lights, railways, surface-cars, hotel elevators and ancient laws!
Something of the customs of the duchy must be told in the passing,
though, for my part, I am vigorously against explanatory passages in
stories of action. Barscheit bristled with militarism; the little man
always imitates the big one, but lacks the big man's excuses.
Militarism entered into and overshadowed the civic laws.

There were three things you might do without offense; you might bathe,
eat and sleep, only you must not sleep out loud. The citizen of
Barscheit was hemmed in by a set of laws which had their birth in the
dark dungeons of the Inquisition. They congealed the blood of a man
born and bred in a commercial country. If you broke a law, you were
relentlessly punished; there was no mercy. In America we make laws and
then hide them in dull-looking volumes which the public have neither
the time nor the inclination to read. In this duchy of mine it was
different; you ran into a law on every corner, in every park, in every
public building: little oblong signs, enameled, which told you that you
could _not_ do something or other--"Forbidden!" The beauty of German
laws is that when you learn all the things that you can not do, you
begin to find out that the things you can do are not worth a hang in
the doing.

As soon as a person learned to read he or she began life by reading
these laws. If you could not read, so much the worse for you; you had
to pay a guide who charged you almost as much as the full cost of the
fine.

The opposition political party in the United States is always howling
militarism, without the slightest idea of what militarism really is.
One side, please, in Barscheit, when an officer comes along, or take