Three men on the bummelJerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka)
General
Three men on the bummel
Jerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka)
Bicycle touring -- Fiction; Black Forest (Germany) -- Fiction; British -- Germany -- Fiction; Humorous stories
If you lose yourself, he finds you; and if you lose anything belonging to
you, he recovers it for you. If you don't know what you want, he tells
you. If you want anything that is good for you to have, he gets it for
you. Private lawyers are not needed in Germany. If you want to buy or
sell a house or field, the State makes out the conveyance. If you have
been swindled, the State takes up the case for you. The State marries
you, insures you, will even gamble with you for a trifle.
"You get yourself born," says the German Government to the German
citizen, "we do the rest. Indoors and out of doors, in sickness and in
health, in pleasure and in work, we will tell you what to do, and we will
see to it that you do it. Don't you worry yourself about anything."
And the German doesn't. Where there is no policeman to be found, he
wanders about till he comes to a police notice posted on a wall. This he
reads; then he goes and does what it says.
I remember in one German town--I forget which; it is immaterial; the
incident could have happened in any--noticing an open gate leading to a
garden in which a concert was being given. There was nothing to prevent
anyone who chose from walking through that gate, and thus gaining
admittance to the concert without paying. In fact, of the two gates
quarter of a mile apart it was the more convenient. Yet of the crowds
that passed, not one attempted to enter by that gate. They plodded
steadily on under a blazing sun to the other gate, at which a man stood
to collect the entrance money. I have seen German youngsters stand
longingly by the margin of a lonely sheet of ice. They could have skated
on that ice for hours, and nobody have been the wiser. The crowd and the
police were at the other end, more than half a mile away, and round the
corner. Nothing stopped their going on but the knowledge that they ought
not. Things such as these make one pause to seriously wonder whether the
Teuton be a member of the sinful human family or not. Is it not possible
that these placid, gentle folk may in reality be angels, come down to
earth for the sake of a glass of beer, which, as they must know, can only
in Germany be obtained worth the drinking?
In Germany the country roads are lined with fruit trees. There is no
voice to stay man or boy from picking and eating the fruit, except
conscience. In England such a state of things would cause public
indignation. Children would die of cholera by the hundred. The medical
profession would be worked off its legs trying to cope with the natural
results of over-indulgence in sour apples and unripe walnuts. Public
opinion would demand that these fruit trees should be fenced about, and
thus rendered harmless. Fruit growers, to save themselves the expense of
walls and palings, would not be allowed in this manner to spread sickness
and death throughout the community.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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