to discover that the lad does not know enough to call a cab, he abuses
not the system, but its innocent victim.

I confine my remarks to French, because that is the only language we
attempt to teach our youth. An English boy who could speak German would
be looked down upon as unpatriotic. Why we waste time in teaching even
French according to this method I have never been able to understand. A
perfect unacquaintance with a language is respectable. But putting aside
comic journalists and lady novelists, for whom it is a business
necessity, this smattering of French which we are so proud to possess
only serves to render us ridiculous.

In the German school the method is somewhat different. One hour every
day is devoted to the same language. The idea is not to give the lad
time between each lesson to forget what he learned at the last; the idea
is for him to get on. There is no comic foreigner provided for his
amusement. The desired language is taught by a German school-master who
knows it inside and out as thoroughly as he knows his own. Maybe this
system does not provide the German youth with that perfection of foreign
accent for which the British tourist is in every land remarkable, but it
has other advantages. The boy does not call his master "froggy," or
"sausage," nor prepare for the French or English hour any exhibition of
homely wit whatever. He just sits there, and for his own sake tries to
learn that foreign tongue with as little trouble to everybody concerned
as possible. When he has left school he can talk, not about penknives
and gardeners and aunts merely, but about European politics, history,
Shakespeare, or the musical glasses, according to the turn the
conversation may take.

Viewing the German people from an Anglo-Saxon standpoint, it may be that