Germany and the Germans Part 9

But this is not enough. Physical safety is not enough, the demand is for political freedom, and for a government answerable to the people and the people's representatives. Rich men, powerful men, representative men by the thousands, men whom one meets of all sorts and conditions, and who are neither radical nor socialistic, vote the Social Democrat ticket. The Social Democrats are by no means all democrats nor all socialists. As a body of voters they are united only in the expression of their discontent with a government of officials, practically chosen and kept in power over their heads, and with whose tenure of office they have nothing to do.

The fact that the members of the Reichstag are not in the saddle, but are used unwillingly and often contemptuously as a necessary and often stubborn and unruly pack-animal by the Kaiser-appointed ministers; the fact that they are p.r.i.c.ked forward, or induced to move by a tempting feed held just beyond the nose, has something to do, no doubt, with the lack of unanimity which exists. The diverse elements debate with one another, and waste their energy in rebukes and recriminations which lead nowhere and result in nothing. I have listened to many debates in the Reichstag where the one aim of the speeches seemed to be merely to unburden the soul of the speaker. He had no plan, no proposal, no solution, merely a confession to make. After forty-odd years the Germans, in many ways the most cultivated nation in the world, are still without real representative government.

Why should the press or society take this a.s.sembly very seriously, when, as the most important measure of which they are capable, they can vote to have themselves dismissed by declining to pa.s.s supply bills; and when, as has happened four times in their history, they return chastened, tamed, and amenable to the wishes of their master?

No wonder the political writing in the press seems to us vaporish and without definite aims. It is perhaps due to this weakness that the writing in the German journals upon other subjects is very good indeed. The best energies of the writers are devoted to what may be called educational and literary expositions. In the field of foreign politics the German press is less well-informed, less instructive, and consequently irritating. The poverty of material resources makes such writing as that of Sir Valentine Chirrol, and in former days that of Mr. G. W. Smalley, beyond the reach of the German journalist, and their press is painfully narrow, frequently unfair, and often purposely insulting to foreign countries. They are not only anti- English, but anti-French, anti-American, and at times bitter. If the American people read the German newspapers there would be little love lost between us.

V BERLIN

He is a fortunate traveller who enters Berlin from the west, and toward the end of his journey rolls along over the twelve or fifteen miles of new streets, glides under the Brandenburger Tor, and finds himself in Unter den Linden. The Kaiserdamm, Bismarck Stra.s.se, Berliner Stra.s.se, Charlottenburgerchaussee, Unter den Linden, give the most splendid street entrance into a city in the world. The pavement is without a hole, without a crack, and as clear of rubbish of any kind as a well-kept kitchen floor. The cleanliness is so noticeable that one looks searchingly for even a sc.r.a.p of paper, for some trace of negligence, to modify this superiority over the streets of our American cities. But there is no consolation; the superiority is so incontestable that no comparison is possible. For the whole twelve or fifteen miles the streets are lined with trees, or shrubs, or flowers, with well-kept gra.s.s, and with separate roads on each side for hors.e.m.e.n or foot-pa.s.sengers. In the spring and summer the streets are a veritable garden.

Broadway is 80 feet wide; Fifth Avenue is 100 feet wide; the Champs Elysees is 233 feet wide; and Unter den Linden is 196 feet wide, and has 70 feet of roadway.

For every square yard of wood pavement in Berlin there are 24 square yards of asphalt and 37 square yards of stone. The total length of streets cleaned in Berlin, which has an area of 25 square miles, according to a report of some few years ago, was 316 miles; there are 700 streets and some 70 open places, and the area cleaned daily was 8,160,000 square yards. The cost of the care of the Berlin streets has risen with the growth of the city from 1,670,847 marks, [1] in 1880, to 6,068,557 marks, in 1910. The total cost of the street-cleaning in New York, in 1907, was $9,758,922, and in Manhattan, The Bronx, and Brooklyn 5,129 men were employed; while the working force in Berlin, in 1911, was 2,150. It should be said also that in New York an enormous amount of scavenging is paid for privately besides. In New York the street-sweepers are paid $2.19 a day; in Berlin the foremen receive 4.75 marks the first three years, and thereafter 5 marks; the men 3.75 marks the first three years, then 4 marks, and after nine years' service 4.50 marks. The boy a.s.sistants receive 2 marks, after two years 2.25 marks, and after four years service 3 marks. The whole force is paid every fourteen days. The street-cleaning department is divided into thirty-three districts, these districts into four groups, each with an inspector, and all under a head-inspector. Attached to each district are depots with yards for storage of vehicles, apparatus, brooms, shovels, uniforms, with machine shops, where on more than one occasion I have seen enthusiastic workmen trying experiments with new machinery to facilitate their work.

[1] The mark is equal to a little less than twenty-five cents.

Over this whole force presides, a politician? Far from it; a technically educated man of wide experience, and, of the official of my visit I may add, of great courtesy and singular enthusiasm both for his task and for the men under him. What his politics are concerns n.o.body, what the politics of the party in power are concerns him not at all. That an individual, or a group of individuals, powerful financially or politically, should influence him in his choice or in his placing of the men under him is unthinkable. That a political boss in this or in that district, should dictate who should and who should not, be employed in the street-cleaning department, even down to the meanest remover of dung with a dust-pan, as was done for years in New York and every other city in America, would be looked upon here as a farce of Topsy-Turvydom, with Alice in Wonderland in the t.i.tle-role.

The streets are cleaned for the benefit of the people, and not for the benefit of the pockets of a political aristocracy. The public service is a guardian, not a predatory organization. In our country when a man can do nothing else he becomes a public servant; in Germany he can only become a public servant after severe examinations and ample proofs of fitness. The superiority of one service over the other is moral, not merely mechanical.

The street-cleaning department is recruited from soldiers who have served their time, not over thirty-five years of age, and who must pa.s.s a doctor's examination, and be pa.s.sed also by the police. The rules as to their conduct, their uniforms, their rights, and their duties, down to such minute carefulness as that they may not smoke on duty "except when engaged in peculiarly dirty and offensive labor,"

are here, as in all official matters in Germany, outlined in labyrinthine detail. Sickness, death, accident, are all provided for with a pension, and there are also certain gifts of money for long service. The police and the street-cleaning department co-operate to enforce the law, where private companies or the city-owned street-railways are negligent in making repairs, or in replacing pavement that has been disturbed or destroyed. There is no escape. If the work is not done promptly and satisfactorily, it is done by the city, charged against the delinquent, and collected!

One need go into no further details as to why and wherefore Berlin, Hamburg, even Cologne in these days, Leipsic, Dusseldorf, Dresden, Munich, keep their streets in such fashion, that they are as corridors to the outside of Irish hovels, as compared to the city streets of America; for the definite and all-including answer and explanation are contained in the two words: no politics.

Berlin is governed by a town council, under a chief burgomaster and a burgomaster, and the civic magistracy, and the police, these last, however, under state control. The chief burgomaster and the burgomaster are chosen from trained and experienced candidates, and are always men of wide experience and severe technical training, who have won a reputation in other towns as successful munic.i.p.al administrators.

In May, 1912, Wermuth, the son of the blind King of Hanover's right-hand man, and he himself the recently resigned imperial secretary of the treasury, was elected Oberburgomaster of Berlin. Such is the standing of the men named to govern the German cities. It is as though Elihu Root should be elected mayor of New York, with Colonel John Biddle as police commissioner, and Colonel Goethals as commissioner of street-cleaning. May the day come when we can avail ourselves of the services of such men to govern our cities!

The magistracy numbers 34, of whom 18 receive salaries. The town council consists of 144 members, half of whom must be householders.

They are elected for six years, and one-third of them retire every two years, but are eligible for re-election. They are elected by the three-cla.s.s system of voting, which is described in another chapter.

This three-cla.s.s system of voting results in certain inequalities. In Prussia, for example, fifteen per cent. of the voters have two-thirds of the electoral power, and relatively the same may be said of Berlin.

Unlike the munic.i.p.al elections in American cities, the voters have only a simple ballot to put in the ballot-box. National and state politics play no part, and the voter is not confused by issues that have nothing to do with his city government. The government of their cities is arranged for on the basis that officials will be honest, and work for the city and not for themselves. Our city organizations often give the air of living under laws framed to prevent thievery, bribery, blackmailing, and surrept.i.tious murder. We make our munic.i.p.al laws as though we were in the stone age.

These German cities are also, unlike American cities, autonomous. They have no state-made charters to interpret and to obey; they are not restricted as to debt or expenditure; and they are not in the grip of corporations that have bought or leased water, gas, electricity, or street-railway franchises, and these, represented by the wealthiest and most intelligent citizens, become, through the financial undertakings and interests of these very same citizens, often the worst enemies of their own city. The German cities are spared also the confusion, which is injected into our politics by a fortunately small cla.s.s of reformers, with the prudish peculiarities of morbid vestals; men who cannot work with other men, and who bring the virile virtues, the sound charities, and wholesome morality into contempt.

We all know him, the smug sn.o.b of virtue. You may find him a professor at the university; you may find him leading prayer-meetings and preaching pure politics; you may find him the bloodless philanthropist; you may find him a rank atheist, with his patents for the bringing in of his own kingdom of heaven. These are the men above all others who make the Tammanyizing of our politics possible. Honest men cannot abide the hot-house atmosphere of their self-conscious virtue. Nothing is more discouraging to robust virtue than the criticisms of teachers of ethics, who live in coddled comfort, upon private means, and other people's ideas.

Germany is just now suffering from the spasms of moral colic, due to overeating. All luxury is in one form or another overeating. Berlin itself has grown too rapidly into the vicious ways of a metropolis, where spenders and wasters congregate. In 1911 the betting-machines at the Berlin race-tracks took in $7,546,000, of which the state took for its license, 16 2/3 per cent. There were 128 days of racing, while in England they have 540 days' racing in the year!

In 1911, 1,300,000 strangers visited Berlin, of whom 1,046,162 were Germans, 97,683 Russians, 39,555 Austrians, 30,550 Americans, and 16,600 English. Berlin killed 2,000,000 beasts for food, including 10,500 horses; she takes care of 3,000 nightly in her night-shelters, puts away $17,500,000 in savings-banks, and has deposits therein of $90,500,000. On the other hand, she has built a palace of vice costing $1,625,000, in which on many nights between 11 P. M. and 2 A. M. they sell $8,000 worth of champagne. No one knows his Berlin, who has not partaken of a "Kalte Ente," or a "Landwehrtopp," a "Schlummerpunsch,"

or "Eine Weisse mit einer Strippe." There is still a boyish notion about dissipation, and they have their own great cla.s.sic to quote from, who in "Faust" pours forth this rather raw advice for gayety:

"Greift nur hinein ins volle Menschenleben!

Ein jeder lebt's, nicht vielen ist's bekannt, Und wo Ihr's packt, da ist es interessant!"

Berlin is still in the throes of that soph.o.m.orical philosophy of life which believes that it is, from the point of view of sophistication, of age, when it is free to be befuddled with wine and befooled by women. But the German mind has no sympathy with hypocrisy. They may be brutal in their rather material views of morals, but they are frank.

There may be mental prigs among them, but there are no moral prigs. In both England and America we suffer from a certain morbid ethical daintiness. There is a ripeness of moral fastidiousness that is often difficult to distinguish from rottenness. It is part of the feminism of America, born of our prosperity, for not one of these fastidious moralists is not a rich man, and Germany escapes this difficulty.

The government of a German city is so simple in its machinery that every voter can easily understand it. No doubt Seth Low and George L.

Rives could explain to an intelligent man the charter under which New York City is governed, but they are very, very rare exceptions.

Our city government is bad, not because democracy is a failure, not because Americans are inherently dishonest, but because we are a superficially educated people, untrained to think, and, therefore, still worshipping the Jeffersonian fetich of divided responsibility between the three branches of the government. The judicial, the legislative, and the executive are, with minute care, forced to check and to impede one another, and we even carry this antiquated superst.i.tion, born of a suspicious and timid republicanism, into the government of our cities. With the exception of those cities in America which are governed by commissions, our cities are slaves as compared with the German cities. They are slaves of the predatory politicians, and they, on the other hand, are the bribed taskmasters of the rich corporations. The German asks in bewilderment why our men of wealth, of leisure, and of intelligence are not devoting themselves to the service of the state and the city. Alas, the answer is the pitiable one that the electoral machinery is so complicated that the voters can be and are, continually humbugged; and worse, many of the wealthy and intelligent, through their stake in valuable city franchises, are incompetent to deal fairly with the munic.i.p.al affairs of their own city. Both in England and in America, the man in the street is quite sound in his judgment, when he declines to trust those who dabble in securities with which their own department has dealings.

The British Caesar's wife official, caught with a handkerchief on her person, woven on the looms of a company whose directors are dealing with the British government, can hardly claim exemption from suspicion, because she bought the handkerchief in America. We all know that when London sniffles the value of handkerchiefs goes up in New York. Caesar's wife finds it difficult to persuade honorable men that she merely had a financial cold, but not the smallest interest in a corner in handkerchiefs.

In the great majority of German cities public-utility services, gas, water, electricity, street-railways, slaughter-houses, and even ca.n.a.ls, docks, and p.a.w.n-shops are owned and controlled by the cities themselves. There is no loop-hole for private plunder, and there is, on the contrary, every incentive to all citizens, and to the rich in particular, to enforce the strictest economy and the most expert efficiency.

What theatres, opera-houses, orchestras, museums, what well-paved and clean streets, what parks Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco might have, had these cities only a part of the money, of which in the last twenty-five years they have been robbed! It is true that the older cities of Germany have traditions behind them that we lack. Art treasures, old buildings, and an intelligent population demanding the best in music and the drama we cannot hope to supply, but good house-keeping is another matter. Berlin, for example, is a new city as compared with New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and its growth has been very rapid.

It cannot be said for us alone that we have grown so fast that we have had no time to keep pace with the needs of our population. Berlin, all Germany indeed, has been growing at a prodigious rate. The population of Berlin in 1800 was 100,000; in 1832 only 250,000; hardly half a million in 1870; while the population now is over 2,000,000, and over 3,000,000 if one includes the suburbs, which are for all practical purposes part and parcel of Berlin. Charlottenburg, for example, with a population of 19,517 in 1871, now has a population of 305,976, and the vicinage of Berlin has grown in every direction in like proportions.

There were no towns in Germany till the eighth century, except those of the Romans on the Rhine and the Danube. In 1850 there were only 5 towns in Germany with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and in 1870 only 8; in 1890, 26; in 1900, 33; in 1905, 41; in 1910, 47; and nearly the whole increase of population is now ma.s.sed in the middle-sized and large cities. The same may be said of the drift of population in America. "A thrifty but rather unprogressive provincial town of 60,000 inhabitants," writes Mr. J. H. Harper, of New York, in 1810.

Between 1860 and 1900 the proportion of urban to rural population in the United States more than doubled. In the last ten years the percentage of people living in cities, or other incorporated places of more than 2,500 inhabitants, increased from 40.5 to 46.3 per cent. of the total; while twenty years ago only 36.1 per cent. of the population lived in such incorporated places.

As late as the thirteenth century the Christian chivalry of the time was spending itself in the task of converting the heathen of what is now Prussia; and it was well on into the nineteenth century before serfdom was entirely abolished in this region. It is the newness and rawness of the population, in the streets of the great German and Prussian capital which surprise and puzzle the American, almost more than the cleanliness and orderliness of the streets themselves. It is as though a powerful monarch had built a fine palace and then, for lack of company, had invited the people from the fields and farm-yards to be his companions therein.

"Jamais un lourdaud, quoi qu'il fa.s.se Ne saurait pa.s.ser pour galaud."

One should read Hazlitt's "Essay on the c.o.c.kney" to find phrases for these Berliners. It is a gazing, gaping crowd that straggles along over the broad sidewalks. Half a dozen to a dozen will stop and stare at people entering or leaving vehicles, at a shop, or hotel door. I have seen a knot of men stop and stare at the ladies entering a motor-car, and on one occasion one of them wiped off the gla.s.s with his hand that he might see the better. It is not impertinence, it is merely bucolic navete. The city in the evening is like a country fair, with its awkward gallantries, its brute curiosity, its unabashed expressions of affection by hands and lips, its ogling, coughing, and other peasant forms of flirtation. It should be remembered that this people as a race show somewhat less of reticence in matters amatory than we are accustomed to. In the foyer of the theatre you may see a young officer walking round and round, his arm under that of his fiancee or bride, and her hand fondly clasped in his. It is a commentary, not a criticism, on international manners that the German royal princess, a particularly sweet and simple maiden, just engaged to marry the heir of the house of c.u.mberland, is photographed walking in the streets of Berlin, her hand clasped in that of her betrothed, and both he, and her brother who accompanies them, smoking! Gentlemen do not smoke when walking or driving with ladies, with us, though I am not claiming that it is a moral disaster to do so. It is a difference in the gradations of respect worth noting, but nothing more. I have even seen kissing, as a couple walked up the stairs from one part of the theatre to another. In the spring and summer the paths of the Tiergarten of a morning are strewn with hair-pins, a curious, but none the less accurate, indication of the rather fumbling affection of the night before.

To live in a fashionable hotel, in a land whose people you wish to study, is as valueless an experience as to go to a zoological garden to learn to track a mountain sheep or to ride down a wild boar. You must go about among the people themselves, to their restaurants, to their houses, if they are good enough to ask you, and to the resorts of all kinds that they frequent.

The manners are better than in my student days, but there is still a deal of improvised eating and drinking. There is much tucking of napkins under chins that the person may be shielded from misdirected food-offerings. There is not a little use of the knife where the fork or spoon is called for; but this last I always look upon as a remnant of courage, of the virility remaining in the race from a not distant time when the knife served to clear the forest, to build the hut, to kill the deer, and to defend the family from the wolf; and the traditions of such a weapon still give it predominance over the more epicene fork, as a link with a stirring past. Mere daintiness in feeding is characteristic of the lapdog and other over-protected animals. Unthinking courage in the matter of victuals is rather a relief from the strained and anxious hygienic watchfulness of the overcivilized and the overrich. The body should be, and is, regarded by wholesome-minded people, not as an idol, but as an instrument. The German no doubt sees something ignominious in counting as one chews a chop, in the careful measuring of one's liquids, in the restricting of oneself to the diet of the squirrel and the cow. He would perhaps prefer to lose a year or two of life rather than to nut and spinach himself to longevity. The wholesome body ought of course to be unerring and automatic in its choice of the quant.i.ty and quality of its fuel.

A well-dressed man in Berlin is almost as conspicuous as a dancing bear. This comparison may lead the stranger to infer, in spite of what has been said of the orderliness of Berlin, that dancing bears are permitted in the streets. It is only fair to Berlin's admirable police president, von Jagow, to say that they are not.

If one leaves the officers, who are a fine, upstanding, well-groomed lot, out of the account, the inhabitants of Berlin are almost grotesque in their dowdiness. This is the more remarkable for the reason that the citizens of Berlin, wherever you see them, not only in the West-end, but in the tenement districts, in the public markets, going to or coming from the suburban trains, in the trains and underground railway, in the cheaper restaurants and pleasure resorts, taking their Sunday outing, or in the fourth-cla.s.s carriages of the railway trains, or their children in the schools, show a high level of comfort in their clothing. There is poverty and wretchedness in Berlin, of which later, but in no great city even in America, does the ma.s.s of the people give such an air of being comfortably clothed and fed.

We have been deluged of late years with figures in regard to the cost of living in this country and in that, and never are statistics such "d.a.m.ned lies" as in this connection. There is better and cheaper food in Berlin, and in the other cities of Germany, than anywhere else in our white man's world. Having for the moment no free-trade, or protectionist, or tariff-reform axe to grind, and having tested the pudding not by my prejudices but my palate, and having eaten a fifteen-pfennig luncheon in the street, and climbed step by step the gastronomical stairway in Germany all the way up to a supper at the court, where eight hundred odd people were served with a care and celerity, and with hot viands and irreproachable potables, that made one think of the "Arabian Nights," I offer my experience and my opinion with some confidence. You can get enough to stave off hunger for a few pfennigs, you can get a meal for something under twenty-five cents, and the whole twenty-five cents will include a gla.s.s of the best beer in the world outside of Munich. If you care to spend fifty cents there are countless restaurants where you can have a square meal and a gla.s.s of beer for that price; and for a dollar I will give you as good a luncheon with wine as any man with undamaged taste and unspoiled digestion ought to have.

There is one restaurant in Berlin which feeds as many as five thousand people on a Sunday, where you can dine or sup, and listen to good music, and enjoy your beer and tobacco for an hour afterward, and all for something under fifty cents if you are careful in your ordering.

During my walks in the country around Berlin, I have often had an omelette followed by meat and vegetables, and cheese, and compote, and Rhine wine, with all the bread I wanted, and paid a bill for two persons of a little over a dollar. The Brodchen, or rolls, seem to be everywhere of uniform size and quality, and the b.u.t.ter always good.

Paris is fast losing its place as the home of good all-round eating as compared with Berlin. Of course, New York for geographical reasons, and also because the modern Maecenas lives there, is nowadays the place where Lucullus would invite his emperor to dine if he came back to earth; but I am not discussing the nectar and ambrosia cla.s.ses, but the beer, bread, and pork cla.s.ses, and certainly Berlin has no rival as a provider for them.

After all our study of statistics, of figures, of contrasts, I am not sure that we arrive at any very valuable conclusions. American working-cla.s.ses work ever shorter hours, gain higher wages, but they are indubitably less happy, less rich in experience, less serene than the Germans. This measuring things by dollars, by hours, by pounds and yard-sticks, measures everything accurately enough except the one thing we wish to measure, which is a man's soul. We are producing the material things of life faster, more cheaply, more shoddily, but it is open to question whether we are producing happier men and women, and that is what we are striving to do as the end of it all. Nothing is of any value in the world that cannot be translated into the terms of man-making, or its value measured by what it does to produce a man, a woman, and children living happily together. Wealth does not do this; indeed, wealth beyond a certain limit is almost certain to destroy the foundation of all peace, a contented family.

A shady beer-garden, capital music, and happy fathers and mothers and children, what arithmetic, or algebra, or census tells you anything of that? The infallible recipe for making a child unhappy, is to give it everything it cries for of material things, and never to thwart its will. We throw wages and shorter hours of work at people, but that is only turning them out of prison into a desert. No statistics can deal competently with the comparative well-being of nations, and nothing is more ludicrous than the results arrived at where Germany is discussed by the British or American politician. Whatever figures say, and whatever else they may lack, they are better clothed, better fed and cared for, and have far more opportunities for rational enjoyment, and a thousand-fold more for aesthetic enjoyment, than either the English or the Americans. That they lack freedom, in our sense, is true, but freedom is for the few. The worldwide complaint of the hardship of constant work is rather silly, for most of us would die of monotony if we were not forced to work to keep alive, and to make a living.

The city, with its broad, clean streets, its beautiful race-course, shaded walks, its forests and lakes, toward Potsdam, or at Tegel, or Werder, when the blossoms are out, with its well-kept gardens, its profusion of flowers and shrubs and trees, is physically the most wholesome great city in the world; but Hans bleibt immer Hans! Goethe, after a visit to Berlin, wrote: "There are no more unG.o.dly communities than in Berlin." [1]

[1] "Est giebt keine gottlosere Volker als in Berlin."