On our way home we included a German University town, being wishful to obtain an insight into the ways of student life, a curiosity that the courtesy of German friends enabled us to gratify.

 

The English boy plays till he is fifteen, and works thence till twenty.  In Germany it is the child that works; the young man that plays.  The German boy goes to school at seven o’clock in the summer, at eight in the winter, and at school he studies.  The result is that at sixteen he has a thorough knowledge of the classics and mathematics, knows as much history as any man compelled to belong to a political party is wise in knowing, together with a thorough grounding in modern languages.  Therefore his eight College Semesters, extending over four years, are, except for the young man aiming at a professorship, unnecessarily ample.  He is not a sportsman, which is a pity, for he should make good one.  He plays football a little, bicycles still less; plays French billiards⁴ in stuffy⁵ cafés more.  But generally speaking he, or the majority of him, lays out his time bummeling, beer drinking, and fighting.  If he be the son of a wealthy father he joins a Korps—to belong to a crack Korps costs about four hundred pounds a year.  If he be a middle-class young man, he enrols⁶ himself in a Burschenschaft, or a Landsmannschaft, which is a little cheaper.  These companies are again broken up into smaller circles, in which attempt is made to keep to nationality.  There are the Swabians, from Swabia; the Frankonians, descendants of the Franks; the Thuringians, and so forth⁷.  In practice, of course, this results as all such attempts do result—I believe half our Gordon Highlanders are Cockneys—but the

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