It is in keeping with this commanding manner that the ruling class fails to give the rank and file credit for common horse sense. Instead of the Anglo-Saxon custom of trusting the individual to take care of himself, German paternalism flashes constantly in his face signs and placards proffering officious advice on every conceivable subject. He is warned to stamp his letters before mailing them, to avoid draughts if he would keep his health; he is _verboten_ to step off a tramcar in motion, lest he break his precious neck, and so on through all the possibilities of earthly existence, until any but a German would feel like the victim of one of those motherly women whose extreme solicitude becomes in practice a constant nagging. The Teuton, however, seems to like it, and he grows so accustomed to receiving or imparting information by means of placards that his very shop-windows are ridiculously littered with them. Here an engraved card solemnly announces, “This is a suit of clothes”; there another asserts—more or less truthfully—“Cigars—to smoke.” One comes to the point of wondering whether the German does not need most of all to be let alone until he learns to take care of himself and to behave of his own free will. Then he might in time recognize that liberty is objective as well as subjective; that there is true philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon contention that “every man’s home is his castle.” Perhaps he is already on his way to that goal. There were promising signs that Germany is growing less _streng_ than she used to be, more easy-going, more human—unless what seemed to be that was the merely temporary apathy of under-nourishment.