ly speak for himself.

It is, however, fair to explain that modern men as well as modern
women come under his censure. All the tendencies and all the habits of
modern life afflict him, and he lashes out at them without
discrimination, and with such an entire lack of prophetic insight
that I have found him consoling. For this book was published sixteen
years before the Franco-Prussian War, when Germany, the world must
admit, proved that it was not decadent. Yet every page of it is a
Jeremiad, an exhortation to his countryfolk to stop short on the road
to ruin. He does not see that the whole nation is slowly and patiently
girding its loins for that mighty effort; he believes it is blind,
weak, and flighty. If he had lived in England, and a little later, he
would certainly have talked about the Smart Set, Foreign Financiers,
and the Yellow Press. As he lived in Germany fifty years ago, he
scolds his countryfolk for living in flats. He wants to know why a
family cannot herd in one room instead of scattering itself in
several. As for a father who cannot endure the cry of children, that
man should never have been a father, says Herr Riehl. He cannot
approve of the dinner hour being put off till two o'clock. Why not
begin work at five and dine at eleven in the good old German way? He
praises the ruinous elaborate festivals that used to celebrate family
events, and considers that the police help to destroy family life by
fining people who in their opinion spend more than they can afford on
a wedding or a christening. He objects to artificial Christmas trees,
and points out that other nations set a tree in the drawing-room, but
that Germans have it in the nursery, the innermost sanctum of family
life. He arrives at some curious conclusions when he discusses the
German's habit of turning the beer-house into a sort of club that he
calls his _Kneipe_. Other races can drink, he says; _aber bloss die
germanischen koennen kneipen_--only the Germanic peoples can make
themselves at home in an inn. What does the _Stammgast_, the regular
guest, ask but the ways of home? the same chair every night, the same
corner, the same glass, the same wine; and where there is a
_Stammtisch_ the same companions. He sees that family life is more or
less destroyed when the men of the household spend their leisure
hours, and especially their evenings, at an inn, but he says that the
homelike surroundings of the _Kneipe_ prove the German's love of home.
I