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 bumpkin the city is an Eldorado and a lordly pleasure-house. In truth, he is much better off in it than in the stagnant life of the country. In the city he sees comfort on every hand, with possibilities of enjoyment of every kind, and if he does not soon get a share of the good things going he grows discontented and turns Socialist. In the city, too, he learns to think and compare, he perceives the distinction of classes and notices that certain classes have open to them careers from which he is excluded. Then there is the apparently inevitable antagonism between labour and capital, between the employer and employed, which drives the worker to Social Democracy, as offering the prospect of his becoming his own master and enjoying the whole fruits of his labour. He may not know Matthew Arnold's "Sick King in Bokhara," but he would endorse Arnold's lines:--