conversation never referred to in other countries. Subjects are
discussed before German girls of eleven and twelve, and German boys
of the same age, that make an Anglo-Saxon anxious to get out of the
room. I do not know whether it is this or the over-education that
leads to the notorious child suicides of Germany, upon which so
many learned treatises have been written.

Just before the war it looked as though the German young man and
woman were going to improve. Lawn tennis was spreading, despite
old-fashioned prejudice. Football was coming in. Rowing was
making some progress, as you may have learned at Henley. It was
not the spontaneous sport of Anglo-Saxon countries, but a more
concentrated effort to imitate and to excel.

Running races had become lately a German school amusement, but the
results, as a rule, were that if there were five competitors, the
four losers entered a protest against the winner. In any case,
each of the four produced excellent excuses why he had lost, other
than the fact that he had been properly beaten.

A learned American "exchange professor," who had returned from a
German university, whom I met in Boston last year on my way from
England to Germany, truly summed up the situation of athletics in
German schools by saying, "German boys are bad-tempered losers and
boastful winners."

Upon what kinds of history is the German child being brought up?
The basis of it is the history of the House of Hohenzollern, with
volumes devoted to the Danish and Austrian campaigns and minute
descriptions of every phase of all the battles with France in 1870,