Appendix F

German Journals

The daily journals of Hamburg, Frankfort, Baden, Munich, and Augsburg
are all constructed on the same general plan. I speak of these because
I am more familiar with them than with any other German papers. They
contain no "editorials" whatever; no "personals"--and this is rather
a merit than a demerit, perhaps; no funny-paragraph column; no
police-court reports; no reports of proceedings of higher courts;
no information about prize-fights or other dog-fights, horse-races,
walking-machines, yachting-contents, rifle-matches, or other sporting
matters of any sort; no reports of banquet speeches; no department of
curious odds and ends of floating fact and gossip; no "rumors" about
anything or anybody; no prognostications or prophecies about anything or
anybody; no lists of patents granted or sought, or any reference to
such things; no abuse of public officials, big or little, or complaints
against them, or praises of them; no religious columns Saturdays, no
rehash of cold sermons Mondays; no "weather indications"; no "local
item" unveiling of what is happening in town--nothing of a local nature,
indeed, is mentioned, beyond the movements of some prince, or the
proposed meeting of some deliberative body.

After so formidable a list of what one can't find in a German daily,
the question may well be asked, What CAN be found in it? It is easily
answered: A child's handful of telegrams, mainly about European national
and international political movements; letter-correspondence about the
same things; market reports. There you have it. That is what a German
daily is made of. A German daily is the slowest and saddest and
dreariest of the inventions of man. Our own dailies infuriate the
reader, pretty often; the German daily only stupefies him. Once a
week the German daily of the highest class lightens up its heavy
columns--that is, it thinks it lightens them up--with a profound, an
abysmal, book criticism; a criticism which carries you down, down, down
into the scientific bowels of the subject--for the German critic is
nothing if not scientific--and when you come up at last and scent the
fresh air and see the bonny daylight once more, you resolve without a
dissenting voice that a book criticism is a mistaken way to lighten up
a German daily. Sometimes, in place of the criticism, the first-class
daily gives you what it thinks is a gay and chipper essay--about ancient
Grecian funeral customs, or the ancient Egyptian method of tarring a
mummy, or the reasons for believing that some of the peoples who existed
before the flood did not approve of cats. These are not unpleasant
subjects; they are not uninteresting subjects; they are even exciting