Shortly after leaving Germany, I returned from a few weeks' shooting in Scotland. We bundled out of the train onto the station platform in London. Dogs, gun-cases, cartridge-boxes, men and maid servants, trunks, bags, baskets, bunches of grouse, and the passengers seemed in a chaotic huddle of confusion. In Germany at least twenty policemen would have been needed to disentangle us. I was so torpid from having been long Teutonically cared for, that I looked on momentarily paralyzed. There was no shouting, not a harsh word that I heard; and as I was almost the last to get away, I can vouch for it that in ten minutes each had his own and was off. I had forgotten that such things could be done. I had been so long steeped in enforced orderliness, that I had forgotten that real orderliness is only born of individual self-control. I forgot that I was back among the free spirits who govern a quarter of the habitable globe and whose descendants are making America; and even if here and there one or more, and they are often recently arrived immigrants, are intoxicated by freedom and shoot or steal like drunken men; I realized that I am still an Occidental barbarian, thank God, preferring liberty, even though it is punctuated now and then with shots and screams and thefts, to official guardianship, even though I am thus saved the shooting, the screaming, and the thieving. In the nine years ending 1910, our Fourth of July celebrations cost America in killed, 18,000; in wounded, 35,000; but even that is better than the civic throttling of the German method. It seems to be forgotten that the men who keep the world fresh with their saline vigor, love risks as they love fresh air. They should be curbed, but not strangled! You read their history, you watch closely their manners, you prowl about among them, in their streets, their shops, their houses, their theatres; you accompany the crowds on a holiday in the trains, in the forests, in the summer resorts, at their concerts or their picnics, in their beer-gardens and restaurants, and you soon see that the orderliness is all forced upon them from without, and not due to their own knowledge of how to take care of themselves. In a recent volume by a distinguished German prison official he writes that, after a careful study of the figures from 1882 to 1910, he has discovered that one person now living in every twelve in Germany has been convicted of some offence. Doctor Finkelnburg shows that the number of "criminals" in Germany is 3,869,000, of whom 3,060,000 are males, and 809,000 females. Every 43d boy and every 213th girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen has been punished by fine or imprisonment. This does not mean that the Germans are criminal or disorderly, but, on the contrary, it shows how absurdly petty are the violations of the law punished by fine or imprisonment.