tolerate, is more jealous of its independence than perhaps any other
nation in matters pertaining to the intellectual, social, and
religious life of the individual. It seems as if the very pressure
from without had helped to strengthen and enrich the life within.

Not only all the great men of German thought, from Luther down to the
Grimms and the Humboldts, have been conspicuous for their freedom from
artificial conventions and for the originality and homeliness of their
human intercourse; but even the average German official--wedded as he
may be to his rank or his title, anxious as he may be to preserve an
outward decorum in exact keeping with the precise shade of his public
status--is often the most delightfully unconventional, good-natured,
unsophisticated, and even erratic being in the world, as soon as he
has left the cares of his office behind him. Germany is the classic
land of queer people. It is the land of Quintus Fixlein, Onkel Bräsig,
Leberecht Hühnchen, and the host of _Fliegende Blatter_ worthies; it
is the land of the beer-garden and the Kaffeekranzchen, of the
Christmas-tree and the Whitsuntide merry-making; it is the land of
country inns and of student pranks. What more need be said to bring
before one's mind the wealth of hearty joyfulness, jolly
good-fellowship, boisterous frolic, sturdy humor, simple directness,
and genuinely democratic feeling that characterizes social life in
Germany.

And still less reason is there for dwelling on the intellectual and
religious independence of German character. Absence of constraint in
scientific inquiry and religious conduct is indeed the very palladium
of German freedom. Nowhere is higher education so entirely removed
from class distinction as in the country where the imperial princes
are sent to the same school with the sons of tradesmen and artisans.