The framework of our republican institutions, as I have tried to outline in this volume, came from the "Woods of Germany." Professor H. A. L. Fisher, of Oxford, writes: "European republicanism, which ever since the French Revolution has been in the main a phenomenon of the Latin races, was a creature of Teutonic civilization in the age of the sea-beggars and the Roundheads. The half-Latin city of Geneva was the source of that stream of democratic opinion in church and state, which, flowing to England under Queen Elizabeth, was repelled by persecution to Holland, and thence directed to the continent of North America."
In these later days Goethe, in a letter to Eckermann, prophesied the building of the Panama Canal by the Americans, and also the prodigious growth of the United States toward the West.
In a private collection in New York, is an autograph letter of George Washington to Frederick the Great, asking that Frederick should use his influence to protect that French friend of America, Lafayette.
In Schiller's house in Weimar there still hangs an engraving of the battle of Bunker Hill, by Müller, a German, and a friend of the poet.
Bismarck's intimate friend as a student at Göttingen, and the man of whom he spoke with warm affection all his life, was the American historian Motley.
The German soldiers in our Civil War were numbered by the thousands. We have many ties with Germany, quite enough, indeed, to make a bare enumeration of them a sufficient introduction to this volume.
On more than one occasion of late I have been introduced in places, and to persons where a slight picture of what I was to meet when the doors were thrown open was of great help to me. I was told beforehand something of the history, traditions, the forms and ceremonies, and even something of the weaknesses and peculiarities of the society, the persons, and the personages. I am not so wise a guide as some of my sponsors have been, but it is something of the kind that I have wished and planned to do for my countrymen. I have tried to make this book, not a guidebook, certainly not a history; rather, in the words of Bacon, "grains of salt, which will rather give an appetite than offend with satiety," a sketch, in short, of what is on the other side of the great doors when the announcer speaks your name and you enter Germany.