Germany and the Germans

IX German Problems

A great nation like Germany must have characteristics, anxieties, problems, and responsibilities, some of which are peculiar to itself. The individual must be of small importance who has not problems and burdens of his own arising from his environment, position, work, and his personal relations with other men; as well as problems of temper, temperament, health, education, and traditions peculiar to himself.

Wise men recognize two things about every other man: that he has his own problems, and that no one else thoroughly understands either another man’s handicaps or his advantages; and that the only way to judge him is not to go behind the returns, but to note how he lives with these same problems. They are there, there is no doubt about that; the question is, does he smile or scowl? does he work away toward a solution, or allow himself to be swamped by them? do they dominate him, or he them? has he that sun of life, vitality, sufficient to burn away the fog, or does he live and die in a moist, semi-impenetrable fog, in which he flounders timidly and rather aimlessly about, always rather discouraged, rather in the dark, and lamentably damp in person and in spirits? The only fair test of a man’s life is his living of it, and the same is true of a nation.

Of Germany’s history, traditions, and temperament I have written. No one can fail to note the chief characteristics: their gregariousness, their melancholic and subjective way of looking at life, their passion for music. It is more what they think, than what they do or see, that gives them pleasure. They agree with Erasmus, that “it is a foolish error to believe that happiness is dependent upon things; it is dependent entirely upon one’s opinion of them.” The indefinite has no terrors for them, they delight indeed in the indefinable. They have done little in great sculpture and architecture, or the founding and ruling of colonies, as compared with their supreme achievements in music, in philosophy, in lyric poetry.

The art of music, which moves one greatly toward nothing in particular; which supplies sounds but not a language for the mysteries of feeling; which easily carries a sensitive soul away from its sorrows or drowns it in tears, and all without offering a semblance of a practical solution; which orchestrates a greater fury, a more poignant jealousy, a sweeter note of bird, a harsher clang of weapons, than any human energy can even imagine to exist; this art with which marching soldiers sing away their fatigue, but not really; with which disconsolate lovers wing their hopes, but not really; with which the pious pipe themselves to heaven, but not really; with which, by strings and beaten skins, organ-pipes and blowing brass, an anaesthesia of ecstasy is produced, leaving one only the weaker against the dourness and doggedness of the devil; with which men and women hymn themselves home to God, only to lose Him when they leave the threshold of His house; which choruses from a thousand throats patriotism, defiance, self-confidence, but arms none of them with any useful weapon; which with drums and brass can send any lout to heroism without his knowing why; this art which burns up the manhood of its devotees - who ever heard of a great tenor who was a great man, or even of a great musician for more than half of whose life one must needs not apologize? - this art flourishes in Germany not without reason, and not for nothing.

In a ragged school in the neighborhood of Posen where the children could hardly speak German they could sing; in a public school in Charlottenburg fifty boys, aged between eight and fifteen, sang the part-song known to every college man in America, “On a Bank Two Roses Grew,” as well as a college glee club; those who know Bayreuth, or have attended a musical festival, or listened to one of the great clubs of male voices, or heard the orchestras and military bands, will not deny the delights of music in Germany. In Berlin there is not a hall suitable for a musical recital that is not engaged a year, sometimes more, in advance.

In the beautiful Golden Hall of the castle of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, at Schwerin, I have attended a concert given by the Grand Duke’s own orchestra, where the selections were all compositions of former leaders or members of the orchestra, dating back over a period of two hundred years. For centuries in this particular grand duchy music and the theatre, supported and guided by the sovereign, have offered a school of entertainment and instruction to the people. At this present writing, special trains are run to Schwerin from the surrounding country districts, and the people for miles around subscribe for their seats for the whole winter, and attend the theatre and certain concerts as regularly as children go to school. It sounds oddly to the ears of an American to hear criticism to the effect, that there are more high-class music and more classical plays than the people have either time or money for. Here is a population which is actually overindulging in culture. We complain of too little; here they complain of too much. It makes one wonder whether any of the problems of social life are satisfactorily soluble; whether indeed it be not true that even the virtues carried to an extreme do not become vices. Philanthropy in more than one city in America is spending time, money, and energy to bring about this very enthusiasm for music and the more intellectual arts which, it is maintained, here in Schwerin at least, has gone too far.

These problems are not so easy of solution as the ignorant and the inexperienced think. Imagine the inhabitants of Hoboken, New Jersey; of Lynn, Massachusetts; of Kalamazoo, Michigan; of Bloody Gulch, Idaho, spending too much time and money listening to the music of Palestrina and Bach, or to the plays of Shakespeare; and yet what money and energy would not be spent by certain enthusiasts for the arts did they think such a result possible! And, after all, it might prove not a blessing, but a danger.

Whenever or wherever you are in the company of Germans you notice their pleasure and their keen interest in the subjective, rather than in the objective side of life. It is from within out that they are stirred, not as we are, by outside things working upon us. They are still the dreaming, drinking, singing, impulsive Germans of Tacitus. Titus Livius, Plutarch, and Machiavelli, all maintained that the successive invasions of the Germans into Italy were for the sake of the wine to be found there. Plutarch writes that “the Gauls were introduced to the Italian wine by a Tuscan named Arron, and so excited were they by the desire for more that, taking their wives and children with them, they journeyed across the Alps to conquer the land of such good vintages, looking upon other countries as sterile and savage by comparison. Even if this be not history, it is an impression; and at any rate, from that day to this the Germans have agreed with the dictum of Aulus Gellius: “Prandium autem abstemium, in quo nihil vini potatur, canium dicitur: quoniam canis vino caret.” When the Roman historian first came into contact with them he notes, that their bread was lighter than other bread, because “they use the foam from their beer as yeast.”

Tacitus writes of them: “The Germans abound with rude strains of verse, the reciters of which, in the language of the country, are called ‘Bards.’”

I visited a private stable in Bavaria, as well ordered and as well kept as any private stable in America or in England, and the head coachman was a reader of poetry; and though he had received numerous offers of higher wages in the city, declined them, giving as one reason that the view from the window of his room could not be equalled elsewhere! Where can one find a stable-man in our country who reads Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe, or who ever heard of William James and Pragmatism? I may be doing an injustice to the stable-men of Boston, but I doubt it.

There are scores of pages of notes to my hand, recounting similar if not such startling examples of the German temperament among high and low. Musical, melancholic, gregarious, subjective, these are their true characteristics, but the superficial among us do not see these things because they are hidden behind the great army, the new navy and mercantile marine, the factories, the increased commercial values, the strenuous agricultural and industrial pushing ahead of the last thirty years. But they are there, they represent the German temperament, they are the internal character of Germania, always to be taken into account in judging her, or in wondering why she does this or that, or why she does it in this or that way.

“As imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

This is what the purely subjective mind is ever doing, and when it is carried too far it is insanity. The individual no longer sees things as they are, but he sees others and himself in strange, horrible, or ludicrous shapes.

Barring Japan, I suppose Germany yields more easily to the temptation of the subjective malady of suicide than any other country. In Saxony, for example, the rate was lately 39.2 per 100,000 of the population, in England and Wales 7.5. During the five years ending with 1908 there were for every 100 suicides among males in the United States 136 in Germany, and for every 100 suicides of females 125 in Germany. In Vienna, and for racial purposes this is Germany, 1,558 persons killed themselves in 1912. Children committing suicide because they have failed in their examinations is not uncommon in Germany; in America and in England the teachers are more likely to succumb than the children. We do not commit suicide in America from any sense of shame at our intellectual shortcomings - what a decimating of the population there would be if we did! - it is more apt to be caused by ill health consequent upon a straining chase for dollars. In Prussia during the five years, 1902-1907, divorce increased from 17.7 to 20.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, and suicide from 20 to 30.7.

If the observer does not take this difference of temperament into account, he does not realize how new and strange it is to find Germany these days, making its first and strongest impression upon the outsider by its industrial progress. The more intelligent men in Germany are beginning to see the dangers to real progress in such feverish devotion to industry, and to recognize that the life of the population is absorbed too largely by science, finance, and commerce. To see so much of the intelligence of the nation exercising itself in material researches, to see such undue fervor in calculations of self-interest, does not leave an enlivening impression. Such an ideal of life is paltry in itself and involves grave dangers in the future. It is a long stride in the wrong direction since Hegel wrote of Germany as “the guardian of the sacred fire of intellect.”

Out of this temperament has grown the self-consciousness, the uneasy vanity, the “touchiness” which has made Germany of late years the despair of the diplomats all over the world. She has become a chameleon-like menace to peace everywhere in the world. What she wants, what will offend her dignity, when she will feel hurt, what amount of consideration will suffice, when she will change color to match a changed situation, and in what color she will choose to hide her plans or to make manifest her demands, no man knows. She will not see things as they are, but always as an exhalation from her own mind. As one of her own poets has written: “Deutschland ist Hamlet.”

At this present moment she does not see either England or America as they are, quite peaceably disposed toward her but she sees them, and persists in seeing them, as they would be were Germany in their place. She is forever looking into a mirror instead of through the open window. “The mailed fist,” “the rattling of the sabre,” “the friend in shining armor,” “querelle allemande,” are all phrases born in Germany in the last thirty years.

She even sees herself a little out of focus, and though I admit her precarious position in the heart of Europe, she exaggerates the necessity for her autocratic military government to meet the situation. That philosophical and literary radical Lord Morley, now wearing a coronet, in the land where logic is a foundling and compromise a darling, writes: “A weak government throws power to something which usurps the name of public opinion, and public opinion as expressed by the ventriloquists of the newspapers is at once more capricious and more vociferous than it ever was.” This, strange to say, is exactly the opinion of the German autocrats, who maintain that no democracy can be a strong military power. It remains for England, and perhaps later America, to prove her wrong.

The sovereign lady Germania, being of this temper and disposition, of this psychological make-up, let us look at her dealings with certain embarrassing problems in her own household. The over-stimulation of ill-regulated mental activity as the result of regimental education is one of the minor problems. Some fourteen million dollars worth of cheap and nasty literature is peddled by the agents of certain publishing houses, and sold all over Germany to those recently taught to read but not trained to think; and this, it is to be remembered, is still a land of low wages, of strict economies, and of small expenditures on books. For Germany that is an enormous sum and represents a very wide-spread evil. I recognize that it is not only in Germany, but in France, England, and America, that the ethically hysterical have assumed that modesty and health and common-sense are characteristics of the intellectually mediocre. That the neglect of all, and the breaking of some, of the Ten Commandments is essential to the creation of art or literature, or necessary to a courageous freedom of living, is a contention with which I agree less and less the more I know of art, literature, and life. But, as I have remarked elsewhere in this volume, the Strindbergs and Wildes and Gorkis are having their day in Germany just now, and beneath this again is this large distribution of the lawless and sooty literature, frankly intended as a debauch for the gutter-snipe and his consort. Even the coarse, and in no line squeamish, Rabelais wrote that, “Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme.”

There is but a puny barrier against this, for the statistical year-book of German cities gives the number of public libraries in forty-two cities as 179. Twenty-seven of these cities gave an annual support to 114 of these libraries of only $64,847! According to the figures of Herr Ernest Schultze, in 1907 the forty largest German cities, with a population of 11,380,000, had public libraries containing a sum total of 807,000 volumes. In the year 1906-1907, 5,437,000 volumes were taken out and 1,607,476 persons frequented the public reading-rooms, and in these forty-two cities $280,095 were contributed from private sources for such library purposes. In 1910 Germany had in some 400 cities, each of more than 10,000 inhabitants, about 650 public libraries and reading-rooms, with together about 3,250,000 volumes. Berlin has thirty public libraries with 231,300 volumes; the number of books taken out in 1910 was 1,655,000. Hamburg has one public library with 100,000 volumes, of which 1,364,000 were taken out. Breslau has 7 libraries and 4 reading-rooms, with 75,578 volumes. Leipzig has 7 libraries and 3 reading-rooms, with 42,100 volumes. Munich has 6 libraries and 26,671 volumes. Cologne has 7 libraries and 6 reading-rooms, with 24,898 volumes.

The smallest library is in the village community of Dudweiler, in the Rhine province, which contains 132 volumes for the 22,000 inhabitants.

There were 14,941 books published in Germany in 1880, 18,875 in 1890, 24,792 in 1900, and 31,281 in 1910.

There were 13,470 books published in America in 1910, 9,209 of them by American authors.

There were 10,914 books published in England in 1911, of which 2,384 were new editions. Of this number 2,215, which includes 933 new editions and 40 translations, were fiction; religion, 930; sociology, 725; science, 650; geography, 601; biography, 476; history, 429; technology, 525. In 1820, there were only 26 novels published in England.

Of the 31,281 books published in Germany in 1910, 4,852 dealt with education and juvenile literature; 4,134, belles-lettres; 3,215, law and political economy; 2,510, theology; 2,082, commerce and industry; 1,981, medicine; 1,884, philology and literary history; 1,480, geography, including maps; 667, military science and equestry; 1,030, agriculture and forestry; 1,750, natural science and mathematics; 1,108, engineering and construction; 1,254, history and biography; 981, art; and 668 on philosophy and theosophy.

There were some 9,000 writers of books in America in 1910, or one author in 10,000 of the population, already more than enough; there were some 8,000 in Great Britain, or one author in about 5,500 of the population; while in Germany there are over 31,000 writers, or one author in every 2,097 of the population, including men, women, and children of all ages, an unreasonable and disastrous proportion. If we estimate the number of adult males of Germany at 14,000,000, the number who voted at the last election, then there was one author to every 450, a most unhealthy proportion, and bearing out exactly what has been said of the German temperament and constitutional bias. Furthermore, this accounts for the fact that Germany imports some 700,000 agricultural laborers each year to garner the food harvests, for which she has not sufficient recruits, and who, by the way, take out of the country each year some $35,000,000 in wages. Twenty per cent. of the miners in Westphalia are foreigners, eight per cent. of them Italians, and there are nearly half a million foreigners employed as common laborers in the various industries of Germany.

Wherever one travels now in the world, he finds that most courageous and self-sacrificing of all the pioneers, the missionary: American, British, French, Italian. The best of them, on the plains of North America, in the destructive climate of India, in China, in all the islands of all the seas, are, whatever their creed, soldiers of whom we are all proud; for they fight not only against the overwhelming prejudice of those whom they seek to save, but against the widespread prejudice of their own people, and against the well-founded suspicion and contempt aroused by their own black sheep. I have found them, here a Jesuit, there a Presbyterian, winning my friendship and my admiration, despite fundamental differences of belief about many things. There are few Germans among them! Even in this field Germany produces theological controversialists whom we have all studied, orthodox and destructive, but few pioneers, and practically no Augustines or Loyolas, Wesleys or Booths, Livingstones or Stanleys. Columba, an Irish refugee, founded on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, a mission station, whence went missionaries and preachers to the conversion not only of England, but of the tribes of Germany. It was only in the sixth century that the Franks, only in the ninth century that the Saxons, and only in the tenth century that the Danes became Christians.

Neither at home nor abroad are her successes those which deal with men by winning their allegiance, their submission, their loyalty, or their respectful regard. She is pre-eminent in the things of the mind, in subjective matters, and in her regimental dealings with, and arrangements for, the inanimate side of life.

As an example on the credit side of her governing is the very complete and successful system of land-banks, introduced by Frederick the Great and since modelled somewhat upon the French methods, which have protected the farmer from usury, insured him money at low rates for improvements, for the purchase of tools, cattle, and fertilizers, and enabled him to do, by sensible co-operation, what would have been impossible for him as an individual. So successful has been this co-operation between the banks and the united farming communities that it were well worth a chapter of description were it not that, through the initiative of President Taft and the able and industrious assistance of our officials in Europe, among whom our ambassador in Paris, Mr. Herrick, may be mentioned as untiring, there will shortly appear a complete exposition and explanation of the scheme, available for those of my countrymen interested in the matter. Or if they will journey to Ireland they may see there what Sir Horace Plunkett has done to revolutionize, and against tremendous odds, agriculture. And, be it noted, it has been done, with emphatic warnings against the modern fallacy of leaning upon state aid. It is estimated that our farmers would be saved between $20,000,000 and $40,000,000 a year in interest alone were we to adopt similar methods of loaning to the land-owners. The Preussische Centralgenossenschaftskasse, or Central Bank of Co-operative Associations, has revolutionized, one may here use the word without exaggeration, agricultural methods, throughout Prussia and Germany.

In Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa there are 5,000,000 acres of land in wheat, which is practically the size of Germany’s wheat acreage, but Germany produces 140,000,000 bushels of wheat off her parcel of land; while the wheat raised on the same area in these three States is only 55,000,000 bushels.

France and Minnesota each plant 16,000,000 acres in wheat, but France produces 324,000,000 bushels and Minnesota 188,000,000 bushels. In round numbers we support 90,000,000 people on 3,000,000 square miles of land, and we could support 150 per square mile just as easily as 30, and even then there would be not even a fraction of the density of population of Denmark, 178; the Netherlands, 470; France, 189; Saxony, 830; England and Wales, 405.6. The average wheat yield of our country is about 14 bushels per acre in good years, it might just as well be 25; the average cotton yield is about four-tenths of a bale per acre, and four times that amount could be raised as easily.

In 1900, 10,500,000 people were engaged in agriculture in America, or 35.7 per cent. of the population; as over against 37.7 in 1890 and 44.3 in 1880. Of these 10,500,000, 5,700,000 were owners, renters, or overseers, or 56 per cent., and only 4,500,000 were actual farm laborers; and more than half of these, or 2,350,000, were members of the family, leaving only some 2,000,000 actual agricultural wage-earners, or employable agricultural laborers. Five-eighths of these were under twenty-five years of age, and of the white regular workers only one-tenth were over thirty-five years of age. This shows how unstable is the foundation of our agricultural prosperity, the chief asset of plenty and contentment of our country. Mr. Get-Rich-Quick has moved on to the shifting and more exciting opportunities of the cities, where poor human nature, aided and abetted by weak philanthropy, and demagogic fishing for votes by eleemosynary legislation, provides him with a mild form of riotous living, and a fatted calf of doles in case of accident, sickness, penury, or old age.

In our American cities of over 8,000 inhabitants the increase in population from 1790 to 1900 has been from 3.4 per cent. to 33 per cent. In cities of 2,500 and over the increase from 1880 to 1900 has been from 29.3 per cent. to 40.2 per cent. In the State of New York the farming population is smaller than ever before, and in parts of New England it is smaller than one hundred years ago. In 1909 there were 15,000 deserted farms with a total of 1,130,000 acres. The average size of farms in the United States in 1850 was 212 acres; in 1890, 121 acres. Wages in the reaping season on fruit, grain, and cotton farms are enormous, running to four and five dollars a day. We are behind every country in Europe except Russia, in our agricultural methods. Some day the American people will discover, may it not be too late, that the tall talk and highfalutin boastings of the politicians and alien journalists in their midst do nothing to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before.

Germany may not have solved this problem, indeed no nation which offers undue legislative alleviation for human frailty will ever solve it, but at least she has not shirked the problem, and presents for our enlightenment a scheme in full and smooth working order.

In dealing with German problems it is fair to give examples where her methods have been wholly and entirely successful. The man who does not know one tree or shrub from another cannot travel in trains, motor-cars, or afoot without remarking the neatness, symmetry, and the flourishing condition of the forests. In these matters Germany so far surpasses us that we may be said to be merely in a kindergarten stage of development. As early as 1783 a German traveller, Johann David Schoepf, was distressed to see the waste of valuable wood in America. He tells of a furnace in New Jersey which exhausted a forest of nearly 20,000 acres in twelve to fifteen years, and goes on to prophesy the grave danger to America unless coal is discovered and used instead of wood.

The public forests in America contain about nine per cent. of the total land area and about twenty-five per cent. of the forest area of the country. In Germany the state owns about 40 per cent. of the forests, and nearly 70 per cent. of the forest area is under state control. The total forest area of the empire is 34,569,800 acres, and two-thirds bear pine, larch, and red and white fir. In a recent year the Federal States made a net profit of $38,250,000 from public lands and forests, and the entire profit from the German forests was estimated at $110,000,000. When one remembers that Germany is less than the size of Texas, and that from her forests alone, in one year, she received an income equal to more than one-tenth of our total national expenditure for that same year, the fact of our childish wastefulness is brought home to us, and makes a patriot feel that a Gifford Pinchot should be given a free hand. I can only write of the subject as one technically entirely ignorant, but that Germany is a university of forestry is not only attested by the demand for her teachers in India, and in America, and elsewhere in the world, but by the condition of the forests themselves all over Germany, which no traveller, from America at any rate, can fail to notice without surprise and delight.

Germany, like the rest of us, has been obliged to face the various social problems that arise from original sin, but which vote-getters are pleased to ascribe to industrial progress. In our country, with a population of some thirty to the square mile, while in the kingdom of Saxony the density of the population is 830.6 to the square mile, it is hard to believe that we suffer from overcrowding so much as from overindulgence, wastefulness, and fussy legislation. None the less, we have 42 institutions for the feeble-minded, 115 schools and homes for the deaf and blind, 350 hospitals for the insane, 1,200 refuge houses, 1,300 prisons, 1,500 hospitals, and 2,500 almshouses. We have 2,000,000 annually who are cared for in homes and hospitals, 300,000 insane and feeble-minded, 160,000 blind or deaf, 80,000 prisoners, and 100,000 paupers in almshouses and out, and we spend each year about $100,000,000 in taking care of them. We are as wasteful and careless in these matters as we have been until very lately in our forestry methods.

In the early days of the empire Germany undertook to deal with these social problems. The German Empire took over some of the principles of socialism, but retained, and retains absolutely, the power of applying those principles. Bismarck himself admitted that his advocacy of the industrial insurance laws was selfish. “My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.” Whatever else may have resulted, discontent, whether well-founded or not, is not now under discussion, has not been lessened. In 1912 more than one-half of the electors voted “discontented” as over against the less than one-half who voted “contented.” The mass of the people may be better clothed, better fed, better housed, better cared for in sickness and in old age, than formerly, but they are not satisfied. No state can go much further than Germany has gone along the lines of state interference, guidance, and control of the personal affairs of its people, and nothing is more surprising about the whole matter than the general acceptance in America and in England of such legislation as having proved altogether successful. I doubt if any intelligent German considers these various pension schemes as altogether successful. I can vouch for it that many German statesmen make no such claims in private, whatever they may say in public.

Some of the barren figures, needing no comment, are of interest in this connection. The cost of insurance in Germany has risen to over $500,000 a day, the total cost of state insurance exceeding $250,000,000 a year at the present time, a fairly heavy tax upon small employers. In 1909, of 422,076 decisions by the industrial unions, 76,352 were appealed against, and of the 100,000 arbitration judgments, 22,794 were appealed against. So difficult is it to settle to the claimant’s satisfaction the amount of salve necessary for his particular wound when, as is true in these cases, the salve is a grant of money for a longer or shorter period!

In 1886 there were, roughly, 100,000 accidents reported and 10,000 compensated, but as they became more thoroughly acquainted with the game, the figures rose in 1908 to 662,321 accidents and 142,965 compensations.

The vast increase of the claims for trifling injuries is shown by the fact that in twenty years from 1888 to 1908, despite the increase of the total compensation from $1,475,000 to $38,715,000, the average compensation per accident fell from $58.50 to $38.83. In the two years 1907 to 1909 the number of members of those state-insured increased by 380,819, while the days of sickness increased by 26,219,632! The cost of sickness insurance alone rose from $42,895,000 in 1900 to $83,640,000 in 1909. The Workmen’s Compensation Act in England costs, for management, commission, legal and medical fees, $20,000,000 a year, while the compensation paid out was $13,500,000. The insurance companies calculate that for every $500 of compensation, the employers have paid $750!

It is becoming increasingly evident that the logical result of state charity, or call it state insurance to avoid controversy, over a large field, and including millions of beneficiaries and claimants, is that the army of officials, the expenses of administration, and the payments themselves must sooner or later break the back of the state morally, politically, and financially. It rapidly increases parasitism among the receivers; makes a powerful though indifferent army of state servants of the distributers; and loses financially to the state far more in expense of administration, and loss of useful labor of the army of civil servants, than it gains by the loss to the state of individual incapacity resulting in pauperism and invalidism, which must be cared for. To put it briefly, it is far more dangerous to the state to tell the individual that he shall be taken care of than to tell him that he must shift for himself. As for the effect upon the individual, it is a lowering medicine, making the patient gradually dependent upon the drug, and bringing him finally to the incurable invalidism of surly apathy. To change Patrick Henry’s fiery peroration slightly: Give me liberty or in the end you give me moral and political death.

Students of the various forms of this modern political nostrum, of getting rid of the fools who are rich by deceiving the fools who are poor, will remember the decree of the Provisional Government of the French Republic in 1848: “This Government undertakes to guarantee the existence of the workman by work. It undertakes to guarantee work to every citizen.” On March 9 public works were started and 3,000 men employed. March 15 saw 14,000 on the pay-rolls, most of them unoccupied because there was no suitable work. Those not working received “inactivity pay” of a franc a day. The end of April saw 100,000 on the pay-rolls. In May a minister ventured to suggest that it was the workman’s duty to work! There were murmurs of disapproval, but the public treasury was nearing bankruptcy, and on June 22 an order was promulgated, that all of these workmen between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five were to enlist in the army. An insurrection followed this order that workmen should work, and 3,000 citizens were shot down in the streets, and another 3,000 were sent to penal colonies in Algeria. The French are a logical people. The state promised suitable work; that always means, from the point of view of the worker, agreeable work, and not too fatiguing at that. Of course, no such thing is possible, and the end was riot, murder, and penal servitude. The state can no more provide suitable and agreeable methods of livelihood for its citizens, than it can provide them with a duty-loving, unenvious, and honest disposition. As I have remarked elsewhere, the only thing that stands between state socialism and the instant solution of all our social problems is human nature! This mongrel demand for an artificial equality, is worse, because more degrading than any tyranny of church or state even. Every man wants superiority and distinction for himself, he only wants equality, invisibility, and inarticulateness for others.

When some such system as this is put to work in Ireland, I shall envy every physician in Ireland, for he will live in a joyous round of farces such as the world has never provided before for the lovers of the humorous. Already Ireland, with only 701,620 electors, out of a total of 8,058,025 in the United Kingdom, is represented in the House of Commons by 103 members out of the total of 670; and out of the 935,000 old-age pensioners on the lists at the beginning of 1912, Ireland had 202,810, and was drawing $12,943,000 out of the total paid of $59,445,500, while the total population of Ireland was 4,368,599, and of the rest of the United Kingdom 40,533,557! Further, as an example of the slight value of education in the game of politics, out of the 41,710 illiterate voters in the United Kingdom, Ireland has 22,515. Long life to Ireland for her gallant attack upon humbuggery with humbuggery! And this is, too, the little island that sent the Wellesleys, the Pallisers, the Moores, the Eyres, the Cootes, the Napiers, the Wolseleys, and Roberts to fight England’s battles, and half the officers and privates who conquered India; which in the Seven Years’ War furnished Austria with her best generals (Brown, Lacy, O’Donnell), and whose exiles, called the “Wild Geese,” flocked to the standard of Washington in 1776. This is proof positive that they are not naturally a parasitic race.

Even in Germany, where there is not a tithe of the impish humour that exists in Ireland, the Socialists have so misused the immense bureaucracy that must carry on the mere clerical work of insurance, that a new law passed the Reichstag in June, 1911, containing several hundred amendments. Employers must now pay one-half instead of one-third of the sickness insurance premiums, which gives them one-half instead of one-third of the management authority.

The management had degenerated into a mere game of politics, with the Socialists in such disproportionate control that they were rapidly turning the insurance machinery into a well-organized body for the exploitation of their own political doctrines; and the employer and the state were helpless. It is, therefore, amusing to the man on the spot to find certain English writers offering as proof of the success of the insurance laws the fact that the Socialists, who once opposed, are now satisfied with them. Of course they are satisfied with them. They have had a war-chest and weapons put into their hands such as they have never had before. Nor have these detailed parchment solutions of social questions done away with all the tramps, poor, sick, and destitute. Over a million persons passed through the municipal night shelters in Berlin during the last year; and there are still admittedly some 5,000 tramps in Germany. The vicious circle is in evidence in Germany as elsewhere. It might be possible to regulate men’s earning power by legislation, but even when this colossal task is done, there must follow the regulation of the spending power to make it complete. What conceivable legislative regulation can efface the difference between what A, B, and C will get out of five dollars once they have them! That is the real problem, but no one proposes a solution of it. A will use his five dollars to make him more powerful, B will use his in dissipation, and C will lose his. How is that to be regulated? And without that regulation you will have rich men and tramps all over again.

In urban and rural districts containing over 10,000 inhabitants, some $40,000,000 was expended for sick and poor relief, and this does not include the hundreds of districts with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants for which there are no figures. Even the wholly admirable Elberfeld system of charity, known all over the world to charity-workers, which is, briefly, investigation of cases by voluntary workers personally and privately, and each dealing with a small number, has not solved the problem. There were 1,537 strikes in Germany in 1909, and 2,109 in 1910. In 1910, 8,269 industrial plants were affected, in which 372,119 persons were employed, and 2,209 plants were obliged to shut down entirely. There were as many as 154,093 persons on strike at the same time. In 1910 there were also 1,121 lock-outs, affecting 10,381 plants and 314,988 persons.

Here again, as in the case of the temperament of the German people, one must look deeper than the average traveller has the time or the necessary experience back of him to do, in order to see and to sift the facts. Scores of travellers have told me: “I have never seen a tramp, a beggar, a drunken man in Germany.” I can only reply that I have seen tramps at large, and colonies of them besides; that I have seen hundreds of the poverty-stricken and diseased; that there are more than thirty drunkards’ homes in Germany; and that between 1879 and 1901 the number of persons under treatment for alcoholism had increased from 12,000 to 65,000, an increase of 500 per cent.; the cases of heart disease and rheumatism increased by 600 per cent.; while the total population had increased 33 per cent. There are 125,000 patients admitted to the public and private lunatic asylums of Germany, and there are accommodations in public and private hospitals for 1,300,000 in-patients passing through them in the year; in 1909, 544,183 persons were tried before the courts of first instance and convicted, of whom 49,697 were between twelve and eighteen years of age; and in the same year there were 183,700 illegitimate births and 14,225 suicides, or 22.3 per 100,000 of the population. The poor law authorities state that the cost to the empire of alcoholism in all its forms of poverty, crime, and disease amounts to some $13,000,000 a year. In 1910 Germany consumed 1,704 million gallons of malt liquors, the United States, 1,851 million gallons; of beer we consumed 20.09 gallons and Germany 26.47 gallons per capita. Germany’s drink bill even ten years ago was $560,000,000 for beer, $140,000,000 for spirits, and $125,000,000 for wine. There is a wine, beer, or spirit dealer in Berlin for every 157 of the inhabitants, men, women, and children. It has always been the avowed policy of autocracies to atone for the lack of political freedom by lax regulations in regard to moral matters. The citizen is imprisoned for insulting the state, but he may insult his own person by dissipation up to any limit, this side of disorderliness in public. Drinking, gambling, and other forms of vice are provided for the citizens of Berlin comfortably and, comparatively speaking, cheaply. Lotteries are sanctioned by all the states, and they use this incentive to the worst form of gambling for all sorts of purposes, from repairing churches to building patriotic monuments, and replenishing the treasury.

This is by no means an attack upon Germany or upon German methods in these matters; probably both in America and in England we are worse off in these respects than are they, but unprejudiced people will agree that it is high time to learn that not even German methods have solved these complicated and heatedly argued questions of social reform. Germany, due to its compactness and well-drilled and subservient population, should succeed if any nation can, for social legislation has never been in stronger or wiser hands or more admirably and honestly administered. In America such opportunities offered to the on-politics-living big and little bosses would lead swiftly to anarchy. We have laws enough now, but the baser politicians protect our city tramps, our gunmen, our decadents, our incendiaries against our elected magistrates, in order that they may keep ready to hand, and increase, the raw material of a purchasable vote, by the domination and protection of which they keep themselves in power. That is the whole secret of our municipal misgovernment wherever it exists, and also the reason for our barbarous crimes. We have a cowed magistracy seeking re-election from the manipulators of the purchasable voters.

The truth is that the Sacculina method of social reform is nowhere a success, certainly not in Germany. The Sacculina is a crustacean. It attaches itself in the form of a simple sac to the crab, into which its blood-vessels extend. It loses its power of locomotion and its limbs disappear. It lives at the expense of the crab; activity is not necessary, and it becomes the highest type of parasite, with no organs except ovaries and blood-vessels. It can propagate, but has lost all power or desire to do anything else. We have succeeded in producing no small number of people of the Sacculina type by playing social and political crab for them, and we are on the way to produce more, until the crab is exhausted and the Sacculina is shaken into the water to sink or swim for himself. “Charity causes half the suffering she relieves, but she can never relieve half the suffering she causes.

Compulsory insurance was tried in the practical and economical Swiss city of Basle and given up, because it was found that each year it was the same small class who reaped the benefit of the insurance. The crab gained nothing and the Sacculina became rapidly impotent. Basle, if I mistake not, will have imitators, inclined to the philosophy of Frederick the Great, who was surely no enemy to rational progress, but who once said: “Depuis bien longtemps je suis convaincu qu’un mal qui reste vaut mieux qu’un bien qui change.”

A good deal of modern legislation is due to fatigue, and some of the rest to ill-founded apprehension, that unless there is a change of some kind the masters of the legislators will discharge them, because they do not furnish enough novelties. In the meantime nobody is bold enough to proclaim to the restless ones, seeking ever some new thing, that there is nothing original except what has been forgotten. The originality of such students of history, and panderers to majorities, as the leaders of the discontented in England, Germany and in America, dates back to about the time of the fall of Pericles and the Athenian republic.

The cry of “discontent” has become a fetich among unthinking politicians. We are all, thank God, discontented, and a poor lot we should be if we were not. The workingman’s discontent has been over-emphasized, for the reason that what he demands is material, ponderable, for sale, easy to see, and not far out of the reach of one’s hand. He wants more rooms, more meat, more tobacco, more beer, more leisure. I am glad he does want them, and let me say just once, in answer to my detractors along these lines, that the workingman has no heartier champion than am I. I applaud his discontent just as I cherish my own, for “it is precisely this that keeps us all alive!” It is just because I wish him well that every ounce of my influence and experience are his, to open his eyes to the demagogues who fatten upon him, fool him, rope him, throw him and brand him, as they have done in Germany, as they are attempting to do in England, and as they will shortly begin to do in America. State socialism means slavery for him, with an army of officials living on him. He will be given so much bread, and beer, and meat, and tobacco; so much music, theatre, and literature; and there will grow up an army whose business it will be to keep him in order, and to cut him down if he revolts, as was done by the police in one of the suburbs of Berlin not long ago. The German workman is already so entangled in the ropes of insurance, so harried by petty officials, so branded by the police, and he has permitted to increase such a host of guardians, that revolt or revolution is practically impossible. Counting the army, navy, and officials, there are said to be three million officials, great and small in Germany; and there are fourteen million electors, or, roughly, one policeman to every five adults. And those three million policemen, armed with lethal and legal weapons, are inflexibly and unalterably for no change. Does the workingman ever stop to think that those officials draw salaries amounting to something like $1,200,000,000 a year, and is he still fool enough to think that he does not pay those salaries to these slave-drivers! I have said that the population is well fed, well clothed, and well looked after. Of course they are. No slave-owner so maltreats his slaves that they cannot work for him! But is man fed by bread alone, even in the sugared form of music and theatricals?

If the socialist Pygmalion ever succeeds in bringing his statue to life, how she will scorn him, hate his suffocating environment, wish for the wealth and softness he cannot give, desert him, begging to return to her marble tomb again.

Long life to discontent, say I; but is the workingman such a fool that his eyes are not opened when a man of Bismarck’s way of thinking, when an autocrat like the Emperor have favored state socialism! Does he not see that socialism is the neatest hangman of them all to strangle his discontent! Does he not see the demagogue gradually assuming the features and the powers of the tyrant! Tyranny is not alone the prerogative of an aristocracy. “It is the place of a court to make its servants insignificant. If the people should fall into the same humor, and should choose their servants on the same principles of mere obsequiousness and flexibility, and total vacancy and indifference of opinion in all public matters, then no party of the state will be sound, and it will be vain to think of saving it.” Thus writes Burke, the champion of our American revolt against his own country. The electors, now so flattered by the smooth phrases of their tyrants disguised as liberators, will one day be aghast to find themselves in a veritable house of correction paid for from their own savings. They will have learnt then, at last, that you cannot get rid of the fools who are rich by deceiving the fools who are poor; and corporalism will be found to be a harsher, fussier, a more meddlesome and a more indifferent tyrant than even feudalism.

Even at the Krupp works at Essen, and the various branches elsewhere, where there is the most elaborate combination of Lady Bountiful and successful business anywhere in the world, men are not satisfied. If they are not contented there, then nowhere in this world will the workingman be contented. The Krupp business employs some 70,000 persons. In the particular Essen works, for a hundred years, there has never been a strike, though others of their employees elsewhere have used the strike. Though the Cadburys and Levers and Taylors, in England, the Armours, the United States Steel Corporation, the National Cash Register Company, the Procter and Gamble Company, the General Electric Company, and others in America, and the famous and successful adoption of co-operation in Monsieur Godin’s iron foundry at Guise, in France, have worked along the lines of recognition of their workmen’s right to participate in the profits, there is nothing on such an elaborate scale as at Essen, under the regime of the Krupps.

From 1904 to 1910 the Krupps spent, for beneficial institutions of all kinds, $14,250,000, or 56 per cent. of the dividends during that time. I have passed many hours at Essen, and seen thoroughly, from cellar to attic, this truly noble institution for the comfortable and safe guardianship of men, women, and children who are at the same time factors in a huge and successful industrial enterprise. There are schools, technical schools, hospitals, convalescent homes, a library with 71,000 volumes, theatre, orchestra, band, lectures, concerts, pension and insurance funds, lodgings for bachelors, tenements and dwellings for married people, separate cottages for widows and widowers too old for work, and every opportunity, with a high rate of interest, for saving. There is in existence a co-operative store, as well managed as the co-operative stores at Tuxedo Park, and with much the same system of rebates. There are bathing facilities, gymnasium, a boat club, a system of providing hot meals from a central kitchen, reading-rooms and smoking-rooms. There is invested, not including the value of the land, which has risen enormously in value, over $12,500,000 in houses for the working-people, the return on the money being about 2 3/4 per cent. It would require volumes - indeed, two bulky volumes were issued last year by the company to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Krupp works - to describe merely the machinery for making the people comfortable.

In 1851 the Krupps exhibited at the exposition in London the first cannon made of cast steel; now they turn out more shells and shrapnel in a week than were used at the whole battle of Königgrätz (Sadowa), which lasted from eight o’clock in the morning till four o’clock in the afternoon on July 3, 1866. The queen of this, the greatest factory of destructive agencies in the world, is a gentle Madonna-faced lady who might well pose for a statue of peace, and whose loveliness is a mirror of the countless and untiring benefactions with which the people who work here are surrounded. Both the powers and the people of Germany may well be proud of the Krupps, for if sane beneficence were to be raised to the rank of statehood this great colony would well deserve the honor. The gross profits for the last year were $9,000,000, half of which was written off and the rest devoted to the reserve, to dividends, and to contributions to the invalid and pension funds of the employees, which now amount to $9,500,000. The employees also have on deposit with the management $8,700,000. The contribution of the Krupps to the workmen’s state-insurance fund amounted, in 1910, to $1,320,000. The Krupp family is rich, but what would their wealth have been had they practised the gobbling and juggling financial methods of —; but I will not pillory my own countrymen by name, for, after all, our political methods have made them, and not they themselves.

The German manufacturer has been at a disadvantage, too, for several reasons, and this may well be noted as one of Germany’s problems. She has not the deposits of coal that have made England rich, nor the wonderful soil of America, from which alone we take $9,000,000,000 every year, nor France’s population, now at a standstill, and which can feed itself off its own soil. She has been a large borrower of capital to finance her enormous expansion of industry and commerce, and, above all, the gold supply of the world, which in the last resort is the foundation of credit, is not in her hands, nor can it be so long as British and American fleets keep the ocean highways over which that gold travels.

The world’s gold output in 1911 was $493,100,000; of this $177,600,000 came from the Transvaal; $100,350,000 from the United States; $63,600,000 from Australia; $42,300,000 from Russia; $23,300,000 from Mexico; $35,600,000 from Rhodesia, India, and Canada; and $15,650,000 from Central and South America, or $458,000,000, of the total output of $493,100,000, from countries which in time of war would be unlikely to ship gold to Germany. More than one half the output comes from the British Empire alone. To those who are satisfied with the easy answer to the reason for the increased cost of living, that the output of gold has increased, it must be puzzling to learn that of the total output, in round numbers, of $500,000,000, $150,000,000 is used in the arts and manufactures and $150,000,000 goes to India, where it is buried and hoarded, and $100,000,000 is retained in the United States for currency and other purposes. In spite of the fact that the gold output of the world doubled between 1890 and 1897, and nearly doubled again between 1897 and 1911, money is dear, and is likely to be so long as present conditions last.

The reason for the higher cost of living is to be found in the movement of the population, from the dulness of the plough to the sprightliness of the cinematograph. This choice every freeman has a right to make for himself, but the trouble arises when the politician comes forward and pays his admission to the cinematograph entertainment, out of the public funds, in order to get his vote. The man who does not leave the plough under those conditions is either a fool or a saint, and the percentage of the growth of cities is a fair measure of their relative numbers. The increased cost of living is the result, not of too much gold, but of too little labor on the land, and this is due, in turn, to the voluptuous rhetoric of the political street-walkers, whose promises of pleasure are as illegitimate as they are impossible of fulfilment. A debtor nation like Germany is highly sensitive to these conditions, and just as she is overcoming, by her splendid success as a manufacturing nation this problem, she is met by increased and ever-increasing rivalry. America, in 1901, exported $466,000,000 of manufactures; in 1891 only $188,000,000; but in 1911, $910,000,000; and in 1912, $1,021,753,918. We now have in America 225,000 manufacturing plants employing 6,000,000 people, with an annual pay-roll of $3,500,000,000 and producing every twelve months $15,000,000,000 worth of goods. The total value of exports and imports of Japan thirty years ago was $30,000,000, or 87 cents per capita; in 1911 the figures were $480,000,000, or $10 per capita. England during the years 1911 and 1912 surpassed all previous figures both for exports and imports. Germany’s rivals, it is thus seen, have not been idle.

The agricultural population of Germany in 1850 was 65 in the 100; it is now less than one third. In 1911, after a bad year for the farmers, Germany was obliged to pay out some $200,000,000 more than usual for food. The total loans of the German banks on industrial securities rose from $107,000,000 in 1890 to $632,000,000 in 1910, and bankers themselves admit that Germany has fallen into the error of seeking and accepting credit far beyond the value of the capital that they have to work with. Still more dangerous is the fact that 55 per cent. of the savings-bank moneys of Germany is locked up in mortgages. In 1907, 217 new companies were formed in Germany, issuing $62,050,900 in securities; in 1909, 179 new companies issued $54,929,450 of securities; in 1910, 186 new companies issued $57,437,700 of securities. In 1910, 340 companies increased their capital by $142,657,200. In 1910 there were 5,295 companies in Germany with a nominal capital of $3,680,979,400. It is estimated that since 1895 there has been invested in industrial companies in Germany $1,200,000,000. It is to be said also that since 1897 German agricultural production has doubled, German industrial production increased sevenfold, and Germany is said to have $4,750,000,000 in her savings-banks. The value of imports for home consumption, exclusive of the precious metals, in 1911 was $2,386,200,000; the value of the exports of home produce, exclusive of the precious metals, was $2,025,450,000. It is a quaint result of her temperament and her good forestry, that Germany sells $25,000,000 worth of toys a year; she is veritably the workshop of Santa Claus, and many more than 25,000,000 children would bless her did they know.

German financiers affirm that she can stand alone financially, while others assert that one sixth of her capital, I have heard it placed at one third, is borrowed from France and England. It is certain at least that the American panic of 1907, and the recent war in the Near East, have seriously embarrassed Germany financially.

As Germany can only feed, even in good harvest years, forty-eight or forty-nine millions of her people, a large proportion of her profits from industry must necessarily go to the purchase of food for the other sixteen or seventeen millions. The consumption of meat has increased among all classes in Germany, and both the demands of the individual and of the state have increased with the increased wealth of the country. In Prussia alone the number of those subject to income tax has increased from 2,400,000 in 1892 to 6,200,000 in 1912; but the taxes have increased as well, or from $800,000,000 to $1,675,000,000.

In the endeavor to increase the manufacturing output and to find new markets German credit has been stretched to a dangerous tenuity. While the war feeling was at its height the Kölnische Zeitung, a conservative and able journal, wrote: “In case of war both France and Germany will be obliged to borrow; but it is certain that the credit of Germany cannot as yet be compared with the credit of France: this is a strong guarantee of peace. Wermuth, said by impartial judges to be the ablest secretary of the treasury the German Empire has had in a quarter of a century, resigned in 1912, on the general ground that he would not be responsible for the finances of the empire, if it was proposed to continue the constant increase of national expenditure, by a constant increase of borrowing, and an ever-increasing amount of interest-bearing liabilities. He must have smiled to himself when an Imperial issue at four per cent. put out in February, 1913, was not only not over-subscribed but not even all taken.

Unlike the French, who invest their savings small and large in national loans, the Germans neglect even their own national loans, preferring the higher returns for their investments from the innumerable industries launched in modern Germany; so pronounced is this form of investment, that a director of the Deutsche Bank has warned his countrymen, that every month’s profits are no sooner gained than they are put out again in new enterprises, either by the individuals themselves, or by the banks in which they are deposited. As a result, the liquid capital at the disposal of Germany is dangerously out of proportion to her borrowings and her working capital. It shows a fine confidence in the future, and it proves what needs no proof: the immense industrial and commercial progress, and the immense sea-carrying trade of Germany. Germany is like a man with $1,000 in the bank to check upon, but doing business with $100,000 of borrowed capital, upon which he must pay interest, and out of which he must take his running expenses. Such a one has no provision for a bad year, and must depend upon more credit in case of trouble; and in the case of Germany, it may be added, his personal and family expenses have largely increased. The German imperial debt had increased during the first twenty-two years of the present Emperor’s reign, or from 1888 to 1910, by $1,040,000,000, and of that sum some $650,000,000 were added in the ten years from 1900 to 1910, when Germany was building her fleet.

Between the years 1905 and 1910 the total export trade of Germany increased by $408,225,000, but the whole of the increase was due to the heavier forms of manufactures: machinery, iron ware, coal-tar dyes, iron wire, steel rails, and raw iron. The increasing competition is shown by the fact that during those same years her exports of the finer manufactures, such as cotton and woollen goods, clothing, gold and silver ware, porcelain, maps, prints, and the like, actually decreased by $66,975,000!

I am not maintaining for a moment that these problems are peculiar to Germany, but merely that, owing to the rapid progress, they are aggravated, and that to point out Germany as a model of successful achievement, along these and other lines, in order to bolster up political cure-alls at home, is a betrayal of crass ignorance of the general internal situation of the country, and once such prejudiced pleaders are found out, the rebound will go too far the other way. That were a pity, too, for we have much to learn from Germany.

The $30,000,000 in gold in the Julius Tower at Spandau, called the war-chest, and the income from railroads, forests, and mines, are to be put down on the other side of the ledger, but as a year’s war, it is calculated, would cost France, England, or Germany some $2,300,000,000 each, these sums are of negligible importance.

The Prussian railways cost $2,250,000,000, and are now valued at twice that sum, and pay an average of seven per cent. on the invested capital. Maintenance costs are included in the total annual expenses, and there is no, so it is claimed, actual depreciation. Of the net revenue of $157,330,417 in 1909, about $55,000,000 are transferred to the state revenue, out of which all charges of the state, including interest on bonds, are paid. The rest is used for new construction, sinking funds, reserve funds, and so on.

The report of the Interstate Commerce Commission of 1909-1910 states that there are nearly $19,000,000,000 of railway capital outstanding in America. There are 240,438 miles of single track in the United States; 59,000 locomotives, 35,000 for freight, and a total of 2,290,000 cars of all kinds; and the railways carried in one year 971,683,000 passengers and 1,850,000,000 tons of freight. In 1910, 386 persons were killed, but, what is often forgotten, more than one half the total accidents were due to stealing rides and trespassing on the tracks. The railways in the United States are our largest purchasers by far, and for every dollar they earn 42 cents is spent in wages, 26 cents for material, raw or manufactured, before anything is given out for interest on loans or dividends.

A first-class ticket in Germany is taxed 16 per cent. on the price of the ticket; a second-class ticket, 8 per cent.; a third-class ticket, 4 per cent.; the fourth-class ticket, nothing. Crowded and uncomfortable travelling in Germany is cheap; comfortable travelling in Germany is very dear indeed. The herding of people in the fourth-class carriages in Germany resembles our cattle-cars rather than transportation for human beings. Such conditions would not be tolerated in America, but against these state-owned railways there is no redress. No luggage, except hand luggage, is carried free. Not once, but many times in Germany, my first-class ticket found me no accommodation, and often in changing from the main line to a branch line not even a first-class compartment. Shippers in the coal and iron districts, when I was there, complained bitterly that there were not enough freight-cars, that their complaints were smothered in bureaucratic portfolios, and that private enterprise in the shape of proposals to build new lines was disregarded. The tyranny of Prussia extends even into the railway field. The Oderberg-Wien line was built to avoid using the Saxon state railway lines, was a spite railway in fact. Here again there was no redress, no one to appeal to against the autocrat.

In a debate in the Reichstag, in January, 1913, there was much complaint that the Prussian government was conducting the railways with the least possible outlay, thus saving money for the state, but hampering the industrial interests of the country. It was stated that there were not enough engines or freight-cars, there was an inadequate staff, and that as a consequence, the loss to the coal industry had been $11,500,000 and to the coal-miners $3,375,000.

On the state-owned railways of the west of France the break-down is ludicrously complete, and the people are staggered by the official estimates that it will require at least $100,000,000 to put them in decent running order.

In twenty years the American railways have practically been rebuilt, with heavier rails, better bridges, more permanent stations, and so on; while twenty years ago it cost a passenger 2.165 cents to travel a mile, to-day it costs him 1.916 cents. We need a lot of bustling about abroad before we realize how much we have to be grateful for at home!

Probably the most costly and the most troublesome of Germany’s problems is her conquered provinces: Hanover, Schleswig-Holstein, Alsace-Lorraine, and Poland. Hanover, which was taken by Prussia and her king deposed, is nowadays a minor matter of the relations between courts, individuals, and families, which may be said to be settled by the arranged marriage between the Kaiser’s charming daughter and the heir to the Duke of Cumberland, whose ancestors were kings of Hanover.

The Danes, on the other hand, in the northern part of these provinces, still resist Prussianization. They keep to themselves and their language, send their children to school in Denmark, and resist all attempts at social and racial incorporation. They are troublesome, as an independent and surly daughter-in-law might be troublesome. Alsace-Lorraine and Posen, on the contrary, are outspoken and potentially dangerous foes in Germany’s own household.

In 1872 Bismarck said: “Alsace-Lorraine will be placed on an equality with the other German states,... so that the people may be induced to forget, in a comparatively short time, the trouble and distress of the war and of annexation.” In 1912, a loyal Alsatian German writes: “Das Elsass, dies jungstgeborene Kind der deutschen Völkerfamilie, braucht etwas mehr Liebe.” Forty years of Prussian rule have not fulfilled the promise of Bismarck. This same Alsatian writer continues: “In short, we are approaching ever nearer to the condition of the citizens of all the other German States, as Baden, Saxony, Bavaria, where they are also not always of one mind with the higher ruling powers.” It is difficult for the American, who, no matter what particular State he lives in, is first of all a citizen of the United States, to understand this jealousy and, in some quarters, bitter dislike of Prussia. If the State of New York had sixty million of our ninety million population, and if the governor of New York were also perpetual President of the United States, commanded the army and navy, controlled the foreign policy, and appointed the cabinet ministers, who were responsible to him alone, we could get an approximate idea of how the people of Virginia, Massachusetts, Illinois, and California would feel toward New York. This is a rough-drawn comparison with the situation in Germany. If, in addition, we had the Philippine Islands where Maine is, and Cuba where Texas is, it is easy to recognize the consequent complications.

We should remember this picture in dealing with this German problem, which, at any rate, from the point of view of kindly feeling and successful adoption of these foreign peoples into the German family, has been a dire failure. The miserable failure of the Germans in Southwest Africa, their inconclusive war with the Herreros, and the absolute break-down of Prussian methods with the natives, is scarcely more typical than the failure in Alsace-Lorraine and Poland. The Prussian belief in sand-paper as an emollient must be by now rudely shaken.

At last a constitution has been given the two conquered provinces. The governor is to be advised by a parliament, but the government is not responsible to the parliament, which is composed of two houses. The upper house has thirty-six members, eighteen of whom are nominees of the Emperor and eighteen from the churches, universities, and principal cities. The lower house is to be elected by popular franchise. Three years’ residence in the same place entitles a man to a vote, but every voter over thirty-five years of age has two votes, and every voter over forty-five has three votes.

This, as an American can appreciate, has not been received with enthusiasm, and their conduct has been so provoking that the Emperor, during a recent visit, scolded the people, in an interview with the mayor of a certain town, and, what caused great amusement among the enemies of Prussia, threatened to incorporate them into Prussia, as had been done with Hanover, if they were not better behaved. This, of course, was seized upon as an admission that to be taken into the Prussian family was of all the hardships the most dreadful. The socialist journal Vorwärts spoke of Prussia as “that brutal country which thus openly confesses its dishonor to all the world.” Herr Scheidemann asked in the Reichstag, if Prussia then acknowledged herself to be a sort of house of correction, and “has Prussia, then, become the German Siberia?” In 1911 the Reichstag gave the provinces three votes in the Federal Council.

Metz, it is said, is more French than ever, and thousands troop across the boundaries on the anniversary of the French national holiday, to celebrate it on French soil. The conquered provinces are kept in order, but the French language, French customs, French culture, are still to the fore, and so far as loyalty, affection, or a change of mind and heart is concerned the conversion is still incomplete. The inhabitants have been baptized Germans, but very few of them have taken voluntarily, their first communion of nationalization.

“On changerait plutôt le coeur de place,
Que de changer la vieille Alsace.”

The German, Karl Lamprecht, in his valuable history of contemporary Germany, is more hopeful of the situation than are other writers and observers. Professor Werner Wittich maintains that the best of the intellectual side of life in Alsace is impregnated with French culture and traditions; and even German officers long stationed in the two conquered provinces admit the stubborn allegiance of the people to French customs, habits, beliefs, and traditions. But however that may be, and it is admittedly a question that different prejudices and hopes will answer differently, there is no denial on the part of any one, high or low, that the Prussian bureaucratic mandarins have made no progress in winning the affection or the voluntary loyalty of the people. The Prussian has had recourse to the advice given by Prince Billow, “if you cannot be loved, then you must be feared.” A friend who is only a friend, an ally who is only an ally, a servant who only serves you because he is afraid of you, is not only an uncomfortable but a dangerous factor in any establishment, whether domestic or national. Corporalism, begun by Frederick the Great and fastened upon Germany by Bismarck, has had its successes. I recognized them, indeed, on returning to Germany after twenty-five years, as astounding successes, but they have their weak side too. A barracks can never be the ideal of a home, nor a corporal the ideal of a guide, philosopher, and friend. Their own philosopher Nietzsche writes: “the state is the coldest of all cold monsters.”

Joseph de Maistre, writing of the Slav temperament, says: “Si on enterrait un désir Slave sous une forteresse, il la ferait sauter.” Germany has some reason to believe that this is true.

In the northeast of Germany live some 3,000,000 Poles under Prussian supervision and laws, and ruled by a Prussian governor. There are some 7,000,000 or 8,000,000 Poles divided between Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia, and behind these are 165,000,000 Russians. The boundary between this mass and Germany is one of sand; and the railway journey from Posen to Berlin, is a matter of only four hours. If we were in Germany’s shoes, we should probably take some pains to be well guarded in that quarter. We should, however, do it in quite another fashion. We should, if possible, turn over the inhabitants to their own governing, as England has done in South Africa, as we have tried to do in Cuba, and as we would do gladly in the Philippines, if every intelligent man who knows the situation there, were not assured that robbery, murder, and license would follow on the heels of our departure; and that instead of doing a magnanimous thing we should be shirking our responsibilities in the most cowardly fashion. It is bad enough to know, that we have such cynical political sophists in Congress, that they would even suffer that catastrophe to innocent people in the Philippines, if they thought it would make them votes at home.

Prussia does not recognize such methods of ruling. Corporalism is their only way, and, where the people are fit to govern themselves, a very bad and humiliating way, for the Eden of the bureaucrat is the hell of the governed. If the Germans approve it for themselves, it is not our business to comment; but where these methods are applied to foreign peoples, we both anticipate and applaud their failure.

The insurrections in Russian and Austrian Poland, had their echoes in Posen, and since 1849 Prussia has tried in every way to substitute Germans for Poles, in the country, and to make the German language predominant in the churches, schools, and in the administration. The Poles have resisted, emphasizing their resistance in 1867, when they were included in the North German Federation, and again in 1871, when they were included in the new German Empire.

The Emperor William I, in 1886, said: “The increasing predominance of the Polish over the German element in certain provinces of the east makes it a duty of the government to guarantee the existence and the development of the German population.” Since 1871 the Poles have increased so much faster than the Germans that there is danger of complete extermination of the German population. In 1902 the grandson of William I, the present Emperor, said at Marienburg: “Polish arrogance is unbearable, and I am obliged to appeal to my people to defend themselves against it, for the preservation of their national well-being. It is a question of the defence of the civilization and the culture of Germany. To-day and to-morrow, as in the past, we must fight against the common enemy.” This speech of the Emperor was made at Marienburg, a fine old town, once very prosperous, and in the days of the Wars of the Roses playing a conspicuous part with the other Hanseatic towns. This town was also the head and seat of the Teutonic Order, and it was this Teutonic Order which, in 1230, began the work of converting the then heathen Prussians, along lines not unlike those of the Prussian Ansiedlungskommission of to-day.

Prussia has attempted to solve this question by establishing a government in the province, pledged to the introduction of the German language, and so far as possible of German manners and customs. This has been met with fierce opposition, and never have I heard in the colonies of other countries, except in Korea, under the present Japanese administration, such fanatical hatred, expressed in words, as I have heard in Posen. If you dislike Prussia, do not attempt to revile her yourself; rather go to Posen and hear it done in a far more satisfying way.

The religious question enters largely into the matter, and the ignorant Poles are even taught that the Virgin Mary, or the “Polish Queen,” will not understand their intercessions if they are not made in the Polish language. In 1870 there was one Polish newspaper in Germany, to-day there are 138.

From 1886 to 1910 the Ansiedlungskommission or committee of colonization, have spent $170,896,325, and have received $51,863,175, leaving a net expenditure of $119,033,150. This large expenditure has resulted in the settlement upon the land of 18,507 families, or about 111,000 persons. The total number settled is now 131,000 persons. Each male adult German settler has cost the state something over $32,000! This is probably the most extravagant colonization scheme ever attempted in the world.

But even this expenditure has not brought success, and for a very interesting reason. Again the Germans have been remarkably successful in their dealings with the inanimate, but the Arcana imperii are still hidden from them. They have redeemed the land, taught the Poles, as well as the German settlers, how to farm successfully; largely increased the output of grain, fruit, pigs, calves, chickens, geese, and eggs, for which Germany spends several hundred millions a year abroad; and seen to it that the breed of cows, pigs, horses, chickens, and geese is kept at a high standard. But now the Poles will sell no more land. They have profited, not been ruined, by what has come out of the belly of the Trojan horse! The commission is at a standstill, and it is now proposed to enforce the Prussian law of 1908 for the expropriation of Polish estates. This law was overwhelmingly defeated in the Reichstag in February, 1913, but the Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg declared that it was an affair of Prussia, with which the Reichstag has nothing to do, and the sand-paper of the Prussian bureaucracy will probably be rubbed upon the Polish wound anew.

This attempt to build a line of moral and intellectual forts, supplemented by German settlers, on the land between Russia and Prussia, and to stop the inrush of the Slavic population, has ample excuse behind it. It is undoubtedly in case of war a serious danger to Germany to leave herself unguarded there. As to what will come of the social and racial questions, prophecy alone can answer, and I have far too much imagination to venture upon prophecy. The care and thoroughness with which the work is done is beyond all praise, but it is as difficult to make your brother love you by taking thought thereon, as it is to add a cubit to one’s stature by the same method.

Professor Ludwig Bernhard, while regretting that this attempt at Germanization has not succeeded, admits that Prussian methods are hopeless in such matters. They have, on the contrary, awakened national feeling, encouraged the forming of agricultural societies, and strengthened the Bank of Posen, which has become the financial citadel of opposition. Professor Bernhard goes so far as to say that he doubts if even the putting into force of the expropriation law of 1908 will bring about any better results. To an American this lack of unity seems to be perhaps of exaggerated importance. Wir brauchen nicht diese Nordlichter (We do not need these northern luminaries), is a phrase of a certain Bavarian official, and in lower or louder tones one hears the phrase all over Germany outside of Prussia, and loudest of all in these conquered provinces.

To legislate men into mechanical relations with one another may keep the peace temporarily, but it is not a final solution of the intricate problem of living together in our huddled civilization. The day has gone by when we could rule men without gaining at least their respect, and if possible their affection. Prussia’s stiffness and newness as a governing power; her lack of a high moral or religious tone, for there is a rapidly increasing tendency there to agree with the writer during the French Revolution: la question de dieu man que d’actualité; her hard and inflexible methods, make her a churlish neighbor and an arrogant master. In forty years Prussia has accomplished great things despite these disadvantages of temperament, of tradition, and despite these external dangers and problems. She is learning now that there are not only individuals but whole peoples who say, as William the Conqueror said to the Pope: “Never have I taken an oath of fealty, nor shall I ever do so.