Self-satisfied as the "cultured" usually are, they could not understand why one should fuss about the fact that thousands of people were starving, though they contributed towards the wealth of the world. Surrounded by beauty and luxury, they could not believe that side by side with them lived human beings degraded to a position lower than a beast's, shelterless and ragged, without hope or ambition. This condition of affairs was particularly pronounced in Germany after the Franco-German war. Full to the bursting point with its victory, Germany thrived on a sentimental, patriotic literature, thereby poisoning the minds of the country's youth by the glory of conquest and bloodshed. Intellectual Germany had to take refuge in the literature of other countries, in the works of Ibsen, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and especially in the great works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgeniev. But as no country can long maintain a standard of culture without a literature and drama related to its own soil, so Germany gradually began to develop a drama reflecting the life and the struggles of its own people. Arno Holz, one of the youngest dramatists of that period, startled the Philistines out of their ease and comfort with his FAMILIE SELICKE. The play deals with society's refuse, men and women of the alleys, whose only subsistence consists of what they can pick out of the garbage barrels. A gruesome subject, is it not? And yet what other method is there to break through the hard shell of the minds and souls of people who have never known want, and who therefore assume that all is well in the world? Needless to say, the play aroused tremendous indignation. The truth is bitter, and the people living on the Fifth Avenue of Berlin hated to be confronted with the truth. Not that FAMILIE SELICKE represented anything that had not been written about for years without any seeming result. But the dramatic genius of Holz, together with the powerful interpretation of the play, necessarily made inroads into the widest circles, and forced people to think about the terrible inequalities around them. Sudermann's EHRE[1] and HEIMAT[2] deal with vital subjects. I have already referred to the sentimental patriotism so completely turning the head of the average German as to create a perverted conception of honor. Duelling became an every-day affair, costing innumerable lives. A great cry was raised against the fad by a number of leading writers. But nothing acted as such a clarifier and exposer of that national disease as the EHRE. Not that the play merely deals with duelling; it analyzes the real meaning of honor, proving that it is not a fixed, inborn feeling, but that it varies with every people and every epoch, depending particularly on one's economic and social station in life. We realize from this play that the man in the brownstone mansion will necessarily define honor differently from his victims.