But, in spite of this preoccupation with money-getting, they did not, after all, respect money. They flung it about, toyed with it, used it for uncertain schemes, wild ventures, took it for their costly and reckless pleasures. Rarely would you find a German treating money with such carelessness, such contempt. It would seem as if the thing everybody sought was not worth keeping when won. Otto hated this. A German knew the value of money--his countrymen did not. And the few who did and hoarded it, refused to risk it--they seemed to receive no such respect from the people as the open-handed. It was incomprehensible--the American and his money. But that which combined to make life in Sabinsport most barren and flat to Otto was his feeling that there was no greatness, no sense of a magnificent and mysterious future coming to the country. The people were not working toward a definite national thing. Men and women seemed to think of nothing more magnificent than to gather and spend wealth. The idea of subordinating a personal aim for a national aim, the thing which so dignified German earning, saving and spending, was unheard of here. Here you lived for yourself, not for your nation. "America is not a nation," he told his father; "it's a place where great numbers of people, largely because of a happy chance which probably can never happen again in the world's history, exercise just enough control of themselves to enable them to live completely selfish lives and they save themselves any slight remorse they might feel for this selfishness by somehow convincing themselves that they are demonstrating the superiority of individual liberty. And what you are getting in America is an undisciplined, self-satisfied people, more and more incapable of thinking itself wrong, more and more incapable of wanting anything but to be let alone in smug comfort. It is not a nation, I tell you, Father," Otto would say. "A nation must have a single, glorious aim." And the old man would wring his hands and say, "You don't understand, Otto." And sometimes, walking up and down, would repeat the story of the incident which had led Otto's grandfather to join the Revolution of 1848 and had brought the family finally to America. It was not an unusual incident. He was a soldier in training, and one morning in drilling his gun slipped and came down as they stood at "Attention." The officer in charge sprang at him with a savage oath and cut him with his sword across the face so that the blood ran in streams over his uniform. Rupert Littman finished the drill and that evening joined the party of young revolutionists, suffered with them defeat, was imprisoned, escaped, and, as has been told, in 1850 came to this country.