most
tyrannically ruled country in the world. Everything in Germany must be
done systematically, and the system must be the result of development.
But there is no use in having a system unless it is enforced--otherwise
it remains, like Social Democracy, a theory. Compulsion, therefore,
is necessary, and the Government provides it through its official
machinery and its police. The systematization has enormous public
advantages, but it is difficult for the Anglo-Saxon, jealous of his
individual right to direct his public life through his own
representatives and his private life according to his own judgment,
to accommodate himself to a system which seems to him unduly to
interfere with both right and judgment.

Perhaps it is the manner in which, under the name of authority,
compulsion is exercised by subordinate officialdom and in especial by
the police, as much as the compulsion itself, which irritates in
Germany. Every profession, business, trade, and occupation, down to
that of selling matches and newspapers in the streets, is meticulously
regulated; and while there is nothing to object to in this, what
strikes the Anglo-Saxon as objectionable is that the regulations are
enforced with the manners and in the tone of a drill-sergeant. The
official in Germany, he finds, is not the servant of the public. There
is a story current in England of a Duke of Norfolk, when
Postmaster-General, going into a district post-office and asking for a
penny stamp. The clerk was dilatory, and the Duke remonstrated. "Who
are you, I should like to know?" asked the clerk impertinently, "that
you are laying down the law." "I am the public," replied the Duke
simply, at the same time showing the clerk his card. An English
Foreign Secretary once told a deputation that the Ministry was
"waiting for instructions from their employers--the people." In
Germany it is the opposite; the official is the master and the public
his dutiful servant. In Germany the official expects marked deference
from the public: the post-office clerk is "Mr. Official," the guardian
of the law "Mr. Policeman" (with your hat off). The Anglo-Saxon rather
expects the deference to be on the other side, and has a sordid
subconsciousness that he pays the official for his services. Perhaps
the Social Democrat has something of the same feeling.

One of the chief consequences of industrialism in Germany is that the
people of the country are migrating to the towns. To the country
b