I had personally for some time been busy in pressing the then somewhat
coldly received claims for a better system of education, higher and
technical as well as elementary, among my own countrymen, and had met
with some success in asking for the establishment of teaching
universities and of technical colleges, such as the new Imperial
College of Science and Technology at South Kensington. Of these we had
very substantially increased the number during the eight years which
preceded my visit to Berlin; but I had learned from visits of inspection
to Germany that much more remained to be done before we could secure our
commercial and industrial position against the unhasting but unresting
efforts of our formidable competitor.

As to the German people outside official circles and the universities, I
thought of them then what I think of them now. They were very much like
our own people, except in one thing. This was that they were trained
simply to obey, and to carry out whatever they were told by their
rulers. I used, during numerous unofficial tours in Germany, to wander
about incognito, and to smoke and drink beer with the peasants and the
people whenever I could get the chance. What impressed me was the little
part they had in directing their own government, and the little they
knew about what it was doing. There was a general disposition to accept,
as a definition of duty which must not be questioned, whatever they were
told to do by the _Vorstand_. It is this habit of mind, dating back to
the days of Frederick the Great, with only occasional and brief
interruptions, which has led many people to think that the German
people at large have in them "a double dose of original sin." Even when
their soldiers have been exceptionally brutal in methods of warfare, I
do not think that this is so. The habit of mind which prevails is that
of always looking to the rulers for orders, and the brutality has been
that enjoined--in accordance with its own military policy of shortening