Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/39

Rh past three generations. Maps are the essential apparatus of Kultur, and every educated German is a geographer in a sense that is true of very few Englishmen or Americans. He has been taught to see in maps not merely the conventional boundaries established by scraps of paper, but permanent physical opportunities—'ways and means' in the literal sense of the words. His Real-Politik lives in his mind upon a mental map. The serious teaching of geography in German High Schools and Universities dates from the very beginning of Kultur. It was organised in the generation after Jena, mainly by the labours of four men—Alexander von Humboldt, Berghaus, Carl Ritter, and Stieler—who were attached to the new University of Berlin and to the since famous map-house of Perthes of Gotha. To this day, notwithstanding all that has been done by two or three exceptional map-houses in this country, if you want a good map, conveying accurately and yet graphically the fundamental contrasts, you must have resort as often as not to one of German origin. The reason is that in Germany there are many cartographers who are scholarly geographers and not merely surveyors or draftsmen. They can exist, because there is a wide public educated to