WOMEN IN GERMANY.
[To !RR EDITOR Or TWA "Ersoveroa."1 SIR,—I am only an ordinary individual, •having no great acquaintance with Germany or the German people, but my limited experience entirely confirms the views expressed in Lord Cromees article in your last issue, both as to the esteem in which women are held in Germany and as to the estimation of veracity and condemnation of mendacity in that country. One of my daughters has lived for a time in two different German families—fortunately some time before the war began. In the first place the head of the family was a Silesian mineowner married to an English wife. My daughter was greatly struck by the "submissiveness to mere man" of the German women and the lack of "that reverence for womanhood which • inspires the noblest chivalry." She described it briefly as the rudeness of the men to the women.
Later she removed to Kiel and lived in the family of a professional man. • There she was much struck by the deliberate .fashion in which the daughters, without any apparent object, would tell lies to their mother. We invited one of the daughters to visit us in this ,country for a few weeks, and her untruthfulness was quite notice- able in spite of her otherwise ladylike behaviour. Happen- ing to mention this to an acquaintance, he told me he had just been staying with some friends who had had a German lady visiting them, and, when leaving them to go back home, she remarked that she had been surprised by the general truthfulness among the people she had met with in England. Before concluding, may I venture to express the opinion that the truthfulness" which Mr. Gladstone considered to be the most prominent of Anglo-Saxon virtues is largely due to our children for so many generations having been brought up on the English Church catechism. I have often thought that if, without any reference to dogma, the definitions af Duty towards God and Duty towards Man contained in that catechisin could be introduced into the Syllabus of Religious Teaching for all elementary schools it would be greatly to the advantage of the
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