Slavery--and of Compulsory
Insurance. Then again, Germany gives the individual exactly the liberty
that has always been given to a slave--the liberty to think, the liberty
to dream, the liberty to rage; the liberty to indulge in any
intellectual hypotheses about the unalterable world and state--such as
have always been free to slaves, from the stoical maxims of Epictetus to
the skylarking fairy tales of Uncle Remus. And it has been truly urged
by all defenders of slavery that, if history has merely a material test,
the material condition of the subordinate under slavery tends to be good
rather than bad. When I once pointed out how precisely the "model
village" of a great employer reproduces the safety and seclusion of an
old slave estate, the employer thought it quite enough to answer
indignantly that he had provided baths, playing-grounds, a theatre,
etc., for his workers. He would probably have thought it odd to hear a
planter in South Carolina boast that he had provided banjos, hymn-books,
and places suitable for the cake-walk. Yet the planter must have
provided the banjos, for a slave cannot own property. And if this
Germanic sociology is indeed to prevail among us, I think some of the
broad-minded thinkers who concur in its prevalence owe something like an
apology to many gallant gentlemen whose graves lie where the last battle
was fought in the Wilderness; men who had the courage to fight for it,
the courage to die for it and, above all, the courage to call it by its
name.

With the acceptance by England of the German Insurance Act, I bring this
sketch of the past relations of the two countries to an end. I have
written this book because I wish, once and for all, to be done with my
friend Professor Whirlwind of Prussia, who has long despaired of really
defending his own country, and has fallen back upon abusing mine. He has
dropped, amid general derision, his attempt to call a thing right when
even the Chancellor who did it called it wrong. But he has an idea that
if he can show that somebody from England somewhere did another wrong,
the two wrongs may make a right. Against the cry of the Roman Catholic
Poles the Prussian has never done, or even pretended to do, anything but
harden his heart; but he has (such are the lovable inconsistencies of
human nature) a warm corner in his heart for the Roman Catholic Irish.
He has not a word to say for himself about the campaign in Belgium, but
he still has many wise, repro