What was the matter? Why simply this: The ticket agent had sent his uniform coat out to be brushed and the boy had not returned with it. He would no more think of selling a ticket except with that blue coat on, buttoned up to the chin, and with every button there, than he would have thought of cutting off his right hand. It mattered not that passengers were waiting, it mattered not that the engine was whistling its last warning notes, that coat was not brushed and on the official’s back, and no tickets could be sold till it was.
Fortunately the boy came with the coat, the official got it on somehow, the train waited two or three minutes, tickets were sold hurriedly and we did get away.
What would have happened if the boy had not come back with the coat at all, no one can answer.
Certainly no one would have got tickets till he got his coat, and we should all have missed our train.
Red-tape is a great institution, and nowhere do you see more of it than in Germany. But we got away finally to Frankfort.
Contrasting strangely with Mannheim’s straight streets and quiet unpretentious business blocks, is the very peculiar city of Frankfort, where within a stone’s throw of each other are streets so entirely different, that in one you may imagine yourself on Broadway, while in the other you may with equal propriety consider yourself set back five or six hundred years.
New Frankfort is the newest city I know of. It is more fresh and recent than Broadway. It is very like Broadway, except that its buildings are less garish, and more solidly built.
The line between the old and the new is only a street, and the old is the oldest in Europe, as the new is the newest. The contrast is wonderful. It is the fourteenth century and the nineteenth shaking hands across the chasm of time. It is the mediæval knight and the London exquisite side by side. The same may be seen in all European cities, but nowhere so striking as in Frankfort.
Approaching the city you see the old watch towers high on the hills that surround the environs of Frankfort, those remaining monuments of the reign of force, when the people, ruled mercilessly by the nobles, erected these towers from which the usurpers watched each other. Germany is not yet free from this kind of rule; it has merely taken a different form. Gunpowder changed the form of force, but not its spirit. These once impregnable fortresses would not stand a minute before the artillery of the present, and so they are abandoned. But in their stead are the regiments we saw in Mannheim and everywhere else, each one a fortress of flesh and blood. Germany will get rid of the whole of it one of these days, and the million of men employed to support that one unmitigated curse of the world, royalty, will be added to the productive power of the country instead of living upon it.