For that is what it almost amounts to now in Germany, and it is for this reason, no less than to escape military service, that so many millions of Germans have immigrated to this country. Unlike the vast majority of the bourgeois and lower classes, a kindly but stupid people, they were born with an alertness of mind and an energy of character which gave them the impetus to transfer themselves to a land where life might be harder but where soul and body could attain to a complete independence. Their present attitude is, however unconsciously, hypocritical, but it is not altogether as traitorous as that of the American born, who has not the excuse of that peculiar form of sentimentality which has fermented in Germans at home and abroad during this period of their Fatherland's peril. It is this curious and wholly German brand of sentimentality which is the cohering force in the various and extraordinarily clever devices by which modern Germany has been solidified. It is a sentimentality capable of rising to real exaltation that no other nation is capable of, and that alone should make the American pro-German pause and meditate upon a future United States where native individualism was less and less reluctantly heading for the iron jaws of the Prussianized American machine; and, furthermore, upon the weird spectacle of the real gladiatorial contest--German sentimentality wrestling in a death grapple with American downright unpicturesque common sense. During the seven years that I lived in Munich I learned to like Germany better than any state in Europe. I liked and admired the German people; I never suffered from an act of rudeness, and I never was cheated out of a penny. I was not even taxed until the year before I left, because I made no money out of the country and turned in a considerable amount in the course of a year. When my maid went to the Rathaus to pay my taxes, (moderate enough,) the official apologized, saying that he had disliked to send me a bill, but the increased cost of the army compelled the country to raise money in every way possible. This was in 1908. The only disagreeable German I met during all those years was my landlord, and as we always dodged each other in the house or turned an abrupt corner to avoid encounter on the street, we steered clear of friction. And he was the only landlord I had. I left Munich with the greatest regret, and up to the moment of the declaration of war I continued to like Germany better than any country in the world except my own.