Viscount Grey of Falloden.  The Tsar is usually depicted covered with vermin.  The King of Italy as an evil-looking dwarf with a dagger in his hand.  Only those who have seen the virulence of the caricatures, circulated by picture postcard, can have any idea of the horrible material on which the German child is fed.  The only protest I ever heard came from the Artists’ Society of Munich, who objected to these loathsome educational efforts as being injurious to the reputation of artistic Germany and calculated to produce permanent damage to the juvenile mind.

The atmosphere of the German home is so different from that in which I have been brought up in the United States, and have seen in England, that the Germans are not at all shocked by topics of conversation never referred to in other countries.  Subjects are discussed before German girls of eleven and twelve, and German boys of the same age, that make an Anglo-Saxon anxious to get out of the room.  I do not know whether it is this or the over-education that leads to the notorious child suicides of Germany, upon which so many learned treatises have been written.

Just before the war it looked as though the German young man and woman were going to improve.  Lawn tennis was spreading, despite old-fashioned prejudice.  Football was coming in.  Rowing was making some progress, as you may have learned at Henley.  It was not the spontaneous sport of Anglo-Saxon countries, but a more concentrated effort to imitate and to excel.

Running races had become lately a German school amusement, but the results, as a rule, were that if there were five competitors, the four losers entered a protest against the winner.  In any case, each of the four produced excellent excuses why he had lost, other than the fact that he had been properly beaten.

A learned American “exchange professor,” who had returned from a German university, whom I met in Boston last year on my way from England to Germany, truly summed up the situation of athletics in German schools by saying, “German boys are bad-tempered losers and boastful winners.”

Upon what kinds of history is the German child being brought up?  The basis of it is the history of the House of Hohenzollern, with volumes devoted to the Danish and Austrian campaigns and minute descriptions of every phase of all the battles with France in 1870, written in a curious hysterical fashion.

The admixture of Biblical references and German boasting are typical of the lessons taught at German Sunday Schools, which play a great role in war propaganda.  The schoolmaster having done his work for six days of the week, the pastor gives an extra virulent dose on the Sabbath.  Sedan Day, which before the war was the culmination of hate lessons, often formed the occasion of Sunday School picnics, at which the children sang new anti-French songs.

There are some traits in German children most likeable.  There are, for example, the respect for, and courtesy and kindness towards, anybody older than themselves.  There are admiration for learning and ambition to excel in any particular task.  There is a genuine love of music.  On the other hand, there is much dishonesty, as may be witnessed by the proceedings in the German police courts, and has been proved in the gold and other collections.