The Days of a Man 1913 



De Neuf- Nuremberg. 1 After the war broke out, De Neufville 



mile signed the manifesto of the German evangelical 



clergy, who accepted for a time the official assertion 



of "the war forced upon us." A year later a mutual 



friend sent me a postcard bearing one sentence only: 



" De Neufville says to you, 'I am disgusted with the 



chicane and brutality of the German -Government." 



Forceful Of the several ladies present at the Schwann one 



women se emed particularly interested in my mission. This 



was Frau Dr. Wirth, the wife (I suppose) of the new 



prime minister. Here also, if I remember correctly, 



I met an extremely prepossessing woman introduced 



as a granddaughter of Alexander von Humboldt. 



Among other prominent guests of the evening was 

 Dr. Otto zur Strassen, the physiologist of Leipzig, 

 whom I had met at the International Congress of 

 Zoology in Boston in 1907, when he seemed one of 

 the most charming and " gemutlich" of German pro- 

 fessors. He had now become director of the Sencken- 

 berg Museum in Frankfort and professor-elect in 

 the new municipal university which was opened the 

 Social following year. When the war broke out he first 

 Sw7r~ served as captain in the German army in Poland, but 

 action was later transferred to Belgium, where to the sur- 

 prise of his American friends he proved to be an 

 uncompromising apostle of "Social Darwinism," a 

 scientific heresy which teaches it to be the ordained 

 duty of strong nations to subjugate or extirpate small, 

 weak, or peaceful peoples. 



While in Frankfort I visited the old Rothschild 

 mansion in the Jiidengasse, a picturesque, high-gabled 

 edifice sumptuous in its day and overlooking like its 

 neighbors a narrow yet well-kept street. It remains 



iSee Chapter XLIV, page 522. 



HS38 3 



