350 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a disadvantage, in a country where public opinion calls drinking a vice 

 and where total abstinence is possible. He learns to shrug his shoul- 

 ders in order to express the slightest doubt or innuendo, and he may 

 easily learn to eat with his knife and make a noise at his soup. He 

 will get methods of thought and points of view in themselves lofty, 

 catholic, and public-spirited, which will, nevertheless, in his own 

 country, as things are, retard rather than advance his career. The 

 relations of school-boys, and even of men, with each other are so dif- 

 ferent from the intercourse of American students, that a boy may for- 

 get how to live comfortably with his fellows on his return. Again, a 

 boy, well brought up and conscientious, when placed with liberal 

 allowances of money in a German city, far from the restraints of home 

 and associates, may get into ways that are unmistakably vicious 

 and immoral. This is a danger that many parents discern when 

 it is too late. The young man's position is perilous, especially when 

 he is merely in the hands of private tutors, and lives in a pension 

 or an hotel. I have myself known several boys who in two or three 

 years in Leipsic and Berlin went from bad to worse — boys who at home 

 in school or college would never have lost their footing. In German 

 cities there is also a certain all-pervading tone of cynicism as regards 

 religion, taken in the stricter sense. It is not fashionable, as with 

 us, for the more intellectual people to go to church. Prussia is a 

 Protestant nation ; even Bismarck may be " evangelical " when occa- 

 sion requires, and churches and preachers are not lacking. But the 

 people whom the school-boy meets are usually agnostics or liberals — 

 those who admire Luther as a man detest the raving atheism of the 

 social-democrats, and are quite respectable. These are influences 

 which few parents wish their boys to meet before they are matured. 



Now, what is gained to offset these drawbacks and dangers ? We 

 will assume that the pupil could attend a good school at home, and that 

 the expenditure of foreign travel and tuition would support him at such 

 a school : the only real gain is a knowledge of German. He will cer- 

 tainly learn German. But on this point bears one fact which few 

 appreciate. In his residence of from one to five years in Germany, 

 speaking, reading, and writing little but German, the boy suffers a 

 great loss in his English. This is the period when at home he is en- 

 riching his vocabulary and forming his style by English composition 

 and the reading of English books. I would not undervalue the power 

 one wields who has at command a great modern language, esjDCcially a 

 langijage like the German, whose intrinsic beauty and force, and the 

 wealth of whose literature, may go far to form the culture of any 

 man. But, in making up a balance for the boy whose parents wish to 

 have him trained abroad, this sacrifice of the mother-tongue must not 

 be ignored. 



These are some of the conditions suggested by the first class of 

 students abroad. What is to be said as regards university students. 



