Specifically, I visited the municipal workingmen’s cottages in Ulm and saw the town-planning charts of the city in the office of the _Stadtbaurat_; the huge apartments, municipally built and owned, in Munich; the big _Volksbad_ in Nuremberg, and the garden-city workingmen’s suburb at Lichtenhof, with the schoolchildrens’ garden allotments; the model garbage-disposal plant at Furth, a miracle of scientific resource and economy; the extraordinary model municipal slaughter-house at Dresden, so characteristically German with its _Schlachthof_ and _Direktorhaus_ at the entrance; and, lastly the famous garden-city of Hellerau, inferior, however, on the whole, to the English Hampstead Suburb at Golders Green. Towns like Rothenburg and Nordlingen were little laboratories of mediæval and modern town-planning. The _Stadtbaurat_ at Rothenburg went over for us the development of the city, and gave us considerable insight into the government, policy and spirit of a typical little German municipality. Undemocratic in political form, yet ultra-democratic in policy and spirit, scientific, impartial, giving the populace--who seemed to have no sense of being excluded from “rights”--what they really wanted, far more truly than our democracies seem to be able to secure, this epitome of the German political scheme served to convince us that we were in a world where our ordinary neat categories of political thought simply didn’t apply. It was futile to attempt an interpretation in Anglo-Saxon terms. There was no objective evidence of the German groaning under “autocracy” and “paternalism.” One found oneself for the first time in the presence of a government between whom and the people there seemed to exist some profound and subtle sympathy, a harmony of spirit and ends. It was dramatic to sweep up through the endless billowing fields and carefully tended forests and imposing factory towns--Germany, caught at mid-summer, in the full tide of prosperity--and come into Berlin on the morning of “the historic day,” July 31st, 1914, with the agitated capital on the brink of war; to see the arrival of the Kaiser and the princes at the Schloss; to watch the Crown Prince’s automobile blocked twenty feet away from us by the cheering crowd;--“der _wahre_ Kriegesmann,” as the papers were calling him in contemptuous contrast to his peaceful father; to hear the speech of the latter--grim, staccato-voiced, helmeted figure, very symbol of war--from the balcony of the palace; to watch next day the endless files of reservists marching through the streets to the casernes to “einkleiden”; and then to hear the finally fatal news of Russia’s refusal with the swarming crowds on Unter den Linden, hysterical from both fervor and anxiety. If ever there was a tense and tragic moment, when destiny seemed concentrated into a few seconds of time, it was that 5 P. M. on the afternoon of August first, at the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse, in Berlin.