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 nobler 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 title,
or whether they have none. They are those who believe that they owe
their best to God 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
God 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 nobody but themselves, for the reason that they know
nobody 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, Repraesentationsaufwand -- after forty years of service. The
foreign ambassadors 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 ambassador, 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 amusement; 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 classes,
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 analyzing 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 classes 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 sturdy 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 municipal 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 DAMNED 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
"damned," 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 damned
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
classes, 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 amusements 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 Goettingen, 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 Dyke at Princeton, Sloane at Columbia, Wheeler at the
University of California, Paul Shorey 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
Doellinger, at Munich; or Ewald, at Goettingen; 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, Koenigsberg, and Berlin in the north,
Munich in the south, Strassburg 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 institutes, 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 institute 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 institutions. 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 Japanese 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 Suenern. 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 emancipate 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 title of the Prussian minister has been: "Minister of
Ecclesiastical Affairs, Instruction, and Medical Affairs." That part
of the minister's title, "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.