The German has not our keen appetite for what we call news, which is often merely surmises in bigger type. Only the very small number who have travelled and made interests and friends for themselves out of their own country, have any feeling of curiosity even, about the political and social tides and currents elsewhere. An astounding number of Germans know Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare better than we do, but they know nothing, and care nothing, for the sizzling, crackling stream of purposeless incident, and sterile comment, that pours in upon the readers of American newspapers, and which has had its part in making us the largest consumers of nerve-quieting drugs in the world. All too many of the pens that supply our press are without education, without experience, without responsibility or restraint. What Mommsen writes of Cicero applies to them: "Cicero was a journalist in the worst sense of the term, over-rich in words as he himself confesses, and beyond all imagination poor in thought." No one of these journals pretends to such power or such influence as certain great dailies in America and in England. They have not the means at their command to buy much cable or telegraphic news, and lacking a press tariff for telegrams, they are the more hampered. The German temperament, and the civil-service and political close-corporation methods, make it difficult for the journalist to go far, either socially or politically. The German has been trained in a severe school to seek knowledge, not to look for news, and he does not make the same demands, therefore, upon his newspaper. German relations with the outside world are of an industrial and commercial kind, and until very lately the German has not been a traveller, and is not now an explorer, and their colonies are unimportant; consequently there is no very keen interest on the part of the bulk of the people in foreign affairs. Even Sir Edward Grey's answering speech on the Morocco question did not appear in full in Berlin until the following day, though Germany had roused itself to an unusual pitch of excitement and expectancy.