Germany must also "prepare the way for world-power by the faithful and unselfish labours of her missionaries in opening up the economic and political resources of her protectorates." He saw that Deutschland über alles meant to many Germans a curious dislocation of values. An agreeable young privat-docent, who visited him later in England, showed something of the same spirit when, coming with a Manchester party on an historical excursion to Lincoln, he saw nothing to admire in the majestic city on a hill nor in the wonderful cathedral. Far finer sites and much better Gothic art were, he solemnly assured us, to be seen in Saxony and the Mark of Brandenburg. Very few of his few German friends had Hovell's keen sense of humour.
Hovell's stay in Germany was broken by a visit to England at Easter 1913, when he attended the International Historical Congress in London, where he introduced me to Lamprecht. I was much impressed with the fluency and accuracy which Hovell's German speech had now attained, as well as with the cordiality of his relations to his large German acquaintance. He returned to Leipzig for the summer semester, and was back in England for good by August.
The novel Leipzig experiences had thrown the Chartists into the shade, the more so as Hovell found the University Library capriciously supplied with English books, and catalogued in somewhat haphazard fashion. But he profited by the opportunity of a careful study of the important works which notable German scholars had recently devoted to the neglected history of modern British social development. He found some of these monographs were "too much after the German style, rather compendia than analytical treatises, but useful for facts, references, and bibliographies." Others of the "more philosophic sort" gave him "good ideas," and he regarded Adolf Held's Zwei Bücher über die sociale Geschichte Englands "specially good." Steffen's Geschichte der englischen Lohnarbeiter, the translation of a Swedish book by a professor at Göteborg, and M. Beer's Geschichte des Socialismus in England were also extremely useful. But he was soon on his guard
