In literature, in science, in art, we find Germany quite on a level with the present age. She has produced men and books equal to the men and books of England or France, as the names of Goethe, Schiller, Humboldt, Liebig, and a score of others bear testimony. But while in poetry, philosophy, and science, she is on a par with the best portions of modern Europe; in politics--in the practical science of government--she is an indefinite number of centuries behindhand. Governmentally, she is now where the English were during the Saxon Heptarchy, with seven or more kingdoms in a space that might be well governed by one sceptre. Where she might get along very well with two, she has a dozen petty kings, and petty courts, and petty national debts, and petty pension-lists, and paltry debased and confusing coinages, and petty cabals, quarrels, and intermixture of contending interests. Out of this division of territory arises, of course, a number of small poor princes; and as poor princes do not like to work hard when their pockets are low, we find them busy with the schemes, shifts, and contrivances, common from time immemorial with penniless people who have large appetites for pleasure, small stomachs for honest work--real, living, reigning dukes though they be, they have added to the royal "businesses" to which they were born, little private speculations for the encouragement of _rouge et noir_ and _roulette_. These small princes have, in fact, turned gambling house keepers--hell-keepers, in the vulgar but expressive slang of a London police court--proprietors of establishments where the vicious and the unwary, the greedy hawk and the silly pigeon, congregate, the one to plunder and the other to be plucked. That which has been expelled from huge London, as too great an addition to its vice, or, if not quite expelled, is carried on with iron-barred doors, unequal at times to protect its followers from the police and the infamy of exposure--that which has been outlawed from the Palais Royal and Paris, as too bad even for the lax morality of a most free-living city--that huge vice which caters to the low senses of cunning and greediness, and tempts men to lose fortune, position, character, even hope, in the frantic excitements of, perhaps, one desperate night--such a vice is housed in fine buildings raised near mineral springs, surrounded by beautiful gardens, enlivened by music, and sanctioned by the open patronage of petty German princes holding sway in the valley watered by the Rhine. In fact, unscrupulous speculators are found to carry on German gaming-tables at German spas, paying the sovereign of the country certain thousands of pounds a year for the privilege of fleecing the public.