My German tour of the last two weeks of July, cut short by the war, was more definitely sociological. I had been through the Rhine country to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and Munich, the preceding summer. This trip went straight north from Friedrichshafen to Berlin. There were the famous town-planned cities to be seen, and housing-schemes, which I had followed rather closely in all the countries, and a general “sizing-up” of German “Kultur.” I missed my settling down in Berlin; newspapers and people had to be taken on the wing. But then the German spirit and expression was much more familiar to me through study than had been the French and Italian. My most striking impression was of the splendor of the artistic renaissance, as shown particularly in the new architecture and household and decorative and civic art. These new and opulent styles are gradually submerging that fearful debauch of bad taste which followed the French war, and which makes the business quarters of the German cities so hideous. But the newer quarters, monuments, public buildings of the last ten years have a massive, daring style which marks an epoch in art. I have yet to come across an American who likes this most recent German architecture; but to me buildings like the University at Jena, the Stuttgart theater, the Tietz shops, etc., with their heavy concrete masses and soaring lines, speak of perfectly new and indigenous ideas. And if artistic creation is a mark of a nation’s vitality, the significance of this fine flare and splurge of German style, the endless fecundity of decorative design in printing and furniture, etc., the application of design to the laying out of towns and suburbs, the careful homogeneity and integrity of artistic idea, should not be overlooked. These things are fertile, are exhilarating and make for the enhancement of life. The Germans are acting exactly as if they no longer believed, as we do, that a high quality of urban life can be developed in a rag-tag chaos of undistinguished styles and general planlessness.