Communications

...William Cranston Lawton) that "every page will reward studious perusal...

...Both critics of a system stand completely outside of the national life of the country concerned, though taking active part therein...

...There should be rich opportunity at this time for American historical students, who would study rather than quote oracularly, opinions inevitably and justifiably biased...

...William Franklin Sands...

...I cannot believe that your reviewers have passed it over as unimportant, even though I do not agree with the publisher's (Brentano's) suggestion that it is the most important book that has come out of Germany since the war...

...An American, a former exchange professor (Yale-Berlin) who was captured by a German raiding party on the coast of Finland and sent down to Berlin (where, by the way, though interned, he was given complete liberty of movement and treated with exemplary courtesy) had most interesting comment to make, upon his return after the Armistice, on the widespread realization to which Harden refers among all classes of Germans back of the lines of the failure of the imperial government and its causes, and of the collapse of the German war effort at the very moment when the Allies were faltering before the last desperate thrust of the Emperor's armies and Belleau Wood...

...but though many, they have always constituted a minority—held to be unpatriotic, if not revolutionary...

...He has always offered to Germans unpalatable food...

...Harden's old personal grudge against the Kaiser as typifying all that he resented, colors everything he writes (perhaps too vividly) just as Professor Ossendowski's experience of Russian administrative ineptitude and the barbarous cruelty of Russian coercive measures in Poland centre his resentment upon the faint tinge of Romanoff blood in the veins of the last emperor of Russia...

...TO the Editor:—I wonder if I have missed a review in your columns of Maximilian Harden's Germany, France and England...

...Rather do I agree with the translator (Mr...

...Harden's style has all the difficulties the German language can compass, plus an enormous number of colloquialisms and side remarks—in patois or journalese—immediately intelligible only to the German reading public...

...Lawton has made the best of an extremely difficult translation...

...Harden does not express German thought...

...Still, though Harden states his facts and people know that they are facts, his is not a German point of view—it is too bitter a dose to swallow...

...Their observations have distinct value for that reason, properly analyzed by others who have not suffered personally...

...Mr...

...Germany's method of primary education during two generations has not trained to individual thought and decision...

...There have always been, during his writing career, many Germans who agreed in the main with his statement of facts and his interpretation...

...Still, he is not so difficult as some of the recent German philosophical theories which seem to have completely baffled one or two of our universities in translation...

...It is a mass production school system, as is ours...