He had begun in the mean time his career as a novelist with his most famous novel, 'Soll und Haben' (Debit and Credit), which was published in 1855 and met with an immediate and unbounded success. The appearance of this first novel, furthermore, was most significant, for it marked at the same time an era both in German literature and in its author's own career, in that it introduced into the one in its most recent phase one of the profoundest problems of modern life in Germany, and unmistakably pointed out, in the other, the direction which he was subsequently to follow. This latter statement has a twofold bearing. It is not only that as a writer of novels Freytag did his most important and lasting work, but that the whole of this work was in a manner the development of a similar tendency. Although as different as need be in environment, all of his subsequent novels embody inherently the characteristics of 'Debit and Credit,' for like it, they are all well-defined attempts to depict the typical social conditions of the period in which they move, and their characters are the carefully considered types of their time. Freytag, with a philosophic seriousness of purpose perhaps characteristically German, is writing not only novels but the history of civilization, in his early work. Later on, the didactic purpose to a certain extent overshadows the rest; and although he never loses his power of telling a story, it is the history in the end that is paramount. 'Debit and Credit' is a novel of the century, and it takes up the great problem of the century, the position of modern industrialism in the social life of the day. Its principal centre of action is the business house of the wholesale grocer T.O. Schroeter, who is an admirable embodiment of the careful, industrious, and successful merchant. In sharp contradistinction to him is the Baron von Rothsattel, the representative of earlier conditions in the organization of the State, which made the nobleman pre-eminently a social force. Freytag's polemic is not only the dignity of labor under present conditions, but the absolute effeteness of the old order of things that despised it. The real hero of the story is Anton Wohlfahrt, who begins his commercial career as a youth in the house of T.O. Schroeter, and ends, after some vicissitudes, as a member of the firm. Mercantile life has nowhere been better described in its monotony, its interests, and its aspirations, as the story is developed; and although at first sight no field could be more barren in literary interest, there is in reality no lack of incident and action, whose inevitable sequence makes the plot. Anton's career in the house of Schroeter is interrupted by his connection with the Baron von Rothsattel, who has, through his want of a business training and his lack of a knowledge of men, fallen into the hands of a Jew money-lender; by whom he is persuaded to mortgage his land in order to