The Emperor of Germany of that time, the grandfather of the present man, must have had a rarely good head or he would never have found a Bismarck and given him almost royal power. But his wisdom was shown, I am inclined to think, just as clearly in another field. Desirous above all things of strengthening his army, he called Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of the famous scientist, Alexander, to counsel. What should be done with the ever increasing number of students who year by year entered the army? Von Humboldt recommended that they should form a class apart as volunteers and be subjected to only one year's training instead of three. At first the old Kaiser would not hear of it: they would be inferior, he thought, to the ordinary soldier in drill and discipline. "All my soldiers must be as good as possible," was his final word. Von Humboldt assured him that the volunteers for one year would soon constitute the pick of the recruits, and he argued and pleaded for his conviction with such fervour that at length the old Emperor yielded. Von Humboldt said that a certain proportion, twenty per cent at any rate, of the volunteers would become non-commissioned officers before their year was over; and the Emperor agreed that if this happened, the experiment must be regarded as successful. Of course the first volunteers knew what was expected of them and more than fifty per cent of them gained the coveted distinction. All through the army the smartest soldiers were the one-year volunteers. It was even said later that the smartest non-commissioned officers were for the most part volunteers, but that is not generally believed, for the German is very proud of his non-commissioned officers and with good reason; for they serve 16 years with the colours, and as they are rewarded afterwards with good positions on the railways, or in the post-office or the police, and indeed may even rise to esteem as gentlemen, they form the most remarkable class in any army. I have known a good many German non-commissioned officers who had learned to speak both English and French fluently and correctly while still serving.
But not only was the whole spirit and mind and discipline of the army enormously vivified by the competition of the educated volunteers; but the institution exercised in turn the most wonderful effect upon the teaching and learning in the schools; and this has never been noticed so far as I know. The middle and lower-middle classes in Germany wished their sons to become one-year volunteers, and so fathers, mothers and sisters urged their sons and brothers to study and learn so as to gain this huge step in the social hierarchy.
In turn this inspired the masters and professors in the Gymnasien and Real- Schulen, and these teachers took immediate advantage of the new spirit in the scholars: the standard of the final examination in the Gymnasien-das Abiturienten-Examen, or "the going-away" examination-was put higher and higher year by year till it reached the limit set by human nature. The level of this examination now is about the level of second-honours in Oxford or Cambridge, far above the graduation standard of American universities.
There are perhaps a thousand such students in Great Britain year by year, against the hundred thousand in German universities, some of whom are going on to further heights.
I don't for a moment mean to suggest that all these hundred thousand German students are the intellectual equals of the thousand honour men of the English universities; they may be on the same level of knowledge, but the best thousand from Oxford and Cambridge are at least as intelligent as the best thousand from German universities. Genius has little or nothing to do with learning; but what I do assert is that the number of cultivated and fairly intelligent men in Germany is ten times larger than it is in England. Many Englishmen are proud of their ignorance: how often have I heard in later life,
"I never could learn languages; French, a beastly tongue to pronounce, I know a few words of, but German is absolutely beyond me: yet I know something of horses and I'm supposed to be pretty useful at banking," and so forth. I've heard an English millionaire, ennobled for his wealth, boast that he had only two books in his house: one "the guid book" meaning the Bible that he never opened, and the other his check book.
One scene which will show the enormous difference between the two peoples is bitten into my memory as with vitriol. In order to get special lessons in Old German, I spent a semester in the house of a professor in a Gymnasium; he had a daughter and two sons, the younger, Wilhelm, an excellent scholar, while Heinrich, the elder, was rather dull or slow. The father was a big, powerful man with a great voice and fiercely imperious temper: a sort of Bismarck; he was writing a book on comparative grammar. Night after night, he gave me an hour's lesson; I prepared it carefully not to excite his irritability and soon we became real friends. Duty was his religion, sweetened by love of his daughter, who was preparing to be a teacher. My bedroom was on the second floor in the back; but often, after I had retired and was lying in
bed reading, I heard outbursts of voice from the sitting room downstairs. I soon found out that after my lesson and an hour or two given to his daughter, the professor would go through his lessons with Heinrich. One summer's night I had been reading in my room when I was startled by a terrible row. Without thinking I ran downstairs and into the sitting-room. Mary was trying to comfort her father, who was marching up and down the room with the tears pouring from his eyes: "To think of that stupid lout being a son of mine; look at him!" Heinrich, with a very red face and tousled hair, sat with his books at the table, sullen and angry: "Ei with the optative is beyond him," cried the professor, "and he's fifteen!"
"Ei with the optative was beyond me at sixteen," I laughed, hoping to allay the storm. The boy threw me a grateful look, but the father would not be appeased.
"His whole future depends on his work," he shouted. "He ought to be in Secunda next year and he hasn't a chance, not a chance!"
"Oh, come," I said, "you know you told me once that when Heinrich learned anything, he never forgot it, whereas I forget as easily as I learn; you can't have it both ways."
"That's what I tell my father," said Mary, and the storm gradually blew over.
But as the time of the examination approached, similar scenes were of almost nightly occurrence; I've seen the professor working passionately with Heinrich at one and two o'clock in the morning, the whole family on pins and needles because of one boy's slowness of apprehension.
The ordinary German is not by any means a genius, but as a rule he has had to learn a good deal and knows how to learn whatever he wishes; whereas the ordinary Englishman or American is almost inconceivably ignorant, and if he happens to have succeeded in life in spite of his limitations, he is all too apt to take pride in his ignorances. I know Englishmen and women who have spent twenty years in France and know nothing of French beyond a few ordinary phrases. It must be admitted that the Englishman is far worse than the American in this respect; the American is ashamed of ignorance.
In mental things the German is, so to speak, a trained athlete in comparison with an Englishman, and as soon as he comes into competition with him, he is conscious of his superiority and naturally loves to prove and display it. Time and again towards the end of the nineteenth century, English manufacturers grieving over the loss of the South American markets have shown me letters in Spanish and Portuguese written by German "drummers" that they could not get equalled by any English agents: "We are beaten by their knowledge," was the true summing up and plaint. And in the first ten years of the twentieth century the German's pride in his unhoped-for quick success in commerce and industry intensified his efforts, and at the same time his contempt of his easily beaten rivals.