“When I was at school at Cassel,” said William, “the Great Elector, for instance, was to me only a nebulous personage. As for the Seven Years’ War, it lay outside my region of study altogether, and for me history ended with the French Revolution at the close of the last century. The Liberation Wars, all-important as they are for the young German, were not even mentioned, and it was only, thank God! by means of supplementary and most valuable lectures from my private tutor, Dr. Hinzpeter, whom I rejoice now to see before me, that I got to know anything at all about modern history. How is it that so many of our young Germans are seduced from the path of political virtue? How is it that we have so many muddleheaded would-be world-improvers amongst us?
“How is it that we all the time hear so much nagging at our own government and so much praise of every other government under the sun? The answer is very easy. It is due to the simple ignorance of all these professional reformers and renovators as to the genesis of modern Germany. They were not taught, the boys of to-day are not taught, to comprehend at all the transition period between the French Revolution and our own time, by the light of which alone can our present questions be understood!”
“Not only would the _gymnasia_ have to mend their methods,” he continued, both as to matter taught and the method of teaching it, but they must also reduce the time burden under which they now crush their pupils. It was cruel and inhuman to compel boys to work so hard at their books that they had no leisure for healthful recreation, and the necessary physical training and development of the body. If he himself, while at Cassel, had not had special opportunities for riding to and fro, and looking about him a little, he would never have got to know at all what the outside world was like. It was this barbarous one-sided and eternal cramming which had already made the nation suffer from a plethora of learned and so-called educated people, the number of whom was now more than the people themselves could bear, or the Empire either. So true it was what Bismarck had once said about all this “proletariat of pass-men”--this army of what were called hunger candidates, and of journalists who were also for the most part unsuccessful graduates of the _gymnasia_, was here on their hands, forming a class truly dangerous to society!