Germany and the Germans Part 11

They are as adamant in their observance of the rules in such matters.

More than once I arrived at the opera a few minutes late, once four minutes late, the doors are closed and guarded, and I listen to the overture from the outside. At a concert led by the famous von Bulow half a dozen women come in after the music has begun, rustling, sibilant, and excited. The music stops, the great conductor turns to glare at them, and, referring to the geese which are said to have saved Rome by their hissing, thunders: "Hier ist kein Capitol zu retten!"

There are some forty thousand professional musicians in Germany. The town council of Berlin is now discussing gravely the sum to be allotted to the support of the Symphony Orchestra, and Charlottenburg is building an opera house of its own, and Spandau a theatre; and there has just been formed in Berlin a "Society of the German Artistes' Theatre," with a capital of $200,000, which is a project along the general lines of the Comedie Francaise. The discussions and arguments relating to these munic.i.p.al expenditures, as I read them in the newspapers, are all based upon the a.s.sumption that the people have a right to good and cheap music, just as they have a right to good and cheap beer and bread.

At Dusseldorf one of the theatres, managed by a woman, and supported by the best people in the town, is not only a playhouse, but a school for actors, and a proving-ground for the drama. It is a treat indeed to attend the performances there. We have tried similar things in America, but with sad results. Fifty millionaires, no one of whom had ever read the text of a serious play in his life, build a temple for the drama, but there are no plays, no actors, no audience, nothing is accomplished. There is no critical body of real lovers of the drama, and there are no cheap seats, and there is still that fatuous notion that exclusiveness, except in the trifling matter of physical propinquity, can be bought with dollars.

The only impenetrably exclusive thing in the world is intellect, he is the only aristocrat left in these democratic days, and we are not devoting much attention as yet to his breeding. We do not realize that the only valuable democrat must be an aristocrat. "Culture seeks to do away with cla.s.ses and sects; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely; nourished and not bound by them. This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality."

In Germany there are more men of culture per thousand of the population than in any other land, but they rule the country not by "sweetness and light," but by force. This seems at first a contradiction. It is not. Religion, life, and love are all savage things. Because we have known men who preach but do not believe; men who breathe and walk who have not lived; men who protest but who have not loved, we are p.r.o.ne to think of religion, life, and love as soft.

We have conquered and chastened so much of nature: the air, the water, the bowels of the earth that we fool ourselves with thinking that culture also is tame, that religion, life, and love are tame too.

Savage things they are! You may know them by that! If you find them nice, vivacious, amusing, amenable, be sure that they are forgeries.

This is the profound fallacy underlying the present-day economic peace propagandism, whose heaviest underwriter, Mr. Carnegie, is, by the way, an agnostic. While there is faith there will be fighting. Do away with either and society would crumble. What the Puritans did for us, the Prussians have done for Germany. They have fought, are fighting, and will fight for their faith. Though they have many unpleasant characteristics, this is their most admirable quality. They believe in an aristocracy of culture with a right to rule. Goethe said of Luther that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind by centuries, by calling in the pa.s.sions of the mult.i.tude to decide on subjects that ought to have been left to the learned. This is a good example of imitation culture. This is very much the view that Mr. Balfour holds in regard to Cromwell. But Luther and Bismarck made Germany. The one taught Germany to bark, the other taught Germany to bite. The great deliverers of the world came, not to bring peace, but a sword.

When you leave the drab crowd in the streets, and enter the houses of the real rulers of Germany, the contrast between the aristocrat and the plebeian is nowhere so outstanding. I have seen no finer-looking specimens of mankind in face and figure and manner than the best of these men. If you stroll though the halls of the Krieges Academie, where the pick of the young officers of the German army, are preparing themselves for the examinations which admit a very small proportion of them, to appointments on the general staff, you will be delighted with the faces and figures, and the air of alertness and intelligence there. And you will find as fine a type of gentlemen, in face, manners, and figure, at their head as exists anywhere.

There are complaints that this Prussian aristocracy is socially exclusive, is given office both in the army and in civil life too readily; but what an aristocracy it is! These are the men whose families gave, often their all, to make Prussia, and then to make Germany. Service of king and country is in their blood. They get small remuneration for their service. There is no luxury. They spurn the temptations of money. Hundreds and hundreds of them have never been inside the house of a rich parvenu, nor have their women. They work as no other servants work, they live on little, they and their women and children; and you may count yourself happily privileged if they permit you the intimacy of their home life.

Officers and gentlemen there are, living on two thousand five hundred dollars a year, and most of them on much less, and their wives, as well born as themselves, darning their socks and counting the pfennigs with scrupulous care. These are the women whose ancestors flung themselves against the Roman foe, beside their husbands and brothers; these are the women who gave their jewels to save Prussia; these are the women, with the glint of steel and the light of summer skies braided in their eyes, who have taken their hard, self-denying part in making Prussia, and the German Empire. No wonder they despise the mere money-maker, no wonder they will have none of his softness for themselves, and hate what Milton calls "lewdly pampered luxury," as a danger to their children. They know well the moral weapons that won for this starved, and tormented, and poverty-stricken land its present place in the world as a great power.

"And as the fervent smith of yore Beat out the glowing blade, Nor wielded in the front of war The weapons that he made, But in the tower at home still plied His ringing trade;

"So like a sword the son shall roam On n.o.bler missions sent; And as the smith remained at home In peaceful turret pent, So sits the while at home the mother Well content."

I, convinced democrat that I am, know very well that there are, and always have been, and always will be aristocrats, for there is no national salvation without them anywhere in the world. The aristocrats are the same everywhere, no matter what their distinctions of t.i.tle, or whether they have none. They are those who believe that they owe their best to G.o.d and to men, and they serve. Likewise the plebeians are the same all over the world; whatever their presumptions or denials, they believe that they are here to get what they can out of G.o.d and men, and they take far more than they give.

Perhaps no feature of German life is so little known, so little understood, as this simple-living, proud, and exclusive caste, who have made, and still protect and guard, Prussia and Germany. They say: "We made Prussia and Germany, and we intend to guard them, both from enemies at home and from enemies abroad!" My admiration for these men and women is so unbounded, that I would no more carry criticism with me into their homes, than I would carry mud into a sanctuary.

They have done much for Germany, but the best, perhaps, of all is that they have made economy and simple living feasible and even fashionable; they have made talent aristocratic; they have insisted that social life shall be founded on service and breeding and ability.

They will have no dealings with Herr Muller, the rich shopkeeper, but whatever name the distinguished artist, or public servant, or man of science, or young giant in any field of intellectual prowess may bear, he is welcomed. In general this welcome given by German society to talent holds good. There is, however, a society composed of the great landed proprietors, who live in the country, who come to Berlin rarely, and whose horizon is limited severely to their own small interests, their restricted circle, and by their provincial pride.

They recognize n.o.body but themselves, for the reason that they know n.o.body and nothing else. There is an exclusiveness born of stupidity, just as there is an exclusiveness born of a sense of duty to one's position and traditions in the world. One must recognize that this side of social life exists in Germany just as it exists in England, and France, and Austria, but it is fast losing its importance and its power.

One hears it lamented that society is changing, that the rich Jew and the rich gentile are received where twenty-five years ago the social portals were shut against them, and that many go to their houses who would not have gone not many years ago. My experience is too slender to weigh these matters in years; my contention is only that, from an American or English stand-point, their social life is notably simple, and still largely founded on merit and service, rather than upon the means to provide luxury.

Though there are thousands of people received at court each year, this does not mean that they are invited to the more intimate parties of those in court control. They are tolerated, not welcomed. Such people are invited to the court ball, but never thought of, even, as guests at the small supper party of, say, a court official later in the evening. Prussia and Germany are still ruled socially and politically by a small group of, roughly, fifty thousand men, eight thousand of them in the frock-coat of the civilian official, and the rest in military uniforms. Added to this must be named a few great financiers, shipping and mining and industrial magnates, and great land-owners, and less than half a dozen journalists, and as many professors.

According to the census there are in all only 720 persons in Berlin with incomes of more than $25,000 a year, and 521 of these have between $25,000 and $60,000 a year, leaving a very small number, indeed, with incomes adequate, from an American point of view, for extravagant social expenditure. Of these 200, probably not 50 are figures in the social life of the capital. It may be seen at once, therefore, that entertaining cannot be on a lavish or spectacular scale.

The minister of foreign affairs and the imperial minister of the interior receive salaries of 36,000 marks, with 14,000 marks additional for expenses. The Prussian ministers have the same. Other ministers receive 30,000 marks and 14,000 additional for expenses. The chancellor of the empire receives 36,000 marks and 64,000 additional for expenses. The highest receivable pension is three-fourths of the salary?not counting the additional sum for expenses, or, as it is named, Reprasentationsaufwand--after forty years of service. The foreign amba.s.sadors to the more expensive capitals, London, Paris, Washington, Saint Petersburg, receive 150,000 marks a year. Where one has seen something of the innumerable demands upon the income of a foreign amba.s.sador, one is the more amazed that a great democracy like ours should so restrict the salaries of its representatives abroad that only rich men dare undertake the duty. What could be more undemocratic!

Germany is a rich, very rich, country in the sense that it has the most intelligent, hardest-working, most fiercely economical, and the most rationally and most easily contented population of any of the great powers. But Germany is not rich in surplus and liquid capital as compared with England, France, or America. It is the more to her credit that her capital is all hard at work. There is just so much less for luxury. The people in the streets; the shop-windows; the scale of charges at places of public resort and amus.e.m.e.nt; the very small number of well-turned-out private vehicles; the comparatively few people who live in houses and not in apartments; the simplicity of the gowns of the women, and their inexpensive jewelry and other ornaments; the fewer servants; the salaries and wages of all cla.s.ses, point decisively to plain living on the part of practically everybody.

Let me say very emphatically, however, that this economy means no lack of generosity. I doubt if there are people anywhere so restricted as to means, and so delightfully hospitable at the same time. Berlin is not as yet under that cloud that covers the new, uncultivated, and rich society in America, that tyranny of money which makes men and women fearful of being without it. Such people shiver at the bare thought of losing what money will buy, for the shameful reason that then there would be nothing left to them; and they are driven, many of them, both in London and in New York, to any humiliation, often to any degradation, to avoid it. They grossly overrate the value of money, and they exaggerate the terrors of being without it.

Professor William James, who succeeded in a.n.a.lyzing what is at the back of men's brains as well as anybody, writes: "We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. We have lost the power of even imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do, and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly--the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. ? It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated cla.s.ses is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers." They suffer from this malady less in Germany than in America or in England. I should like to introduce such people into dozens of households in Berlin; alas, they could not speak or understand the moral or mental language there, where there is everything that makes a home's heart beat proudly and peaceably, except money. "La prosperite decouvre les vices, et l'adversite les vertus."

These people need no tribute from me, and for their hospitality and friendliness I can make no adequate return. I sigh to think that we in America know so little of them. Germany would not be where she is without them; and I offer them as an example to my countrymen, and to my countrywomen especially, as showing what self-sacrifice and simplicity, and loyal service can do for a nation in times of stress; and what high ideals and st.u.r.dy independence and contempt for luxury can do in the dangerous days of prosperity. Unadvertised, unheralded, keeping without murmuring or envy to their own traditions, they are here, as everywhere, the saviors of the world.

In this great city of Berlin it may seem that I have over-emphasized their part in the drama of the city's life. Not so! They are the backbone of the munic.i.p.al as of the national body corporate. It is no easy industrial progress, no increasing wealth and population, no military prowess, no isolated great leader that makes a nation or a city. It is the men and women giving the high and unpurchasable gift of service to the state; giving the fine example of self-sacrificing and simple living; giving the prowess won by years of hard mental and moral training; giving the gentle courtesy and kindly welcome of the patrician to the stranger, who lift a nation or a city to a worthy place in the world. Seek not for Germany's strength first in her fleet, her army, her hordes of workers, nay, not even in her philosophers, teachers, and musicians, though they glisten in the eyes of all the world, for you will not find it there. It is in these quiet and simple homes, that so few Americans and Englishmen ever enter, that you will find the sweetness and the sternness, the indomitable pride of service, and the self-sacrificing loyalty that won, and that keep for Germany her place in the world.

VI "A LAND OF d.a.m.nED PROFESSORS"

It can hardly be doubted that could Lord Palmerston have seen what I have seen of the changes in Germany, he would at least have placed the "d.a.m.ned," in another part of his famous sentence. These professors have turned their prowess into channels which have given Germany, in this scientific industrial age, a mighty grip upon something more than theories. It may be dull reading to tell the tale of d.a.m.ned professordom, but it is to Germany that we must all go to school in these matters.

The American chooses his university or college because it is in the neighborhood; because his father or other relatives went there; because his school friends are going there; on account of the prestige of the place; sometimes, too, because one is considered more democratic than another; sometimes, and perhaps more often than we think, on account of the athletics; because it is large or small; or on account of the cost.

The German youth, owing to widely different customs and ideals, chooses his university for other reasons. If he be of the well-to-do cla.s.ses, and his father before him was a corps student, he is likely to go first to the university, where his father's corps will receive him and discipline him in the ways of a corps student's life, and rigorous ways they are, as we shall see. Young men of small means, and who can afford to waste little time in the amus.e.m.e.nts of university life, go at once where the more celebrated professors in their particular line of work are lecturing.

Few students in Germany reside during their whole course of study at one university. The student year is divided into two so-called semesters. The student remains, say, in Heidelberg two years or perhaps less, and then moves on, let us say, to Berlin, or Gottingen, or Leipsic, or Kiel, to hear lectures by other professors, and to get and to see something of the best work in law, theology, medicine, history, or belles-lettres, along the lines of his chosen work.

One can hardly say too much in praise of this system. Many a medical, or law, or theological, or philosophical student, or one who is going in for a scientific course in engineering or mining, would profit enormously could he go from Harvard to Yale, or to Johns Hopkins, or to Princeton, or to Columbia, and attend the lectures of the best men at these and other universities. Many a man would have gone eagerly to Harvard to hear James in philosophy, Peirce in mathematics, Abbot in exegesis, or to read Greek with Palmer; or to Yale to have heard Whitney in philology in my day; or now, to name but a few, Van d.y.k.e at Princeton, Sloane at Columbia, Wheeler at the University of California, Paul Sh.o.r.ey at Chicago, and many others are men whom not to know and to hear in one's student days is a loss.

The German student is at a distinct advantage in this privilege of hearing the best men at whatever university they may be. The number of students, indeed, at particular German universities rises and falls in a large measure according to the fame and ability of the professors who may be lecturing there. One can readily imagine how such men as Hegel, or Ranke, or Mommsen, who lectured at Berlin; or Liebig or Dollinger, at Munich; or Ewald, at Gottingen; or Sybel, at Bonn; or Leibnitz or Schlegel, in their day, or Kuno Fischer, in my day, at Heidelberg, must have drawn students from all parts of Germany; just as do Harnack, and Schmidt, and Lamprecht, and Adolph Wagner, Schmoller, or Gierke, or Schiemann, or Wach, Haeckel, List, Deitsch, Hering, or Verworm, in these days. Though the German professors are somewhat hampered by the fact that they are servants of the state, and their opinions therefore on theological, political, and economic matters restricted to the state's views, they are free as no other teachers in the world to exploit their intellectual prowess for the benefit of their purses. Each student pays each professor whose lectures he attends, and as a result there are certain professors in Germany whose incomes are as high as $50,000 a year.

Even in intellectual matters state control produces the inevitable state laziness and indifference. One could tell many a tale of professors who arrive late at their lecture-rooms, who read slowly, who give just as little matter as they can, in order to make their prepared work go as far as possible. Some of them, too, read the same lectures over and over again, year after year, quite content that they have made a reputation, gained a fixed tenure of their positions, and are sure of a pension.

There are twenty-one universities in Germany, with another already provided for this year in Frankfort, and practically the equivalent of a university in Hamburg. The total number of students is 66,358, an increase since 1895 of 37,791. Geographically speaking, one has the choice between Kiel, Konigsberg, and Berlin in the north, Munich in the south, Stra.s.sburg on the boundaries of France, or Breslau in Silesia. At the present writing Berlin has 9,686 students, and some 5,000 more authorized to attend lectures, over half of them grouped under the general heading "Philosophy"; next comes Munich with 7,000, nearly 5,000 of them grouped under the headings "Jurisprudence"

and "Philosophy"; then Leipsic with 5,000; then Bonn with 4,000; and last in point of numbers Rostock with 800 students. There are now some 1,500 women students at the German universities, but a total of 4,500 who attend lectures, and Doctor Marie Linden at the beginning of 1911 was appointed one of the professors of the medical faculty at Bonn, but the appointment was vetoed by the Prussian ministry.

In addition to the universities is the modern development of the technical high-schools, of which there are now eleven, one each in Berlin, Dresden, Braunschweig, Darmstadt, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Munich, Stuttgart, Danzig, Aix, and Breslau. These schools have faculties of architecture, building construction, mechanical engineering, chemistry, and general science, including mathematics and natural science. They confer the degree of Doctor of Engineering, and admit those students holding the certificate of the Gymnasium, Realgymnasium, and Oberrealschule. They rank now with the universities, and their 17,000 students may fairly be added to the grand total number of German students, making 83,000 in all, and if to this be added the 4,000 unmatriculated students, we have 87,000.

While the population of Germany has increased 1.4 per cent. in the last year, the number of students has increased 4.6 per cent. and of the total number 4.4 per cent. are women. Since the founding of the empire the population has increased from 40,000,000 to 65,000,000, but the number of students has increased from 18,000 to 60,000. The teaching staffs in the universities number 3,400, and in the technical high-schools 753, or, roughly, there are, in the higher-education department of Germany, nearly 90,000 persons engaged; as these figures do not include officials and many unattached teachers and students indirectly connected with the universities. There are in addition agricultural high-schools, agricultural inst.i.tutes, and technical schools such as veterinary high-schools, schools of mining, forestry, architecture and building, commercial schools, schools of art and industry; a naval school at Kiel; a colonial inst.i.tute at Hamburg, with sixty professors and tutors, where men are trained for colonial careers, and which serves also the purpose of distributing information of all kinds regarding the colonies; there are 400 schools which prepare for a business career, with 50,000 pupils, and the Socialists in Berlin maintain an academy for the instruction of their paid secretaries and organizers in the rudiments and controversial points of socialism, military academies at Berlin and Munich, besides some 50 schools of navigation, and 20 military and cadet inst.i.tutions. There are also courses of lectures, given under the auspices of the German foreign office, to instruct candidates for the consular service in the commercial and industrial affairs of Germany.

At several of the universities evening extension lectures are given, an innovation first tried at Leipsic, where more than seven thousand persons paid small fees to attend the lectures in a recent year.

If one considers the range of instruction from the Volkschulen and Fortbildungsschulen up through the skeleton list I have mentioned to the universities, and then on beyond that to the thousands still engaged as students in the commerce and industry of Germany, as, for example, the technically employed men in the Krupp Works at Essen, or the Color Works at Elberfeld, to mention two of hundreds, it is seen that Germany is gone over with a veritable fine-tooth comb of education. There is not only nothing like it, there is nothing comparable to it in the world. If training the minds of a population were the solution of the problems of civilization, they are on the way to such solution in Germany.

Unfortunately there is no such easy way out of our troubles for Germany or for any other nation. Some of us will live to see this fetich of regimental instruction of everybody disappear as astrology has disappeared. There is a j.a.panese proverb which runs, "The bottom of lighthouses is very dark."

As early as 1717 Frederick William I in an edict commanded parents to send their children to school, daily in summer, twice a week in winter. Frederick the Great at the close of the Seven Years' War, 1764, insisted again upon compulsory school attendance, and prescribed books, studies, and discipline. At the beginning of the nineteenth century began a great change in the primary schools due to the influence of Pestalozzi, and in the secondary schools owing to the efforts of Herder, Frederic August Wolf, William Humboldt, and Sunern. Humboldt was the Prussian minister of education for sixteen months. In 1809 he sent a memorial to the King, urging the establishment and endowment of a university in Berlin. He used his authority and his great influence to further higher and secondary education, and fixed the main lines of action which were followed for a century. He hoped that a liberal education of his countrymen would make for both an intellectual and moral regeneration, and emanc.i.p.ate the people from their sluggish obedience to conventionality. The schools then were part of the ecclesiastical organization and have never ceased to be so wholly, and until recently the t.i.tle of the Prussian minister has been: "Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, Instruction, and Medical Affairs." That part of the minister's t.i.tle, "Medical Affairs," has within the last few months been eliminated.

The French Revolution, and the dismemberment of Prussia at Tilsit, put a stop to orderly progress. Stein and his colleagues, however, started anew; students were sent to Switzerland to study pedagogical methods; provincial school-boards were established, and about 1850 all public-school teachers were declared to be civil servants; and later, in 1872, during Bismarck's campaign against the Jesuits, all private schools were made subject to state inspection. In Prussia to-day no man or woman may give instruction even as a governess or private tutor, without the certificate of the state.

This control of education and teaching by a central authority is an unmixed blessing. In Prussia, at any rate, the officials are hard-working, conscientious, and enthusiastic, and the system, whether one gives one's full allegiance to it or not, is admirably worked out.

Above all, it completely does away with sham physicians, sham doctors of divinity, sham engineers, and mining and chemical experts, sham dentists and veterinary surgeons, who abound in our country, where shoddy schools do a business of selling degrees and certificates of proficiency in everything from exegesis to obstetrics. These fakir academies are not only a disgrace but a danger in America, and here, as in other matters, Germany has a right to smile grimly at certain of our hobbledehoy methods of government.

The elementary schools, or Volkschulen, are free, and attendance is compulsory from six to fourteen; in addition, the Fortbildungsschulen, or continuation schools, can also be made compulsory up to eighteen years of age.

There are some 61,000 free public elementary schools with over 10,000,000 pupils, and over 600 private elementary schools with 42,000 pupils who pay fees.

Under a regulation of the Department of Trade and Industry, towns with more than twenty thousand inhabitants are empowered to make their own rules compelling commercial employees under eighteen to attend the continuation schools a certain number of hours monthly, and fining employers who interfere with such attendance. It has even been suggested that this law be extended to include girls.

In Berlin this has already been put into operation, and this year some 30,000 girls will be compelled to attend continuation schools, where they will be taught cooking, dress-making, laundry work, house-keeping economy, and for those who wish it, office work.

It will require some training even to p.r.o.nounce the name of this new inst.i.tution, which requires something more than the number of letters in the alphabet to spell it, for it has this terrifying t.i.tle: Madchenpflicht-fortbildungsschule.

The work in these Pflichtfortbildungsschulen, or compulsory continuation schools, is practical and thorough. The boys are from fourteen to eighteen years of age, and are obliged to attend three hours twice a week. Shopkeepers and others, employing lads coming under the provisions of the law, are obliged by threat of heavy fines to send them. The boys pay nothing. There are some 34,000 of such pupils under one jurisdiction in Berlin, and the cost to the city is $300,000 annually. The curriculum includes letter-writing, book- keeping, exchange, bank-credits, checks and bills, the duty of the business man to his home, to the city, and to his fellow business men, his legal rights and duties, and, in great detail, all questions of citizenship. Methods of the banks, stock exchange, and insurance companies are explained. The business man's relations in detail to the post-office, the railways, the customs, ca.n.a.ls, shipping agencies are dealt with. The investigation of credits and the general management from cellar to attic of what we call a "store" are taught, and lectures are given upon business ethics and family relations and morals.

In towns where factories are more common than shops there are schools similar in kind, as at Dortmund, for example, where you may begin with horse-shoeing in the cellar, and go up through the work of carpenter, mason, plumber, sign-painter, poster-designer, to the designing of stained-gla.s.s windows and the modelling of animals and men.