century and beyond?

To try to answer this aright, it is obviously necessary to know what
the German is--what he is really like. To know him at his best, in
his truest colors, is to live with him in his most normal condition,
and that is at his fireside, surrounded by his family. This aspect
has been the least fully presented during the war. What the Teuton
military and political chieftains, clergymen, professors, captains
of industry, editors and other men of position have said, how they
have conducted themselves toward the rest of humanity, is
notoriously and distressingly familiar. But what the ordinary,
educated German of peaceful pursuits, staying by his hearthstone
far behind and safe from the battle line, thought and wished to
say, has been beyond our ken. There has been no way to get at him
or hear from him as to what lay frankly in his mind.

His leaders loudly proclaimed themselves to be as terrifying as Huns
and unblushingly gloried in this profession. Has he agreed or has he
silently disagreed? Has he too wished this or has he been unwilling?
Is he essentially a Hun, are his family essentially Huns, or are
they in reality good and kindly people like our people? Are they
temporarily misled?

The humble German families of education who are hospitable, who sing
and weep over sentimental songs in their homes, whose duties are
modest and revenues small, who have never been out of their
provinces, who have had no relations with foreigners and could have
no personal cause for hatred--have they been so bloodthirsty about
killing and pillaging in alien lands?

Villa Elsa contains a family immune from any foreign influence and
matured in the most regular and unsuspecting Teuton way. The German
household is the most thoroughly instructed of all households. Its
members are disciplined to do most things well. How can it then be
Hun in any considerable degree? Impossible, said the nations, and so
they remained illy prepared against a frenzied onslaught. But a
shocked public has beheld how readily the most erudite of mankind,
as the Germans were generally held to be, could officially,
deliberately and repeatedly as soldiers, singly and _en masse_,
act like their ancestors--the barbarians of the days of Attila.

These are all puzzling queries which this story attempts to
illuminate and solve by its pictures and observations of the
life of such a modest and typical Teuton home in 1913 and 1914.
Admittedly too much lig