Germany had reared a magnificent economic structure. Her prosperity was great--too great, in fact.
The country had a _nouveau-riche_ aspect, as will happen when upon a people that has been content with little in the past is suddenly thrust more than it can assimilate gracefully. The Germany I was familiar with from travel and literature was a country in which men and women managed to get along comfortably by the application of thoroughness and industry--a country in which much time was given to the cultivation of the mind and the enjoyment of the fruits that come from this praiseworthy habit.
Those were the things which I had grouped under the heading, _Kultur_. Those also were the things, as I was soon to learn from the earnest men and women of the country, for which the word still stood with most. But the spirit of the _parvenu_--_Protzentum_--was become rampant. The industrial classes reeked with it.
From the villages and small towns, still the very embodiment of thrift and orderliness, I saw rise the large brick barracks of industry, topped off with huge chimneys belching forth black clouds of smoke. The outskirts of the larger towns and cities were veritable forests of smoke-stacks--palisades that surrounded the interests of the thousands of captains of industry that dwelt within the city when not frequenting the international summer and winter resorts and making themselves loathed by their extremely bad manners--the trade-mark of all _parvenus_.
I soon found that there were two separate and distinct Germanys.
It was not a question of classes, but one of having within the same borders two worlds. One of them reminded me of Goethe and Schiller, of Kant and Hegel, and the other of all that is ultra-modern, and cynical. The older of these worlds was still tilling the fields on the principle that where one takes one must give. It was still manufacturing with that honesty that is better than advertising, and selling for cost of raw material and labor, plus a reasonable profit.
In the new world it was different. Greed was the key-note of all and everything. The kings of industry and commerce had forgotten that in order to live ourselves we must let others live. These men had been wise enough to compete as little as possible with one another. Every manufacturer belonged to some _Syndikat_--trust--whose craze was to capture by means fair or foul every foreign field that could be saturated.