As a matter of fact it was only with Papalagos and the Serbians on the hill that Dick was able to carry on any really intelligent exchange of views on European politics. Ralph, who ought to have been, he felt, his comrade in these matters, had practically no interest in them. This indifference always puzzled and dismayed Dick. European politics, in Ralph's opinion, were as unrelated to the United States as the politics of Mars. One feature only he treated with interest, and that was Germany's social work. The forms of social insurance she had devised interested him keenly. He had regularly written enthusiastic editorials on the way she met the breaking down of men through age, illness, accident. Her handling of employment was one of his stock subjects. Germany was socially efficient in his mind, preserving men power, "as well as machines and hogs," as he put it in the phrase of his school. He pictured her as a land where every man and woman was well housed, continuously employed, cared for in sickness or in health, and that was all Ralph knew about Germany. When Dick, who had tramped the land from end to end, put in a protest and mentioned the army as the end of all this care of human beings, Ralph broke out in a violent defense of the military system. It was merely a way of training men physically and arousing in them social solidarity. A nation couldn't do what Germany did for men and women unless she loved them. It was what the United States needed. Outside of these devices for meeting the breaking down of human beings, Ralph took no interest in Europe. His attitude through the Balkan War had baffled Dick by its perfunctoriness. He published the news as it came to him daily. He kept the maps on his walls, and now and then he wrote a few correct paragraphs, noting the change in situation. He was pleased that the power of Turkey was limited at the end, for he did have a hazy notion of the undesirableness of Turkey in Europe, but beyond this there was neither feeling nor understanding. How, Dick asked himself, could a man of Ralph's ability spend four years in a first-class American college and two on a great newspaper and still be so completely cut off from the affairs of the globe outside of the United States? It was a fact, but Dick could not understand how it could be a fact. It gave him his first real sense of the newness of the country, its entire absorption in itself. Ralph defended this indifference. "They're nothing to us," he declared. "We're too busy taking care of their scrap heaps. A million a year coming here to be reconstructed and Americanized, why should we bother about what Europe thinks or does? We're too busy. They can't touch us."