"That is easily answered," says your Anglophobe. "England has arrived where she is by seizing everything she can lay hands on. Now it is going to be our turn." You express your interest in the future of Germany as seen by your friend, and he shows you a map of Europe which he has himself marked with red ink all round the empire as it will be a few years hence. There is not much Europe outside the red line. "But you haven't taken Great Britain," you say, rather hurt at being left out in this way. "We don't want it ... otherwise, ... but India ... possibly Australia." He waves his hands. You look at him pensively, and suddenly see one of the great everyday distances between your countryfolk and his. You think of a French novel that has amused you lately, because the parents of the heroine objected to her marriage with the hero on grounds you were quite incapable of understanding. The young man's work was in Cochin-China, and the young lady's father and mother did not wish her to go so far. Never in your life have you heard anyone raise such a trivial difficulty. You live in a dull sober street mostly inhabited by dull sober people, but there is not one house in it that is not linked by interest or affection, often doubly linked, with some uttermost end of the earth. You can hardly find an English family that has not one member or more in far countries, and so the common talk of English people in all classes travels the width of the world in the wake of those dear to them. But in 1900 only 22,309 Germans out of a population of 60,400,000 emigrated from Germany, and these, says Mr. Eltzbacher, whose figures I am quoting, were more than counterbalanced by immigration into Germany from Austria, Russia, and Italy. It is true that the population of Germany is increasing with immense rapidity, and that the question of expansion is becoming a burning one; but it is a question quite outside the strictly home politics of this unpretending chronicle. We are only concerned with the obvious fact that Germans settle in far countries in much smaller numbers than we do, and that those who go abroad mostly choose the British flag and avoid their own. It does not occur as easily to a German as to an Englishman that he may better his fortunes in another part of the world, or if he is an official that he will apply for a post in Asia or Africa. He wants to stay near the Rhine or the Spree where he was born, and to bring up his children there; and with the help of the State and his wife he contrives to do this on an extraordinary small income. The State, as we have seen, almost takes his children off his hands from the time they are six years old. It brings them up for nothing, or next to nothing; in cases of need it partially feeds and clothes them, it even washes them. Some English humorist has said that a German need only give himself the trouble to be born; his government does the rest. But first his mother and then his wife do a good deal.