The great servant-girl question is also up for discussion in Germany, after occupying womankind for three thousand years. Here is a group of servants talking together. "Yesterday I gave warning," says one. "Why?" asks another; "the wages are high, the food is good, and you have every Sunday out." The reply is: "Well, you must know, my Fritz don't like it. Mistress buys her wine at the wine-merchant's, where I get the bottles all sealed. Don't you see?"
Ahead of Time.
The aged and extremely absent-minded prince of a little territory visits the public institutions every year. On leaving the high school, he says to the teacher: "I am very much pleased with every thing, only the soup is a little too thin."
Teacher (aside to aid-de-camp). "What does his Highness mean by thin soup?"
Aid-de-camp. "It is only a slip. His Highness should have said that in the hospital."
In the same spirit, as every reader knows, the drawing-room judges the kitchen in other lands besides Germany, and is supported in its judgment by satiric artists who evolve preposterously impossible servants from the shallows of their own ignorance.
Rarely, indeed, does a German caricaturist presume to meddle with politics, and still more rarely does he do it with impunity. The Germans, with all their excellences, seem wanting in the spirit that has given us our turbulent, ill-organized freedom. Perhaps their beer has offered too ready and cheap a resource against the chafing resentments that tyranny excites; for a narcotized brain is indolently submissive to whatever is very difficult of remedy. Coffee and tobacco keep the Turk a slave. The wisest act of Louis Napoleon's usurpation was his giving a daily ration of tobacco to every soldier. Woe to despots when men cease to dull and pollute their brains with tobacco and alcohol! There will then be a speedy end put to the system that takes five millions of the élite of Europe from industry, and consigns them to the business of suppression and massacre. Whatever may be the cause, Germany has scarcely yet begun her apprenticeship to freedom; and, consequently, her public men lose the inestimable advantage of seeing their measures as the public sees them. Let us hope that the German people may be able to appropriate part of our experience, and so work their way to rational and orderly freedom without passing through the stage of ignorant suffrage and thief-politicians. Meanwhile there is no political caricature in Germany.