"Exactly," Anderson scolded. "Why, look at our Exchange professors. They are coming over here, ready to swallow the Germans whole. The Kaiser invites them to lunch on his yacht, gives them a pat on the shoulder blade, and they are his. While the Germans plainly despise us, our educators go home crying Great is Germany! How superior are her people! Let us send our sons over there to drink of her wisdom and grandeur! What inanity! Bah!"
"And so here I am," Gard smiled. "But I have bunted into you almost the first thing."
"Couldn't do better—couldn't do better," repeated Anderson with a cheering turn. "I'll tell you what to do. I'll give you a little practical advice—free."
"It won't be worth much if it's free, will it?"
"Well, it's worth this rotten German cigar you've given me. Read the editorials and correspondence in the Dresden papers. They're a good sample. There you'll see what the German attitude toward us is officially, and what German hatred feeds on day by day. The trouble with Americans over here is they don't read anything serious. Of course our students study their text books. But generally our people just fly around, hear music, drink beer in the cafés, but they don't read. Too nervous—afraid of being bored. So they don't learn much."
Anderson ran on into other subjects.
"One great thing about the German system is that it would make such people work to some purpose. We don't. It also makes its plodders work. This Government recognizes frankly that most of its population, like all populations, are plodders, and it gives them something regularly to do and sees that they do it. This converts this dull element into an organized strength—a source of power. The Germans practice their wonderful economies with respect to the poorest kind of human energy. They kick something into their drones. So they are such a mighty nation in a small land.
"In America, in other countries, this element is rather a disorganized weakness. It is not pushed. It is for the most part waste material or neglected material. Our public system, when economies are concerned, first considers money, property. It seems sometimes as if our free individualistic plan of government were, after all, adapted for the minority of the bright-witted."