To live in a fashionable hotel, in a land whose people you wish to study, is as valueless an experience as to go to a zoölogical garden to learn to track a mountain sheep or to ride down a wild boar. You must go about among the people themselves, to their restaurants, to their houses, if they are good enough to ask you, and to the resorts of all kinds that they frequent.
The manners are better than in my student days, but there is still a deal of improvised eating and drinking. There is much tucking of napkins under chins that the person may be shielded from misdirected food-offerings. There is not a little use of the knife where the fork or spoon is called for; but this last I always look upon as a remnant of courage, of the virility remaining in the race from a not distant time when the knife served to clear the forest, to build the hut, to kill the deer, and to defend the family from the wolf; and the traditions of such a weapon still give it predominance over the more epicene fork, as a link with a stirring past. Mere daintiness in feeding is characteristic of the lapdog and other over-protected animals. Unthinking courage in the matter of victuals is rather a relief from the strained and anxious hygienic watchfulness of the overcivilized and the overrich. The body should be, and is, regarded by wholesome-minded people, not as an idol, but as an instrument. The German no doubt sees something ignominious in counting as one chews a chop, in the careful measuring of one's liquids, in the restricting of oneself to the diet of the squirrel and the cow. He would perhaps prefer to lose a year or two of life rather than to nut and spinach himself to longevity. The wholesome body ought of course to be unerring and automatic in its choice of the quantity and quality of its fuel.
A well-dressed man in Berlin is almost as conspicuous as a dancing bear. This comparison may lead the stranger to infer, in spite of what has been said of the orderliness of Berlin, that dancing bears are permitted in the streets. It is only fair to Berlin's admirable police president, von Jagow, to say that they are not.
If one leaves the officers, who are a fine, upstanding, well-groomed lot, out of the account, the inhabitants of Berlin are almost grotesque in their dowdiness. This is the more remarkable for the reason that the citizens of Berlin, wherever you see them, not only in the West-end, but in the tenement districts, in the public markets, going to or coming from the suburban trains, in the trains and underground railway, in the cheaper restaurants and pleasure resorts, taking their Sunday outing, or in the fourth-class carriages of the railway trains, or their children in the schools, show a high level of comfort in their clothing. There is poverty and wretchedness in Berlin, of which later, but in no great city even in America, does the mass of the people give such an air of being comfortably clothed and fed.