tranquillity, and wholly subversive of the principles that should control every well-regulated human life, to be compelled to lose half an hour from one's meditations on the Corpus inscriptionum Romanarum in an attempt to ascertain from a miserable telegram whether a colliery explosion in Wales occurred at Llwydcoed or at Llwidcoed.

But in no department of journalistic enterprise is Germany more deficient than in her Art journals. When St. Paul's Cathedral requires new windows of stained glass they must be brought from Munich; when Englishmen of culture weary of looking at the wretched, tawdry collections of the National Gallery, they flee to Dresden and Munich; yet when Germans would read of what themselves have accomplished they are obliged to subscribe for a London journal. Germany affords the most striking demonstration of the truthfulness of the old complaint, that artists do not read. Of agricultural papers Leipsic publishes over half a dozen,—in fine, there is no known country in which agriculture is at the same time better taught and illustrated and more wretchedly practiced than in Germany, especially in South Germany.

Single newspapers in Germany never attain the colossal circulations sometimes found in France and England. This fact is entirely in accordance with the centrifugal tendencies of the character of the nation. There prevail in Germany as many theories of governmental and ecclesiastical polity-all of them of the most indubitable practicability and impregnable orthodoxy-as there are separate and particular persons, viz., some fifty or sixty millions. Now every thoughtful reader must see at once that it would be very difficult-I think I might say extremely difficult-for one paper to espouse one-half of these theories, or even a tenth portion of them. It

should also be here premised that every German citizen desires the welfare of the land of his nativity more than he desires his customary nutriment; and, further, that he is profoundly persuaded and convinced that that welfare can be permanently established and maintained only by bringing to bear upon the science of legislation a body of preordained, immutable, and primordial principles, axioms, and corollaries which no previous legislator or collection of legislators of any century or country has hitherto either discovered or applied. For want of an understanding of those principles the fatherland is traveling hourly to canine habitations. To avert a catastrophe so deplorable and so fraught with direful consequences, he patriotically establishes a journal in which to propound, elucidate, and demonstrate those principles. He also reads it. Whether any other of his countrymen engage with him in that patriotic and interesting avocation is a matter of secondary consequence, for he now peruses healthful sentiments, and feels secure.

Thus, while the United Kingdom of Great Britain supports only ninety daily newspapers, Prussia publishes one hundred and forty-three, and Austria seventy-two, most of them in the German provinces. While I do not for a moment overlook the importance of the circumstance that the journals of Great Britain have only one government to assault or champion, while those of Germany have a matter of thirty or thereabout upon which to employ their attention, I likewise cannot forget that in Prussia it is perilous to subscribe for more than one political journal, while in England (as also in America) it is perilous to subscribe for only one. As soon as a thriving burgher in the little village of Eichhornstadt becomes so ambitious as to presume to peruse a journal in addition to the government organ, it will go hard but the

police will presently find it necessary to confiscate his wild-cherry book-case, together with its contents; but if the American farmer peruses only one partisan newspaper it may be a great many months after the occurrence before he learns that his party has violated the Constitution. I am fully persuaded, therefore, that it is the great multiplicity of governments alone that has been able to impart vitality to so large a number of daily journals, when they were laboring under the depressing restrictions above narrated; and in view of this fact the cruelty of Count Bismarck in merging together a number of those governments will appear in its most aggravated and heinous character.

Another notable phenomenon is found in the fact that Protestant and intelligent North Germany does not publish proportionately as many papers as South Germany and Austria. Berlin, with a population of 620,000, requires only 142,200 copies of daily newspapers; while Vienna, with a population of only 530,000, requires 142,700 copies. In other words, Berlin has a daily to every 4.39 inhabitants; Vienna, one to every 3'73. Dresden, with a population of 200,000, requires 25,800 copies; Munich, population 167,000, daily papers 77,600.

Certainly this marked disparity cannot establish a superior intelligence for the South, for every other known fact demonstrates the contrary. The true explanation is that the South publishes a greater proportionate number of small penny papers (Kreutzerblätter)-very minute and trivial affairs, largely filled with advertisements, and of so low a price that thrifty merchants subscribe for several of them. They contain very little political or valuable information of any description, but chiefly "wise saws and modern instances," "old wives' fables," neighborhood genealogies, chronicles of two-headed calves, and

such like matters as are level with the intellectual abilities of the credulous, tattling populations of the Catholic South. The South German or the Austrian laborer awaits nearly as anxiously as the French or the American, and more anxiously than the English or the Prussian, his daily portion of small news, though he employs great economy in its purchase. You will find in his house a trifling newspaper and a well-thumbed prayer-book oftener than in that of the Prussian, but less frequently a copy of Schiller.

17

SOME GERMAN CHARACTERISTICS.

Dey set dem down und argued it,
Like Deutschers vree from fear,
Dill dey schmoke ten pfounds of Knaster
Und drinked drei fass of bier.

Der Breitmann go py Schopenhauer,
Boot Veit he had him denn,
For he dook him on de angles

Of de moral oxygen.

HANS BREITMANN.

O

NE of Kaulbach's colossal frescos, ornamenting the new picture-gallery of Munich, allegorizes the triumph of true art over false. Under the conduct of Minerva, the artists and scholars, some on the friendly back of Pegasus, some on the ground, are making a terrific row with a many-headed monstrosity called the Zopf. Thwacked and thumped on all sides with all manner of weapons, brushes, mahl-sticks, dictionaries, chisels, this modern Cerberus struggles to escape in every direction, but cannot, on account of the number of his heads. With frantic rage depicted in one of his hideous faces, the blustering and gasconading audacity of an Homeric hero in another, and the whimpering, sneaking grimaces of a whipped Thersites in another, this grotesque manbeast-worthy the creative genius of Spenser-writhes and writhes, but cannot escape.

Such a many-headed nondescript has Germany always been among the nations. Every one of the sixty-odd millions who speak the great language of Luther-he is