And So It Was That King Verboten Lived Happily Ever After And In The Fullness Of Time Died Peacefully In His Bed, Surrounded By His Wives, His Children And His Courtiers; And All Of Them Sorrowed Greatly And Wept, But The Royal Signpainter Sorrowed Most Of All.

I know that certain persons will contest the authenticity of this passage of history; they will claim Verboten means in our tongue Forbidden, and that Ausgang means Outgoing, and Eingang means Incoming - or, in other words, Exit and Entrance; but surely this could not be so.

If so many things were forbidden, a man in Germany would be privileged only to die - and probably not that, unless he died according to a given formula; and certainly no human being with the possible exception of the comedian who used to work the revolving-door trick in Hanlon's Fantasma, could go out of and come into a place so often without getting dizzy in the head. No - the legend stands as stated.

Even as it is, there are rules enough in Germany, rules to regulate all things and all persons. At first, to the stranger, this seems an irksome arrangement - this posting of rules and orders and directions and warnings everywhere - but he finds that everyone, be he high or low, must obey or go to jail; there are no exceptions and no evasions; so that what is a duty on all is a burden on none.

Take the trains, for example. Pretty much all over the Continent the railroads are state-owned and state-run, but only in Germany are they properly run.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 86 of 341
Words from 23132 to 23400 of 93169