders, so it seems to the foreigner, the progress of his own country : America has become too great to stop at a philosophy of government characteristic of the eighteenth century. An heroic revival is at hand, imperialism awakens echoes throughout the land, and days are near when Americans will understand better what we mean by the symbols of German history, and that it is not lack of freedom that prevents us from believing overmuch in majority votes and the dogma of equality.

But I am not at all afraid to turn the discussion from the philosophical to the practical side, from the idea of monarchy to the present Emperor. I think there is no other man with whom the American newspapers have been so successful in substituting the caricature for the real portrait. The irony of the case lies in the fact that the hundreds of amusing stories about the Emperor all come from the camp of those bureaucrats who dislike the impulsiveness of the young head, because a passive monarch is more convenient for them. There is nothing more incompatible with the American spirit than the temper of those bureaucrats whose petty purposes the papers here have furthered, while there is nothing more in accord with the American mood than the true nature of the Kaiser. The one living American whose personality most closely resembles that of the Emperor William is the brilliant young governor of New York, whom many Americans hail as the future President. The Germans feel in the same way : if Germany were to become a republic, the people would shudder at the thought of having one of the parliamentary leaders of to-day or an average general become President, but they would elect the present Emperor with enthusiasm as the first President; he is the most interesting, energetic, talented, industrious, and conscientious personality of our public life. Those, however, who maintain that the Emperor is an autocrat do not understand how closely the German monarchy, not only through the constitutional and parliamentary limitations imposed upon it, but still more in its inner forces, is identical with the national will. I do not care to discuss here whether the Spanish war was necessary, whether the annexation of the Philippines was desirable, or whether Alger was a good minister ; I know only that the German Emperor would not have been able to retain a minister for a year against unanimous public opinion, or to make war and to create colonies when but a short time before the public soul had revolted against the idea of war and aggressive annexation. A President with such vast powers, parties in the grasp of bosses, city administrations under the whip of spoilsmen, the economic world under the tyranny of trusts, and all together under the autocracy of yellow-press editors— No, I love and admire America, but Germany really seems to me freer.

I have tried to show that it is equally one-sided and unfair for the Germans to maintain that the Americans have no idealism, and for the Americans to maintain that the Germans have no sense of freedom ; the two cases served merely as chance illustrations, instead of which I could have chosen a dozen others. Wherever we look we find the Same fact : that the two great nations see each other through distorting spectacles, and do not understand each other’s real features. They misinterpret mere gestures, and therefore do not see the deeper similarity of their natures and their ideals. All this, of course, does not suggest that they are without important differences, but the differences seem to me much more the results of outer conditions than of character. In the outer conditions no stronger contrast is possible: the Americans with a new national culture in an undeveloped realm of immense material resources ; the Germans in a realm of limited resources, but with an old traditional culture. An old traditional culture signifies a system of institutions in which the best spirit of past efforts is condensed, and into which the individual is put by birth. The individual may be low-minded, and yet he must move in the given tracks, and is thus shaped to ends nobler than his own. The result is that, in Germany, the institutions are often better than the individuals, the forms of civilization higher than their wearers, the public conscience wider awake than the private. In the United States, with its new culture, just the opposite condition must prevail: the individuals are better, much better, than the institutions ; the individuals are thoroughly idealistic, while the external forms of social life are by no means penetrated to the same degree with the idealistic spirit; they are still too often the survivals of the time when the new land had to be opened in a severe struggle for livelihood, and the commercial resources had to be developed at all costs. Consequently, these forms are now on as great a scale as the resources themselves, but they appeal still too often to the lower instincts, and too often tend to pull men down instead of raising them up. The individual conscience is here higher than the public conscience ; individual initiative and responsibility are wonderful, but the encouragement and inspiration which come to the individual from his public institutions are inadequate.

The psychical effect of this situation is a necessary one. In Germany, where the institutions take the lead, the result is that the average man too easily believes he has fulfilled his duty when he appears to satisfy the public requirements, and the spirit of individual initiative therefore slumbers. In America this danger certainly does not exist, but the dangers resulting from the lack of inspiring energy in the centre are not less. Instead of reinforcing tlie highest emotions, the institutions adjust themselves to the lower instincts, and the psychological effect is that the higher energies are repressed, and the feeling of duty becomes less urgent in public life. We see the newspapers crowded with matter adapted to the lowest tastes of the mob, political results determined by appeals to the most selfish desires, the theatres relying upon the cheapest vaudeville, — everywhere the same willingness to do what the public likes, and nowhere the question what the public ought to have. And this spirit must slowly undermine every public function. We see how the churches are filled and sermons made attractive by sensational and trivial matters; we see how the kindergarten method creeps under the mantle of the elective system into all our educational institutions and conquers the schools. The pupils learn what they like to learn, till the go-as-you-please system paralyzes the feeling of obligation and lowers the tone of the whole community. Such a system inevitably provides a hothouse of mediocrity ; where there exists no social premium upon the highest efforts toward ideal interests, where no general appreciation stimulates individual energies, there is no maximum effect to be expected. The good personal material secures a high average, but no great men. I do not mean that men of the first rank can be made at will by the social spirit alone; a Goethe, a Kant, or a Beethoven cannot come with every generation, and even Germany, since the death of Bismarck, Richard Wagner, and Helmholtz, has brought forth no really great men; the social soil must sometimes lie fallow, too. But Germany has still in Mommsen and Virchow, in Boecklin and Menzel, in Bunsen and Hauptmann, in Koch and Roentgen, and many others, eminent men of the second rank, who are not equaled by any poet, artist, scholar, or scientist now living in America. Above all, no one of these men would have reached the same height of achievement under the conditions provided by American institutions. Everywhere we find in this country fair solid work, nowhere a masterpiece ; ten thousand excellent public lectures every winter, and not a single great thought. It cannot be otherwise. There is no social premium provided by the public institutions upon ideal greatness ; consequently, the best minds turn to banking and railroading and law; and while in Germany, for instance, the highest ambition of the best families is to see their sons in the service of learning, here the graduate schools represent a lower social stratum of the universities than the college or the law schools.

Germany, then, needs more sense of initiative and of responsibility in its individuals, and America needs more sense of duties and ideals in its public institutions. Germany must become more democratic, and America more aristocratic. It is, to be sure, not democracy after Bebel’s prescriptions, nor aristocracy after Astor’s ideas, that is required; we need the democracy which makes every man ethically responsible for himself, and the aristocracy which considers the individual as existing, not for himself, but only in his relation to those public institutions in which the duties and ideals of the nation are centralized. Time will bring the change to both countries, and it is interesting to observe the numerous symptoms which indicate that this reciprocal movement toward aristocratic development here, and toward democratic strengthening there, will be brought about in both countries most directly by the same political means, the policy of expansion. The colonial transmarine development of the German Empire is taking away that narrowness of its citizens which too much depressed the spirit of individual initiative ; it is widening the horizon, and giving to the individual that increased self - respect which is the noblest endowment of democracy, and which will secure the safest basis to the national monarchy. The expansion policy of America, on the other hand, must reinforce the spirit of public responsibility, must give through its international consequences an absolutely new position to the government and to military life and diplomacy, must stimulate new energies in public service, and so create an aristocratic spirit which may in time bring to us a national art and poetry and science and philosophy, and thus weave the golden thread of greatness into a glorious democracy.

Whether it takes the short cut through expansion or chooses a longer way, in any case time will bring about the change in Germany as well as in America; but those who know both countries cannot fail to see how much this movement would be reinforced, and how much energy would be saved in the process, if the [two nations were to influence each other more directly and learn from each other more willingly. They feel it, therefore, their profound duty to help remove the foolish, narrow-minded prejudices on both sides of the ocean, and with them the mood that occasions petty quarrels and unnecessary friction.

Hugo Münsterberg .