In this great city of Berlin it may seem that I have over-emphasized their part in the drama of the city's life. Not so! They are the backbone of the municipal as of the national body corporate. It is no easy industrial progress, no increasing wealth and population, no military prowess, no isolated great leader that makes a nation or a city. It is the men and women giving the high and unpurchasable gift of service to the state; giving the fine example of self-sacrificing and simple living; giving the prowess won by years of hard mental and moral training; giving the gentle courtesy and kindly welcome of the patrician to the stranger, who lift a nation or a city to a worthy place in the world. Seek not for Germany's strength first in her fleet, her army, her hordes of workers, nay, not even in her philosophers, teachers, and musicians, though they glisten in the eyes of all the world, for you will not find it there. It is in these quiet and simple homes, that so few Americans and Englishmen ever enter, that you will find the sweetness and the sternness, the indomitable pride of service, and the self-sacrificing loyalty that won, and that keep for Germany her place in the world. VI "A LAND OF DAMNED PROFESSORS" It can hardly be doubted that could Lord Palmerston have seen what I have seen of the changes in Germany, he would at least have placed the "damned," in another part of his famous sentence. These professors have turned their prowess into channels which have given Germany, in this scientific industrial age, a mighty grip upon something more than theories. It may be dull reading to tell the tale of damned professordom, but it is to Germany that we must all go to school in these matters. The American chooses his university or college because it is in the neighborhood; because his father or other relatives went there; because his school friends are going there; on account of the prestige of the place; sometimes, too, because one is considered more democratic than another; sometimes, and perhaps more often than we think, on account of the athletics; because it is large or small; or on account of the cost. The German youth, owing to widely different customs and ideals, chooses his university for other reasons. If he be of the well-to-do classes, and his father before him was a corps student, he is likely to go first to the university, where his father's corps will receive him and discipline him in the ways of a corps student's life, and rigorous ways they are, as we shall see. Young men of small means, and who can afford to waste little time in the amusements of university life, go at once where the more celebrated professors in their particular line of work are lecturing.