e by women; or to a _Stift_, a residential school of
the conventual type, which may be either Protestant or Catholic. A
girl who had spent some years at a well-known Protestant _Stift_
described her school life to me as minutely as possible, and it
sounded so like the life in a good English boarding-school thirty
years ago that it is difficult to pick out points of differences. That
only means, of course, that the differences were subtle and not
apparent in rules and time-tables. The girls wore a school uniform,
were well fed and taught, strictly looked after, taken out for walks
and excursions, allowed a private correspondence, shown how to mend
their clothes, made to keep their rooms tidy, encouraged in piety and
decorum. In these strenuous times it sounds a little old-fashioned,
and as a matter of fact a school of this kind fits a girl for a
sheltered home but not for the open road. For everyone concerned about
the education of women the interesting spectacle in Germany to-day is
the campaign being carried on by Helene Lange and her party, the
support they receive from the official as well as from the unofficial
world, and the progress they make year by year to gain their ends.

CHAPTER IV

THE EDUCATION OF THE POOR

There are no people in the world who need driving to school less than
the Germans. There are no people in the world who set so high a value
on knowledge. In the old days, when they lived with Jove in the
clouds, they valued knowledge solely for its own sake, and did not
trouble much about its practical use in the world. It is absurd to
say, as people often do now, that this spirit is dead in the nation.
You cannot be long in the society of Germans without recognising that
it survives wherever the stress of modern life leaves room for it. You
see that when a German makes money his sons constantly enter the
learned and the artistic professions with his full approval, though
they are most unlikely to make a big income in this way. You are told
by people who work amongst the poor, that parents will make any
sacrifices year after year in order to send a boy to one of the higher
schools. You know that the Scotsmen who live on oatmeal while they
acquire learning have their counterparts in the German universities,
where many a student would not dine at all if private or organised
charity did not give him a dinner so many days a week. Sometimes you
have heard it said of such and such a great German, th