even under these ideal conditions; for it is difficult to see how the
state could be more grandmotherly in her officious care of her own.
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 pricked 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 assembly very seriously,
when, as the most important measure of which they are capable, they
can vote to have themselves dismissed by declining to pass 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 Strasse,
Berliner Strasse, 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 scrap 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 grass, and with separate roads on each side for
horsemen or foot-passengers. 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 assistants 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
nobody, 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 title-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
pass a doctor's examination, and be passed 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, Duesseldorf, 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 municipal
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-class system of voting, which is described in another chapter.
This three-class 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 municipal 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 surreptitious murder. We make our municipal 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
class 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 snob 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 classic 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 sophomorical 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
superstition, 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 municipal 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
canals, docks, and pawn-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 massed 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 fasse
Ne saurait passer pour galaud."
One should read Hazlitt's "Essay on the Cockney" 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 glass with his hand
that he might see the better. It is not impertinence, it is merely
bucolic naivete. 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 Cumberland, 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 zooelogical 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 quantity 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-class 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
mass of the people give such an air of being comfortably clothed and
fed.