The postman had tears in his eyes. "Ah," he exclaimed, "it does me good to hear you say that. I love the French. You are so awfully nice to every one. You don't despise the common people."

Yes, they have changed greatly since our coming. The dogma of French decadence, with which they had been sedulously indoctrinated, no longer finds credence. They join with us in making fun of it. It is amusing to see these humble folk, who have always been treated with disdain by their superiors, whether civil or military, accept us as intimate friends. They feel flattered when they can talk to us on a footing of democratic equality, for they do not fail to recognize our superiority, and they are greatly touched that we never abuse it. They feel that we are sincere in our hatred of the pride

of caste. They applaud our republican speeches. In return, they confide to us their grievances and their despair. The poor devils are absolutely unanimous in detesting the horrible butchery of this great war.

It is unquestionable that the terrible. burden of the war, the most terrible burden of death, weariness, and misery that has ever weighed humanity down, presses more heavily upon their shoulders than upon ours. Alternately victors and vanquished, upon the Eastern front there continually occurs some new gigantic action, like that of the Marne. And why? In defense? "Ah," they say to us, "if you only knew how little we care whether we are French or Prussian! Give us peace! give us peace!"

They no longer believe that the war is a war of defense. They have heard their non-commissioned officers, men of the

middle class, cursing Austria for having led them into this hateful business. The idea has become current in the villages where the troops are quartered. Exasperated by their sufferings, the soldiers are murmuring. Many would like to desert. They understand perfectly that they are the victims of a caste of nobles and manufacturers mad with pride. They still obey, but they grumble. A German grumbler is a new phenomenon. A fat Unterofficier spoke as follows:

"I honestly prefer the French to the Prussians. The French are good fellows. They feel compassion; they share their bread with us. But the Prussians! It 's kicks we get from them. A pack of swelled heads who imagine they can do anything they like, who want everything for themselves, who bamboozle their own people, and refuse to give them any rights. There is but one thing we want-to live at peace with the world. Instead of that they make us go and kill. Why? Does any one know why? What do we gain by it? The villages are full of widows and disabled men. It is even worse in the towns, where lots of working-class families are positively starving. You fellows are lucky. France is rich. France can send parcels to her prisoners. All that we can do is to draw our belts tighter. They lead us to the slaughter while they leave our wives and children to suffer. And how it drags! Peace! Let's have done with it! Peace at any price!"

For the last six months I have not heard a single German soldier use any other language than this. Wounded returning to the front, men of the Landwehr or the Landsturm on their way to the fightingline, they are unanimous. If only the tenth part of their private grumblings were to be translated into action there would be revolution throughout the country.

I have noticed a thousand times that these Teuton soldiers who, through dread of their leaders, are not yet traitors in fact, are nevertheless traitors in soul.

ment alone we filled six haversacks with cigars, which we sent to the front to the 30th of the line, the regiment of poor Robequain, of whose death I learned on reaching Bellegarde.

Do not imagine that this explosion of generosity was inspired by mere pity for the wreckage of war. I am absolutely confident that it was inspired by love for France. Burghers and peasants, children and old men, in German Switzerland just as much as in French, all sang the "Marseillaise." They waved the tricolor. They cried, "Vive la France!" At the stops they talked to us frankly, like brothers. They handed us addresses, which were hymns to "The Nation of Valmy and of the Marne," to "The Champions of the Rights of Man," to "The Citizen Army which has Sworn to Conquer or Die for the Advent of a Free Europe."

I cannot describe the mad jubilation which surged through our veins. France, France the beloved, France of our blood and our heart, France the eternal, resuscitated by the German aggression, once more become the champion of freedom! France hailed by the neutrals, and by all men who respect the right; I was drunk with happiness. This single night was a compensation for you, noble fellows muti

lated in the war; for you, my brother, with broken ear-drums and split skull; and for you, my friends, all my dear dead friends, who sleep in Lorraine, in Belgium, in Flanders, and on the Marne.

T was at the end of February, 1892, when I was twenty-eight years old,I was at that time assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Freiburg, in southern Germany,-that a most unexpected letter from America came in my morning mail. I knew the handwriting on the envelop. It was a letter from William James, the famous Harvard psychologist. We had met three years before at the first international psychological congress in Paris, and since that time we had remained in superficial contact. He had sent me his monumental psychological volumes, and as my modest share I had given him the thinner booklets of my first contributions to experimental psychology. We had also exchanged many a written word. I do not want to say letters, as William James's favorites were the postal cards; he was probably America's greatest artist in postal-card literature in the good old times when no pictures were needed to make postal cards picturesque. Yet I had always had a bad conscience in that exchange. I knew that he read my German with the greatest ease, but his scintillating English was too subtle for me. I preferred the standard sentences in the elementary grammar. In my school-days only Greek, Latin, and French were prescribed; there had not been time for English. During my university years in Leipsic and Heidelberg I had taken some private lessons, which gave me a certain groundwork in English, enough to read a very easy text. Surely I saw a hard task before me that winter morning when the long letter from James arrived. I opened it and reached for the dictionary. I expected a dissertation on muscle sensa

tions, about which we had disputed before; but, lo! it was an invitation to settle in America!

It was a time when experimental psychology had successfully started its march. over the globe. The first psychological laboratory was founded in Leipsic by Wundt in 1879, and Wundt's pupils carried the work far and wide. In the middle of the eighties two of the most brilliant disciples of Wundt, G. Stanley Hall and J. McKeen Cattell, had carried the message across the ocean, and in a few years many other young Americans followed. At the beginning of the nineties it seemed a matter of course for every large American university to have a workshop for psychological investigations. And now James wrote:

The situation is this: we are the best university in America, and we must lead in psychology. I at the age of fifty, disliking laboratory work naturally and accustomed to teach philosophy at large, although I could tant bien que mal make the laboratory run, yet am certainly not the kind of stuff to make a first-rate director thereof. We could get younger men here who would be safe enough, but we need something more than a safe man: we need . . .

The surprise of the invitation was complete, as up to that morning America had not entered into my life as a reality. I was brought up in a home which surely was hospitable to an international spirit. I spent my childhood and youth in beautiful Dantzic, "the Venice of the North," where the Vistula flows into the Baltic Sea. My father's business was to buy for

terest in my first papers, and as a result English and American students began to flock to my Freiburg lecture-room and laboratory, and not a few of them became. welcome guests in our new home on the bank of the Dreisam. One of the most brilliant American pilgrims, Edmund Burke Delabarre-he is to-day a wellknown professor in Brown Universitywas even the first student who ever prepared his doctor thesis in my little laboratory. He and I took many a walk together to the lovely mountains of the Black Forest, which frame the old university town. Then I got my first glimpses of American college life. When he had passed his doctor examination I was the guest of honor at a regular Doktorkneipe that he gave in German fashion to his friends. But as these friends were mostly Americans with strong temperance ideas, they sang the German student songs to a lemonade that we all were sucking through straws. Of course my reading, too, had left the Cooper level, and I remember well the delight with which, at the border of Lake Geneva, I read several volumes of Emerson in a German translation, and later in Leipsic much of Poe in German for pleasure and Washington Irving in English for grammar.

The one, however, who brought me. nearest to America was the historian Holst. When I went to Freiburg as the youngest instructor, Holst was the famous rector of the university. The torrent of his oratory was marvelous. As a scholar he lived a double life. On the platform of the classroom he spoke of European history, but his fame was based on the six volumes of his American history. He had been many years in America before he returned to the German university. In the lecture-room his real life-work was silenced; who would care to study American history? But in the drawing-room he did not talk of anything else: America and America again. As his rhetoric made it impossible for any other guest to open his mouth when he was thundering, we sometimes had to listen to American stories through whole dinner parties. I do re

member that at my first Freiburg party he reached his climax when he told the fascinated company that he had been in a hotel in New York where his room had a private bath-room in which he could have a hot bath at any hour of the night. The lady next to me relieved the dramatic tension by whispering, "I do not believe it." Well, no one believed much of what he heard concerning America. Whatever the newspapers brought out about it sounded so sensational and exaggerated that it was probably untrue, and when papers published quiet and modest news from across the sea it was believed still less because it sounded so un-American. Of course every German knew what an American duel is-a duel in which lots are drawn, and he who draws the black lot must commit suicide. Moreover, at that time every one liked to have at home an American stove, which was probably just as prevalent in America as the American duel. Besides that, the lower classes knew that it is easy for the emigrant to make money there, and the upper classes knew that it is a land where no other interest but the hunt for the dollar is known and where humbug and corruption flourish.

Was I to settle in this America? This was the question to decide on that dreary. February morning. Certainly I should not have given even a moment's thought to this astonishing invitation if it had been a question of my going for a lifetime. William James knew that. What he proposed was that I come at first for a period of three years, and these three years might be covered by a leave of absence from my home university. James, to be sure, wrote, "Of course we hope for permanence." But that was not a possibility to which I gave the slightest thought or which figured in our family discussions. On the other hand, to take a leave of absence for six semesters and to use it for a kind of scientific expedition to the New World, with a chance to build up a model laboratory in a distant land, that sounded interesting and almost romantic. My wife and I were young and wanted to see