WHAT'S IN A NAME

Those gentlemen who find it amusing or profitable to judge each race by an absolute standard, and call one people art-loving, another frivolous, a third conservative--and such persons include most authors, from newspaper correspondents to popular biographers--have had rather a hard task in re-cutting and pasting together post-war Germany to make it fit into its pigeon-hole. In the war years, and previous to them, it was easy to list the Germans as militaristic, servile to rank and title, and later bloodthirsty committers of atrocities. But the last decade has found, in spite of the gloomy presages at Versailles, a peaceful, democratic, and very harmless people in the land between the Rhine and the Oder.

But the old classification was right in some respects: witness the time-honored belief in German thoroughness. The continued existence of this trait is seen in a report from Berlin on the thorny path laid out for the diplomats-to-be of the young republic. The German university curriculum is a strenuous enough struggle; but after that, three years of theoretical political studies face the apprentice statesman. Add to this requirement the necessity of completely mastering a minimum of three languages, and of acquiring the sports and social graces of foreign countries; and one sees the same perserverance that has actuated scholars in other fields, like Lippman, whose Entstehung der Alchemie still lulls Harvard's chemists to sleep in the Reading Room.

Likewise, the Teutonic love of music has endured the war, and persists in innumberable festivals, and still more noticeably in the breast of one of the fallen mighty. Prince Joachim Albrecht, composer and orchestra conductor, has followed Count Keyserling and Herr Ludwig across the sea, and has stirred up rather more of a storm than his predecessors. Unless his much-discussed concert materializes. America will miss a first-hand view of royalty, and the coiners of clever generalities on racial characteristics will lose a perfectly good example.