Friedrich Kapp has written a book about the relations of Frederick the Great to the United States that will make him few friends either here or even in Germany. Just as Traugott Bromme in his day converted ten-thousand German emigrants to Democrats by a few sentences which he wrote in his Handbook For Emigrants on the topic of political parties, so the mischievous judgments of Kapp on America will for years to come go from hand to hand like coined money, in the educated circles of Germany, producing an attitude of disgust, or even of spitefulness. One will look down contemptuously on America, from whom, in spite of all that Kapp says, Germany still has to learn extraordinarily much that it would find useful, and very few only will bother to examine whether Kapp's judgment is based on an unprejudiced valuation of facts, or if it is colored by his subjective ill humor.

What Kapp says about the low intellectual quality of most of the American politicians is not altogether, but largely, true. However, he also finds in other than the political spheres of American life much that is "great, noble, and encouraging." Very well, then - why does he close his eyes to the observation that in America, differently from Germany, the relation of the individual to the state forms only an insignificant part of his being, 2and that it is therefore an immense injustice to compare public life here and over there. If one man wears a long overcoat that with a thousand folds envelops his whole figure, and the other prefers a short jacket - then it would be an absurdity to pity the jacket-wearer for his miserably misfitted overcoat. The German conception of the state is comparable to the heavy many-folded overcoat - the American state to a comfortable lumber-jacket hampering no movement.