receive luxurious allowances from their parents. On the contrary, the largest number are rather poverty-stricken, and some of them would starve were it not for a good deal of help they receive from well-to-do people who have established cheap feeding centers.

It must be counted unto the late Hugo Stinnes for righteousness (and he may need it) that he subsidized a system of free meals for needy students in his group of hotels, including the magnificent Esplanade, in Berlin. In many cases, however, it is seen that the pride of the students makes them hesitate to line up for this cheap food which, after all, is a humiliating form of charity to young men of good birth and sensitive feelings.

STUDENTS IN RAGS

GOT into touch with some of these German students and found them extremely intelligent and very friendly. I went to one of their lectures and was more interested in the audience than in the lecture, though it was not at all dull. It was attended by a mixed class of young men and women. Most of them were so poorly and shabbily dressed that it was impossible to imagine them in an English or an American university. The sleeves of their jackets were frayed, their trousers looked as if they had slept in them, and I pitied the girls especially because of their poor worn garments without a touch of finery, or any little sign of girlish vanity.

It was the same when I found my way to an old barracks behind the slummy end of the Friedrichstrasse, where, in one of the long, bare rooms the students have their "mensa," or mid-day meal, which costs them a little less than a mark. The lucky young men of Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, would have little in common with young German men and women who came hurrying in to get their bowls of soup and plates of meat. Among the whole crowd of them I doubt if there was one who had any margin of money for the little comforts and graces which give charm to university life in more fortunate countries. And yet I have not the slightest doubt that in

actual learning these German students would be contemptuous of our own. There is only one reason for university life amongst most of them, and for the acquisition of knowledge they "eschew delight and live laborious days."

During the time of inflation many foreigners went to the University of Berlin, which then comprised more than 14,000 students. They took advantage of the exchange in foreign currencies. Now, after the stabilization of the mark, these Poles, Czechs, and Austrians have fled, and the number of students has been reduced to about 7,000.

A CLASS THAT PROSPERS

MOR
Msional classes, the small officials,

ORE prosperous than the profes

and the clerical class, who just scrape along with extreme difficulty, is the shopkeeping, merchant, and industrial class, who seem to be doing rather well, and here and there extremely well. They form the well-to-do bourgeoisie of the great cities. A good many of them are the "new rich" who came up in the time of inflation by lucky gambling with foreign exchange, and by acquiring businesses and plants for very little money in a depreciated currency. At the present time they seem to have plenty to spend, and they spend it freely, having lost the old spirit of thrift which used to be the tradition of their class.

One has only to go into restaurants like Kempinsky's in the Leipsigerstrasse— an enormous eating-house of bourgeois reputation-to see that normal times have returned in Germany for at least a solid block of the nation. Floor after floor is crowded with middle-class men and women, eating largely, drinking good wine or beer, enjoying the food, the lights, the music, the heavy decorations, without anxiety about the cost, which is higher than in London or Paris. In Düsseldorf, Cologne, Bonn, and in many other German cities, there is this fairly prosperous middle-class, determined upon having a good time after the lean years— and having it.

I do not blame them. They have had

a narrow escape from black ruin. I do not blame those crowds of tourists who throng into Genoa, Venice, and other pleasure cities of the south, enjoying themselves rather noisily, like most tourists, eating and drinking rather elaborately. For years, during the war and after the war, they were shut up in their own frontiers. The blockade kept them prisoners on "ersatz" food, which was filth. During the time of inflation their money was worthless outside of their own country. Now they feel a desperate need of escape. If they have money they want to spend it, to grab at joys and liberties long denied them.

One wishes only that there were more equality in Germany as well as in other

rank, but formerly the most comfortable, the most leisured, the most secure and conservative class in the nation.

I went to the house of one such family not long ago, and I think it was typical of many others. The husband had been the governor of a provincial state. The wife had had an estate in Russia in the time of the Czarist régime and had been the lady bountiful of her district when she stayed there with her own family.

They had traveled all over Europe, collecting many treasures of art, and establishing friendship with the most cultured and intellectual people of many nations, including France. They were patrons of art and letters, and international

countries, less profiteering at the expense of underpaid labor and all that mass of hard-working folk who have to scrape and stint in little households where the wolf still stands at the door.

There is one class in German life hard hit by recent history and uncertain of its future. They had no genius for high finance and could not profit like the "Valuta hounds" when there was gambling in paper marks. They put their inherited wealth into government securities which were wiped out, or bought industrial shares which, at present anyhow, are paying no dividends. They are the old aristocracy and country gentry of Germany, not enormously exalted in

They could

in spirit and opinions-which is rare among Germans of their class and tradition. Now, when I met them they had lost all, or nearly all, of their fortune. They could not afford to travel abroad. keep in touch with the outside world only by gifts of books from old friends. They were helping to organize a home for undernourished children from industrial towns of Germany, and lived next door, with some of the relics of their former state in their private rooms-a bust by Rodin, some eighteenth-century miniatures of the husband's ancestors, several good pictures. Not a tragedy, compared with the Nacht Asyl, perhaps, but just a little revelation of the changed state in

548

the old aristocracy of Germany, which formerly was so rich and certain of its power.

There is still great wealth among individual Germans, unevenly distributed, as in most countries, and not to be taken as general prosperity. Some of the big industrialists have made enormous fortunes. Some of the international financiers have plenty of capital for new adventures. They are the new Princes.

I

A DINNER TO MOVIE STARS

WENT to a wonderful dinner given by one of these magnates, a little old gentleman whose history is astounding, though I cannot tell it here. It was at his private house in a street off the Thiergarten in Berlin. It was more than a private house. It was a private palace. I walked through a great hall with marble pillars into a salon like one of the state apartments at Versailles, illumined by immense candelabra of precious Venetian glass. The walls were hung with French and Flemish tapestries and pictures by great masters, among them a lovely Goya. In other rooms were fine bronzes and beautiful statuary, with Persian rugs, and a great divan, on the polished boards gleaming below the shaded lamps. In the library was a priceless collection of early printed books, worth, I was told, millions. of dollars. Eight footmen stood behind the Louis Quinze chairs as the company was seated in the dining room-a company of all the great film stars in Berlin, among whom were Germans, Danes, Russians, English, and Americans. There was a different wine at every course in glasses that were beautiful to see and touch. It was a superb banquet, given by that little old gentleman who, as some one whispered to me, is one of the five richest men in Germany, but very simple in his manners, and self-effacing among his guests. It was the night afterward that I went to the Nacht Asyl, at the other end of the social scale.

Here, then, are some glimpses of the contrasts of life in Germany, but as yet I have said nothing as to the way these people look upon life, their various views

and philosophies, their ideals and hopes and politics. It is well to find out something about that and write it down, as fairly as one can. Because the future of Europe depends a great deal-perhaps entirely for peace or war-upon the thoughts and emotions now working among this great, vigorous people.

To some extent they are recovering from the neurotic state into which they inevitably fell after their defeat in the war, their long agony in the war-for it was that-and the humiliations, economic pressure, mental torture inflicted upon them after the war.

Now I find German mentality has changed. There is no longer black despair and so the temper has altered too, in many classes. The London Agreement, the trade treaties with England and France, the release of the Ruhr, the revival of industry, the postponement of crushing payments, have steadied the German pulse. The main body of the people are thinking again in terms of reason and not in terms of passion. The ideals of peace against those of force are gathering pover again. The extremists of both camps have been defeated for a time.

THE

THOSE WHO VOW REVENGE

passions, as

HE old passions, hatreds, and traditions are as strong as ever in the minds of those who by education and profession cannot escape from them while they live. Round the tables of little restaurants at Potsdam, as in many other places, sit groups of ex-officers. They have no job in life, now that Government officials have been "under the axe" for the sake of national economy. Hour after hour they vow vengeance against France, eternal hatred of England. It is natural. It is all they have to do. Here and there, in Bavaria and elsewhere, generals put on their spiked helmets and ex-officers their steel helms and war decorations, and there are drillings and parades, with some of the old pomp of the past.

"Why not?" I was asked by a German official at the Foreign Office. "It gives

F

A

AROM the bulging mail bags dropped before the doors of the Wisconsin Free Traveling Library at Madison spill daily about three hundred letters:

Send all you can please. We live fifteen miles in the brush and these books bring us so much pleasure. Only one who has experienced it can know the weariness of long winter evenings with nothing to read.

P. S. As we are far from a railroad it is important that we get them before the snow becomes heavy.

This typical appeal, copied with the underlines intact, sketches an instant picture for all who know the country. Fifteen miles in the brush when the narrow, crooked paths are choked with snow! The one-story house of logs or rough clapboards stands bleak in the clearing. Within, the furnishing is almost as bare-perhaps a strip of red flannel floating in the lamp oil, a flaunting

calendar from an insurance company, a fat mail-order catalogue. Books-if they exist are few and dingy, their contents long since emptied. People who are caught in such a room-the young wife who has taught school, the fretful invalid, restless youth-might indeed find the weariness of long evenings insupportable with nothing to read.

More desolate still is the picture drawn by a library worker some years ago.

the loneliness was so great, the isolation so unendurable, the enforced idleness of the winter months so hideous, that she unpicked and remade, unpicked and remade her scanty wardrobe, unraveled and reknit, unraveled and reknit her stockings so as to keep the balance of her mind.

The man who responded to this need of books as effectively as has any one before

him or since died some ten years ago at Madison, Wisconsin. For close to thirty years now the library movement he sponsored has expanded and grown, but it has never passed beyond the outposts of his vision. Although traveling libraries in some form are now common to almost forty states in the Union, Wisconsin, because Frank Avery Hutchins worked there, has often served as model and stimulus for the rest.

HISTORIC TRAVELING LIBRARIES

THE

HE idea of a traveling library was not new. If the Babylonians never circulated their sun-dried bricks nor the Egyptians their papyri, certainly Julius Cæsar is credited with introducing the system in his travels. The curious may discover a more authentic origin of the movement in the well-nigh undecipherable biography of a pious Scotch deacon, getic years before 1800 in establishing Samuel Brown by name, who spent enerlibraries" in the county of East Lothian, what he tersely called “circumambulatory Scotland, "sustained throughout by the pious hope that his plan might become one of the agents for illuminating the world."

The traveling library we know to-day was begun in 1893 in the State of New York under the leadership of the great librarian Melvil Dewey. New York sent books largely to supplement or strengthen libraries already in existence, but Frank Hutchins, who learned of the plan at the World's Fair, decided that in his state books must be sent where there were none before. Eight hundred villages with a population of from forty to three hundred and fifty, and unnumbered farmhouses indicated thousands of minds which must be starving for the printed word.