I am bound, both by tradition and experience as an American, to discover the reason for such conditions in the lack of fluidity in social and political life in Germany. The industrials, the military, the nobility, the civil servants, and to some extent the Jews, are all in separate social compartments; and the political parties as well keep much to themselves and without the personal give and take outside of their purely official life which obtains in America and in England.
It is an impossible suggestion, I know, but if the upper and lower houses of the empire, or of Prussia, could meet in a match at base-ball, or golf, or cricket; if the army could play the civil service; if the newspaper correspondents could play the under-secretaries; if they could all be induced occasionally, to throw off their mental and moral uniforms, and to meet merely as men, a current of fresh air would blow through Germany, that she would never after permit to be shut out.
Personal dignity is refreshed, not lost, by a romp. Who has not seen distinguished Americans and distinguished Englishmen, in their own or in their friends' houses, or at one or another of our innumerable games, behaving like boys out of school, crawling about beneath improvised skins and growling and roaring in charades; indulging in flying chaff of one another; in the skirts of their wives and sisters playing cricket, or base-ball, or tennis with the one hand only; caricaturing good-humoredly some of their own official business, or arranging a match of some kind where their own servants join in to make up a side; or, and well I remember it, half a dozen youths of about fifty playing cricket with one stump and a broom-handle for an hour one hot afternoon, amid tumbles and shouts of laughter, and a shower of impromptu nicknames, and one or two of them bore names known all over the English-speaking world. Nobody loses any dignity, any importance; but there is an unconquerable stiffness in Germany that makes me laugh almost as I make this suggestion. We have only a certain reserve of serious work in us. To attempt to be serious all the time is never to be at rest. This worried busyness, which is a characteristic of the more mediocre of my own countrymen also, is really a symptom of deficient vitality. Things are in the saddle and you are the mule and not the man, if you are such an one. The stiffness and self-consciousness of the Germans is really a sign of their lack of confidence in themselves. Youth is always more serious than middle age, for the same reason. A man who is at home in the world laughs and is gay; he who is shy and doubtful scowls. It is the God-fearing who are not afraid, it is the man-fearing who are awkward and uncomfortable.