Note 147 — LETTER XL.

Nothing can be a more astonishing proof of the difficulty of comparing the moral and intellectual character of two countries than this remark. Every Englishman accustomed to the cultivated society of his own country, must be struck by the extraordinary inferiority of German female education, in proportion to the high superiority of that of men. The solution is probably this:—The Author was chiefly confined to fashionable society here, and mixed little with the more instructed classes. In Germany, it is precisely the women of the middling classes who are so lamentably deficient in education,—a defect, of course, there as every where attributable to those who govern their destiny, and who profess sentiments even more unworthy than those here attributed to Englishmen. The motive ascribed to the latter is surely more strong and more noble than the desire of possessing a thorough cook or a contented drudge.—Trans.