has amused you lately, because the parents of the heroine
objected to her marriage with the hero on grounds you were quite
incapable of understanding. The young man's work was in Cochin-China,
and the young lady's father and mother did not wish her to go so far.
Never in your life have you heard anyone raise such a trivial
difficulty. You live in a dull sober street mostly inhabited by dull
sober people, but there is not one house in it that is not linked by
interest or affection, often doubly linked, with some uttermost end of
the earth. You can hardly find an English family that has not one
member or more in far countries, and so the common talk of English
people in all classes travels the width of the world in the wake of
those dear to them. But in 1900 only 22,309 Germans out of a
population of 60,400,000 emigrated from Germany, and these, says Mr.
Eltzbacher, whose figures I am quoting, were more than counterbalanced
by immigration into Germany from Austria, Russia, and Italy. It is
true that the population of Germany is increasing with immense
rapidity, and that the question of expansion is becoming a burning
one; but it is a question quite outside the strictly home politics of
this unpretending chronicle. We are only concerned with the obvious
fact that Germans settle in far countries in much smaller numbers than
we do, and that those who go abroad mostly choose the British flag and
avoid their own. It does not occur as easily to a German as to an
Englishman that he may better his fortunes in another part of the
world, or if he is an official that he will apply for a post in Asia
or Africa. He wants to stay near the Rhine or the Spree where he was
born, and to bring up his children there; and with the help of the
State and his wife he contrives to do this on an extraordinary small
income. The State, as we have seen, almost takes his children off his
hands from the time they are six years old. It brings them up for
nothing, or next to nothing; in cases of need it partially feeds and
clothes them, it even washes them. Some English humorist has said that
a German need only give himself the trouble to be born; his government
does the rest. But first his mother and then his wife do a good deal.
They are like the woman in Proverbs who worked willingly with her
hands, rose while it was night, saw well to the ways of her household,
and ate not the bread of idleness.

I have before me the household accounts of several Ger