terest himself in the affair, sacrifices
his position to accompany the family to their dilapidated estate in a
distant province. The Baron will tolerate no interference, however,
and Anton finally returns to the house of Schroeter and is reinstated
in the business. Lenore, the Baron's daughter, the first cause of
Anton's interest, meantime becomes engaged to the young nobleman Fink;
who has been an associate of Anton's in the office of T. O. Schroeter,
has but recently returned from the United States, and who first
advances funds for the improvement of the estate and ultimately
purchases it.

Fink acts his part in the author's philosophy as a contrast to the
Baron von Rothsattel. Although a nobleman, he has adapted himself to
the conditions of the century, and is free from any hallucinations of
his hereditary rank, even while he is perfectly awake to its
traditions. He has entered upon a commercial career not from choice,
but from necessity; but he has accepted his fate and has made
successful use of his opportunities. Anton marries the sister of T. O.
Schroeter, and becomes a partner in the business. Fink is however
really the one who gains the princess in this modern tale, and is
plainly to have the more important share as an actual social force in
the future. The old feudal nobility has played its part on the stage
of the world; and being so picturesque, and full of romantic
opportunity, its loss is doubtless to be regretted. The tamer
realities of the modern industrial state have succeeded it. As Freytag
solves the problem in 'Soll und Haben,' it is the man who works, the
man of the industrial classes alone, to whom the victory belongs in
the modern social struggle, be his antecedents bourgeois or
aristocratic.

Freytag's second great novel, 'Die Verlorene Handschrift' (The Lost
Manuscript), which appeared in 1864, concerns itself with another
phase of the same problem. This time, however, instead of the merchant
and man of affairs, it is the scholar about whom the action centres.
Felix Werner, professor of philology, has come upon unmistakable
traces of the lost books of Tacitus, whose recovery is the object of
his life. In his search for the manuscript in an old house in the
country he finds his future wife Ilse, one of the finest types in all
German literature of the true German woman, both while at home a maid
in her father's house and subsequently as the professor's wife in the
university town. Werner, in hi