Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/364

350 a disadvantage, in a country where public opinion calls drinking a vice and where total abstinence is possible. He learns to shrug his shoulders 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 different from the intercourse of American students, that a boy may forget 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 occasion 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 certainly 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 enriching 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, especially a language 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.