Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/144

Rh Such a development may well be respected and feared; and if we would better arm ourselves against industrial encroachments and equip ourselves for a continuance of our present encouraging commercial expansion with the most effective weapons, we would do well to take the example and lesson of Germany to heart by looking seriously and long to our own industrial schools, good though they are, and improving and developing these in the light of American conditions and of foreign experience.

In a comparatively short time Germany has become one of the great workshops of the world, and has secured a place in the front rank of manufacturing nations with but little assistance from nature and in the face of many difficulties. It is not a rich country ; its natural resources are moderate ; its position is disadvantageous for trading ; it has enjoyed peace for but thirty years ; it has never enjoyed security, and tranquillity has been purchased at the cost of an immense military burden. In all these matters it presents a striking contrast to the United States, which has had every conceivable advantage. Then its people are not particularly inventive and have not fashioned for themselves superior weapons in the shape of new mechanical appliances and revolutionizing processes, like the earlier inventions of England and the later ones of America. Nor do they possess exceptional skill in special directions like the French. Even in science, wherein their intellectual strength is greatest, they have no general advantage over England and France, for all three countries can show records of equal luster, whether in physical or biological science; and yet Germany has advanced from comparatively small beginnings so rapidly that she now does what no other country, though possessing superior advantages or fewer difficulties, can do ; she successfully challenges England in nearly all the great branches of indus- try in which England is or was the strongest. Other countries challenge in this or that or they have special lines of their own ; Germany is an all-round competitor, and the most formidable we have ; and not we only ; she competes with other countries in the products in which they are strongest — with the United States in electrical machinery and small machine tools, with France in dress materials, as she does with England in shipbuilding and large machinery. To complete the tale, I must add that while doing this and maintaining the most powerful military system in the world Germany has at the same time modernized, regulated, and improved the conditions of civil life more completely than any other country. She has done all those things in the way of sanitation, public health, street architecture, and public order that other rising industrial countries, and conspicuously the United States, have been too busy to do.

PHILIP NOLAN AND THE "LEVANT"

THE curious paper which Dr Hague has printed in the National Geographic Magazine for December closes with a reference to a story which I wrote in the year 1863 called "The Man Without a Country." That story begins with these words :

"I suppose that very few casual readers of the New York Herald of August 13 observed, in an obscure corner among the 'deaths,' the an- nouncement, ' Nolan. Died on board the United States corvette Levant, lati- tude 2° 11' S., longitude 131° W.' "

I had full right to say that very few