CHANGING GERMANY.*
Tan war has enabled, or rather compelled, Mr. Tower to take his "first long holiday in England." For thirteen years he has lived continuously in Germany, and so has a fair title to be listened to when he describes the changes which have come over the German temper and character during that period. There is a melancholy interest about his first chapter, and his readers should not be discouraged by its singularly in- appropriate heading, " The Parable of a Top-Hat," He tells of a journey he made in the spring of 1904 to watch in the dawning, among the hills not far from KSpenick, "whilst some young girls, clad in black or grey and with shawls over their heads, came in silence to the spring, took water in the hollow of their hands and dashed it over their eyes. Then they filled little pots and, silently as they had come, went away again." This, he was told, was one of the oldest ritual customs in Germany. The bonfires on the hilltops on St. John's Eve were another custom of equal antiquity. Ten years ago, "men and women, young and old, still took the ceremonies of the year seriously and rather solemnly. 'It was uplifting,' they said, and their Sursum Cords was no mockery." This simplicity of character lingered longer in Germany than in any other country of Western Europe. In 1907 Mr. Tower spent a night in Ulm, and while waiting for breakfast in the morning in the empty guest-room of a little inn near Bacharach was asked what his Christian name was, and then discovered that the object of the question was that a child that moment born might be called after him. Then the innkeeper bade him eat and drink what he would, " for he brought fortune with him." Only a few years ago life in the Baltic fishing villages, even when tho summer holidays drew crowds from Berlin, was still extraordinarily simple. After the bathing was over "the German paterfamilias (not only the children) usually spent his day in building or repairing a huge sand fortress to be subsequently decorated with flags." Now the smart hotel has taken the place of the little three-roomed villa; there is a " toilet promenade" even in the smallest Baltic village, and "the quiet of the shore is destroyed by Kursaal bands." Something of the mama change, of course, is to be seen in other countries, and in none more than in our own. But with as the process has been more gradual, and it has not been followed by the extraordinary moral transformation that has come over Germany. Mr. Tower attributes this latter change to the inability of the people to stand success. He finds evidence of this, not only in the scandals which have made so much noise in Berlin in recent years, but in the growth of specialization.
• Collongi;:ii Germany. By Charles Tower, London: T. 1Pia11, In Germany no one is allowed to be a Jack-of-all-trades. Even- Bismarck and Moltke would now be censured for presuming to think about matters outside their own provinces. This is the reason why Bismarck's warning against allowing the Army to free itself from the control of politicians has been so neglected in the present war. The Great General Staff knows nothing of the great Chancellor's fear that soldiers left to them- selves might commit Germany to a war with France and Russia in which victory would be doubtful and oven success might prove disastrous. Nor is it only in these great matters that the new system is a constant danger. Throughout the whole area of German society " the State has substituted for the old personal and individual code a State code." The morality of any order given by authority must not be questioned, and nothing is too small to attract the notice of the omnipotent Government. But this kind of omnipotence is, after all, only a pinchbeck affair, and consequently it has its limits. It. only concerns itself with the material interests of the State and with the virtues which !observe them. When the citizen " has been taught almost from babyhood that the thing to look for is the police placard ' Verboten,' there will be in time no other categorical imperative to keep him from the evil." The moral outcome of such a theory of the function of the State stares us in the face as we read the Report of Lord Bryce's Committee.
Mr. Tower repeats the warning which has been heard from other quarters, that the stringency of German food regula- tions must not be taken as evidence that the resisting-power of the nation is near its end. Germany is a long way from being starved oat, and she is the better secured against this disaster by the very restrictions that are sometimes supposed to point to it. The confiscation of the wheat supply by tho Government means, not that there is any present shortage of breadstuffs, but only that such a shortage may come after the next harvest even if it is good, and must come if it is bad. "Any supplies of foodstuffs that can be held aver by the strictest economy now will be then worth far more than their weight in gold." By way of further precaution, "large tracts of country planted with young trees under the careful afforesta- tion scheme of the Department of Woods and Forests are now being cleared again and are to be sown with wheat." The German poor have always used certain kinds of food which are now unknown in England, and in the present necessity the habit has its advantages. The public parks in Berlin are largely planted with oak-trees, and in the autumn the rule against walking on the grass has always been suspended in favour of schoolchildren belonging to the poorer families, who hold police permissions to gather the acorns. Even in peace these, when roasted and ground, were esteemed an economical addition to the family, coffee-pot, and since the war broke out they have largely taken the place of the real coffee-bean.
There is much more information of the same kind in Changing Germany, and Mr. Tower may fairly claim to have turned his long residence in Germany to good account for English readers.
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