A nation is most often punished for its faults by the exaggeration of its qualities, and if, as it seems to me, Germany suffers like the rest of us in this respect, it is none of my doing. It will be my failure and the reader's failure, if we do not profit by watching these qualities in ourselves, and in others festering into faults. Woman's position and ambitions, the home, the amusements, and the satisfactions of life, are very different in Germany from ours. I note these as facts, not as inferiorities. I note, too, that in Germany, as elsewhere, Hegel was profoundly right in his dictum, that everything earned to its extreme becomes its contrary. Too much caution may become a positive menace to safety; too much orderliness may result in individual incapacity for sell-control; just as liberty rots into license, and demos descends to a crown and sceptre and tyranny. I am merely calling attention to this great law of national development, that the exaggeration of even fine qualities is the road to the punishment of our faults, in Germany, as in every other nation under the sun. It is only when you have had a peep into a small farmer's house in Saxony, into the artisans' houses in the busy Rhine and Westphalia country; spent a night in a peasant's house and stable, for they are under the same roof, in the mountains of the South; and visited the greater establishments of the large land-holder and the less pretentious houses of the gentleman farmer, and the country houses, big and little, in all parts of Germany, that you get anything of the real flavor of Germany. If, as Burke says, it is impossible to indict a whole nation, it is even more difficult to fit a people with a few discriminating and really enlightening adjectives. One word I dare to apply to them all, though I know well how different they are in the north and south and east and west, as diversified indeed as any nation in the world, and that is the word patient. They can stand longer, sit longer, eat longer, drink longer, work longer hours, and dream longer, and dawdle longer than any people except the Orientals. This custom may date back to far distant times. Sitting, in the Greek view, was a posture of supplication (Odyssey, XIV, 29--31). The Emperor himself sets the example. He is an indefatigable stander, if I may coin the word, and on horseback he can apparently spend the day and night without inconvenience. Their patient quarry work in archeology and in comparative philology laid the foundations for the new history-writing of Heeren and Mommsen; and their scholarship to-day is still of the digging kind. They seldom produce a Jebb, a Jowett, a Verrall, and never that type of scholar, wit and poet combined, a Lowell or an Arthur Hugh Clough. Indeed, with a suspicious self-consciousness the German professional mind inclines to be contemptuous of any learning that is not unpalatably dry. What men can read with enjoyment cannot be learning, they maintain.