It was not so much what was done for him and for other Americans in Berlin that impressed Otto. It was the country itself--the brightness and neatness of things captivated him. He liked its little gardens with every inch under immaculate cultivation--its tidy forests where the very twigs were saved--its people fitted into their particular niches like so many well-arranged books on a shelf. He liked the sense of men and women being looked after, kept in health, kept in employment, the utmost made out of them--no more letting a bit of human material go to waste than a bit of iron. Their ways of doing things in business pleased him. There was always somebody that knew everything to be known about a particular thing. There were experts for every feature of the banking business. It was not an inherited rule-of-thumb way of carrying on things, such as he was familiar with at home; it was a thoroughly considered, scientific practice. To be sure, it seemed ponderous to him, but he felt as if it were sure. It had been thought out. Science--science in everything--nothing left to chance--no reliance on luck. He began to take the banking business very seriously indeed, to feel that he could carry home something important and serve not only Sabinsport but the country at large, which at that moment was wallowing in a terrible banking muddle over which his German friends held up their hands in shocked amazement. As time went on, Otto began to take other things more seriously, and gradually there crept over him a sense of something stupendous going on in men's thoughts and souls. People were not living for the present in Germany as at home; they were not accepting their place in the world as something fixed; they seemed always to have before them the future, and that future on which their eyes were fixed was something of magnificent if dim proportions. It was something that he finally discovered stirred them to the depths of their being. "What ails them?" he asked himself, at first. "It is as if they saw things. It isn't natural." Slowly he began to understand what they saw, what they felt. It wasn't a dream; it was a faith that absorbed them--a faith in their own greatness and a conviction that they were soon to be called to prove it to the world, to take their proper place at the head of nations. "They're crazy," he told himself at first, "or I am." But later he began to see with them. Was it not the truth? What nation on earth equaled them--in effective action, in restraint, in fidelity, in valor, in bigness of vision? What other nation was worthy to rule the earth? Certainly not England--she was soft, vain, selfish--her lands in the hands of a few, her people neglected, her government rent by dissensions, her colonies self-governing or ready for revolt. England certainly had lost her sense and her genius for empire.