complete and successful system of land-banks, introduced by Frederick
the Great and since modelled somewhat upon the French methods, which
have protected the farmer from usury, insured him money at low rates
for improvements, for the purchase of tools, cattle, and fertilizers,
and enabled him to do, by sensible co-operation, what would have been
impossible for him as an individual. So successful has been this
co-operation between the banks and the united farming communities that it
were well worth a chapter of description were it not that, through the
initiative of President Taft and the able and industrious assistance
of our officials in Europe, among whom our ambassador in Paris, Mr.
Herrick, may be mentioned as untiring, there will shortly appear a
complete exposition and explanation of the scheme, available for those
of my countrymen interested in the matter. Or if they will journey to
Ireland they may see there what Sir Horace Plunkett has done to
revolutionize, and against tremendous odds, agriculture. And, be it
noted, it has been done, with emphatic warnings against the modern
fallacy of leaning upon state aid. It is estimated that our farmers
would be saved between $20,000,000 and $40,000,000 a year in interest
alone were we to adopt similar methods of loaning to the land-owners.
The Preussische Centralgenossenschaftskasse, or Central Bank of
Co-operative Associations, has revolutionized, one may here use the word
without exaggeration, agricultural methods, throughout Prussia and
Germany.
In Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa there are 5,000,000 acres of land in
wheat, which is practically the size of Germany's wheat acreage, but
Germany produces 140,000,000 bushels of wheat off her parcel of land;
while the wheat raised on the same area in these three States is only
55,000,000 bushels.
France and Minnesota each plant 16,000,000 acres in wheat, but France
produces 324,000,000 bushels and Minnesota 188,000,000 bushels. In
round numbers we support 90,000,000 people on 3,000,000 square miles
of land, and we could support 150 per square mile just as easily as
30, and even then there would be not even a fraction of the density of
population of Denmark, 178; the Netherlands, 470; France, 189; Saxony,
830; England and Wales, 405.6. The average wheat yield of our country
is about 14 bushels per acre in good years, it might just as well be
25; the average cotton yield is about four-tenths of a bale per acre,
and four times that amount could be raised as easily.
In 1900, 10,500,000 people were engaged in agriculture in America, or
35.7 per cent. of the population; as over against 37.7 in 1890 and
44.3 in 1880. Of these 10,500,000, 5,700,000 were owners, renters, or
overseers, or 56 per cent., and only 4,500,000 were actual farm
laborers; and more than half of these, or 2,350,000, were members of
the family, leaving only some 2,000,000 actual agricultural wage-earners,
or employable agricultural laborers. Five-eighths of these
were under twenty-five years of age, and of the white regular workers
only one-tenth were over thirty-five years of age. This shows how
unstable is the foundation of our agricultural prosperity, the chief
asset of plenty and contentment of our country. Mr. Get-Rich-Quick has
moved on to the shifting and more exciting opportunities of the
cities, where poor human nature, aided and abetted by weak
philanthropy, and demagogic fishing for votes by eleemosynary
legislation, provides him with a mild form of riotous living, and a
fatted calf of doles in case of accident, sickness, penury, or old
age.
In our American cities of over 8,000 inhabitants the increase in
population from 1790 to 1900 has been from 3.4 per cent. to 33 per
cent. In cities of 2,500 and over the increase from 1880 to 1900 has
been from 29.3 per cent. to 40.2 per cent. In the State of New York
the farming population is smaller than ever before, and in parts of
New England it is smaller than one hundred years ago. In 1909 there
were 15,000 deserted farms with a total of 1,130,000 acres. The
average size of farms in the United States in 1850 was 212 acres; in
1890, 121 acres. Wages in the reaping season on fruit, grain, and
cotton farms are enormous, running to four and five dollars a day. We
are behind every country in Europe except Russia, in our agricultural
methods. Some day the American people will discover, may it not be too
late, that the tall talk and highfalutin boastings of the politicians
and alien journalists in their midst do nothing to make two blades of
grass grow where one grew before.
Germany may not have solved this problem, indeed no nation which
offers undue legislative alleviation for human frailty will ever solve
it, but at least she has not shirked the problem, and presents for our
enlightenment a scheme in full and smooth working order.
In dealing with German problems it is fair to give examples where her
methods have been wholly and entirely successful. The man who does not
know one tree or shrub from another cannot travel in trains, motor-cars,
or afoot without remarking the neatness, symmetry, and the
flourishing condition of the forests. In these matters Germany so far
surpasses us that we may be said to be merely in a kindergarten stage
of development. As early as 1783 a German traveller, Johann David
Schoepf, was distressed to see the waste of valuable wood in America.
He tells of a furnace in New Jersey which exhausted a forest of nearly
20,000 acres in twelve to fifteen years, and goes on to prophesy the
grave danger to America unless coal is discovered and used instead of
wood.
The public forests in America contain about nine per cent. of
the total land area and about twenty-five per cent. of the forest area
of the country. In Germany the state owns about 40 per cent. of the
forests, and nearly 70 per cent. of the forest area is under state
control. The total forest area of the empire is 34,569,800 acres, and
two-thirds bear pine, larch, and red and white fir. In a recent year
the Federal States made a net profit of $38,250,000 from public lands
and forests, and the entire profit from the German forests was
estimated at $110,000,000. When one remembers that Germany is less
than the size of Texas, and that from her forests alone, in one year,
she received an income equal to more than one-tenth of our total
national expenditure for that same year, the fact of our childish
wastefulness is brought home to us, and makes a patriot feel that a
Gifford Pinchot should be given a free hand. I can only write of the
subject as one technically entirely ignorant, but that Germany is a
university of forestry is not only attested by the demand for her
teachers in India, and in America, and elsewhere in the world, but by
the condition of the forests themselves all over Germany, which no
traveller, from America at any rate, can fail to notice without
surprise and delight.
Germany, like the rest of us, has been obliged
to face the various social problems that arise from original sin, but
which vote-getters are pleased to ascribe to industrial progress. In
our country, with a population of some thirty to the square mile,
while in the kingdom of Saxony the density of the population is 830.6
to the square mile, it is hard to believe that we suffer from
overcrowding so much as from overindulgence, wastefulness, and fussy
legislation. None the less, we have 42 institutions for the feeble-minded,
115 schools and homes for the deaf and blind, 350 hospitals
for the insane, 1,200 refuge houses, 1,300 prisons, 1,500 hospitals,
and 2,500 almshouses. We have 2,000,000 annually who are cared for in
homes and hospitals, 300,000 insane and feeble-minded, 160,000 blind
or deaf, 80,000 prisoners, and 100,000 paupers in almshouses and out,
and we spend each year about $100,000,000 in taking care of them. We
are as wasteful and careless in these matters as we have been until
very lately in our forestry methods.
In the early days of the empire Germany undertook to deal with these
social problems. The German Empire took over some of the principles of
socialism, but retained, and retains absolutely, the power of applying
those principles. Bismarck himself admitted that his advocacy of the
industrial insurance laws was selfish. "My idea was to bribe the
working classes, or shall I say to win them over, to regard the state
as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in
their welfare." Whatever else may have resulted, discontent, whether
well-founded or not, is not now under discussion, has not been
lessened. In 1912 more than one-half of the electors voted
"discontented" as over against the less than one-half who voted
"contented." The mass of the people may be better clothed, better fed,
better housed, better cared for in sickness and in old age, than
formerly, but they are not satisfied. No state can go much further
than Germany has gone along the lines of state interference, guidance,
and control of the personal affairs of its people, and nothing is more
surprising about the whole matter than the general acceptance in
America and in England of such legislation as having proved altogether
successful. I doubt if any intelligent German considers these various
pension schemes as altogether successful. I can vouch for it that many
German statesmen make no such claims in private, whatever they may say
in public.
Some of the barren figures, needing no comment, are of
interest in this connection. The cost of insurance in Germany has
risen to over $500,000 a day, the total cost of state insurance
exceeding $250,000,000 a year at the present time, a fairly heavy tax
upon small employers. In 1909, of 422,076 decisions by the industrial
unions, 76,352 were appealed against, and of the 100,000 arbitration
judgments, 22,794 were appealed against. So difficult is it to settle
to the claimant's satisfaction the amount of salve necessary for his
particular wound when, as is true in these cases, the salve is a grant
of money for a longer or shorter period!
In 1886 there were, roughly,
100,000 accidents reported and 10,000 compensated, but as they became
more thoroughly acquainted with the game, the figures rose in 1908 to
662,321 accidents and 142,965 compensations.
The vast increase of the
claims for trifling injuries is shown by the fact that in twenty years
from 1888 to 1908, despite the increase of the total compensation from
$1,475,000 to $38,715,000, the average compensation per accident fell
from $58.50 to $38.83. In the two years 1907 to 1909 the number of
members of those state-insured increased by 380,819, while the days of
sickness increased by 26,219,632! The cost of sickness insurance alone
rose from $42,895,000 in 1900 to $83,640,000 in 1909. The Workmen's
Compensation Act in England costs, for management, commission, legal
and medical fees, $20,000,000 a year, while the compensation paid out
was $13,500,000. The insurance companies calculate that for every $500
of compensation, the employers have paid $750!
It is becoming increasingly evident that the logical result of state
charity, or call it state insurance to avoid controversy, over a large
field, and including millions of beneficiaries and claimants, is that
the army of officials, the expenses of administration, and the
payments themselves must sooner or later break the back of the state
morally, politically, and financially. It rapidly increases parasitism
among the receivers; makes a powerful though indifferent army of state
servants of the distributers; and loses financially to the state far
more in expense of administration, and loss of useful labor of the
army of civil servants, than it gains by the loss to the state of
individual incapacity resulting in pauperism and invalidism, which
must be cared for. To put it briefly, it is far more dangerous to the
state to tell the individual that he shall be taken care of than to
tell him that he must shift for himself. As for the effect upon the
individual, it is a lowering medicine, making the patient gradually
dependent upon the drug, and bringing him finally to the incurable
invalidism of surly apathy. To change Patrick Henry's fiery peroration
slightly: Give me liberty or in the end you give me moral and
political death.
Students of the various forms of this modern
political nostrum, of getting rid of the fools who are rich by
deceiving the fools who are poor, will remember the decree of the
Provisional Government of the French Republic in 1848: "This
Government undertakes to guarantee the existence of the workman by
work. It undertakes to guarantee work to every citizen." On March 9
public works were started and 3,000 men employed. March 15 saw 14,000
on the pay-rolls, most of them unoccupied because there was no
suitable work. Those not working received "inactivity pay" of a franc
a day. The end of April saw 100,000 on the pay-rolls. In May a
minister ventured to suggest that it was the workman's duty to work!
There were murmurs of disapproval, but the public treasury was nearing
bankruptcy, and on June 22 an order was promulgated, that all of these
workmen between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five were to enlist
in the army. An insurrection followed this order that workmen should
work, and 3,000 citizens were shot down in the streets, and another
3,000 were sent to penal colonies in Algeria. The French are a logical
people. The state promised suitable work; that always means, from the
point of view of the worker, agreeable work, and not too fatiguing at
that. Of course, no such thing is possible, and the end was riot,
murder, and penal servitude. The state can no more provide suitable
and agreeable methods of livelihood for its citizens, than it can
provide them with a duty-loving, unenvious, and honest disposition. As
I have remarked elsewhere, the only thing that stands between state
socialism and the instant solution of all our social problems is human
nature! This mongrel demand for an artificial equality, is worse,
because more degrading than any tyranny of church or state even. Every
man wants superiority and distinction for himself, he only wants
equality, invisibility, and inarticulateness for others.
When some
such system as this is put to work in Ireland, I shall envy every
physician in Ireland, for he will live in a joyous round of farces
such as the world has never provided before for the lovers of the
humorous. Already Ireland, with only 701,620 electors, out of a total
of 8,058,025 in the United Kingdom, is represented in the House of
Commons by 103 members out of the total of 670; and out of the 935,000
old-age pensioners on the lists at the beginning of 1912, Ireland had
202,810, and was drawing $12,943,000 out of the total paid of
$59,445,500, while the total population of Ireland was 4,368,599, and
of the rest of the United Kingdom 40,533,557! Further, as an example
of the slight value of education in the game of politics, out of the
41,710 illiterate voters in the United Kingdom, Ireland has 22,515.
Long life to Ireland for her gallant attack upon humbuggery with
humbuggery! And this is, too, the little island that sent the
Wellesleys, the Pallisers, the Moores, the Eyres, the Cootes, the
Napiers, the Wolseleys, and Roberts to fight England's battles, and
half the officers and privates who conquered India; which in the Seven
Years' War furnished Austria with her best generals (Brown, Lacy,
O'Donnell), and whose exiles, called the "Wild Geese," flocked to the
standard of Washington in 1776. This is proof positive that they are
not naturally a parasitic race.
Even in Germany, where there is not a
tithe of the impish humour that exists in Ireland, the Socialists have
so misused the immense bureaucracy that must carry on the mere
clerical work of insurance, that a new law passed the Reichstag in
June, 1911, containing several hundred amendments. Employers must now
pay one-half instead of one-third of the sickness insurance premiums,
which gives them one-half instead of one-third of the management
authority.
The management had degenerated into a mere game of politics, with the
Socialists in such disproportionate control that they were rapidly
turning the insurance machinery into a well-organized body for the
exploitation of their own political doctrines; and the employer and
the state were helpless. It is, therefore, amusing to the man on the
spot to find certain English writers offering as proof of the success
of the insurance laws the fact that the Socialists, who once opposed,
are now satisfied with them. Of course they are satisfied with them.
They have had a war-chest and weapons put into their hands such as
they have never had before. Nor have these detailed parchment
solutions of social questions done away with all the tramps, poor,
sick, and destitute. Over a million persons passed through the
municipal night shelters in Berlin during the last year; and there are
still admittedly some 5,000 tramps in Germany. The vicious circle is
in evidence in Germany as elsewhere. It might be possible to regulate
men's earning power by legislation, but even when this colossal task
is done, there must follow the regulation of the spending power to
make it complete. What conceivable legislative regulation can efface
the difference between what A, B, and C will get out of five dollars
once they have them! That is the real problem, but no one proposes a
solution of it. A will use his five dollars to make him more powerful,
B will use his in dissipation, and C will lose his. How is that to be
regulated? And without that regulation you will have rich men and
tramps all over again.
In urban and rural districts containing over 10,000 inhabitants, some
$40,000,000 was expended for sick and poor relief, and this does not
include the hundreds of districts with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants
for which there are no figures. Even the wholly admirable Elberfeld
system of charity, known all over the world to charity-workers, which
is, briefly, investigation of cases by voluntary workers personally
and privately, and each dealing with a small number, has not solved
the problem. There were 1,537 strikes in Germany in 1909, and 2,109 in
1910. In 1910, 8,269 industrial plants were affected, in which 372,119
persons were employed, and 2,209 plants were obliged to shut down
entirely. There were as many as 154,093 persons on strike at the same
time. In 1910 there were also 1,121 lock-outs, affecting 10,381 plants
and 314,988 persons.
Here again, as in the case of the temperament of the German people,
one must look deeper than the average traveller has the time or the
necessary experience back of him to do, in order to see and to sift
the facts. Scores of travellers have told me: "I have never seen a
tramp, a beggar, a drunken man in Germany." I can only reply that I
have seen tramps at large, and colonies of them besides; that I have
seen hundreds of the poverty-stricken and diseased; that there are
more than thirty drunkards' homes in Germany; and that between 1879
and 1901 the number of persons under treatment for alcoholism had
increased from 12,000 to 65,000, an increase of 500 per cent.; the
cases of heart disease and rheumatism increased by 600 per cent.;
while the total population had increased 33 per cent. There are
125,000 patients admitted to the public and private lunatic asylums of
Germany, and there are accommodations in public and private hospitals
for 1,300,000 in-patients passing through them in the year; in 1909,
544,183 persons were tried before the courts of first instance and
convicted, of whom 49,697 were between twelve and eighteen years of
age; and in the same year there were 183,700 illegitimate births and
14,225 suicides, or 22.3 per 100,000 of the population. The poor law
authorities state that the cost to the empire of alcoholism in all its
forms of poverty, crime, and disease amounts to some $13,000,000 a
year. In 1910 Germany consumed 1,704 million gallons of malt liquors,
the United States, 1,851 million gallons; of beer we consumed 20.09
gallons and Germany 26.47 gallons per capita. Germany's drink bill
even ten years ago was $560,000,000 for beer, $140,000,000 for
spirits, and $125,000,000 for wine. There is a wine, beer, or spirit
dealer in Berlin for every 157 of the inhabitants, men, women, and
children. It has always been the avowed policy of autocracies to atone
for the lack of political freedom by lax regulations in regard to
moral matters. The citizen is imprisoned for insulting the state, but
he may insult his own person by dissipation up to any limit, this side
of disorderliness in public. Drinking, gambling, and other forms of
vice are provided for the citizens of Berlin comfortably and,
comparatively speaking, cheaply. Lotteries are sanctioned by all the
states, and they use this incentive to the worst form of gambling for
all sorts of purposes, from repairing churches to building patriotic
monuments, and replenishing the treasury.
This is by no means an attack upon Germany or upon German methods in
these matters; probably both in America and in England we are worse
off in these respects than are they, but unprejudiced people will
agree that it is high time to learn that not even German methods have
solved these complicated and heatedly argued questions of social
reform. Germany, due to its compactness and well-drilled and
subservient population, should succeed if any nation can, for social
legislation has never been in stronger or wiser hands or more
admirably and honestly administered. In America such opportunities
offered to the on-politics-living big and little bosses would lead
swiftly to anarchy. We have laws enough now, but the baser politicians
protect our city tramps, our gunmen, our decadents, our incendiaries
against our elected magistrates, in order that they may keep ready to
hand, and increase, the raw material of a purchasable vote, by the
domination and protection of which they keep themselves in power. That
is the whole secret of our municipal misgovernment wherever it exists,
and also the reason for our barbarous crimes. We have a cowed
magistracy seeking re-election from the manipulators of the
purchasable voters.
The truth is that the Sacculina method of social reform is nowhere a
success, certainly not in Germany. The Sacculina is a crustacean. It
attaches itself in the form of a simple sac to the crab, into which
its blood-vessels extend. It loses its power of locomotion and its
limbs disappear. It lives at the expense of the crab; activity is not
necessary, and it becomes the highest type of parasite, with no organs
except ovaries and blood-vessels. It can propagate, but has lost all
power or desire to do anything else. We have succeeded in producing no
small number of people of the Sacculina type by playing social and
political crab for them, and we are on the way to produce more, until
the crab is exhausted and the Sacculina is shaken into the water to
sink or swim for himself. "Charity causes half the suffering she
relieves, but she can never relieve half the suffering she causes."
Compulsory insurance was tried in the practical and economical Swiss
city of Basle and given up, because it was found that each year it was
the same small class who reaped the benefit of the insurance. The crab
gained nothing and the Sacculina became rapidly impotent. Basle, if I
mistake not, will have imitators, inclined to the philosophy of
Frederick the Great, who was surely no enemy to rational progress, but
who once said: "Depuis bien longtemps je suis convaincu qu'un mal qui
reste vaut mieux qu'un bien qui change."
A good deal of modern legislation is due to fatigue, and some of the
rest to ill-founded apprehension, that unless there is a change of
some kind the masters of the legislators will discharge them, because
they do not furnish enough novelties. In the meantime nobody is bold
enough to proclaim to the restless ones, seeking ever some new thing,
that there is nothing original except what has been forgotten. The
originality of such students of history, and panderers to majorities,
as the leaders of the discontented in England, Germany and in America,
dates back to about the time of the fall of Pericles and the Athenian
republic.