HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY PLEA, *: DO NOT REMOVE THIS BOOK CARD! V, Lfl University Research Library i HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE No. 72 Editort: HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. PROP. GILBERT MURRAY, LiTT.D., LL.D., F.B.A. PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. PROP. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. A complete classified list of the volumes of THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY already published will be found at the back of this book. GERMANY OF TO-DAY BY CHARLES TOWER NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE X o h CONTENTS " % CHAPTER PACE I INTRODUCTION . . . , . 7 ^V" II KAISER, BUNDESRATH, REICHSTAG, AND STATE-PARLIAMENTS .... 25 HI THE EXECUTIVE, CHANCELLOR AND BUREAUCRACY, POLICE, LAW COURTS 47 V IV THE FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE : THE ARMED FORCES, IMPERIAL FINANCE, SOCIAL INSURANCE, AND THE COLONIES . . 69 V BETWEEN THE STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL. THE MUNICIPALITIES AND THEIR WORK 100 GERMAN EDUCATION .... 129 *~ VII THE ORGANISATION OF INDUSTRY . . 160 VIII AGRICULTURAL GERMANY . . . 183 IX CASTES AND CLASSES .... 207- X INTELLECTUAL LIFE .... 230 BIBLIOGRAPHY 254 INDEX 255 GERMANY OF TO-DAY CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION IF the future of the German Empire lies, as the German Emperor maintained, upon the water, it would seem to be at least as certain that the past history of that part of Central Europe now included in the Empire has been largely influenced and in part perhaps deter- mined by water : not indeed by the water of the Baltic or the North Sea, but by the water of the rivers, which now, as of old, are the natural and cheapest means of transport, and at times have also formed natural divisions. It is only necessary to recall such catchwords and phrases as, " there must be no line of the Main" (that is to say, the particularist orl separatist tendencies of North and South Germany must be made to disappear), or "the Junkers East of Elbe" (that is, the land-owning and ultra-conservative squires of Eastern Prussia), or " the line of the Lippe " (which forms an almost complete division between the seats of the poorer Evangelical 7 8 GERMANY OF TO-DAY and wealthy Catholic landlords and nobles of Westphalia), to see that even to-day rivers play a great part not only in the unity of the - Empire but also in its internal divisions and dissensions. The Germans, their ambitions, achieve- ments, methods, men and manners are so con- tinuously the topic of private conversation and public debate in English-speaking countries, that sometimes there is a tendency to forget the outlines of the map of the Germany of to-day. In fact, " you forget the map " is apt to be one of the complaints made by German newspaper-writers and even German statesmen when defending German military budgets against the charge of Jingoism. So it is well to begin with the map. Modern Germany consists, geographically, of a territory drained by the four rivers, Rhine, \Vej5er,Elbe, and Oder,_ flowing northwards, together ^ilh a so irtKerrf section drained, it is true, by rivers flowing in the other direction, but finding its commercial connection north- wards for political reasons. In the development of the modern Empire out of the mere con- geries of petty States, formed in part by water- shed divisions, it was geographically natural that the northern States should be the first to combine and it was also natural that a struggle should take place before the southern portion of the Empire, south of the Main, broke loose INTRODUCTION 9 from fts geographically more natural con- nection with Austria and found its outlet northwards-X Hence one might expect to find sharply defined contrasts between the portions of the Empire north and south of the Main, and it becomes easy to bear in mind the fact that all German development has been and still is profoundly modified by the contrast, for example, between the Bavarian and Prussian character and their political, religious and economic tendencies. Even to the present day there is probably too little mutual give-and-take between North and South Germany : there is still a clearly de- fined " line of the Main." Leaving out of account for the moment certain accretions, such as Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig-Holstein, and Prussian Poland, there is yet another marked division whereof politically too little notice is sometimes taken, the division marked roughly by the course of the Oder, -to the west of which lies the indus- trial region of Northern Germany, to the east the agricultural section. Quite frequently discussions in England regarding " Germany " appear in reality to be discussions only about Prussia, and even about one part of Prussia, the old monarchy east of the Oder. It is possible that some of the antipathy sometimes displayed is felt instinctively not for the German Empire, but the old Prussian nucleus, 10 GERMANY OF TO-DAY whose character, manner of thought, and even political aspirations are to quite a consider- able extent determined by geographical and geological conditions. West of the Oder is Industrial Germany, east of it Agricultural. Westphalia, the Rhine- land, the valley of the Weser, these are the districts which developed Germany's foreign trade, and for whose protection in their infancy the high tariff-wall was partly destined: these are the countries interested in the " open door," in the maintenance of the best possible commercial relations with all foreign countries, and therefore also in the maintenance of good political relations throughout the world. It is after the traveller from London to Berlin has passed the Porta Westphalica, that picturesque gap in the semi- circle of the Teutoburg hills, that he enters the long and dreary stretch of flat country, which, at first pleasantly pastoral, interspersed with red-roofed villages, and sometimes timbered farmhouses, gradually merges in the pine- forests and sand-dunes of Brandenburg, the ungenerous soil from which the East Prussians gather a hard living. It is, perhaps, not too much to say that the predominance of Prussia in the partnership of which the Empire consists has been brought about precisely by the difference of soil and climate here intimated. In East Prussia, for example, 11 nearly one-quarter of all the land is naturally unproductive sand, fifty-two per cent, is sand with a greater or less admixture of loam, and only sixteen per cent, is good loam. In the province of Brandenburg nearly half (42 per cent.) is sand and only ten per cent, loam. Hannover has 41 per cent, sand, West Prussia 40 per cent., Pomerania 35 per cent., and so forth. On the other hand Westphalia has 60 per cent, good loam, Hesse-Nassau 63 per cent., and the Rhineland 67 per cent. These figures are perhaps more strikingly characteristic than any amount of descrip- tion. The north-eastern part of Prussia knows conditions of climate, extremes of heat and cold, almost as great as those of Central Russia. The farmer has no rich black soil to deal with, but largely sand ; timber worth the cutting must be grown carefully ; the husbandman cannot eat such things as " grow of themselves," and he grows hard as") his labour, ungenerous as the soil, stubborn r as the effort which wins him his livelihood.^ But he also grows strong and wiry. The descent of a hardy mountain or steppe-folk into a soft* country of luxuriant natural conditions, easy subsistence, and abundant reward of light labour has almost always in history been followed by a slackening of the national muscles, a dimming of the national 12 GERMANY OF TO-DAY keenness of vision, and presently a relaxation of the national vigilance. That Prussia is to-day the predominant partner in the federa- tion of States called the German Empire may well be due largely to the fact that she has always had the hardest task to subsist at all. This, however, is the next point to which we must turn. The German Empire is neither the successor of the old Holy Roman Empire, nor is it itself a unity. It is a federation, a close political coalition for certain purposes, chief of which is that of defence^ Bavaria, Saxony, and Wiirttemberg are independent kingdoms, Baden, Saxe- Coburg, Saxe- Weimar, Saxe-Altenburg, the Mecklenburgs, are independent Grand- Duchies, the two Reusses are independent Principalities with their own legislatures, their own constitutions, and in the case of Bavaria and Saxony their own State railways, in the case of Bavaria alone her own coinage and postage-stamps. They levy taxes and excise independently both of Prussia and of the Empire, they maintain diplomatic repre- sentatives at each others' Courts, and expect foreign countries to be independently re- presented at their Courts. But they combine for the purposes of national defence, and thus possess an imperial, that is, a federal army; they are comprised within one imperial INTRODUCTION 13 Tariff-Union (the Zoll-verein), they con- tribute through their individual exchequers to an Imperial Treasury conducted for imperial purposes, and they recognise as visible symbol of this federation, a federal chief, the German Emperor, who is also King of Prussia. The formation of the Zoll-verein or Customs Union was facilitated by the very differences of soil, climate, and natural resources which we have already noted. The west, rich in minerals, needed the assistance of the agricul- tural east ; the little Duchies and States by the head-waters of the rivers needed unre- stricted access to the sea along the water-ways, and the gradually developing industries needed an unchallenged market in the districts which are not industrial. The combination, which was not possessed by individuals, was possessed by all together. But there was, at the time, a still weightier reason why the various German kingdoms and principalities should combine in the form of a federation, however much their mutual antipathies and jealousies might and did stand in the way. This reason was that the individual States had for centuries been the cockpit of European wars, the victims first of this conquering army, then of that, the prize of victories in which they had no share, and the goal of ambitions in which they had no interest. The necessity 14 GERMANY OF TO-DAY for the foundation of the present Federal German Empire lay much less in the bickerings and quarrels of the individual States now included in the Federation than in the quarrels and ambitions of the neighbouring powers, the ambitions and rivalries of foreign princes and of foreign representatives of various creeds. Perhaps the most illuminating illustration of the conditions of life in the German country which ultimately made the Empire a necessity is to be found in a book called " Simplicius Simplicissimus," retailing the adventures of a farmer's son in the period of the Thirty Years' War, and recently published in English. The castles of western Germany have for the most part been blown up or burned, not by the troops of opposing political factions, Roundhead or Cavalier, White Rose or Red, but by foreign aggressors, who ravaged Germany from the Rhine to the Vistula^from the Baltic to the Giant moun- tains. /That they might live at last in peace, might aevelop their own resources by mutual assistance, the States of modern Germany, led by iron-handed Prussia, came to found the modern Empire. It is thus geographically clear that the new German Empire might be expected to develop first out of a confederation of the States north of the line of the Main. Politi- cally this must involve a dispute between a INTRODUCTION 15 northern and the chief southern Germanic State for the hegemony, in other words, be- tween Prussia and the old hegemon of the Holy Roman Empire, Austria. Such a dispute involved the break-up of the loose alliance which had subsisted since the formal end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. It follows that, although actually the present Empire has been gradually developed since 1806, there is a complete break of continuity marked by the foundation of the North \ German Confederation, the nucleus of the present Empire, by a majority vote of the delegates on April 16, 1867. It came into force on July 1 in the same year, which is therefore the birthday of the North German Confederation, and in reality of its later extension, the German Empire. What had happened is most briefly expressed in the words of the Treaty of Prague after the short campaign between Prussia and Austria : " His Majesty the Austrian Emperor hereby recognizes the dissolution of the existing confederacy of German States and will not oppose a new formation in which Austria shall have no part. Furthermore, the Emperor will recognize the closer federation which the King of Prussia shall establish north of the Main . . . and will admit of the formation of a federation of the States south of the Main ; the relations of the 16 GERMANY OF TO-DAY southern federation to the northern bund to be regulated later by mutual agreements between them." The northern federation consisted of twenty-two States, all the States north of the Main except the Kingdoms of Hanover and Saxony, and the Duchies of Kur-Hesse, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Luxemburg. Subsequently the two Mecklenburgs, and Hesse, so far as it lay north of the Main (note the sharp river division), the elder Reuss, Saxe-Meiningen, and the Kingdom of Saxony came into the Bund, raising the number of States subscribing to the terms of April, 1867, to twenty-two. The next step was to bring the northern bund into relations with the States south of the Main. The southern confederation provided, for in the Peace of Prague was never formed, but even before the formal publication of the terms of the northern confederation, Prussia had made an offensive and defensive alliance with the southern States, providing for the placing of all the forces under the command of the King of Prussia in the event of war, and also providing that all forces should be trained on the Prussian model, thus ensuring uniformity. A military federation was thus virtually in existence , before even the North German confederation had been definitely announced, and that early military federation is in a INTRODUCTION 17 closer form the basis of the present German army. We next turn to the commercial federation, the other great binding link in the Empire. A German customs union had been formed as early as 1833, and it still existed in 1866. In July, 1867, the North German confedera- tion made a fresh tariff agreement with the southern States, to run for twelve years, and the affairs of the tariff were regulated by a Bundesrath or Federal Council and a Tariff Diet. The Council consisted of the Federal Council of the North German Bund, together with South German representatives, and the Diet or Tariff Parliament consisted of the Diet of the northern bund together with eighty- five members elected by the south German States on the basis of manhood suffrage in a secret ballot. The Tariff Council was prac- tically identical with the present supreme Federal Council of the Empire, and the combined Tariff Parliament paved the way for the Parliament of the Empire or Reichstag. It needed only an external impulse to develop these special agreements between north and south into a definite agreement or complete federation. The northern bund provided for this future development by the terms of its constitution. Article 79 provided that " the entry of the south German States or any one of them into the federation may ensue upon B 18 GERMANY OF TO-DAY the proposal of the presidency of the federation and in the form of federal legislation." The agreement for united action in the event of war was soon put to the test. The outbreak of the war with France brought the northern and southern troops into the field side by side as had been agreed, and the successful conclusion of the war made the closer union of the States not only rational Vbut inevitable. ) The southern States came to the conclusion that an international rela- tionship was no longer sufficient ; a national relationship must succeed it. The Kingdom of Bavaria notified the presidency of the northern bund in September, 1870, that it did not consider the international agreement any longer sufficient, and " thus it happened that in the latter half of October representa- tives of all the south German States assembled , in Versailles to discuss the foundation of a German Federation " (speech of the Chancellor of the Federation, before the Reichstag, December 5th, 1870). It is worth while to note that, in this report of the proceedings given to the Reichstag on December 5th, 1870, the minister (Delbriick) uses the word federation (bund) to describe the new relation- ship of all the German States to each other. The line of the Main, created politically by the formation of the North German Bund in 1866, disappeared politically by the entry INTRODUCTION 19 of the south German States into the northern bund in 1870. There were three treaties made : first, an agreement between the northern bund, Baden and Hesse, whereby a German bund was formed and its constitution agreed to. In the second agreement the northern bund, with Baden and Hesse, made an agreement with Wiirttemberg, and in the third they made an agreement with Bavaria. Bavaria obtained a number of special privi- leges, which will be detailed later, and which are called the Bavarian " Sonderrechte." The treatises were in form entries of the various States into the northern bund on condition of certain alterations of the federal constitution. It should be noted, too, that they were not agreements of all the German States severally, but agreements between the northern bund as a political unit and the southern States severally. The new bund, which was even formally only an extension of the old northern bund, was given a new title, the German Empire (not the Empire of Germany), and the president, who con- tinued to be the King of Prussia, was also given a new title, namely German Emperor (not Emperor of Germany). /^ Such in brief was the development OY fche Empire out of the close coalition of the north- ern States. The Empire remains what it was, a federation of States which guard, some 20 GERMANY OF TO-DAY of them with very great jealousy, the smallest remaining item of their independence, and which also watch jealously any suggestion of accretion of power to any one of them such as might disturb the balance between them. Besides the strictly German parts of the Empire, there are certain non-German ele- ments which constitute " problems." Prussia is chiefly troubled by her Polish provinces, acquired at the time of the division of Poland in 1795, and to some small extent by the problem of the Danish strip acquired by her victory over Austria. The third problem was that of the territory ceded by France after the war of 1870. The Alsace-Lorraine territory was acquired by the victories of all the German States. It was, therefore, vested as a proprietory district in the new bund, and became Reichsland, Imperial territory. Recently the question of arranging the final relationship of the Reichsland to the Empire became acute, and there was not wanting a demand that it should in some way be more closely attached to Prussia than heretofore. The other States would have raised an exceedingly vehement protest had the proposal actually reached maturity, but finally the Reichsland was given a constitution with an electoral assembly and a second chamber. Its nominal head is a viceroy, who represents the rights of the original federal INTRODUCTION 21 States, but it has been made a member of the federation with a voice in federal discussions and agreements and a seat in the Bundesrath, or Federal Council. Thus the Empire now consists of twenty-six States, twenty-two being monarchical, three being republican city-States, and one a semi- independent Viceroyalty. That is the sim- plest formula for expressing the nature of the federation which is called the German Empire. It may be as well to enumerate these States. They are : Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Wiirttemberg (kingdoms), Baden, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Oldenburg, Brunswick, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Saxe-Altenburg, Anhalt, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Schwarzburg-Son- derhausen, Waldeck, Reuss (elder and younger lines), Schaumburg-Lippe, Lippe (the last seven principalities, the others duchies or grand-duchies), Liibeck, Bremen and Hamburg (republican city-states), and the viceroyalty of Alsace-Lorraine. In a further chapter we shall see how these States differ in their forms of government and in their relations to the Imperial Federation and the Federal Government. For the present it is desirable to note that certain of the old political divisions have disappeared. Prussia, for in- stance, has swallowed amongst other once independent units the old Kingdom of Han- 22 GERMANY OF TO-DAY nover, which is now the Prussian Province of Hanover ; a portion of the former Kingdom of Saxony, the swallowed portion being now the Prussian Province of Saxony ; Frankfurt, which is now a Prussian city instead of being an independent city-state like Hamburg arid Bremen ; and so forth. Inasmuch as Prussia also includes now Westphalia, the Rhineland as far as Frankfurt, and the Eiffel uplands west of the Rhine, it is by far the largest partner in the federation, and stretches " across the map " from the Belgian to the Russian frontiers. Oldenburg, the Mecklen- burgs, and the republican city-states break its coast-line, and the small Duchies intervene in part between Prussia and the old dividing- line of north and south, whilst it is also broken up by occasional excrescences like the Princi- palities of Lippe and the Schwarzburgs. It should be added that the tendency is for these little Principalities, whilst retaining their individual ducal or princely families, to combine for purposes of internal revenue and administration, and also, as recently in the case of the Schwarzburgs, for represen- tation in the Federal Council. But there is no tendency to relinquish any kind of privilege to Prussia. It may be added that the map of the small central German or Thuringian States shows curiosities comparable only to the map of INTRODUCTION 28 Scotland. The Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, for example, is not even territorially united : the Gotha part of it is separated by a fragment of Saxe-Weimar territory, and a big strip of Saxe-Meiningen from its Coburg section. There are eleven different sections of Saxe- Weimar-Eisenach scattered all over the map of the Thuringian States, and even the two parts of the little Principality of Reuss Elder Line are some fifteen miles apart. Sondershausen, the northern part of Schwarz- burg-Sondershausen, is at its extreme southern limit twenty-five miles as the crow flies from the extreme northern limit of its middle part at Arnstadt, which is again separated by a bit of Gotha and a trifle of Rudolstadt territory from its southern part at Gehren. A glance at a good coloured map of the Thur- ingian States, Dr. Lange's, for example, is itself sufficient to show the difficulties involved hi the self-government of such com- plicated territories, so long as there was no adequate central authority and no common protection. Even County Councils might find it difficult to carry on their work with one bit of the county at Brighton, another tiny section in the middle of Surrey, and a third round Salisbury. Development, one might suppose, was only possible when some central authority had provided norms or general lines of procedure for the principal 24 GERMANY OF TO-DAY functions of self-government, and had further removed difficulties of inter-State communi- cation by road and rail. That is what was achieved partly by Prussia and later by the Empire. CHAPTER II KAISER, BUNDESRATH, REICHSTAG, AND STATE-PARLIAMENTS ALTHOUGH historically it is no doubt true that the foundation of the new German Empire was an act of all the people, or nearly all the people, included within the Empire, from the point of view of constitutional law the foundation might be described rather as the act of the several States into which these people were divided. The individual States existed previous to the foundation, and their existence was not ended by it. This distinction is clearly shown in the Constitution. There is the federal body called the Bundesrath, representing the States severally, and the Parliament of the Empire or Reichstag, representing all the people collectively. The Bundesrath is not a debating body, nor is it a second chamber : its members are delegates appointed by the various States, and they vote not according to their individual judgment or according to party orders, but 20 26 GERMANY OF TO-DAY according to instructions received from the governments of the States they represent, and they do not vote on any single proposal without definite instructions on that particular proposal. In the Bundesrath Prussia has seventeen votes, corresponding to the four votes she possessed in the council of the North- German Federation plus the votes belonging originally to Hanover, Kur-Hesse, Holstein, Nassau and Frankfurt, which were incorpor- ated into Prussia. Bavaria has sax, votes, the kingdoms of Saxony and Wiirttemberg four each, Baden and Hesse three each, Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Brunswick two each, and the rest of the States one each. It is clear that since the plural votes are not distinct but merely represent the pro- portionate weight to be attached to the opinion of the particular State represented, the representatives of each State must vote " solid.." The Reichstag or Parliament of the Empire, is, on the other hand, the representative and debating body of all the German people, without distinction of district or State. It is the body representing the Empire, no longer in its federal aspect but in its unified aspect as one Empire and one people. Hence every German possessing the franchise, that is every male German who has passed his twenty-fifth birthday, and is not dis- KAISER AND PARLIAMENTS 27 qualified under the provisions of the penal code or under the laws governing bankruptcy, or by the receipt within the twelve months preceding the election of assistance under the poor-laws, is entitled to vote not merely in the State to which he belongs, but in whatever State he has his residence at the time of the election. Similarly every male German who has passed his twenty-fifth year is eligible to membership of the Reich- stag, provided he has the qualifications for the franchise. He need not be elected from the State to which he belongs, but he must have been a citizen of the Empire for at least a year, and must be a resident of the State from which he is elected. Military persons may not vote so long as they are actually with the colours : the right to vote is considered in their case to be temporarily in abeyance, but it is clear that, unlike prisoners or persons judicially sentenced to temporary loss of the franchise, their qualifications for the franchise still exist, and therefore they are eligible as members of the Reichstag. The reason why military persons and men on active naval service may not exercise their vote is evident : it is considered impossible to reconcile freedom of choice in balloting with the restraint on individual freedom required by military organisation. 28 GERMANY OF TO-DAY Originally the Reichstag was intended to contain one member for every 100,000 of the population, each State sending as many members as it contained multiples of 100,000, and one extra for any remaining fraction of 100,000 exceeding 50,000. Lauenburg, with less than 100,000 inhabitants, nevertheless had one representative. In practice this theory of representation has long since vanished. The present Reichstag should have about 600 members instead of 897 on the numerical basis, and the representation of the towns should have been nearly doubled. For instance, Berlin, with over 2,000,000 inhabitants, still has only six members, whilst the agricultural districts are in part over- represented even on the original numerical basis. The Government is, however, loth to introduce a redistribution bill, because any equitable distribution must diminish the proportionate strength of those parties or sections upon which the Government can usually reckon for the passing of " national " bills. The Reichstag possesses no control over the administration or the executive except in so far as it can refuse to grant supplies. Bills brought before it have to be passed first by the Federal council, and after alteration by the Reichstag are again subject to the veto of the Council. Hence its actual legislative KAISER AND PARLIAMENTS 29 power is hardly as great even as that of the House of Lords before the passage of the Parliament Act. Its composition does not necessarily determine the character of the policy of the Government ; an adverse vote does not turn the Government out, though it may involve a dissolution. A second adverse vote after a dissolution would, however, doubtless result in the resignation of the Chancellor concerned, though the Chancellor might decide again to proceed to dissolution. Since, therefore, the Reichstag is neither itself a governing body nor has any real power to call the Government to account, and since the imperial officials are neither legally nor practically responsible to it, it has never developed a true party-character. Member- ship of the Reichstag is scarcely a social asset, and it does not appeal to talent. It is even claimed that the introduction of the system of payment of members some years ago has rather decreased its reputation than otherwise. Moreover, since the source of all concessions is a permanent Government, that Government invariably seeks a temporary majority by granting concessions to different sects. In the main the Government must thus be permanently agrarian, as it is in Prussia, or at least Conservative, because its own existence and character is essentially non-Liberal and anti-democratic, and it cannot proceed far in 80 GERMANY OF TO-DAY the granting of concessions to liberalism. Hence German Liberalism (regarded as in- cluding Radicalism) is either driven to an extreme, when it becomes as negative as Socialism, or it tends to toady to the Govern- ment in the hope of small concessions. Its reputation is thus at a very low ebb. Of the chief parties in the House the Socialist is now the strongest, not because it represents an overwhelming acceptance by four million voters of Socialist principles, but because it is the only party which adequately represents democratic opposition. It is the representative of the opposition to permanent bureaucratic institutions. The Freisinnige or Radical groups stand about half-way between the Socialists and the so-called National Liberals, who in turn represent for the most part industrial and commercial capital and interests, as against the privileged Conserva- tive class on the one hand, and Labour on the other. The word " Liberal " in their title is virtually a misnomer. The Centre party, the second strongest in the House, is the represen- tative of the Catholic population. Next to the Socialist it is the best organised, but politically it is not a constant factor. It cannot be described as Liberal, because its strength is based largely on a reactionary view of life, but it is also not necessarily Conserva- tive, because its vote on a reactionary proposal KAISER AND PARLIAMENTS 31 may be determined by consideration for the demands of a section of its supporters which is opposed to agrarian and Conservative privileges. Since, however, as has been said, the Government is the source of privileges and concessions, the Centre can usually be persuaded to support Government bills in return for concessions to its confessional interests. The General Election of 1913 left the strength of the parties as follows : Social- ists, 110 ; Centre, 99 ; Conservatives, 56 ; National Liberals, 46 ; Radicals, 43 ; Poles, 18 ; Reichspartei (usually voting with Con- servatives), 15 ; Independents, etc., 10. Having thus sketched the character of the Bundesrath and the Reichstag, represent- ing the Empire in its two aspects, it remains to see what are the limits of the authority and powers of the two bodies. When the northern States formed the original bund they surrendered individually some portion of their absolute independence or rights of sovereignty in order to exercise them col- lectivety. They did not surrender all, but they did permit Prussia to exercise a dominant though not an absolutely major influence in the exercise of the part surrendered. The same principle prevailed when the empire was developed out of the bund : that portion of the sovereign rights of the northern States formally exercised by the northern bund was 32 GERMANY OF TO-DAY transferred to the enlarged bund and the southern States performed the same act of surrender which had been originally performed by the northern States. In return they received a portion of the collected sovereignty of the whole. Primarily, as was seen in the first chapter, matters of war and commerce as far as foreign countries are concerned, were the fields for the exercise of this new collective sovereignty, but the scope was extended inas- much as the new bund was no international agreement, but a national union. It may be best to summarise the matters which actually come under the imperial control : (1) Questions of citizenship of the Empire : treatment, surveillance and expulsion of foreigners ; colonization and emigration ; in- crease and, of course, also decrease of territory within the Empire. (2) Legislation regarding customs duties, taxes to be applied for imperial purposes, regulations of coinage and weights and measures, banking regulations, especially the issue of paper money, stock exchange trans- actions, etc. (3) Patents, inventions, the protection of the products of intellectual activity. (4) Protection of German trade abroad and on the high seas, hence also the consular service. (5) Means of communication : railways, KAISER AND PARLIAMENTS 88 roads, waterways, posts and telegraphs (with certain exceptions in the case of postage and railways, and in the case of roads and waterways where the interests of common defence are not concerned, or where such roads and waterways are not means of communica- tion between States, but only within one State). (6) Legislation unifying civil and criminal law and legal procedure, and enforcing the mutual execution of judgments. (7) Authentication of public documents, regulations for the press within certain limits, and of the right of assembly, regulation of certain departments of health, and veterinary matters. (8) Army and navy. It will be noticed that one of the chief features of modern life, education, does not fall within the competence of the Empire, but is left to the individual States. In the chapter on education it will be seen, however, that uniformity is nevertheless to a large extent achieved within the Empire. But the relations of Church and State are not touched by imperial legislation. Also each State is left to make its own Budget for its own purposes, and it is also left to collect in its own way that portion of the imperial revenues which has to be subscribed by each State in addition to the imperial revenue o 84 GERMANY OF TO-DAY derived from imperial taxation and customs. Domestic agricultural questions, so far as they are not included within the imperial veterinary or protective regulations, are also left to the individual States : mining and forestry, fishing and shooting, police regula- tions concerning building and prevention of fire, and also the regulations whereby the general police agreements are actually exe- cuted. Moreover, even in the criminal and civil law, though the Empire decides the principles the State executes them. Judg- ments are rendered and executed not in the name of the Empire, but in the name of the State. Even customs duties, imperial taxes, and so forth are collected not by officials of the Empire, but by officials of the State or States concerned, acting on behalf of he Empire. It is important to remember that these features of State as opposed to Federal control are not prerogatives ceded by the Empire to the individual States in the way of decentrali- sation, but are part of the old, completely in- dependent sovereignty retained by the States. The tendency of modern Germany is emphati- cally not towards decentralisation, but the reverse ; and the centralising tendency would be more evident and swifter in development if it were not for the fear that the whole country might be conformed to the peculiar, and in KAISER AND PARLIAMENTS 85 some respects, too harsh characteristics of one State Prussia. This is a matter to which it will be necessary to recur. In plain language Germany is not an Empire which has conceded " Home Rule all round " to its individual parts. It has already been stated that certain States retain certain special privileges, and this may be a convenient point to sketch them. Bavaria retains the right to print her own postage stamps, and to mint her own coinage, though the reverse of Bavarian coins, showing the imperial eagle, makes them current, of course, everywhere in the Empire. On the other hand, only Bavarian stamps may be used in Bavaria, and they may not be used through- out the rest of the Empire. Wiirttemberg sur- rendered a similar privilege quite recently. Baden and Bavaria reserve the right to tax domestic beers and brandies, and the latter reserves certain rights affecting domicile, and the railroads within her frontiers ; certain insurance laws may only be passed with the consent of Bavaria, and there are Bavarian military privileges which may be noted in the chapter dealing with the army. On the other hand Prussia also has certain privileges, which have now to be considered in connection with the position and attributes of the Kaiser. In the old North-German bund there was a 86 GERMANY OF TO-DAY function called the Presidency (Bundes- Praesidium) and another called the Bundes- Feldherr or Military Over-Lord, commonly translated " War-Lord. " The president of the bund or chief magistrate of the federation could summon and open, adjourn or dissolve, the federal Parliament, and could appoint and dismiss the federal Chancellor and federal officials, could declare war and make peace. The War-Lord had supreme command of the federal forces by land and sea in times of peace and of war, he determined the strength of the army and navy, ordered new fortifications, could declare a state of siege in any part of the federal dominions, and if necessary could mobilize the federal army against a recalcitrant member. Both the presidency of the bund and the warlordship were occupied by the Kingdom of Prussia. When the bund was extended to include the southern States, the bundes-praesidium and the warlordship were retained, but they were merged in one term which included them both " Deutscher Kaiser," the German Emperor, and the title " German Emperor " was made the prerogative of the King of Prussia. Thus the Kaisership is the old Presidency of the bund plus the warlordship. The adoption of the title " Kaiser " did not create a new federal institution, nor did it revive the old institution of the Holy KAISER AND PARLIAMENTS 87 Roman Empire, though the tendency of the present holder of the title has, doubtless, been to regard himself as the successor of the old Emperors, holding his title and prerogatives " Dei gratia " rather than by decision of the individual States ; still less did the possession of the title by the King of Prussia imply that he was in any sense the superior of the monarchs of the other Kingdoms and Duchies. The special title chosen was, indeed, as Bis- marck says (Reflections, chapter 23), intended to " constitute an element making for unity and centralization," but it was also actually intended to assist the wearer of that title in repressing an inclination, " dangerous, but a vital feature of the old German history, to inculcate upon the other dynasties the superi- ority of the Prussian dynasty." The first Emperor was in Bismarck's opinion much too prone to emphasize what he calls the superior respectability of the hereditary Prussian crown. The matter can be put most simply in this way. The Kaiser is not even in theory possessor of the Empire as any one of the German Kings or Dukes is in feudal theory possessor of the country over which he holds sway. The German colonies are not the " dominions of the Kaiser overseas " : he can neither add to them nor surrender them even in theory without leave of the Federal Council and of the Reichstag. The King of " 4115 88 GERMANY OF TO-DAY England can talk of "my dominions over- seas," the Kaiser cannot. Moreover, the Kaiser as such receives no income from the treasury of the Empire. There is no imperial civil list, and the revenues of the Kaiser are either the possessions of the royal house or those bestowed upon him by Prussia alone in his capacity of King of Prussia) The only form of subsidy is the " Disposition Fund," a comparatively small sum voted annually with the imperial budget. Moreover, the Kaiser as such can neither initiate legis- lation nor veto it. He formally endorses bills and may send them back if they are in form defective, but he cannot veto them because he considers them bad legislation. But almost all these legislative functions lacking to him as Kaiser, he does actually ^possess as King of Prussia, because he controls the seventeen Prussian votes in the Bundes- rath, and any State represented in the Bundes- rath can initiate legislation. Moreover, the [aiser appoints and dismisses the Imperial Chancellor, who is president of the Bundesrath, and in effect the only responsible minister. Hence the actual director of policy in the Empire is only under the control of the Kaiser, and is only responsible to him. Again, the Kaiser is supposed to supervise the proper carrying out of imperial legislation, but he has no civil force at his command to KAISER AND PARLIAMENTS 89 punish or re-adjust omissions ; he can only refer the matter to the Bundesrath, leaving that body to take action if it pleases. Judi- cially the Kaiser has the rijorht of pardon only in matters adjudged by the imperial court, whose judges he appoints ; that is to say, he has the right of pardon only in cases of treason against the Empire or against his own person : in the States outside Prussia the Kings or Dukes have the sovereign's right of pardon except in cases of high treason. As Warlord the Kaiser has much more nearly monarchical powers. His power to declare war of his own accord is, however, limited to cases in which German soil is invaded, though as he is the sole determiner of what constitutes invasion the limitation does not perhaps go for much. But whilst the Kaiser is thus strictly limited in his functions and privileges in all German States other than Prussia, he takes a different character directly the relations of Germany to foreign powers are concerned. Here the Kaiser, according to the wording of the constitution, " represents the Empire, is to make treaties and other agreements with foreign powers in the name of the Empire, and to accredit and receive ambassadors." (It will be noticed that he does so in the name of the Empire, not in his own name. The Sovereignty still rests with the Bundesrath, not with the Kaiser.) 40 GERMANY OF TO-DAY It has been necessary to attempt to define the limitations of the Kaiser's power in this way because, otherwise, it would not be possible to explain the repeated demands on the part of Reichstag that the Kaiser shall restrain himself in one direction or another. It is fairly obvious that questions of com- petence must frequently arise in the relations between the Imperial Parliament and the Parliaments of the various States. Roughly speaking, it is true that where the Imperial Parliament has not legislated the individual States are competent : hence arise the con- stant efforts of Liberals in the Imperial Reichstag to extend the limits of imperial legislation so as to remove competence from individual States governed, as is Prussia, under less liberal constitutions. The regu- lation of hours of labour, regulations affecting the health of home-workers, the expropriation of Polish proprietors in Prussian Poland, and many other domestic questions can and do periodically give rise to the question of competence, but Prussia jealously guards herself against any interference which she can avoid. Recently there arose in the Reichstag the question whether the Empire could require all the individual States to introduce the imperial franchise, that is the direct manhood vote by secret ballot with one value to all votes. The Conservatives KAISER AND PARLIAMENTS 41 declared, without question correctly, that the Empire could not interfere in this sense : the National-Liberals stated that the Empire could demand that every State within the Empire could be required to possess an electoral representation whose consent should be required for all State legislation, and for the passing of the budget, but the Empire could not lay down the exact character which such electoral representation should take. The Centre have several times declared that harmony of constitutional institutions is a necessity of the public life of the Empire, but that it can only be produced or initiated by the Empire if the States constituting the Empire elect to enlarge the imperial privilege so as to include the necessary interference with the rights remaining to the individual States. This is an excellent illustration of the debates which may and do arise on the question of imperial and State competence ; and this may be a convenient point at which to glance at the constitutional conditions actually prevailing in the individual States. In Prussia, the largest State, conditions are still but little removed from feudalism. The so-called popular house of the Prussian Parliament is elected on the " three-class system." The total of the State tax paid in each electoral constituency is divided into three portions, and the voters, all males 42 GERMANY OF TO-DAY who have reached the age of twenty-five, are also divided into three classes. The first class consists of the heaviest taxpayers, whose payments total one-third of the whole sum for the constituency ; the second class consists of the next heaviest payers, again totalling a third ; and the third class consists of the poor or lowest taxpayers. Each of these three divisions elects a certain number of intermediate electors. These intermediate electors, or " Wahlmanner," must number one for every 250 inhabitants, and they in turn elect the members of the lower house. The absurdity of designating a house so elected a " representative house " is sufficiently clear, and Bismarck himself described the Prussian system as the " wretchedest of all systems." The first class may consist of a hundred primary electors, but they have just as much influence over the final choice of representative as the third class, which usually numbers at least twenty to twenty-five times as many. In view of the fact that the first and second class usually vote the same " ticket," it is evident that the third class is in an absolute minority of one to two. There are electoral districts in Berlin where one man in his constituency constitutes the first class, and elects two members of the electoral college : in the second class there may be forty voters, also electing two Wahlmanner, and in the KAISER AND PARLIAMENTS 43 third class several hundred. In recent news- paper discussions it was asserted that in two adjoining districts of Eastern Berlin, in one district one taxpayer, with an annual income- tax of over 2,000, constituted the first class by himself ; whilst in the adjoining (very poor) district ten men, paying roughly 5 apiece, also constituted a first class. But if the rich taxpayer had lived one mile west- wards, in the wealthy Thiergarten quarter, he would have been compelled to vote in the third division like the Imperial Chancellor, Herr von Bethmann Hollweg ! The actual figures in recent elections show that the first class of voters, electing one third of the Wahlmanner, consists of about 200,000 voters ; the second class of about 900,000, and the third class of over 6,000,000 ! It is against this wholly illiberal system that the Prussian Socialists are constantly protest- ing, and the growing opposition to it has become strong enough to compel the Govern- ment to introduce a promise of reform into the speech from the throne. The new electoral scheme recently brought before the Houses as a result of this promise failed to pass, and the Government has not since then introduced any other Bill. If the Lower House of the Prussian Diet is thus completely controlled by the rich classes the Upper House, or House o! Peers, is in reality no 44 GERMANY OF TO-DAY less reactionary. The members are either hereditary legislators, or they are appointed by the King of Prussia as life members, or they are ex-officio members through tenure of high Government appointments. The agricultural districts of Prussia have about two-thirds of the total representation in the House of Peers and more than half the representation in the Lower House, although on the basis of population the proportion should be almost exactly the opposite. It follows that the Prussian Parliament is necessarily devoted to the agrarian interests, and tends sadly to neglect the just claims of the 23,000,000 Prussians who constitute the industrial popu- lation. Mecklenburg is almost the only country which is even worse off than Prussia, for it retains the strictly feudal arrangements of 1523 as modified in 1755. At the time of writing the adoption of a representative Parliament is still under bitter discussion. Saxony modified its feudal system in 1909 by adopting direct manhood suffrage, and the secret ballot, but incomes of over 80 per annum entitle the possessor to two votes, 110 to three votes, and certain standards of education, certain professions, and incomes of more than 140 give four votes. The election of members takes place directly. To take an illustration of a liberal constitution it may be added that Baden, the " model KAISER AND PARLIAMENTS 45 duchy," as it is sometimes called, has direct manhood suffrage by secret ballot and " one man, one vote." It is natural that the landlords, the feudal aristocracy, and the wealthy classes should cling to their advantageous position by every means in their power, and wherever possible, but it can scarcely be doubted that far-reach- ing changes must come in the near future. At present the suggestion seems to be that a compromise should be found between the Reichstag electoral system and the Saxon system, whereby the Reichstag system would be modified slightly in favour of " brains, caste, and money," whilst in Prussia and elsewhere the direct secret ballot would be introduced, but the two upper classes of the present system would receive two or more votes. The basis of the reactionary system in Germany does not, however, consist of any theory that birth, money, or even education warrant the possession of a more powerful voice in the election of legislators ; there appears to be no subtle suggestion that a stake in the country, the possession of brains or fortune or position make an elector better able to judge what he wants or what is good for himself and his country ; it is simply that the current of ideas both in the Empire and in most of the States is from the top down- 46 GERMANY OF TO-DAY wards, not from the bottom upwards. Legis- lation derives primarily from the permanent Government, not from the representatives of the people, hence a strengthening of popular representation is almost meaningless in a country where public officials are not in any true sense the servants of the public. CHAPTER III THE EXECUTIVE ; CHANCELLOR, AND BUREAUCRACY ; POLICE ; LAW COURTS IN the previous chapter it was pointed out that although the Reichstag may and does alter laws presented by the Government for its approval, the whole method of its working prevents it from being a law-giving assembly. The controlling factor remains the Bundesrath, which votes upon a law before it goes to the Reichstag, and may refuse its assent when the Reichstag has modified it. Thus the function of the Reichstag to a great extent is that of a body which does indeed possess a veto, but does not possess an actual initiative. If a Bill presented by the Government does not meet with the approval of the Reichstag, the Government can simply disregard the matter altogether, and proceed with the next item in its programme. Neither the Chan- cellor nor the Bundesrath can be made accountable, nor can the Reichstag compel the Government to introduce bills suggested by the representative house. The essential 47 48 GERMANY OF TO-DAY 4 point is that the flow of legislative ideas comes from permanent authorities to the people, and if at times a popular demand for some particular modification of existing laws or for the creation of new makes itself felt, this occurs despite the legislative machinery, and not through it. The same feature prevails in the executive. The Bundesrath, which has first to be con- sulted as to the desirability of any law, also includes the machinery for its execution. The Empire itself does not, on the whole, provide the machinery, but leaves the execu- tive to the individual States, and although the Kaiser is legally supposed to supervise such execution, yet he has virtually no machinery at his command for carrying out such supervision. He can refer cases of obstinate refusal to execute a law to the Bundesrath, and in the last instance can mobilize the Federal army against a recal- citrant State, but he does not actually control the departments and sub-departments responsible for the work. On the other hand, neither the Reichstag nor any popular representative body in any State can control the appointment of executive officers. It is so much the custom to talk of Germany as a bureaucratic country, and therefore of the German bureaucracy, that the impression sometimes seems to prevail that the whole THE EXECUTIVE 49 Empire is administered by a hierarchy of functionaries, all appointed by the Kaiser, and having the Chancellor at the head. As has been already explained, there is no such imperial bureaucracy, because the internal affairs of each State are left to its own manage- ment, though in many departments the norm or general rules of procedure are regulated by laws of the Empire. There is only one imperial minister, the Chancellor, who is responsible only to the Kaiser. All the other imperial departments, Foreign Affairs, Colonies, Post Office, Finance, etc., are technically departments of the Chancellery, for the Imperial Chancellor has subordinates but no colleagues. The navy is, of course, exclusively imperial in its nature, that is to say, there are no State contingents as in the army, and obviously there could not be. Therefore there is an imperial Admiralty, and this too is technically a department of the Chancellery. But there is no imperial War Office. Each of the States possessing a mili- tary contingent, namely, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Wurttemberg, has a war-ministry responsible for the administration of its own contingent according to the norm laid down in the articles of federation. At the same time it is clear that the vast charge thus laid upon the Chancellor involves also an army of subordinates in their various 50 GERMANY OF TO-DAY degrees, and it is, of course, true that certain departments of the Chancellery tend more and more to achieve a certain independence, just because no one man can be omniscient enough or has time enough to exercise a real super- vision and directorate of all the imperial departments. Under the present Chancellor, Herr von Bethmann Hollweg, the Foreign Office has acquired a remarkable degree of independence, though its ability to exercise it is, of course, limited by the fact that finally the policy to be carried out is on its broad lines the policy of the Emperor. But this imperial bureaucracy does not extend to the domestic and local administration in the various States : nor indeed are the methods of local administra- tion the same in all States, inasmuch as the Empire has only laid down norms for some spheres of human activity, such as litigation. There is, however, a uniform civil right for all Germans contained in the remarkable Biirgerliche Gesetzbuch, and against breaches of this, that is, against any circumscription of individual liberty, such as is forbidden by the Biirgerliche Gesetzbuch, there is ultimately an appeal beyond the State to the Empire through the High Court at Leipzig. But the appeal to the Empire Is not always effective, because, as already stated, there is often a conflict of opinion as to where the rights confirmed to all citizens of the Empire by THE EXECUTIVE 51 the imperial laws are infringed by action of the States. An illustration from practice will make this clear. Article 3 of the Imperial Code provides for rights of domicile, the acquisition of land, and the enjoyment of civil rights. " No German shall be limited in the exercise of these rights by the authority of his native State or by the authority of any other State of the bund." The Reichstag recently protested under appeal to this clause against the action of the Prussian Government in exmitting Polish proprietors under the Prussian coloni- zation scheme. The imperial authorities refused to interfere on the ground that the imperial Government was not competent. Similarly the federal law provides that no German properly elected to a representative body in any State or to the representation of the Empire shall be prevented from the exercise of the rights attached to his election. Recently some Socialist members of the Lower House of the Prussian Diet or parliament were removed by the police, and an appeal was made against this removal as contrary to federal law. The imperial authorities again refused to interfere, and an action brought against the Prussian police failed. We turn from the imperial bureaucracy to the domestic bureaucracy of Prussia, which, it would appear, j what is usually meant 52 GERMANY OF TO-DAY when people refer loosely to the " German bureaucracy." In the year 1808 Baron von Stein, the great Prussian administrator, vir- tually abolished the old feudal system in Prussia, and introduced a system of repcesfinta- tion of communes, districts, and provinces which might perhaps be easiest paralleled as parishes, constituencies, and counties. At the same time, in order to centralise control, he devised a system whereby the ultimate control of each of these representative and administra- tive bodies was placed in the hands of a Government authority. By degrees these Government authorities have lost their local attachment, and have become professional members of a home civil service, responsible only to their immediate chief, and through him to the King of Prussia. Local government by locally elected or at any rate localised bodies and authorities is thus restricted by the superior authority of men imposed by the State. For administrative purposes Prussia is divided into twelve provinces, plus two major administrative districts, namely, Berlin and the Principality of Hohenzollern. Each province is governed by a Provincial President responsible only to the King and appointed by him. The province is subdivided into a number of districts (Regierungsbezirke), with a district president, who is subordinate to the THE EXECUTIVE 53 Provincial President. The districts are again divided into circles, and over each circle (Kreis) there is a Landrat. Now the Landrat personifies in Prussia the bureaucratic officialdom, for he comes most closely into contact with the local bodies, and his influence is most felt and least admired. The province, the district, and the circle have each their representative council, and below the circle comes the commonalty, parish or urban district (Gemeinde), which is as a matter of fact the essential organ of self-government. The Geminderat is either one person, a Burgomaster or a Dorf schulze, whose appoint- ment is usually for three or more years, and requires Government confirmation, or there exists in larger parishes and commonalties a collegiate body deciding by majority vote. The population is represented by an electoral body, which is generally so elected that property qualifications obtain a dis- proportionate, if not actually a decisive voice. Local taxation and local government are nominally in the hands of these local Parlia- ments, with their representative assembly, and second chamber or single superior (Gemeindevorsteher). But the Landrat, be- sides presiding over the meetings of the representative body, has a direct control of the affairs of the commonalty. Its accounts are inspected by him, and many of its decisions are 54 GERMANY OF TO-DAY subject to his veto. The attitude of the Landrat to the commonalty officers was recently epitomized in its crassest form by a statement published in the Berlin press. According to this statement there appears on the door of the residence of a certain Landrat in East Prussia the notice " Burgo- masters are to use the backstairs ! " It would carry us too far to investigate here the functions and privileges of the Landrathe. Their method of appointment will be sketched in the following chapter, under the heading of the professions, but it should perhaps be made clear here that the Landrathe are no longer, at any rate in Prussia, feudal ap- pointees. Formerly not only the Landrat but also the Dorfschulze, that is mayor of a country district, was always the lord of a certain manor, but these hereditary local offices were abolished in Prussia in 1872. In no department of imperial or State machinery are the officials " servants of the public. " As a rule foreigners visiting Germany find the first and most striking illustration of this fact outwardly in the German post- offices, where the public is in almost every case cut off from the officials by a wooden screen with little windows behind which the officials sit to transact the business of the Empire or the State. Almost all railways in Germany are State railways or imperial THE EXECUTIVE 55 railways, and the railway authorities are State or imperial authorities. Even on private lines, such as the electric overhead line in Berlin, the company's officials are given an official status by being sworn in as " railway-police " and armed with the authority of traffic police. It is calculated that there are now approximately 3,000,000 officials in Germany, or five per cent, of the population. In general it cannot be said that Germans feel the same objection to this bureaucratic or paternal system of government that would be felt in England. Responsi- bility is removed from the shoulders of the ordinary citizen, and although he is hedged about with a palisade of exasperating regula- tions he is accustomed thereto from the outset, and does not worry about the matter. It is not to be supposed, however, that this official machinery is uniform throughout Germany, or that the life of the unofficial citizen is restricted as sharply in one district as another. The sharp police control, which is such a feature of Prussia, is a great deal more lax in Baden, and so far as foreigners are concerned is almost unnoticeable in the Rhineland, and in parts of Southern Germany. It may be convenient to summarize in this connection the features of the chief executive organisation, the police. A householder 56 GERMANY OF TO-DAY moving from one suburb of Berlin to another is compelled to fill up two forms, one showing the names, ages, birthdays, birthplace, con- fession, and business or profession of himself and all members of his family residing with him ; the other giving the names and other details concerning his servants or members of his household who are not relations. These papers must be signed by the landlord or porter of his flat and deposited with the local police. Similar papers must be filled up and deposited with the police within three days of his arrival in his new home. He will be required, if a foreigner, to state how long his residence will be, and if it is to be for more than three months he will presently be instructed to appear at. a police-station and produce his passport. The object of this close police surveillance is partly to render the tracing of crime easier but mainly it is to control army service. The law governing army-service declares that every male German not rejected on the score of physical unfitness is liable to service in the army : the system of police supervision exists partly for the pur- pose of tracing every male so liable, but also, and this is even more important, for the purpose of tracing the whereabouts of every trained reservist at any moment in order that orders to join the colours may be conveyed to him immediately upon the outbreak of war THE EXECUTIVE 57 or upon the receipt by the local authorities of the orders for mobilisation. In practice it is extremely doubtful whether the supervision system is a preventa- tive of crime, and it has been shown in numerous recent murder trials in Germany that the system is of little use in tracing an adroit criminal. On the contrary the theft of another man's police papers and evidence of identity has been shown to be very easy, and the result to be very confusing. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that the country police are very loth, even in Prussia, to worry a good workman or agricultural labourer in a district where labour is badly wanted just because he happens to have mislaid his papers. It is claimed that it is quite as easy for a clever criminal to escape the police in Berlin as in London, and news- paper evidence of recent years points to much- policed Berlin being in point of fact a happy hunting-ground for clever swindlers of all sorts. Special police control almost every department of human activity, at any rate in Prussia, and their powers are much more extensive than in England. " The uniform," it has been said, " is a key to all doors." No magistrate's warrant is required for the intrusion of the uniformed policeman in a private house, and the building police in particular are armed with extensive powers 58 GERMANY OF TO-DAY of investigation. Recently in Berlin it was thought that a number of families were exceeding the police provision forbidding the use of attics for sleeping purposes. Building police entered some of the blocks of flats, ascended to the attics, and removed the heat- ing apparatus installed by the landlords ! The ordinary police, however, exercise a sometimes useful role in the settlement of disputes. They can be called upon by mas- ters to interfere against insolent servants and by servants to recover wages. In these cases they act as mediators, and frequently arrange a compromise without the necessity of the disputants carrying the matter before a court of law. Although they are almost always recruited from the army, and thus accustomed to exercise an abrupt authority inconsistent in other countries with the freedom of civil life, they are not, on the whole, either a violent or a discourteous body of men. It should be added here, perhaps, in defence of the German bureaucratic system, that discourtesy and insolence towards the public is the exception not the rule, but the excep- tions are apt to be more exasperating than in other countries because the victim is completely powerless. To obtain redress against a policeman who grossly exceeds his instructions is difficult and often impossible, THE EXECUTIVE 59 whereas a mild remonstrance may appear in the eyes of the official as an insult. The tendency of the police is certainly to become more autocratic. It may be enough to quote such instructions as those recently issued by the police-president of Berlin to policemen interfering in a street disturbance. Owing to cases in which policemen had been injured by pistol-shots, the police-president threatened that he would punish any policeman who failed to " shoot first." As in all other departments of German life, the police-system, owing to its elaboration and close confinement to written instructions, has become inelastic ; there is very little room for individual intelligence on the part of the executive, and there is practically nx> adaptation to individual circumstances. Over all German life stands the text " Nach Vor- schrift." Everything must be carried out exactly according to instructions. That is why, for example, Berlin street traffic strikes a Londoner as being so badly managed and so clumsily organized. The traffic police are restricted to certain methods of control, and the opening or closing of a traffic route is too often dictated not by the pressure of traffic, but by the hands of a stop- watch. It may be useful to note shortly the main divisions of the Prussia police-system, its 60 GERMANY OF TO-DAY duties and its functions. It should be observed again here that there is no such thing as an imperial or a German police- system, though such a system is constantly advocated. The executive police are of three kinds : first, the gendarmerie or country- police, a practically military force organized on army lines and armed with carbines as well as with the usual revolver and sabre of the town police. The gendarmerie is recruited as far as possibly from time-expired army-men, and is controlled for the most part by the local Government officials, who in turn are organs of the central administration. The gendarmerie is employed for country districts and at certain points of the frontiers. "The town police, armed with revolvers or pistols and sabres, are of two kinds, State- police, controlled eventually by the Ministry of Justice, and the communal police, controlled usually by the civic authorities, that is, in most cases, the Burgomaster. In any case the cost of maintenance falls not upon the State but upon the community. Almost all large towns in Prussia now have State- controlled police, Kiel, and the towns of the west-Prussian mining districts and of the Reichsland, having been added to the number comparatively recently. The tendency, there- fore, is to remove police control from the municipalities on the frontiers and in mining THE EXECUTIVE 61 districts, where there is usually a large floating population of foreign labourers. The reason for this tendency is obvious, and probably the system is, on the whole, beneficial. It is distinctly not beneficial in some cases, because the police-force comes to be regarded as a sort of subordinate military force, and is divorced completely from any touch with or control by the municipalities, who nevertheless have to find the money for its support. Hence arises the growing unpopularity of the police in towns like Berlin, and the increasing tendency of the general public to regard all police action as suspicious, and therefore to take sides in many cases against the police even when they are very far from exceeding their duties. The actual frontier police and the political police in great towns and in the western industrial districts are special groups divorced from the ordinary police work and trained for the special work of watching foreigners. German States have only just begun to establish special training- schools for the police. There are schools at Duesseldorf, Dortmund, Recklinghausen, and elsewhere, and there is or is shortly to be an academy for police at Hanover. The search authority of the police as inspectors is constantly being enlarged, so that the little manual regarding the police issued for the benefit of the public in Prussia declares that 62 GERMANY OF TO-DAY " there are now very few branches of business exempt from police inspection." From the police system it is natural to turn to the administration of justice. Ger- many possesses a uniform code of civil and criminal law, a uniform commercial code, and a bankruptcy law. The administration of justice is regulated by federal laws which deal with the organization of the courts, arrange the rules of procedure, and regulate also the costs and the fees of witnesses, experts, lawyers, and so forth. It is impos- sible in the restricted space of a chapter to enumerate the objections to and points raised in favour of codified as against statute law. It is customary to complain that whereas English law is the slowly matured expression of human experience in dealing with disputes between the individual and the community, or between man and man, German law is " the hastily produced product of special commissions worked out in innumerable paragraphs and acting with an iron inflexibil- ity which almost eliminates the very idea of equitable justice." It is clear, however, that a codified law is better adapted for public comprehension and may, in many cases, eliminate a dangerous possibility of over- susceptible human sentiment. German legal processes are not, on the whole, speedier than in England, but the THE EXECUTIVE 63 costs of litigation are very much smaller to the litigant. An essential difference, too, lies in the complete divorce of Bench and Bar. The same qualifications are required of the law student for both branches of the pro- fession, but the two branches are divorced ; the law student may select either the Bench or the Bar ; he cannot attain the one via the other. Hence the Bench does not, as in England, represent the experience gained at the Bar ; it comes to be regarded by the barrister not with respect, but with a feeling akin to animosity and at times contempt. The judge becomes a kind of glorified police- man or bureaucrat. German courts are of four kinds, Amts- gerichte, Landgerichte, Oberlandesgerichte, and the Reichsgericht, or Imperial Court of Final Appeal. Only the judges of the Imperial Court are imperial officials appointed by the Kaiser upon the nomination of the Bundesrath. The judges of all other courts are State officials, appointed by the various ; States according to their own arrangements. The elementary court is the Amtsgericht. It consists of a single judge with an assistant called a Referendar, who is really an unpaid probationer. It is a court of first instance, involving civil jurisdiction in property claims where the value of the claim does not exceed 15. It also determines suits between masters 64 GERMANY OF TO-DAY and servants, tenants and subtenants, hotel bills, transportation charges, freightage, and so forth. Alimentation claims are also sub- ject to its jurisdiction in some cases, as well as certain controversies in bankruptcy. Judges of the Amtsgericht are wont to endeavour to establish a compromise. In criminal cases there is erected in con- nection with the Amtsgericht what is called a Schoffengericht or small jury, consisting of a judge of the Amtsgericht, with two laymen acting as jurors. During the trial itself the jurors possess all the rights and privileges of the judge, and have an equal voice in all decisions which do not relate to the fixing of the penalty ; the latter is left entirely to the judge. All Germans between thirty and sixty-five are liable to serve as Schoffen unless they have lived less than two years in the commune or are disqualified by loss of civil rights as the result of a judicial decision or by the receipt of public charity, etc. Members of Parliament, certain State officials, physicians, officers of army or navy, and others are relieved of the necessity to sit as jurors. A special committee, consisting of Government officials and persons elected locally, assembles annually to draw up the list of persons to serve as jurors, and service is determined by lot for the whole year. The days on which the small juries are to sit are THE EXECUTIVE 65 also determined in advance for the whole year. The fine for non-attendance may run from 5s. to 50. The competence of the Schoffengericht extends to all misdemeanours and petty offences, the penalty for which does not exceed three months' imprisonment or a fine of 30. Cases of theft or embezzle- ment also come before it when the value of the property in question does not amount to more than 25s. The appeal from the Amtsgericht is to the Landgericht, a collegiate court consisting of a president and of associate judges not fewer than two in number. The actual number is determined by each State for itself. The Landgericht also functions as a criminal court, in which case it must consist of at least five members, except in cases of appeal against conviction in the lower court for misdemeanours, when the number may be three as in civil cases. Whereas litigants may appear before the Amtsgericht without legal assistance they must be represented before the Landgericht by an attorney ; there is in Germany no distinction between the functions of solicitor and barrister. Attached to the Landgericht is one of the most useful institutions in Germany, the chamber for commercial matters (Kammer fiir Handelsachen), consisting of one of the Landgericht judges as president, and two 66 GERMANY OF TO-DAY Handelsrichter or commercial judges nomi- nated for a space of three years by the Cham- bers of Commerce and Merchant Guilds and confirmed by the sovereign of the State in question. Any German is eligible as com- mercial judge, who has been registered as a merchant, and is thirty years old or more. The Commercial Chamber comes into action on the application of one or two parties to a suit brought in the ordinary course of pro- cedure before the Landgericht in respect of transactions which are commercial trans- actions for both parties. Criminal matters are tried and decided by the criminal court of the Landgericht only when the penalty does not exceed five years' imprisonment, or the crime has been committed by persons under eighteen years of age. (It should be added that for juvenile persons Germany is adopting the system of children's courts in vogue elsewhere.) In all other criminal cases the competent court is no longer the Landgericht, but the Grand Jury or Schwurgericht, which is composed of three judges and twelve jurors summoned from the same lists and in the same way as the Schoffen. Both the public prosecutor and the defendant have the right of appeal. There is, however, a preliminary stage before a case reaches the Schwurgericht. The public prosecutor may, and usually does, THE EXECUTIVE 67 request the Landgericht to appoint an Unter- suchungsrichter or examining judge. The examining judge decides whether the circum- stances warrant immediate arrest. During this preliminary examination the prisoner may be represented by counsel, but the latter has not the right to inspect the files prepared by the examining judge ; his office is confined to making application on behalf of his client for medical attendance, relief in the matter of special food and bedding, and if necessary, removal to a hospital. When the preliminary enquiry is completed the documents are sent to the public prosecutor, who then decides whether he will demand a trial before the Grand Jury or will request the jury to dismiss the case. When the case comes for trial the prisoner is interrogated by the presiding judge. His attorney may not put questions to him ; he must ask the judge to do so. Similarly wit- nesses may only be interrogated by prosecutor or counsel for the defence after the judge has endeavoured to elicit the witness's story if he has one to tell. The jury passes a verdict of guilty or not guilty on the several counts of the indictment, and after this verdict the prosecution demands such and such a sentence, the defence endeavours to get it lessened, and the bench of judges decides. The only appeal from the decision of the 68 GERMANY OF TO-DAY Schwurgericht is to the Criminal Senate of the Imperial Court at Leipzig, and can only be made on the ground of a technical error in the procedure before the Schwurgericht. The Oberlandesgericht is, roughly speaking, a court of appeal from the decisions of the Landesgericht when such appeal is based on technical faults of procedure. It is not a court of appeal from the Grand Jury. The Imperial Court at Leipzig is, as already explained, entirely independent of State influence or control. It acts as final court of appeal in many civil and criminal cases, but it is also the court of first and last instance in cases of treason against a State and of high treason against the Emperor or the Empire, and especially in all cases of espion- age. It is a collegiate court with a president, presidents of the various senates or divisions, and associate justices. All are imperial officials, appointed for life at a fixed salary by the Emperor. The bench for a trial by one senate of the Imperial Court consists of a president and six justices, but in trials for high treason and most cases of espionage, it is usual for two senates to sit together. At present there are ninety-two justices of Imperial Court, including the president and the presidents of senates. CHAPTER IV THE FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE ; THE ARMED FORCES ; IMPERIAL FINANCE ; SOCIAL INSURANCE, AND THE COLONIES THE new Empire was founded with the sword and the essential theory of its structure is that it must be so defended. Hence the military forces available for the purpose must be the first and most important field for the exercise of the imperial powers. The German Emperor, the Supreme War Lord, has, as we have seen, the right to mobilize and dislocate the troops of the Empire, the right to declare war and peace, the right to appoint the highest officers of the army, and to receive their oath of obedience (Fahneneid). Moreover, according to the constitution of the Empire, every able-bodied male is liable for service in the army for a period of one, two, or three years, one if he have passed the one- year volunteer service examination, two if he serve in the infantry, and three if with the mounted forces. But on looking a little closer one finds 70 GERMANY OF TO-DAY that there is not, as a matter of fact, an imperial Army Board or an imperial War Office, or even an imperial Military Gazette. It is impossible in the space at disposal to trace the origin of these apparent discrepancies, but in part they will be understood in the light of the development of the Empire out of the northern bund. Theoretically every State of the Empire contributes a contingent to the army, practically there are only four con- tingents, those of Bavaria, Wiirttemberg, Saxony and Prussia, the Prussian contingent including the minor contingents of the other States. Moreover, although the imperial con- stitution gave the legislative control of military affairs to the imperial bodies, a sub-clause provided that in Bills relating to military affairs where there is a difference of opinion in the Bundesrath, the vote of the Praesidium, that is of Prussia, shall always decide provided that vote is cast for the maintenance of the existing order of things. The Prussian military system is the basis of the imperial system, and the clause mentioned above provides for its maintenance against any modifications proposed by the other States. The Prussian military code was made obligatory for all States, and the Prussian military " cut " and equipment was made equally obligatory, but the States retained the right of appointing officers other than the FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 71 chief officers. The latter are appointed by the Emperor, but even such appointments are " promulgated," that is gazetted, not in the name of the Empire, but by the princes or senates of the several States. Bavaria's special privilege in military matters consists really of a kind of veto against the intro- duction for Bavaria of military ordinances and legislation made for Prussia prior to 1870 : she possesses therefore the honorary distinction of a kind of voluntary conformity point by point. (But she is bound by all subsequent imperial legislation regarding the army. The regiments of the German army are numbered continuously, and in all other ways uniformity is fully provided for, so that it is correct to say that the contingent system is fonaal^and only in so far effective as it gives the regiments a territorial connection and character. The numerical strength of the contingents, according to Article 63 of the constitution, is to be determined by the Emperor, but the preceding article provides that the peace-footing of the army (one per cent, of the population of 1867) shall only be altered by imperial law. It has, of course, so been altered and very considerably. The new bill of April, 1913, raised the total peace strength of the army to 661,176 privates, 109,535 non-commissioned officers, and 37,553 72 GERMANY OF TO-DAY officers and officials holding officers' rank. To these must further be added about 20,000 one-year volunteers. Next to the regular peace army comes the reserve, into which are drafted the men who have served their term with the colours. The infantry and two-year men serve five years with the reserve, and the three-year men (cavalry and horse-artillery) four years. They are called up in large contingents each year for exercise with the regular troops, but the same men are not called more than once in two years, and for the most part their service amounts to two periods of about thirty days each. From the first-line reserve, men are passed into the, Landwehr or second reserve, to which they belong for five or six years if infantry, and three years in the first division with eight in the second division, if cavalry. Infantry of the second line are called up for about a week or fourteen days at various periods. The last line is the Landsturm, for which there seems to be no adequate English rendering. Landsturm men are called for occasional roll-call, but they are not called upon for service in the field.. At 45 military obligation ceases. This is the outline of the compulsory en- listment scheme. Then there are also a number (about 50,000) of volunteers who " compound " after reaching non-commis- FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 78 sioned rank in their first enlistment. They enlist voluntarily at eighteen (instead of at 21) for three years in the infantry or four in the cavalry, and may then re-enlist. These non-commissioned men are entitled at the end of twelve years' service to a bounty of about 50 ; they are also eligible as candidates for the military vacancies in the civil services, that is for a certain number of appointments in the postal service, the police, etc., reserved for time-expired men. It is clear, however, that the skeleton reserve must be supplied with officers both when called up for periodical short service, and in an emergency for active service. To provide these officers at least in part there exists the privileged class of one-year volun- teers. These men, who naturally belong to the well-to-do classes, must have passed the second-class examination in a full-grade gymnasium (see chapter on Education) or modern school or an equivalent examination from other schools. Application for permission to serve as a one-year volunteer must be made in the eighteenth year, but service may be delayed with permission to the twenty-fourth year. After four months' service " Ein- jahrige ' are required to pass a theoretical and practical examination, and may then be recommended as aspirant-officers on leaving : they pay for their own rations, arms, quarters 74 GERMANY OF TO-DAY and equipment, and may choose any branch or even any regiment of the army, or they may choose the navy. At the expiry of their year's service they are put up for election to the corps of officers of the regiment they have chosen ; the officers' corps of the regiment has the absolute right of blackballing them, and this veto it is which gives rise to most of the popular complaints about the system. Quite apart from the strain caused by the preparation for and anxiety regarding the first examination on leaving school, which is thought to be peculiarly disastrous to the health of many young students, there are certain .injustices regarding the selection of aspirants by the officers' corps. Practically, the son of Jewish parents is certain to be black-balled, though it is notorious that such blackballing excludes many excellent officers, whilst the privilege of rank results in the inclusion of many who do no credit to the army or to the officers' corps. Another source for the provision of officers are the cadet schools, where sons of officers and civil servants are specially educated from an early age for a military career. They usually enter the army at 18 as ensigns, become second lieutenants between 19 and 20, lieutenants six years later, captains about 83, and majors about 45. A lieutenant's pay rises from 60 to 85, up to the sixth year, thence up to FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 75 120 in the twelfth year. A captain's pay rises from 170 to 255. These figures will serve to show why indebtedness in crack regiments is apt to become the rule rather than the exception, why the Emperor finds it necessary so frequently to insist upon simplicity and abstinence in the officers' corps, and lastly, why German officers have "become a name" for seeking rich brides. The following figures give approximately the cost to each officer of his career. Outfit as ensign, 25. Financial assistance (17 months at 5 per month), 85. Outfit as officer, 50. Financial assistance : First three years, monthly, 3 15s. 135 Second three 3 108 Subsequently (ten years), monthly 2 to 2 10s 257 This would give a total of 700, but the actual amount (reckoned on the lowest possible terms) is really nearer 800. According to a rescript of the Emperor not more than 2 5s. is to be required monthly by an infantry officer in addition to his pay ; but in point of fact it is clear that this sum will rarely suffice him. It is perhaps unnecessary to add more on this subject, but it may be mentioned in conclusion that about 65 per cent, of recruits accepted as fully fit for the 76 GERMANY OF TO-DAY two or three years' service are provided by villages with populations not exceeding 2,000, whilst cities of over 100,000 inhabitants provide not more than 7 per cent. It is clear that this peculiar drain on the able-bodied population of the villages is a special handicap to German agriculture, and Dr. Heim, a leader of the "South-German Peasants' Union," shows that it is particularly a handicap to the small independent farmers. He even declares that many peasant families who have sent several sons to the army are ruined by the expense incurred, not only in providing substitutes for the able-bodied lads whilst with the colours but in supplying these sons with money, clothes, and additional supplies of various kinds. He estimates the expense of such supply at about 8 per annum for each son sent to join the colours. The German army is not organised for ex- peditionary purposes : the whole scheme, the carefully regulated and periodically revised plans for employment of the railways upon mobilisation, the details of supply and the calculations of the quantity of fodder which German farmers are under obligations to provide upon the outbreak of war, the lists of available private motor-cars, and so forth, are based, as is the organisation of the army itself, upon the theory of the defence of Germany upon two frontiers. When it became FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 77 necessary to organize an expeditionary force at the time of the Herero campaign in South- West Africa, it was found that mistakes and miscalculations were at the least as frequent, and in some instances hardly less disastrous than those made in expeditionary campaigns of other nations. This is, of course, the very nature of a " nation in arms," which is what the newest bill has made Germany, and it is the basis also of the German claim that the army is not intended for offence but for defence. < Unlike the army, the German navy has been from the outset an imperial factor. It is administered by an imperial Admiralty, its officers are imperial, and the expense of creation and maintenance falls upon the imperial treasury. Hence article 53 of the constitution declares that " the navy is unitary (as opposed to contingental) under the supreme command of the Kaiser." Immediately subordinate to the Emperor is the Admiral's staff, with its seat in Berlin. This controls the naval appointments and similar matters. On the other hand the Admiralty (Reichsmarineamt) is not an independent office, but like the Foreign Office is a branch of the Chancellery, the Chancellor being responsible for its acts. That it has tended in recent years to develop an excessive degree of independence, especially in the way 78 GERMANY OF TO-DAY of publicistic propaganda, is a charge which it would be impossible to disprove, but within recent months its political activities have been restrained, owing to the private representations of the Chancellor and the Foreign Secretary. Nevertheless the Secretary for the Navy exercises an important, and at times an unfortunate political influence, but this seems to be a part of a general tendency amongst the departments of the Chancellery, those for the colonies, foreign affairs, and so forth, tending also to develop an independence of the Chancellery. The fact is that since Bismarck's time the affairs of the Empire have so enor- mously developed in many directions that no one man can hope to be master of all depart- ments, and whilst the responsibility of the Chancellor for all departments is still main- tained as a legal formula it is becoming in practice little more than a fiction. The danger lies in the fact that the Chancellor's subordinate officers are only responsible to him, and he only to the Emperor, so that there is no real public control, and the burden of decision always rests with the Emperor, who in turn is liable at times to be misinformed by his confidential advisers. It would serve no purpose to repeat here at length the history of th? rise of the German navy. At the time of the war with France FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 79 Prussia had but a few ships, and they of no great power, and yet they were sufficient to prevent an attack on Kiel, the war-harbour of Prussia, by the French admiral Bouet- Willaumez, who was otherwise able to sail unmolested along the German coastline. This itself was a lesson in the influence of sea-power, but the beginning of the German navy may be traced from the time when it became clear that some protection should be provided for the increasing overseas commerce of the new Empire. This was about 1889, when the first commander-in-chief of the navy was appointed. Nine years later, chiefly through the energetic efforts of the Emperor, the first navy bill passed the Reichstag. It provided for the construction of a fleet of nineteen battleships and forty-two cruisers. Two years later the programme was again enlarged, and provision was now made for thirty-eight battleships, fourteen first-class cruisers, and thirty-eight smaller cruisers, with ninety-six torpedo boats and destroyers. The creation of the German torpedo fleet is peculiarly the work of Admiral von Tirpitz, who entered the navy in 1865 and became chief of the Baltic station in 1891. In 1908 the naval programme was again altered, in consequence of the decision to reduce the life of a battleship from twenty-five to twenty years, to add a submarine flotilla, and to 80 GERMANY OF TO-DAY increase the torpedo fleet to 144. In the form which subsequent alterations have given the naval programme, it provides for the creation by 1917 of a battle fleet with one flagship and five squadrons of eight battleships each, ten Dreadnought cruisers, and thirty small cruisers. The foreign fleet would then consist of ten large and ten small cruisers. The " Material Reserve " provided for in the previous programmes was dropped out in 1912, when the battle fleet was increased. It was then arranged that the active battle fleet should consist of three instead of two squadrons, with two squadrons as before in reserve. All three squadrons of the active battle fleet are to be kept permanently in commission and half of the reserve. The German naval centres are Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. The latter has been in the main a creation of the present century. It had indeed been long projected, but its great development was largely necessitated by the fact that the Kiel canal at the time could not accommodate modern battleships. In the main, however, it seems to be true that the chief German naval station must now be taken to include the whole Bight of Heligo- land, that island having been gradually built up and developed into a sort of outer-base. The Kiel canal is also being increased, not merely to take present battleships of the FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 81 super-Dreadnought type, but also the con- jectural giants of the future, up to 50,000 tons, a size which is at present only reached by the huge transatlantic liners. The chief construction docks are the Admiralty docks at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, Krupp's docks at Kiel, the Vulcan, Bloehm and Voss at Hamburg, and others. The private yards employ nearly 60,000 artificers, or nearly treble the numjber employed in the Govern- ment yards. Of the twelve naval stations which have arisen since 1898 Sonderburg is mainly devoted to marine artillery, Eckern- forde to torpedo-instruction, Cuxhaven to coastal artillery, Emden to mines, and Wangeroog to light artillery, whilst Murwik and Flensburg are the naval educational centres. The navy is recruited like the army by conscription. The seafaring class is, of course, specially reserved, but landsmen may also enlist voluntarily, if medically fit, for four years or more. The usual period of service for ordinary recruits is three years in the active fleet, four years in the first reserve, and another five years in the second reserve. The age limit for the war call is 40. Petty officers are recruited largely from volunteer enlist- ments of lads between 15 and 18. A number of engineer officers of the reserve are obtained from the one-year volunteers, of whom some 82 GERMANY OF TO-DAY 700 annually enter the navy. The training of the officers of the navy proceeds very much on English lines, the base, of the system being the naval cadet corps, though it appears that German cadets join the service rather later than in England. There are not wanting, of course, patriotic Germans who hope and believe that in time Germany will possess the most powerful navy as well as the most powerful army. They base their calculation for the most part not on any supposition that England would not or could not build two ships for one or even more if necessary, but on the theory that conscription alone can ultimately enable any country to man the ships that the growth of navies all over the world will render necessary. Lack of petty officers as well as, or rather, more than lack of seamen, is the rock on which these enthusiasts hope to see the British navy go to pieces. On the other hand, it is true that the German con- ception of the object of her navy has been developed. The preamble to the first navy bill asserted that Germany required a navy not only to protect her commerce, but chiefly in order that her naval strength " might be such that even the greatest sea-power must hesitate to attack Germany unless she were willing to risk her whole position as a Great Power." Latterly the creed has been devel- FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 83 oped into a demand that the German navy shall be so powerful that " Germany may be able to compel respect for her wishes in any international complication or development in any part of the world." Vires acquirit eundo. Between the army and the navy there has arisen in the last year a third arm whose importance has never yet been tested in any important war, and which it is thought may profoundly modify future European contests by sea and land. That arm is the aerial " force." The great surprise of the German military bill of 1913 was the large amount demanded for the creation of an aerial depart- ment of the army (4,000,000), in addition to the demands already made for the navy. Germany had already made great strides in the provision of aeronautical sections for the army ; during several precedent autumn manosuvres airships and aeroplanes had been tested, and it was now finally decided to equip both army and navy with a powerful aerial force. The bill proposed to provide for the navy that there should be two " Staffel " (squadrons with a base) of airships consisting of four vessels to each squadron, with one in reserve. Both squadrons were to be stationed at a common base, probably at the mouth of the Elbe, and the base was to be furnished with double revolving sheds and 84 GERMANY OF TO-DAY all the necessary gas and other installations. There would also be a " mother-station " for naval aeroplanes and six coastal stations. There would be thirty-six planes (presumably hydro-aeroplanes) always in service and fourteen in reserve. The coastal stations would be maintained in condition for use immediately on an emergency, would doubt- less be guarded at all times, but would not be occupied except at manoeuvre times. From this it may be concluded that the chain of islands with Borkum as the centre would be the situation of at any rate some of these coastal stations. The staff and crews were to number 1,452. For the army the following are approximate figures : Airships, 25 or 30 ; aeroplanes, 150 to 200. The principal airship stations were to be Berlin, Cologne, Mannheim, Metz, Konigsberg, and Graudenz, with " company- stations " at Hanover, Dresden, Diisseldorf, Darmstadt, Lahr, Friedrichshafen and Schnei- demuhl. The five battalions of the airship arm are, it is understood, to have from six to eight vessels each, but some of these will, of course, be reserves, and Berlin will have only three, with one reserve. The distribution of the aeroplanes is uncertain, but they will certainly be placed wherever there is sufficient room to manoeuvre them within existing fortified districts. The Government further FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 85 proposes to subsidize private craft, and to keep a register of privately owned aeroplanes available in an emergency (as is already done of motor cars that could be used for transport of troops and provisions). It is not even claimed that the airship is as yet a reliable arm, but the object of the Government is to be adequately provided with the latest aeronautical appliances so that they may be used to the utmost if the con- ditions arise in which experiment has shown them to be of probable value. The Admiralty officials believe that given certain atmospheric conditions, rigid airships might be very useful for " attack," and that in any case during the course of a naval campaign in the North Sea they would do great service as scouts. At the time the bill was presented to the Reichstag there were existing or building three army airships of the Zeppelin type, two naval airships and three privately owned. Germany also possessed one rigid airship with wooden frame (Schutte-Lanz), and another was building. There were also four non- rigid vessels (Parsevals), belonging to the army, and two private vessels. The list was com- pleted by three semi-rigid vessels ("Gross"), in which the car is carried by a framework. The Siemens-Schuckert and Clouth vessels have been dismantled and the companies concerned have ceased construction. 86 GERMANY OF TO-DAY It has already been said that the imperial navy is constructed and maintained out of imperial funds. The great and increasing expense of this imperial factor was not provided for in the original federal financial arrangements, nor was provision made for many other items of expenditure now con- nected with the increasing number and extent of strictly imperial functions. A word of explanation is required here, though it will be clear from preceding chapters that the preservation of the individuality of the States within the Empire made a simultaneous preservation of their individual budgets necessary. Since the individual States were not swal- lowed up by the Empire, but were left as to a great extent self-administrative, independent principalities, they had also to be left a fiscal independence, and the sphere whence the Empire could collect revenues for its own purposes was limited. The basis at first of the imperial fiscal theory was a system of annual contributions from the individual States calculated according to the actual number of inhabitants and called matricular contributions. The amount of this contri- bution per head of population was, and is, fixed annually, usually in November, with the fixing of the imperial budget for the coming year. It has to be fixed thus early in order FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 87 that the individual States may have time to arrange their own budgets according to the amount that they have to contribute to the imperial treasury. But there were also certain duties upon articles of consumption earmarked for imperial purposes. These were the customs duties, less the cost of collection, which is repaid to the individual frontier States who collect them, and also the excise duties on tobacco, salt, sugar, beers, brandies and by-products of the beet-sugar industry. It was arranged, however, that the Empire should only receive the amounts proceeding from the tobacco and customs duties up to the annual value of 6,500,000. Any surplus was to be repaid to the individual States in proportion to their assessment for the matricular contributions. In some years the amount thus repaid ex- ceeded the matricular contributions collected. Thus in 1889 the States received back nearly 7,000,000 more than they paid in contribu- tions. There was a plus repayment in all years from 1883 to 1892, and again from 1895 to 1897. In 1901 the matricular contributions and the repayments exactly balanced. This system, however, presented two evils, first, that the individual States had great difficulty in making up their budgets because they could never be sure whether the repay- ment would equal or exceed or fall below the 88 GERMANY OF TO-DAY amount of the matricular contributions ; and secondly, that although the imperial treasury was making these repayments, they did not represent, as they were intended to do, the actual amount collected by the Empire above and beyond its own requirements. On the contrary, the Empire only succeeded in dispensing with loans, thanks to the millions paid by France as war-indemnity, up to 1875. In that year the Empire began to issue treasury-notes, which were bonded in 1877. From 1877 the imperial loans increased rapidly, partly owing to the require- ments for the increase of army and navy, and partly owing to the demands for subven- tions to the contributory old-age, invalid, and other social insurance schemes. By 1891 the imperial debt had risen to 75,000,000 sterling, and in 1911 it was approximately 250,000,000. Most of the expenditure repre- sented by this sum was unproductive, for the property of the Empire, as distinguished from the property of the individual States, in which money had been invested at profit, was represented principally by the improve- ments to the railways in Alsace-Lorraine (originally taken over from France), as well as some lines in the Duchy of Luxemburg. The State loans raised by individual States are not thus unproductive ; for instance, the Prussian State loans have been largely em- FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 89 ployed in extending canals and State railways, which are highly productive forms of invest- ment, and as a matter of fact, constitute one of the most important sources of Prussian revenue. Moreover, Prussia and other States have fixed the gradual repayment of loans by law ; since 1897 Prussian budgets must provide annually for the repayment of not less than three-fifths per cent, of the entire loan. To remedy the hopeless condition of the imperial finances the law of May, 1904, repealed the constitutional arrangement for the return to the individual States of the part of the proceeds from customs and tobacco duties exceeding six and a half millions. The same law, however, provided that the proceeds of certain other taxes (mash-vat and brandy materials) should be handed over to the individual States ; should these pay- ments not cover the matricular contributions the contributions were to be repaid only in such additional measure as the imperial surplus would allow. What this law appar- ently did was to abandon the fiction that the Empire could meet its financial requirements without genuine instead of fictitious matricular contributions. Numberless writers then and since then have pointed out that the Empire suffers from the great disability of being unable to raise a direct tax based on income 90 GERMANY OF TO-DAY for its own purposes, as is the case, for example, in England. The opposition to a direct imperial tax, for which the Liberal press in Prussia continually clamours, is derived first from the particularist tendencies still noticeable in the individual States, and secondly from the fact that an imperial income-tax would tax incomes for the third time. It has to be explained that in Prussia and other States local municipal and communal bodies under the local self- government scheme also raise a large part of their requirements by direct taxation of in- come. In Prussia, for example, communities are entitled to raise one hundred per cent, of the State income-tax for their own purposes. Thus, if an income of 500 pays 15 State-tax, the municipality may raise an additional 15 for its own purposes. Latterly the State has raised a super-tax on incomes, but the muni- cipalities have been denied the right to utilise this super-tax as a basis for their own taxation. In cases, however, where a munici- pality desires to raise more than 100 per cent, of the State tax for its own purposes it is compelled to obtain the sanction of the central government through the local author- ity, and also to submit its budget for Govern- ment inspection. This regulation is doubtless deliberately intended to check municipal extravagance and to keep the percentage FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 91 down to 100. Nevertheless there exist such violent differences of municipal taxation, as those between certain ill-situated towns in the north-west with a percentage of over 200 of the State income-tax, and Grunewald, a wealthy forest-suburb of Berlin, which does not require to raise more than about 60 per cent, of the tax. And there are also some lucky country communes which, thanks to the possession of communal mines or other valuable property, raise no local taxes whatever. The above outline may serve to show the difficulties which the Empire is under in raising money for imperial purposes, since the kind of taxes that it can raise is limited by the previous ear-marking of the individual States. The glamour of a " patriotic sacri- fice " had to be thrown over the " revolu- tionary " proposal to raise the fifty millions required for the Government's military pro- gramme in 1913 by means of what is in reality an imperial property-tax, and in order to cover the additional annual recurring expense of the increased army bill resort has been had once more to an increase of the matricular contributions, it being however provided that the additional sum to be produced each year by matricular contributions must be raised by each State, not in any way it pleases as heretofore, but by a tax on " incomes, 92 GERMANY OF TO-DAY property, or capital." That is how the Government proposes to avoid the odium of breaking with the tradition of forty years by introducing annual imperial direct taxa- tion. It is claimed that little more than the phantom of that tradition will any longer be left. It is perhaps desirable to add one word concerning the famous war-reserve of 6,000,000 in gold, stored in the Julius Turm at Spandau near Berlin, which is now to be raised to 12,000,000 in gold and 6,000,000 in silver. This treasure (according to Geheim- rath Riesser, Finanzielle Kriegsbereitschaft, Jena, 1909) will be employed on the outbreak of a war or when the order for mobilisation is given, not for payment in gold but to provide a basis for the issue of notes of the Imperial Bank, which may be issued under these cir- cumstances up to three times the value of the gold coin handed over to it. Geheimrath Riesser calculates the demand on the out- break of war at about 12,500,000, which must be paid in coin (this he calls the panic- demand for coin), 60,000,000 for the pur- poses of the army in the first six weeks, 50,000,000 for the demands of industry for payment of wages, etc., in the hurried prepara- tion of war material. Thus the requirement in the first six weeks would be roughly 125,000,000. He calculates that under FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 93 present conditions the Imperial Bank could issue roughly 110,000,000 in additional bank- notes based on its gold reserve. The addition to the war treasure in 1913 was perhaps due to the conclusion of the authorities that the panic demand at the outset, and the other requirements mentioned would be very much heavier than that thus estimated, and that it is desirable to enable the Reichsbank to issue nearly another 50,000,000 in notes on the outbreak of war. It also became clear during the panic months of 1912-1913 that the so-called panic demand for gold will be greater than that estimated, and efforts, it is understood, are being made greatly to increase the permanent gold reserve of the Imperial Bank, which was estimated to reach approxi- mately 50,000,000 in May, 1913. Reference has been made above to the cost falling upon the Empire in consequence of its assumption of the business of insur- ance. It is no longer necessary to expound the German old-age and sickness insurance system, because it has been imitated in England, and its workings are in the main familiar. It is clear, however, that primarily the State control of insurance and the com- pulsory character given to it first in Germany was necessitated partly by the change from independent to factory labour, but largely also by the paternal system of Government 94 GERMANY OF TO-DAY itself. Inasmuch as every male citizen of the Empire is compelled to serve the empire first, devoting to it at least one, and often three years of the best part of his life, and being liable at any time to be called upon to forsake his business or trade, and to fight for the Empire, it became incumbent upon the Empire to ensure the citizen against extreme want in old age, and still more against destitu- tion resulting from sickness. The Empire might doubtless have introduced a non- contributory scheme, and it would appear that its citizens had a better claim to non- contributory pensions than those where the service demanded by the State is less onerous. The arguments against a non-contributory system, financial and politico-economic, are, however, sufficiently familiar, and need not be repeated. Germany adopted a contributory- basis, and the scope of its compulsory insurance arrangements has gradually been extended, partly because the State can carry out insurance work more cheaply than private companies, but also because it thus gradually sweeps into its net precisely the classes of insured persons most desired by any sound insurance system. The old-age clause itself was and is no more than a time-limit at which a pension must be given in return for the premiums paid ; in practice the sickness or disability clause is the essential feature of the FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 95 scheme. Thus there were in 1910 only about 100,000 old-age pensions in force, whereas there were nearly 900,000 invalidity pensions. In the twenty years from 1891 to 1911 about 70,000,000 was paid out under the scheme, and only two-thirds of this amount was raised by the premiums. Of these two-thirds one- half had been paid by employers. The scheme, which is doubtless familiar now to most readers, is as follows : Weekly Pay- ment (half paid Yearly Wage; by Employer); Class I. Up to 17 :10s Ifd. II. 17 10s. to 27 10s. .. 2|d. III. 27 10s. to 42 10s. . . 3d. IV. 42 10s. to 57 10s. .. 3fd. V. Over 57 10s 4|d. An extension of the law raising the weekly premium by sums of d. in Class I. to l|d. in Class V. has been arranged to provide a fund for widows and orphans of pensioners. Other branches of insurance which the Government now controls are workmen's accident insurance (premiums paid solely by the employer), domestic servants, employees', and clerks' hospital fund and compulsory sickness insurance (taken over from the private companies from January, 1914), in- surance of working-women in the event of motherhood (mothers who do not go out 96 GERMANY OF TO-DAY to work are not compulsorily insured), and so forth. It is further proposed that the Imperial Government should control other branches of insurance, such as fire, life, burglary, accident, agricultural insurance and so forth, and inasmuch as the Government is at present mostly burthened with the kinds of insurance which do not show a profit, it seems not improbable that it will even the odds by assuming control of the forms of insurance which in the hands of private companies have produced handsome profits. The one form of insurance which the Imperial Government resolutely refuses to touch is insurance against unemployment. The latest communiqu6 on the subject (1912) stated that in the opinion of the imperial authorities there had not yet been found any satisfactory basis for an unemployment insurance scheme e of any kind. Last of the spheres of strictly imperial activity which can be mentioned here are the protectorates (Schutzgebiete) or colonies. Bismarck foresaw the difficulties which colonial questions would involve for the Empire, and therefore was opposed from the outset to their formation at all. They had to be obviously possessions of the whole Empire, and thus had to be administered by the Empire,, but there was no machinery in existence for such administration, and until FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 97 quite recently there was no Colonial Office or Colonial Secretary in Berlin. There was only a branch of the Foreign Office dealing with the protectorates (a sufficiently clear indication of the view taken of them !) and an Under-Secretary to deal with them. Recently the Colonial Office has become a separate institution, though, like all the other imperial offices, it is nominally a branch of the Chancellery. The complaint of Germans regarding the non-possession of colonies is so familiar through the columns of the daily press that there can be little need to repeat it here. Germany's foreign trade has enor- mously increased in all parts of the world, her passenger ships are second to none, and her foreign connections have, it must be admitted, in part justified the claim that her fleet is built largely for the protection of her overseas trade. Moreover Germans are valued as colonists everywhere : in America, Canada, South Africa, Australia, India. But for the numbers that have left and still leave the Fatherland to seek wider spheres of profit or utility overseas, there were and are practically no districts under the German flag whither they could go. It is estimated that there are some 15,000,000 of Germans living out of Europe, and not under the protection of the German flag. In other words, Germany has an expansive a 98 GERMANY OF TO-DAY population with no direction for that expan- sion except to countries where the emigrants are lost to Germanism and the Empire. The present possessions of the Empire overseas consist of Togo and Camerun on the west coast of Africa near the Equator ; South- West Africa (developed from the earliest German colony), which lies between latitudes fifteen and thirty, and has recently increased in value owing to the discoveries of diamonds ; German East Africa, wedged between British East Africa and the Portu- guese territory ; a part of New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelm Land) ; the Carolines and Bismarck archipelago, Samoa, and the port of Kiaut- schou in China. Of the parts of the globe outside Europe where German organisation, German enterprise, and German money have been most successfully invested, none belongs to the Empire. " We came too late upon the scene ; there is no place for us in the sun." That is the common complaint, and it is easily understandable. That the adoption of the German bureaucratic system for colonial administration has not proved altogether a success is a fact frequently overlooked, and it is perhaps not altogether certain that German emigrants and German capital would flow even to the " rich places of the earth " if they were administered on the German domestic plan. It is possible in fact that FUNCTIONS OF EMPIRE 99 German emigration is partly encouraged by the desire to find countries where bureaucratic organisation is less perfect, where the State is less all-important, and where the individual counts a little more* CHAPTER V BETWEEN THE STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL. THE MUNICIPALITIES AND THEIR WORK ACROSS the film which, one may suppose, represents for the intelligent newspaper reader the mind-picture of Berlin composed from scores of special descriptions, there will be doubtless a number of catch-words and perennial phrases doing duty for epigrammatic descriptions. Berlin is the " Gay City," Charlottenburg (the Kensington of Berlin) is the "Model City," Moabit is the "East End," with no slums, very few foreigners, and " streets you could eat your dinner from." Most of these phrases do little justice to Berlin, and less to the other cities of the Empire. For Berlin has not, and perhaps will never have, that light-heartedness, that joie de vivre which was once thought character- istic of Paris, and is occasionally with much injustice attributed to Munich. It is by the accident which sooner or later overtakes all great cities that the temples of pleasure have collected in the neighbour- 100 THE MUNICIPALITIES 101 hood of the Friedrichstrasse, in Berlin, just as, a little to the east of it, there is growing up a real " city," a business-man's city which is not or is only to a very small extent resi- dential. And as for the " model city," Charlottenburg, it must be remembered that a few years ago her great boulevards were potato-fields, and in the place of her gorgeous balconied flat-fronts there were little two- storied country houses amongst the forest- trees and the open fields. Berlin, that is Greater Berlin, grew very fast, but at a time when municipal problems were no longer slowly struggling for expression and from expression to solution. It was possible to foresee many municipal dangers and diffi- culties, and to provide for them (not for all but for many). There was, or ought to have been, plenty of room for expansion in all directions, at any rate for the suburban municipalities on the periphery, and the conception of municipal town planning as opposed to haphazard development was not entirely new, nor was there any lack of warn- ings against the doctrine of haphazard. Hence if the term " model city " must be applied to Charlottenburg, it ought only to refer to Charlottenburg as a model for other cities built under similar circumstances ; and then Charlottenburg itself would admit that the designation is false. 102 GERMANY OF TO-DAY But the concentration of attention on Berlin and its suburbs is unjust not only to Berlin but also to the many other cities of the Empire which are of older development and yet have solved their municipal problems with no less success. For there has never been such a concentration of intellectual, social, and economic life in Berlin as there was from a very early period upon London. The division of the country into a number of States involved the slow development of the capitals of these States in the early period, gave them the kudos of royal or princely capitals, and brought to them the business and the intellect of each State to an extent which has never been the case with the great provincial towns of England. Then account must also be taken of the City-State development in the Hansa period and later. It must not be forgotten that Frankfurt was a free City-State until the middle of the last century, just as Hamburg and Bremen and Lubeck still are. It is as though Dan and Beersheba had existed as national centres before Jerusalem, so that the separatist move- ment needed only to insist upon their priority and greater reputation. Moreover, scarcely any great city of Ger- many was at such disadvantage as Berlin in respect of drab surroundings and difficult approach. Set in a flat plain and surrounded THE MUNICIPALITIES 103 by a wilderness of pine-trees and sand relieved only by desert lakes, the capital of Prussia has not retained the incense-smell of venerable antiquity which attaches to Cologne or Frankfurt or Munich or Hanover : it is a new city, and the paint is not yet dry. Its growth was only rendered possible by the extension of the railway system and the development of the rapid trade-route eastwards to Russia. It is not, and perhaps it can never be, an international centre like Paris, and it will perhaps never attain a national importance or dignity such as London has possessed for ages. Dresden and Munich will perhaps always be its too successful rivals in the domain of art, Frankfurt and Hamburg in the domain of trade and business. It follows that there is far less justification for treating Berlin as representative of German municipal methods than there is for a similar treatment of London. Berlin has no garden city that can compare at present with Dres- den's Hellerau ; the two best newspapers in Germany are not published in Berlin at all ; and at present she has neither the best opera- house nor the finest galleries, and architectur- ally it would perhaps scarcely be too much to say that she is hardly even second-rate. But it cannot be denied to her that she stands in the front row as regards the growth of municipal science. It is true that she does 104 GERMANY OF TO-DAY not own her own tramways or her own electric lighting service, she is not an administrative unity, nor are her rates uniform throughout her borders. But municipalism in Germany generally is gradually taking its place as the connecting link between the State and the individual : municipalities have developed a Beamtenschaft, which causes them to be ranged sometimes as bureaucratic organs, but they have remained democratic in their essence, as is sufficiently seen by the opposition to municipal developments on the part of the feudal Prussian Government and its adminis- trative and executive officials. That opposi- tion is summed up in the single phrase, " Berlin is too democratic for the Junkers." The city of Berlin itself has been surrounded by a number of satellite towns, Charlotten- burg, Wilmersdorf, Schoneberg, and so .forth, which have swallowed the space which should have been available for Berlin development. They have become the residential quarters, and have left to Berlin the poor, who must live near factories and workshops, and the officials, who retain their official residences. Gradually Berlin is becoming a city of a few thousand permanent inhabitants, and vast hordes of daily visitors. Her municipal re- quirements are heavier than those of her suburban satellites, but she dare not make her municipal taxation heavier than theirs THE MUNICIPALITIES 105 because the result would be to drive capital out to the periphery, and that process is developing too fast already. Efforts to equalize taxation throughout the group of municipalities have hitherto failed. One suburb has recently raised the percentage of municipal taxation to 110 per cent, of the income-tax, a course which Berlin would like to adopt but dare not. Grunewald, which has few poor and many rich residents with private houses, raises only some 65 per cent. ; Charlottenburg, which was able to expand into the forest-land, has brighter houses and broader boulevards ; elsewhere one suburb after another possesses advantages which Berlin does not possess, and perhaps now never can obtain. But Greater Berlin has not succeeded in developing a unity out of its plurality, nor in distributing the burdens and the advantages over the whole congeries of municipalities. In other words she has not succeeded in achieving, any more than has London, a true communal solidarity. The Zweckverband, an intermunicipal association for the discussion and protection of common interests, has had perhaps too little time as yet to develop its full efficacy, and it may prove the germ of later solidarity, but it does not receive its fair measure of Government support, and there are plenty of signs that governmental 106 GERMANY OF TO-DAY jealousy of the more democratic municipalities is not on the wane. Perhaps it is hardly even a good sign that in the attempt to propitiate the State Government, one municipality after another is appointing as its chief magistrate an ex-official of the bureaucratic State system. The attempt of the Association to secure for the city in perpetuity the band of forest and lake which is one of its few charms, and perhaps one of the chief reasons for its healthy character, is met by the Treasury, to whom the forest belongs, in a spirit which can only be called unduly grudging ; the price asked for the small portion of the forest which is to be bought and preserved by the city was at the outset prohibitive, and even as amended (it is said by the intervention of the Emperor), the price is absurd, if it be considered that the development of the Imperial capital on rational lines ought to be the first care of the Government. It would almost appear that the growth of Berlin, perhaps of towns generally, is con- sidered by the Prussian bureaucratic system as a dangerous democratic threat which must be checked as far as possible. But if the municipalities thus tend to represent a democratic tendency, especially in Prussia, where democracy is otherwise almost without representation of any kind, it does not follow that the municipal bodies are elected upon a THE MUNICIPALITIES 107 democratic basis. The origin of the local government system in Prussia has already been sketched above, but it should be added here that the mayors of German towns are not annually elected honorary officials, but paid officers, often very highly paid, chosen as a rule by the Town Council for a period of twelve years. Their appointment must, how- ever, be ratified by the King of Prussia, and it may be remembered that there were great searchings of heart in Berlin not many years ago owing to the non-ratification for many months of the former chief Burgomaster Herr Kirschner. The reason was commonly believed to lie in the opposition of the city of Berlin to certain royal ideas concerning town-planning and architectural develop- ments. The Town Councils are not themselves purely democratic bodies, for they are elected, in Prussia at any rate, on a ballot which resembles the Prussian governmental electoral system and thus tend to be measurably oligarchical. They are, however, forced by the nature of the Government into a demo- cratic attitude, which retains for them a great measure of public sympathy. Municipal executives are almost always highly trained and well paid officials, for amateurism is as little tolerated here as in other spheres of public life. 108 GERMANY OF TO-DAY The actual growth of German cities has been chiefly fostered, of course, by the growth and concentration of industry. Thus Diisseldorf is purely an industrial town, and it has perhaps the most extensive development of municipal activities. Chemnitz, Plauen, Essen, Elberfeld, Duisburg, and others equally owe their development almost entirely to industry. Breslau and Berlin amongst others may be held to have developed partly through railway connections. In the case of the former the seat of Prussian and imperial government has naturally attracted population from the large agricultural districts eastwards, and to such an extent that it is stated that only about one-quarter of the population of Berlin are natives of the city. Apart from the industrial and other causes which tend to increase the population of German towns at the expense of the country (at present nearly one-fifth of the population of Germany lives in towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants), there is little doubt that the concentration of troops in towns tends to withdraw the time-expired men permanently from the country. An estimate recently formed by an agricultural paper that the country loses nearly 100,000 able-bodied men annually to the towns as the result of the non-return of time-expired soldiery to the villages would appear to be too high, THE MUNICIPALITIES 109 and a reliable estimate is not available, but it is clearly true that the conscript system has an important effect in this direction ; hence efforts are now being made in the army to prevent this land-desertion after the two years' service, by giving agricultural lectures and other forms of suggestive education to the men. Under a paternal form of Government such as exists in German States, it is natural that the undertaking of local public services by the municipalities, and, in consequence, also the development of municipal enterprise, should meet with less opposition than in countries where individual enterprise has at all times been the main factor in progress. Hence it is found natural that German cities should own their own electric supplies, their gasworks, tramways, waterworks, certain forms of educational institutions, should construct canals and canal -harbours (as in the case of Treptow and Berlin), and especially should undertake elaborate projects for the extension of buildings on carefully laid plans, themselves purchasing land for the purpose, and attending to its rational development. Berlin, however, does not own its own tramways, for the huge tramway company called the Grosser Berliner is a private concern with a virtual monopoly ; but its contract involves the payment to the municipality of eight per cent, of the gross 110 GERMANY OF TO-DAY proceeds, and six per cent, of the net profit on any fresh capital invested. The muni- cipality reserves to itself the right to regulate fares, which are fixed uniformly at ten pfennigs (about five farthings) for each trip, and for any distance within the radius. Similarly the Berlin electrical company pays to the town ten per cent, of its gross proceeds and fifty per cent, of all clear profit exceeding four per cent, of the capital. The muni- cipality has an agreement for the supply of the town lamps with power at fixed rates, and has also a control over the general rates charged to the public by the company both for lighting and power purposes. Amongst the strictly municipal enterprises should be mentioned the excellent public swimming and other baths, disinfecting estab- lishments, rubbish destructors, the great establishment for destruction of bad meat in the open country near Bodelschwing's well-known labour colony, a canal-port and so forth. Between 1877 and 1881 the city of Berlin constructed its own slaughter-house, connecting it with the railway and fitting it with the latest appliances. The law which authorises communities to establish slaugh- ter-houses provides that the fees charged for butchers' pay and inspection shall not be higher than is sufficient to amortize the original outlay at one per cent., pay the THE MUNICIPALITIES 111 interest at five per cent., and also cover the costs of maintenance. Meat passed through the Berlin slaughter-house is " unbedingt tau- glich," that is, it is free of all possible taint and is so stamped. Meat that is partially fit for food or that can be made so without danger to health is sold to the poor at muni- cipal establishments called the " Frei-Banke." The meat sold at these establishments, which are now a feature of most of the great German cities, is specially treated under steam, and then sold at very low rates at certain hours on three or four days in each week. Purchasers have no choice of meat, for they must take what is offered to them, hence the last comers may receive little more than bones, though efforts are, of course, made to distribute the available meat in fair portions. The covered market-halls of Berlin have not proved very successful. Intended originally for coun- try salesmen, they have gradually deteriorated and many of them have been closed owing to more than fifty per cent, of the stalls being un- occupied. The open-air markets, particularly the two on the confines of Charlottenburg, are extremely well patronized, especially for vegetables, eggs, live fish, and fruit, the difference between the prices on the open retail market and those of the small green- grocers' shops being often very marked. The result is, of course, a constant effort on 112 GERMANY OF TO-DAY the part of the small shopkeepers to secure their abolition. Many German municipalities have recently opened halls for the sale on certain days of fresh fish and, more recently still, of imported foreign meat. These ventures have proved eminently successful, and, on the whole, popular, though the sale of foreign meat is still only a temporary measure limited by the period set to the facilities offered for the purpose by the Government. Some South- German cities have also recently entered into contracts with German cattle-farmers for the direct supply of meat with the object of excluding the middlemen's profits, or perhaps of testing the truth of the assertion that these middle profits are the prime cause of the high price of meat throughout the Empire. It is natural, perhaps, that these measures of the communities for reliev- ing the effects of the high prices of food-stuffs do not meet with the approval of local butchers and other purveyors, but the opposi- tion is spasmodic and not very effective. Both the gas and water supply of Berlin, as of several other German cities, are prim- arily due to the enterprise of English com- panies in the first half of the last century. German industry at the time lacked all experience in the provision of gas plants, so that from 1826 until 1847 there was no THE MUNICIPALITIES 113 municipal gas supply in Berlin. In the latter year two municipal gasworks were opened, with the result that the English company exactly halved its rates (from 35.3 to 17.7 pfennige per cubic metre). There are now several additional municipal works, providing altogether about four-fifths of the gas supply of the city at a price of rather more than three halfpence per cubic metre. The Berlin water- works company established by Messrs. Fox and Crampton began to supply water in 1856, buf the plant was purchased by the Government in 1873, and handed over to the city. Large new works were subsequently constructed to take water from the neigh- bouring lakes, and the two principal works yield now about 300,000 cubic metres per day. Some of the Berlin suburbs, however, are still supplied with water by a private company taking water from the Havel and from the lakes in the Grunewald. Owing to the drying up of these lakes the company has now been obliged to undertake to refill them by pumping water from the Havel into them, but it is manifest that the water-level in the Berlin area is rapidly sinking, and it would appear that at some time in the near future the growth of the city will involve the bringing of water from a much greater distance. In Cologne, to take one contrasting instance, all the public services are now controlled by 114 GERMANY OF TO-DAY the municipality, which paid, for example, over half a million to secure the cancelling of the tramway concession. The town also took over the gasworks from the English company, and has its own electricity and waterworks, the water being obtained from springs in the Rhine valley. Like other cities of Prussia, Cologne recently purchased from the Government the site of the old fortifications, and the extension of the city in this manner was controlled by the muni- cipality itself. The slaughter-house, which cost nearly 500,000, is usually described as a " model," with some right to the term. The necessary funds appear to have been borrowed from the Government at a very low rate of interest. Like Berlin, Cologne pays particular attention to matters of education, and its Municipal High School of Commerce is a valuable foundation. Reference to muni- cipal attention to education in general will be found in the chapter on education, which follows. One feature of municipal enterprise which is perhaps as characteristic as any other in Germany, is the promotion of dramatic and particularly of operatic art. Probably the finest municipal opera-house in Germany is that which has just been opened in Charlot- tenburg. It is a very handsome building outwardly and inwardly, and it is fitted not THE MUNICIPALITIES 115 only with all the latest appliances, such as the Fortuny system of lighting, and the Fortunj' permanent " sky," but it has also a stage system which is an improvement on the revolving stage, and appears destined to replace it in all new theatres. The stage is threefold, that is to say, there are three spaces of equal magnitude, in the centre (the actual stage) and at the two sides. A stage set is prepared at the right of the acting stage whilst the scene is in progress : the set just utilised is then rolled off to the left, and the new set appears from the right. The prices are low and the house always well filled. The municipal opera-house of Cologne, to take an earlier example, cost 180,000 with fittings and stage equipment. Municipal theatres throughout Germany maintain a high tone in their productions, and the best works of contemporary dramatists, as well as Shakespearean and other classical dramas, form a regular feature of their seasons. In general, the municipalities control trading hours indirectly through the police. Some sixty towns now insist on an eight p.m. closing time for all shops except restaurants, cafes, and the like, but there is not as yet a uniform hour for the closing of shops. For instance, whilst some towns still permit certain kinds of trading on Sundays between twelve and two, others have confined such 116 GERMANY OF TO-DAY trading to the hours from eight to ten. Charlottenburg has recently determined to introduce a final closing hour for restaurants, caf^s, and places of entertainment at two a.m., and it is suggested that Berlin may follow suit. The proposal has been subjected to criticism on the ground that the chief attraction for foreigners to Berlin is the gay life of its cabarets, cafes, and bars, which really begins at about London's closing time. But the municipalities are gradually coming to insist upon the somewhat elementary fact that " all-night gaiety," especially to the extent to which it has been carried in Berlin, where whole boulevards once occupied by respectable residents are now stigmatized by rows of doubtful night bars and more than doubtful night sojourners, cannot ultimately be a recommendation to a town, and it is dawning upon Berliners themselves that the town must lose as a residential city in pro- portion as it increases through such dubious means its supposed attraction for foreigners. It has already been suggested that German municipalities, no less than those of other countries, have recently turned their attention to an increasing extent to the question of their own development on sane lines and especially, of course, to the provision of healthy dwellings for the poorer classes of the population. Foreign visitors to large German. THE MUNICIPALITIES 117 cities, especially to those of great recent growth, are apt to be struck first by the scrupulous cleanliness, the width and, as a rule, the airy appearance of the boulevards, the fine frontage of the houses with their tiers of richly beflowered balconies and big front windows facing upon streets lined with trees or upon squares bright with flower-beds and plots of carefully kept grass. They lavish encomiums upon the municipalities which clean the streets, pave the roads, maintain the gardens and parks, and in general provide this aspect and impression of health, wealth and cleanliness. Then, we will suppose, such a visitor seeks a permanent home in the city. Unless he can pay prices which may vary from 100 to 200 or more (without municipal taxes, which, as explained in the preceding chapter, are levied upon income-tax) he will find that he cannot obtain any of the flats in the fine buildings looking upon the boulevards, the light and airy rooms are not for him, but he will be obliged to content himself with small rooms looking upon a back courtyard, frequently dark, not always, or indeed often, any too well provided with fresh air, and subject to that chief infliction of the German " barrack-houses," as they are con- temptuously called, the beating of innumer- able carpets within that courtyard twice a week from eight to twelve or longer. J18 GERMANY OF TO-DAY He will find that the new houses whose beflowered balconies he has so much admired are frequently jerry-built, so that a type- writer on the third floor is a daily infliction to the tenant of the ground-floor and of course all between. In a word he will arrive at the conclusion that he does not get for his fifty, sixty, or seventy pounds per annum anything like as much comlort as he could obtain for a similar sum in London. Now he will abandon any idea of living within reasonable distance of his work in the city, and will seek a less expensive home outside. He will find first that means of communication are infinitely less well developed than in the suburbs of any first-rate English town, because the Prussian railways have not the same interest as private companies in developing suburban property. Moreover he will find in his suburb exactly the same structural features that he has admired and later criticized in Berlin. He will find prices very little lower, and in some cases actually higher, and there will be the same choice of expensive front flats or less expensive, and very much less desirable flats upon the yards or courts euphoniously termed " gardens." Let him now consider where, under such circumstances, must live those families which cannot afford the daily train journey and must confine themselves to districts within easy THE MUNICIPALITIES 119 reach of their working-place by means of the rather slow tramway service (for the enormous increase of the tramway service and the resultant concentration from the suburban towns upon the city has, of course, resulted in tram-congestion and slowness of service). Exactly the same type of house, but without the stucco front and the gorgeous balconies, and with not one " garden-house " but two or three Hofe (inner courts), one behind the other, greet his eyes in the north and east of Berlin. The darkness and the airlessness, and the dust and the noise are multiplied, and he will ask himself whether on the whole the clean streets can make up for the gloomy interior. It is hardly too much to say that the flat-system of Berlin and other great German cities has been, tried and found hopelessly wanting. The cause of it we shall consider presently, but our presumptive visitor, bearing in mind the character of all kinds of Berlin habitations, and contrasting them, if he will, with those " long, desolate rows of uniform blocks of little houses " which depress the foreign visitor as the train bears him into London, may do well in this light to consider the following figures regarding the dwellings of Berlin and London respectively. In Berlin and Charlottenburg at the begin- ning of the century over half the total number 120 GERMANY OF TO-DAY of dwellings were yard-dwellings. There were then in Berlin 24,000 cellar dwellings with about 120,000 inhabitants, and there were about 90,000 attic dwellings (that is fourth floor or higher), and their inhabitants num- bered about one-fifth of the entire population of the city. At the time of the last official enquiry there were in Berlin roughly 30,000 single heatable rooms occupied each of them permanently by six or more people. In most cases they were also small rooms, for the rule is that " the smaller the dwelling the smaller the air space of each room." It may be added that in Berlin the average price for one heatable room was rather more than 11 per annum, and the price in the suburb of Wilmersdorf for one unbeatable room was 13 per annum. In London (1905) six per cent, of the population lived in " dwellings, " of one room : in Berlin 41 per cent, lived thus, and an additional one per cent, in rooms which could not be heated at all. In London 15 per cent, lived in dwellings of two rooms, in Berlin 33 per cent. In London 46 per cent, lived in houses having four or more rooms, in Berlin only 12 per cent. Further the average weekly rent paid by the German workman in towns was in the aforesaid year nearly 25 per cent, higher than that of the English workman (Vorwaerts, July 2, 1912, THE MUNICIPALITIES 121 Board of Trade Enquiry, London, 1908-1911). It is not therefore surprising to learn on the authority of the Prussian Minister of the Interior that the birth-rate in Prussian towns is rapidly decreasing ; in Berlin the decrease is greater than anywhere else in Germany. The problem was thus stated by the North German Gazette in its official commentary (June 23, 1912) : " It is only necessary to consider the housing conditions in our great towns, where many house-owners make childlessness or a small family a condition of the lease, to understand the difficulties which face a family with many children at every turn. It is clear that the housing problem, as diffi- cult as it is important, bears a great share of the responsibility for the decrease in the birthrate." Berlin's special problem, that of the " barrack-flats " and the growing desire to return at any rate in some measure to the small-house system, especially for workmen's cottages, is due in great part to the unsound land speculation which has developed with the growth of the city. The value of land in Berlin has increased since the foundation of the Empire approximately 200 per cent, on an average, that is from about ten shillings per square foot to thirty shillings, and a great deal of this increase is due to speculation upon the continuous growth of the city. Building- 122 GERMANY OF TO-DAY land is driven to a price at which normal building conditions can no longer pay, and even outside the periphery it becomes necess- ary to crowd the maximum number of families paying rent upon the same plot of ground. The police and the building-laws place a limit upon the number of floors which may be constructed and oppose a sane veto to the oft-repeated proposal to institute a system of sky-scrapers on the model of New York, but it is left to the municipalities to check the evil which already exists. Speculation was not checked at the outset by legislation, partly because municipalities were still obsessed by the doctrine of laissez faire (for example, the otherwise very advanced building provisions of Chemnitz in 1885 prescribe that each house must have a courtyard, but they do not state how big the courtyard must be !), and also by the fact that the Town Councils were, and have remained democratic only by contrast, and not by constitution. The speculative element has and had a large influence on the Councils. Town councillors, as already mentioned, are elected on the three-class system, which gives members of the first or richest class from fifty to one hundred times the voting power of the poorest or third class. The study of the problem is a very special one, and can be no more than suggested THE MUNICIPALITIES 123 within the compass of this chapter. To some extent it is possible that the evil will provide its own remedy. " The trees will not be permitted to grow up to heaven," says a German proverb, and it is not unlikely that the process of development of Berlin will receive a check just because ground is becom- ing so dear that employers can scarcely any longer consider the construction of factories in the neighbourhood of Berlin. In fact, in recent years there has developed a tendency for factories to be removed altogether from Berlin to districts where ground is compara- tively inexpensive, but communications reasonably good. The development of Berlin will doubtless be in the direction of a trade and business centre, but probably not along industrial lines. The cities themselves, not only Berlin and the great industrial towns of Westphalia, but the majority of large German towns, have adopted three means to regulate the housing problem ; first by developing a system of municipal house-agencies ; these existed at the end of 1909 in fifteen large towns, whereof Stuttgart, Barmen and Elberfeld published their own house-lists ; secondly by house or lodgings inspections, which as a municipal undertaking is yet too new for there to exist any body of evidence as to its results. Charlottenburg has recently commenced an 124 GERMANY OF TO-DAY inspection of small dwellings on lines character- istically thorough and unsensational. At the beginning of the present year the Prussian Diet passed on first reading a bill providing for the establishment of such inspectorates, called in the law " Office for housing accommo- dation." Berlin and Charlottenburg have already arranged for female inspectors, whilst at Worms and Halle female inspectors have already presented their first annual reports. The Worms report observes that the personal influence of the inspector in persuading the inmates of small dwellings to " keep the windows open and the sinks clean," is of prime importance. In the main, German States have only followed at considerable distance institutions and regulations for the inspection of dwellings developed in England after the establishment of sanitary inspectors in 1875. Hesse was the first to introduce female inspectors, and Bavaria introduced early a central Govern- ment inspectorate. The Kingdom of Wiirttem- berg made the establishment of local in- spectorates compulsory for all communities (towns and villages) of more than 1000 inhabitants. The thirdmethod is, of course, the municipal purchase of land, and either the direct or mediate construction of suitable workmen's dwellings, and the exclusion thereby of the THE MUNICIPALITIES 125 reckless ground speculator. In general the Governments of the German States encourage and perhaps do their best to assist this form of municipal undertaking, but it would appear, as has already been observed, that Berlin is not given all the assistance that she might be entitled to expect in her efforts in this direction, and the Treasury, which owns much of the land in the neighbourhood, has on more than one occasion shown a spirit which the Berlin city fathers have described as oppositional. A large section of open ground belonging to the War Office and former- ly used as the principal military parade- ground has recently been built over, but there were disagreeable discussions at the time of the sale, in which the War Office was made to appear in a light which could hardly be described as socially beneficent. It is impossible here to enumerate or even to sketch the various efforts made by German communes to provide cheap and healthy dwellings for the working-class of their population. The Governments themselves make efforts to provide to some extent for their own employees. For example, the Prussian railway administration spent over two millions sterling in six years for this purpose : the imperial Home Office spent nearly as much, the Mining Department spent one million, and so forth. Building societies 126 GERMANY OF TO-DAY receive encouragement in their efforts to provide suitable dwellings, and their expenditure is on the increase : the insurance departments and committees are constantly extending their efforts in the same direction, and the figures of the imperial Statistical Office give the amount spent by them on those lines between 1900 and 1906 as approximately 40,000,000. Many German towns have built two- family houses for their own and also for local workmen, not in municipal employ : Breslau, Kiel, Frankfurt, Mannheim, and many others could be mentioned in this connection. Diisseldorf has invested nearly three-quarters of a million in land which it employs largely for the purpose of workmen's dwellings, either constructed by the city itself or under the most scrupulous safeguards by lessees. Metz also builds workmen's dwellings on its own account, Duisburg has about fifty State- built cottages for families with many children. (One of the oldest municipal foundations for workmen was the Cite* Ouvriere, of Miilhausen, in Alsace, commenced in about 1853 with the assistance of Napoleon the Third, but the buildings have since fallen into speculative hands, and no longer fulfil their original purpose.) Large private firms also provide in many cases for their own employees, prominent amongst these being Krupp, with THE MUNICIPALITIES 127 nearly 5,000 homes occupied by some 30,000 inhabitants, the Baden Aniline Factory and others. The total number of workmen's dwellings thus provided by private firms is estimated at about 200,000. Frankfurt-on- Main has developed the so-called Erbbaurecht, a principle which enables the State to lease the land belonging to it for certain classes of building, and for a definite number of years (usually 99). No purchase price is paid, but a yearly rent is charged. The lessee can sell his lease in the ordinary way, but the State profits by the increase in ground-value. A fourth method of controlling the housing problem is that now widely adopted by German municipalities of imposing a tax, which really amounts to a fine, upon suitable building land left unbuilt in the hope of a rapid rise of ground-value, and further of imposing taxa- tion representing a fair proportion of the increase in value between one sale and the next. This taxation was instituted much less for the purpose of municipal revenue than for the discouragement of pure land-and- building-speculation. The above notes must suffice to suggest the lines along which German cities are attempt- ing to cope with the evils of overcrowding, and of the concurrent evils resulting therefrom. Mention must, however, be made here of the efforts in various German cities to erect 128 GERMANY OF TO-DAY series of dwellings for single girls and young men, with central kitchens or restaurants, and other suitable adjuncts. The idea is not especially German in origin, nor has it as yet found its fullest development in Germany, though very favourable specimens of such structures and institutions may be found in Berlin and elsewhere. Finally there should be mentioned the garden city movement, which came from England to Germany, and has its best illustration at present at Hellerau, near Dresden. CHAPTER VI GERMAN EDUCATION IT has already been observed that education is not one of the departments which the Empire took as its own province. Nor has the Empire yet provided any norms or general standards upon which the individual States should base their educational systems. Hence the large measure of uniformity which does actually prevail is not to be credited to the Empire, but either to the intelligence of the individual States, or perhaps even to that mysterious agent " the force of circum- stances." The very low proportion of illiter- ates amongst the men called up for military service (less than three per thousand) is sufficient evidence that elementary education is nowhere neglected in Germany, although a uniform scheme is not provided. For comparison it may be added that the propor- tion of illiterates amongst recruits is in France about fifty, in Austria 210 per thousand, and in Russia more than seventy per cent. Strange as it may seem, elementary educa- i 129 130 GERMANY OF TO-DAY tion is the one form of education in Germany in which attention is paid, one might almost say, primarily, to the formation of character, which is notoriously the weak point in the higher branches of German education. But the character which the German elementary school teacher strives to form is by no means that of " upright, manly independence " ; it is rather the character of a patient and obedient link in a chain. Obediejige and discipline are the two moral lessons of the elementary school, as indeed they are nearly sure to be where the teachers are Government officials and are part and parcel of the machinery erected, at any rate in Prussia, for carrying on the business of the State as the most important sphere of human activity. Teachers in Prussian elementary schools are badly paid, their social position is not a high one, and the restrictions are considerable, but they are in general a conscientious body of men, in the vast majority of cases they are fitted by temperament and natural aptitude for their task, and they are of course specially trained. After leaving the elementary school at the age of fourteen, the future elemen- tary school teacher has to go through a five to seven years' course in one of the " preparatory institutes," where he remains three years. The cost of the preparatory GERMAN EDUCATION 131 course is only 36s. 6d. per year, but the student has to provide for his own lodging and food. Prussia has sixty State establish- ments and thirteen municipal. At about the age of seventeen, after passing the qualify- ing examination, the future teacher goes on to the seminary, which is usually a residential school or college, and provides a three-year course of instruction, ending with practical teaching under the guidance of an expert. In Saxony the whole six or seven years' course takes place at the seminary, and the preparatory institute is abolished. The State bears the expense of the seminary instruction, amounting to rather less than 30 for each candidate. The highest income attainable after thirty-one years' service as elementary teacher is about 200 per annum. Elementary education is, of course, free, the State itself paying about one-third of the total cost, whilst the remaining two-thirds are borne by the local school authorities, that is to say ultimately by the communes, though school-upkeep and maintenance is one of the few burdens consistently laid upon Prussian landowners and squires. It is scarcely neces- sary to review at great length the character of elementary education in Germany. The school age is from six to fourteen almost everywhere in the Empire, and attendance is, as in England, compulsory. Recently, owing 132 GERMANY OF TO-DAY to complaints that there is not sufficient attention paid to the difference between town and country children, a measure of specializa- tion has been introduced in Prussia even into elementary education, the third or highest class in the elementary school being provided with means to acquire theoretical knowledge applicable to agricultural and rural callings generally. It should be added that this has been done chiefly under pressure from the landowners, who believe that it may prove one means of stopping the flight from the land or in plain language of providing farmers with reliable and obedient farm labourers. Prussia is of course one of the pioneers of municipal enterprise in the provision of forest open-air schools for sickly children, schools for the blind, deaf, and other forms of early invalidity, and such special provision is on the increase, though it is extensively left to municipal enterprise. The average hours of attendance in the lowest class of an elementary school are twenty per week ; in the middle and upper classes the hours rise to thirty, including six hours of science and two of gymnastics and handicraft. The school is generally supervised by the local clergy, and religious teaching plays an important part, possibly with the underlying idea that this should serve for that formation of moral GERMAN EDUCATION 183 character lacking in the general features of the teachers' control. The religious question is not less acute in Germany than elsewhere. In parishes with mixed confessions there are what are called Simultan-Schule, that is schools where religious instruction is given by teachers professing the Catholic and the Protestant religions respectively. The Catholics are constantly endeavouring to increase the number of these schools and the Protestants continually strive to secure the legal abolition of those already existing. Considering that religious instruc- tion occupies four hours a week in the lower class and five in the two upper, it will be seen that there is plenty of room for dispute. It should perhaps be added that the State officials, particularly the Landrathe, have a right of veto in the appointment of school- inspectors, and are otherwise vested with considerable influence in the school world. It is at the point where the German child passes out of the elementary school at the age of fourteen that the great work of German education in general may be said to begin. It has long been clear that elementary education ending at fourteen is inadequate and unsatisfactory. As in other countries so in Germany the tendency of children re- leased from school thus early has been to drift into occupations bringing money to their 134 GERMANY OF TO-DAY parents early, but offering to the children themselves nothing resembling a career and actually unfitting them for competition with children whose training is continued longer. Hence Hamburg, Saxony, Coburg-Gotha, and other States introduced a system of compul- sory attendance at continuation schools long before Prussia took the matter in hand. Wiirttemberg made such attendance obliga- tory up to the age of eighteen before the Prussian Government had even suggested that attendance up to that age might be desirable. Prussia, however, did mark a new departure by placing the control of the continuation schools in 1884 no longer in the hands of the Minister of Education, but in those of the Minister of Trade and Commerce. This date may thus be said to mark the commencement of the era of specialized business training which is now so highly developed in big German towns. The continuation schools are, however, not intended to serve the purposes of specializa- tion, hence the classes are still usually in the hands of the elementary school teachers, and the subjects of the six-hour course are mainly confined to German, arithmetic, geometry and drawing. Since 1891 local authorities are empowered to inflict punishment for non- attendance at continuation classes, but it is stated that attendance in country districts GERMAN EDUCATION 185 where continuity is more than usually neces- sary still leaves much to be desired, the fact being that compulsion is difficult to reconcile very often with local conditions. Saxony and Wiirttemberg were amongst the first to introduce commercial and agricultural courses, which are now widely developed in both countries, as well of course as in Baden, where continuation schools and special courses are perhaps best organised. The two Mecklen- burgs, reactionary in this as in all else, have only just begun to introduce continuation schools on an organised plan. Bavaria is best provided with commercial schools, whilst Baden and Prussia appear to pay most atten- tion to the domestic and farm training of girls and teaching of handicrafts to boys. By the side of the elementary schools there exist a class of schools called " middle schools." v These are erected in Prussia by the local authorities, and are intended to give a rather better education than is possible under the three class system of the elementary schools, whilst not attempting the work of the higher grade schools. They are usually of five classes, the numbers of children in each class being limited to fifty (there are as many as eighty children in some classes of the ele- mentary schools). A middle school must teach at least one foreign language, and J " where local conditions make it desirable 136 GERMANY OF TO-DAY the middle school is also to provide instruction in agriculture, forestry, mining, shipping, com- merce, and trade." In the Hansa towns, the middle schools (which are almost everywhere controlled by a rector) teach both French and English and sometimes Latin. Special examinations must be passed by the teachers, and the salary is in all cases higher than that of the elementary school-teachers. Chil- dren attending these schools pay small fees, and this is perhaps really one of their raisons d'etre. It should be added that brilliant scholars of the elementary schools have the opportunity of gaining a sort of scholarship which enables them to attend the high schools free of cost, and thus eventually to reach the university. The high-school course in Germany is neces- sarily much more complicated than the elementary, and much less easy to explain to the English reader, since it differs to such an extent from the public school and university system in England. It will be best perhaps to enumerate the different forms of German high schools, and then to call attention to the difference in the aims and attainments of these and English public-schools. It should be premised that on the whole the same system prevails throughout the Empire. The names of the different kinds of schools vary a little and the school-course may show local differences, GERMAN EDUCATION 187 but speaking broadly it is very nearly true that a family with young boys transferred from east to west or north to south could find a school of the same type, and with the same course of study as the boys had been accus- tomed to attend, so that their school-course would suffer very little interruption from the change. From this jt will be gathered that the high schools are Government insti- tutions with a course of study prescribed by the educational authorities, and not left to the management of .each particular high school. Further, the schools are non-resident. In Prussia the following are the names given to the various schools : Classical Course 1. Gymnasia, nine years' school-course ; 2. Progymnasia, six years course. Semi-classical (with Latin) 1. Real gym- nasia, nine years ; 2. Real progymnasia, six years. Modern School (without Latin) 1. Ober- real-Schulen, nine years ; 2. Real-Schulen (also Hohere Biirger-Schulen), six years. In addition to these there are a certain number of schools not directly under State control ; their scheme of education does not differ fundamentally but in most cases these private schools are confessional in character. There are about six hundred gymnasia and progymnasia in the Empire, about 200 real 138 GERMANY OF TO-DAY gymnasien and real progymnasien and about 400 oberreal-schulen and real-schulen. The total expense of their maintenance, as far as it falls on the States, is said to be roughly 5,000,000 per annum. The distinction be- tween the courses may be easiest suggested by tabulating side by side the course of study in the full classical course and the full modern course ; the other courses fall midway between the two. The difference in numbers of boys attending the two courses, classical and modern, is now very little : the tendency is for the modern schools to increase the number of their scholars at the expense of the classical schools, and this appears to be especially the case in West Prussia and the Rhine- land. The full courses last nine years, usually from the ninth to the eighteenth year. The short six-class courses last only seven years. In addition to the hours enumerated there are sometimes extra hours for special subjects, and there is about two to three hours' preparation or home work. The theory that the German schoolboy works longer hours than his English contemporary is scarcely maintainable. In an English public school in a form corresponding age for age to the middle form of a German gymnasium, the hours would be about twenty-eight per week in class or form, and twenty-one hours' GERMAN EDUCATION 139 O4 CO - CO CO CO 1 , 04 1 i a 04 CO - o CO CO 1 - 1 ja O4 O4 CO - o CO CO 1 - m 1 h O4 CO t> CO CO - - 04 1 i P8 04 O4 00 CO M - CO 04 1 04 fc O4 04 00 o O4 m - CO 04 1 O4 * 04 CO 00 , 04 04 1 04 10 CO 00 1 04 04 M a -w* CO * 00 1 04 04 04 i a i-l ~~ Cl E o co ^3 w c . . . . -> I ^^ OQ E c3 O a> Tl i 05 a o 'So i German an ti 1 o o 1 1 CQ Geography Mathematic Science 43 i bC &. I 140 GERMANY OF TO-DAY *_! 0 94 1 S i* a to a ^.^ .s i ; o ' ; g i i R a D ; 1 ; IS* i German an French 1 1 O 1 CO i O Mathematii o 02 "S bo s 1 GERMAN EDUCATION 141 " preparation " corresponding to the German home-work. Many, perhaps most English public schools, recognize the " private tui- tion " hours, usually at extra charges and for special purposes. They may amount to two or three per week. But the German school- [^ boy is usually harder driven whilst at work. The English scholarship system may perhaps be held to drive a certain proportion of Eng- lish public schoolboys equally hard, but the German boy has two incentives which drive him from the very outset. First of all, he cannot attend any university course or techni- cal high-school course without possessing his certificate of maturity from his school : hence the " professions " are closed to the sluggard because the university or technical high school graduate has an absolute monopoly of them, as well of course as of all Government civil appointments. Secondly, only the possessor of a State-regulated certificate of maturity is entitled to serve his time in the army as a " volunteer," that is for one year instead of two in the infantry or two instead of three in the cavalry. Furthermore, such " volun- teers," who obtain very definite privileges during their time of service, are eligible after their service with the colours to the corps of lieutenants of the reserve, that is to say they are called up for their subsequent training no longer as privates but as officers. Quite apart 142 GERMANY OF TO-DAY from the professional advantages which in- variably result from being taken away from a civil career for a full year less than other com- petitors, the title " Lieutenant of the re- serve " provides in a country so overwhelm- ingly given up to the military hierarchy as Germany a social position, the lack of which is from the outset a very grave handicap. The scholarship impulse in England is very largely financial : the driving motive is " unless you get a scholarship I cannot afford to send you to a university." The impulse is thus only a temporary one and the prestige of success is comparatively short-lived. The German impulse is the desire to avoid what is usually a clearly recognized handicap lasting through life. It follows necessarily that the German school system, however throughgoing the instruc- tion and grounding may be and despite its acknowledged merits as the basis of a general education in the narrowest sense of the word, is not and by its very nature cannot be a sys- tem based upon the building up of character ; it is not educational in the best sense. English public schools may and do turn out many " weeds," they do facilitate the " ice- jam " of lazy and hulking incompetents in the lower middle forms, but those who are not weeded out by the ordeal are better, man for man, than the average product of the German GERMAN EDUCATION 143 system. The German system, to put it another way, levels all to an average, almost to a uniformity. The English system turns out some lanky weeds and some stunted growths but it also turns out some, even many, first-class plants of a kind much less frequent in Germany. There is a corollary to this pro- position. An English head-master who did not at least try to select his staff with a view to their influence on the character of the boys who are to come under him would be condemned universally as false to the system and to his calling. The German school authorities are glad enough, no doubt, to get a teacher whose influence is likely to be good but they are more inclined to be satisfied if his influence is not bad. The first consideration is his ability to teach his subjects according to scheme. The governance of the schools is in the last instance in the hands of the Minister for Education : there is also in eacTT Prussian province a medial authority called a " pro- vincial school-college," that is a school board consisting of officials, whilst the Provincial President has two educational advisers attached to his staff. These various officials control the finances and general management of the schools, give orders for the examinations and have a general right of inspectorate, except where the schools are municipal, in which case the rights are held by a municipal 144 GERMANY OF TO-DAY commission. The staff consists of a director, who may give as much as sixteen hours' teaching per week, and a number of first-class teachers giving from twenty to twenty-four hours' teaching per week and eligible for the title of professor. The salary of a director is from 300 to 400 per annum and of a teacher from 130 to 250. These salaries, however, of course carry pensions. One of the most useful publications in Germany, the " miniature library on choice of a career," expends a chapter of its scanty space in warning German lads against select- ing teaching as a career : the reason is that of those who do become teachers very many are not in the least born teachers but such as have become used to the atmosphere of the school in their nine years, and have besides followed the formal course which is compulsory for teachers, that is the gymnasial course leading to the faculty of philology at the universities, so that they drift into the teacher's profession automatically as being the natural outlet from their gradually specialised educational course. One may be pardoned perhaps for pointing out that in this matter extremes meet. It is a subject for complaint that in too many instances English school teachers are men who have drifted into a profession which does not suit them because on leaving the university they have been left stranded without a purpose GERMAN EDUCATION 145 in life and with only a very general idea of what they should do next. The question what to do next is too often answered by the formula, " Apply to a scholastic agency." It has been argued ad nauseam that the German system, which practically compels specialisation at the university and often earlier, avoids this danger. It does nothing of the sort. It simply crams into the teaching profession a number of men who having been taught along the lines laid down by the State for a future professor or first-class teacher naturally drift along into teaching as being the line of least resistance and on the whole the shortest cut to a miserable pension. Socially, to put the matter mildly, Germany has yet to recognize the teacher's as one of the honoured professions. She is at least as far as England from adopting the apostrophe of Juvenal, Di, majorum umbris tenuem et sine pondere terram Spirantesque crocos et in urna perpetuum ver Qui praeceptorem sancto voluere parentia Esse loco. After eight or nine terms at the University during the philological course of the academic teacher, the student has to spend a year at a seminary, where he is instructed in the practice and theory of pedagogy. Then there is yet another year without salary, and before the candidate has obtained a permanent appoint- 146 GERMANY OF TO-DAY ment he is usually thirty-three or thirty-five years old and has incurred an educational expense of about 1000. Even when the future teacher has passed his final State examination in pedagogy and is qualified to accept an appointment his troubles are not at an end. He is at the disposal of the pro- vincial directorate of schools, who may dis- patch him here and there over its district as locum-tenens at small salary, or if he prefer he may ask for work as volunteer, in which case he at least saves travelling expenses. Furor est post omnia perdere naulon. " A crotchety, jejune faddist," says the little guide I have mentioned, " is expected to educate our lads to become free men, pillars of the State, lights of the world." If the German becomes, as it is complained that he increasingly does, a mere wheel, and if more and more the nation appears to accept the doctrine that the individual exists for the State machine, not the other way about, it would seem that no small portion of the blame therefor must be laid to the account of the German school system. The fees for higher education are so mode- rate as to be within the reach of a much larger percentage of boys than the public-school education in England. For the classical course the average fee is approximately 7 10s. per annum. In the modern schools it is GERMAN EDUCATION 147 5 10s., but in neither case do these fees include books or stationery. Concerning the general results on the individual of the high-pressure system there is much dispute. It is asserted, for instance, that as a result of the system seventy per cent, of the lads become short-sighted and that forty per cent, are ultimately rejected as unfit for military service. It is also painfully true that i - child-suicide is disproportionately frequent in Germany. The Berlin papers report on an average not less than one a week throughout the year and in by far the greater number of cases the report runs, " The child committed suicide owing to having received a bad report, or owing to having failed to pass the terminal examination, or having failed to secure pro- motion." It might reasonably be suspected that some of the fault lies in these cases with the German parents and not entirely with the system. The higher education of girls is neither so thoroughly organised as that of boys, nor is it to anything like the same extent in the hands of the State or of the municipali- ties. The fees vary from three to six pounds per annum, and the course is nominally a nine- year one. The tendency, however, in Germany as elsewhere is to conform the courses approxi- mately to those of the boys' schools, and this tendency of course makes itself more promi- 148 GERMANY OF TO-DAY nent in the more advanced stages of education. There are some gymnasia for girls in Berlin, Leipzig, and elsewhere with four-year courses and a fee of about 12 per annum. Germany is as yet no more than on the way toward a State recognition of the in- creasing extent of feminine competition in public life. There are between 30,000 and 40,000 women-teachers under State control in Germany, but the majority of these are teachers of the elementary schools. So far as the education of girls is concerned it would seem to be true that the Governments within the Empire are chiefly concerned to prevent girls drifting from the elementary schools into factory or shop-work, and statistics published by the Bavarian Government appear to show that continuation schools for girls, with instruction in household management, the care of children, and domestic economy, have the effect of reducing the " rush to the counter." The essential difference between the educa- tion given at a German university and that given at one of the old English universities is that the German course is not even regarded as the completion of a general education. It is a special education for a special purpose, and the tendency is for specialisation to increase, as is shown by the growth of the tech- nical high school system (which is perhaps GERMAN EDUCATION 149 really better translated university technical graduate course) and also by the fact that whereas there is rarely any difficulty in obtaining money for the establishment of a new chair in some highly specialised and technical branch there are repeated excuses made when there is a question of filling a vacant chair in one of the classical subjects. Unconsciously, perhaps, the State is here again following the tendency already seen in connection with school education, to subor- dinate the individual and his character to the welfare or the supposed welfare of the State. " Man is a productive animal," takes the place of Aristotle's dictum about the Politikon Zoon. From this it also follows that the German university life tends more and more, to lose its social character. The picturesque student of Heidelberg, Jena, or Gottingen with his sabre slashes and his dog and his mug of beer was, perhaps, always a parody of life at a German university. Now he has ceased to be even a parody of a social institution which may have corresponded more or less to the social life of Oxford or Cambridge. It is not, of course, true that this social life has vanished or that the parody thereof is no more to be met in Heidelberg, but it no longer sets its stamp upon the whole. The State might almost be said to use the uni- versities (which of course are State institutions) 150 GERMANY OF TO-DAY for turning out specialised parts of its own intricate machinery : the technical high schools serve at any rate very largely to turn out the machinery of other departments of human activity, for, as we shall see, the rapid progress of Germany in the domain of indus- try is partly due to the fact that the German readily falls into his place as a wheel and does not easily strike out for himself. It is the smooth working of the more delicate parts of the German industrial machine which is one of its most prominent characteristics, and this may be due to some extent to the fact that the parts are ready for adjustment when they are delivered from the technical high school. But specialization almost always involves delay, and the delay is accentuated partly by the Government control exercised over so many branches of public life, with all the apparatus of certificates and examinations, and partly, of course, by the system of military service. We have already seen that the German high school teacher is well on into the thirties as a rule before he obtains the first salary that can be described as a living wage in the sphere he is compelled to occupy. In other professions the same feature prevails, and this in turn makes for specialization. Unless a man comes ready fitted and trained to his job, he must of necessity fall behind in the race, GERMAN EDUCATION 151 because coming so late to his life's work he has no time to learn it when his work has begun. That this system produces a scientific class of workmen is, of course, fully proved, and scientific workmen make for rapid national progress. But it is at least a matter of dispute whether the individual profits by the system. Collegiate life, then, as it is understood in England, does not exist at a German university, and that which is called the " hall-mark " is left to be prefixed by the schools. If these, too, fail, as they tend to do, it would seem that something which is valu- able to the individual must be missing altogether. The effects on the manners of the nation are, to speak politely, sufficiently apparent. We shall now note briefly the various faculties at the universities, of which there are twenty-four, including the Military Academy, and excluding the new University of Frank- furt-on-Main, which has only just received the royal permission for its foundation. The statistics show that there were in the winter term, 1912, 2,852 students taking the theological course, of which no more need be said, since its purpose is sufficiently evident. Over 11,000 were taking the course of jurisprudence, the most important of the four original faculties. The juristic faculty is the gateway not only to the Bench and the 152 GERMANY OF TO-DAY Bar, but also to the civil service, the diplo- matic service, and so forth. The course lasts usually three and a half years. After passing his first examination the candidate for the Bench becomes a Referendar, usually a purely honorary title, which is held for four or five years unless the Referendar be a candidate for the diplomatic service, in which case the period is shortened to two years. In any case the candidate for further advance- ment along any of the lines opened by the juristic faculty must satisfy the authorities that he is in a financial position so to live as to cast no discredit during this unpaid period upon the profession he proposes to adopt. (It will be seen that though university fees are low, there is heavy expenditure to be met before the graduate can pass from the university to the practice of his chosen profession.) The faculty of medicine, which needs no explanation, showed nearly 14,000 students, of whom 600 were women. The course of study required for practice as a doctor in Germany is both long and expensive : the university fees are nearly double those of the juristic faculty, but the course is rather shorter. The candidate studies anatomy, physiology, botany, chemistry, physics and zoology. After passing his examination, called the tentamen physicum, the student takes GERMAN EDUCATION 158 up a practical course of lectures and observa- tion at the hospitals. This course lasts about five years, and is followed by a rigorous State examination, which is so lengthy that at the smallest universities it takes not less than eight weeks, whilst at the greatest and most famous it may take from six to nine months. There follows the " doctor " exami- nation, which probably lasts not less than eight weeks, and the young doctor who has then passed this final test is permitted to give his services to a hospital for a year without remuneration. His army service consists of six months with the army medical corps. Thus under favourable circumstances the doctor may be ready to start a practice at the end of seven or eight years. Unless he now has some small reputation and a considerable capital to help him along, he may spend some ten years as assistant surgeon at a hospital or from three years upwards, if he is specializing. The philological course, as has already been mentioned, is the course for teachers, and it lasts about five years. The statistical tables give about 13,000 students, and there are about as many studying the special branches, which are included in the lists of students under the general title of " philo- sophy," etc. ; that is to say, mathematics, chemistry, agriculture, pharmacy, dentistry. 154 GERMANY OF TO-DAY It is clear, however, that some of these must include simply students attending a special course of lectures on a special subject. Such courses cannot, of course, be described as faculties. In conclusion, it may be desirable to add a note regarding the management and staff of German universities. The German student has one inestimable advantage, namely, that the professors at the German universities are by no means only theorists. The supervision exercised by the State over its universities ensures that where practical science is required a practical scientist shall teach it. Hence to some extent the old world complaint of the aloofness of the lecture-room is made baseless, and the com- bination of practice and theory, the wedding of science and technique, which is the basis /of German material progress, is introduced into the universities as it is into the technical high schools. An inventor of importance is usually sooner or later the expounder to students of his own discoveries. It is also clear that the system whereby university professors are exchanged by universities makes for uniformity of opportunity throughout the Empire without the necessity for an imperial norm. On the whole university professors are not highly paid. A professor in ordinary, if he be of great national importance and GERMAN EDUCATION 155 highly respected, may in Prussia be in receipt of an income amounting to about 000 ; the average salary in Prussia is about 350, to which should be added the lecture fees, which in certain instances may amount to another 100 per annum. Complaint is made that, despite the general cheapness of German universities, the teaching : they give is not made accessible to the poorer classes. To some extent this is, of course, true, but efforts are made to enable poor students to take courses free of charge under what is called the " poverty-certificate." University extension courses are also increas- ing, and as elsewhere have been found justified by results. The majority of the German universities are now open also to women, and there are considerable numbers of unattached female auditors as well as the regular students. Strangely enough, " misogyny " amongst university lecturers, once rather common, is by no means extinct. Certain well-known lecturers at Berlin University, and elsewhere, still refuse to lecture before a mixed audience. We now turn to that feature of education hi which so far at least as Europe is concerned, Germany was the pioneer and is still the model, the teaching provided in the technical high schools. It is no longer necessary to explain the purpose or the character of the German 156 GERMANY OF TO-DAY technical high schools. Most of the high schools date back for seventy years, and they have borne a very large share in the bringing of Germany commercially and industrially as well as scientifically to the front. They rank now with the universities, confer degrees in the same way, and make the same require- ments of those who desire to take the courses they offer. The four general courses of the technical high schools, corresponding to the faculties of the universities, are : (1) Archi- tecture ; (2) Building (civil engineering) ; (3) Machinery, including shipbuilding, which, however, is more and more becoming a separ- ate faculty ; (4) Chemistry and Mining ; (5) Science and Mathematics. But there are also special academies of mining, forestry, agriculture, veterinary surgery, and art, including sculpture, architecture, engraving, and so forth. Some of these are directly attached to the normal universities, like the agricultural high school at Bonn, which is attached to Bonn University. The musical high school in Berlin, to mention one only of numerous illustrations of specialization, is famous throughout Europe. Whilst specialist education for industrial pursuits was thus early a feature of German education, there was one branch of special training to which attention was called com- paratively late, namely, special commercial GERMAN EDUCATION 157 education. The earliest commercial high school seems to have been that at Leipzig, which is loosely connected with Leipzig University. Cologne and Frankfurt have commercial high schools since 1903, and Berlin since 1906. There was a special purpose behind the foundation of most of these commercial universities. It was felt that men who are subsequently to manage the affairs of large commercial undertakings or to administrate the affairs of chambers of com- merce ought to possess, if possible, the prestige of a university degree or its equivalent, but there was a strong body of opinion which disapproved of the young men being removed for three years from the atmosphere of com- mercialism in which they expected to spend their lives. This difficulty was overcome to some extent by the establishment of these commercial universities, which are in almost all cases foundations established by local communities, or as in Berlin by the Merchants' Guild (Aelteste der Kaufmannschaft). Leipzig found that the commercial lectures were flooded by foreign students, so it was arranged that all fees at Berlin Commercial High School should be doubled for foreign students, except the fees payable for the laboratories. The fee for Germans at Berlin is on entrance thirty shillings, and terminally 6 6s. The following is the usual three-year course : 158 GERMANY OF TO-DAY In the first semester the student is recom- mended to attend two lectures weekly on the theory and technique of book-keeping, method in trade, trade arithmetic, and so forth. He is further advised to take one of the four-hour courses in a foreign language. In addition, he usually takes a special subject, such as national economy, bourgeois legislation, experimental physics, or the like. In the second semester the student takes the advanced five-hour course in a foreign language, as well as courses in international commerce and trade, trade law, colonial trade (especially trade with the great English colonies), etc. The two last semesters are usually devoted to further study in the theory and practice of commercial science and kindred subjects. The examination for the diploma is oral and written, failure in two written papers disqualifying for the oral examination. Four classes of students are admitted, but probably the most interesting class is that of those students who have taken the short six-year course of the gymnasium, and having thus obtained the one-year volunteer certificate, have then served a three-year business apprenticeship. A special three- year course is provided for these, as shown above, or they can take a one-year course if desired. The other three classes of students GERMAN EDUCATION 159 are those who have taken the full nine-year gymnasium course, students of commercial intermediate schools, and German teachers who have already taken their State examin- ation. CHAPTER VH THE ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY IF it be true that Germans upon whom the burden is laid have shown an immense capacity for organization not only of army and navy, as we saw in a foregoing chapter, but also of almost all departments of human activity, it is no less true that Germans generally show a marvellous capacity for being organized. Whether this is an inherent virtue, carried at times to an excess which renders it a vice, or whether it is the result of years of military training, need not now be disputed. The German system of education, and even the carefully graduated bureaucratic system, which is less correctly pictured as wheels within wheels than as a vast system of band transmissions, have played and con- tinue to play their part in this development of the capacity for being organized. From very early years, as has been seen, the German youth envisages his future career, prepares for it, accepts it as the inevitable, and, if he will, can virtually estimate its finan- 160 ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 161 cial possibilities before he has entered upon it. An American writer has asserted that many, perhaps most Germans can estimate their income from the time they begin to earn one until they draw their old-age pensions. This necessarily decreases individual ambition and makes for contentment, which for the individual is not always an unmixed blessing, but creates a state of mind which facilitates the organization of the individual in the interests of the State or of the capitalist. Both the States and the Empire, as well as the municipalities, further encourage this condi- tion of things by their extremely thorough and extremely definite care that the individual shall not be too greatly worried about his future. The vast system of insurance in which Germany was the pioneer was devised by the Empire-builders less because of any strictly humanitarian tendencies than with the object of encouraging contentment or rather of discouraging individual ambition, except along the hard and fast lines laid down by the State scheme. It would not, of course, be fair to assert that the insurance system was invented solely as a sop to the Cerberus of labour, any more than it is true that the universal manhood suffrage of the Reichstag electoral system was granted in the face of feudal opposition simply to prevent popular opposition to the universal manhood 162 GERMANY OF TO-DAY military service : but effectively the one and the other case may be considered as partially true. The capacity for being organised has however produced results not entirely in accordance with those desired. The organisation of the German Social Democracy, probably the most astonishingly perfect political organisa- tion the world has ever seen, would not be possible in any other country in. Europe. Education enables the individual to under- stand what is required of him, but it does not cause him, at least in Germany, to demand the reasons for these requirements ; moreover, instructions must be very plain, and must not require the exercise of any particular effort of the brain. Hence the Socialist head- quarters' staff simplified their instructions to the extreme limit, developed a strategic and tactical organisation, obviously military in its character, and created a nucleus of some million " enlisted " troops, which for electoral purposes can be brought up to nearly four millions. No one who has watched the vast army of Berlin Socialist demonstrators marching out in well-organised companies with their marked commissioned and non-commissioned officers, company by company and regiment by regiment, to some one of the great parks or commons can mistake the character of the formation or the habit of ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 163 mind which make such an orderly political demonstration possible. There is no noise, no conflict, and unless the police interfere no windows or heads are broken. The tens of thousands march out, listen to a speech, record a resolution, and march back to barracks. The desired effect is produced by the leaders not by the led. The Government is warned that this or that proposal can and will be met at the word of command by so and so many opponents : there is no pretence that the demonstration is the spontaneous outburst of an infuriated populace. And just for this reason these demonstrations somewhat fail of their desired effect, but they illustrate, which was also the purpose of this digression, the German capacity for being organised. But there was a more immediate cause than this capacity for being organised leading to the immense development of German industry, especially after 1890, and again after the crisis of 1900, namely, the growth of internal com- petition as the result of the foundation of the Empire, a growth which compelled German manufacturers to raise continually their standards of quality and hence constantly to improve their methods of production. No doubt this effect ought to have been produced in great measure by the foundation of the economic union in 1833, followed as the union was by a vast improvement of means of 164 GERMANY OF TO-DAY communication, and by the development of the railways, but actually it would appear that the divisions of the German States politically and the uncertainty which was produced by the non-existence of a reliable military union retarded development, which however was ready to burst out so soon as there was poli- tical conformity promising a period of military security. It may therefore be untrue or only partly true that the foundation of the Empire was the principal cause of that sudden develop- ment of German industry which has been the chief characteristic of the last forty years : there were causes lying fallow in Germany, but developed in other countries. But it so happened that the dispersion of the long frost coincided with the appearance of two factors which gave German industry a special push upwards, viz., the introduction of electricity in lighting and traction and as factory motive- power, and also the development of the chemical industry, which is usually quoted as the most brilliant illustration of the alliance of laboratory science and industrial trade. E. D. Howard, in his work on the cause and extent of industrial progress in Germany, pointed out in 1907 that the early develop- ment of German trade was much less in the direction of foreign competition than of home sales. Between 1880 and 1890 the increase ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 165 in the production of pig-iron was nearly five and a half million tons, but more than two- thirds of this increased output found its market within the German frontiers. He shows too that even in the chemical industry the home market must be taken to have grown faster than the foreign, and the same appears to be true ki other directions also. At the outset it is undoubtedly true that cheapness at the expense of quality was the secret of the development of German factory work. " Cheap and nasty " were epithets applied to German products, not by envious foreigners but by the German representative at the Philadelphia centennial celebrations in 1876. Cheapness and the cheap imitation of high-class English goods first drove the old high-class German handicraft out of competition, and later laid the foundation of Germany's foreign business. It would be absurd to deny that even to this present date competition with imported goods in certain branches of manufacture is only maintained, despite the high tariffs, by imitation of the foreign goods in an inferior quality. However, domestic business was developed, not only by these methods, but also as has been suggested by railway development. From 1840 to 1860 Great Britain had at any time nearly double the mileage of railways that Germany possessed. In 1870 Great 166 GERMANY OF TO-DAY Britain still was four thousand miles ahead, but in the next seventeen years, whilst Great Britain only added four thousand miles, Germany added twenty-three thousand miles or more than doubled her mileage. Ten years later her mileage was nearly twice that of Great Britain, which again had only added four thousand miles as against Germany's eight thousand. This suffices to show 'how backward was Germany's railway communica- tion until the foundation of the Empire. It is true that the subsequent rapyl development may be attributed in part to well-recognised military requirements, but in the main the State Governments took the railways in hand from economic motives. With few and unim- portant exceptions all the German railways are State-owned. A large amount of public capital has been invested in them, the States borrowing for the construction. Bismarck originally attempted to secure railway administration direct by the Empire, but the large South German States declined to accede to this project, chiefly for financial reasons, and it was abandoned. In general, railway administration through- out the Empire follows norms which exist, though they are not laid down as such by any authority. However, disputes do, of course, arise, and at times give occasion to inter-State quarrels. Prussia nationalized her railways ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 167 immediately after the war with France, and has used them not only as a very valuable source of State income, but also as a means o encouraging or assisting this or that industry or branch of agriculture. Rates for building material for the shipping industry were immediately lowered when the shipping industry required national support, rates for agricultural produce are lowered when agri- culture needs a helping hand, and the develop- ment of regular agricultural railway traffic is a prominent feature of Prussian administra- tion. The chief disadvantage of the system arises from the fact that owing to the vast State capital locked up in the railways the administrations are expected by the Finance Ministries to produce for the States financial revenues, which in some years are not quite in accordance with the interests of the railway service. But it is none the less true that the nation- alization of railways after the war was one of the deliberate contributions of the States to the rapid development of industry. The canal policy was another of the well-chosen means to the same end, and the canalisation of rivers still proceeds and is a paying invest- ment. It should not be forgotten, however, that the long stretches of nearly level plain which are characteristic of North-Eastern Germany have facilitated canal-work to an 168 GERMANY OF TO-DAY extent not frequent elsewhere. Many of the later schemes for junction of north and south Germany by series of locks over great hill- ranges (or by canal-tunnels through them) are certainly never destined to be executed, because their value to the development of the home market would bear no kind of relation to their cost. The traffic on the inland water- ways of Germany in 1911 amounted to nearly 80,000,000 tons, carried by approximately 20,000 vessels of various sorts. A curious interlude in the history of canal development in Germany has been the quarrel over the midland canal between the agrarians and the Prussian Government. The main feature of the quarrel was really the anxiety of the agrarians lest by the opening of a cheap waterway nominally intended to facilitate the communication between the agricultural east and the industrial west there should actually be facilitated the introduction and popularisa- tion in the east of cheap foreign agricultural produce. The quarrel even developed into an estrangement for some time between the Emperor and the feudal landlords and aristocrats. The classic illustration of that combination of scientific enquiry with practical industrial life which is quoted as one of the " secrets " of German industrial development is, as has been observed, the chemical industry, which, ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 169 as E. D. Howard says, ** is the direct produce of German technical education : for the technical schools and university-laboratories may be regarded as the corner-stone of the nation's industrial greatness and the whole foundation of its supremacy in the chemical industry." The most spectacular instance of this growth of the chemical industry is doubtless the substitution of artificial indigo, discovered by the Munich chemist, Dr. Bayer, in 1897, for the vegetable indigo, which Germany had up to that time been obliged to import. A few years previous to the discovery, the Empire was importing vegetable indigo valued at over one million sterling ; a few years after- wards Germany was exporting three times that value of artificial indigo. The value of exported dye-stuffs derived from formerly useless by-products of gas and coke manu- facture amounted in the last year for which statistics are available to more than six million sterling. At the end of 1909 there were about 150 limited companies manufacturing chemi- cals, their capital was about 25,000,000, and their profit in the year nearly 20 per cent. [The figures are quoted from the Statistical Year-book for the German Empire.] The chemical industry, employing roughly 100,000 people, has its chief seats in the neighbourhood of the Rhme_aiid JVfain, though one of the largest companies is the Aniline 170 GERMANY OF TO-DAY Company of Berlin, which employs fifty-five chemists and twenty-one experts. The well- known Badische Anilin Fabrik of Ludwigshafen employs 148 chemists and 75 experts, the Elberfeld factory employs as many chemists and twice the number of experts. These are, of course, only illustrations. An important feature of German chemical industry is the export of potash salts for fertilisation, of which Germany has virtually a monopoly. The export is valued at roughly six millions sterling per annum. But, as has already been suggested, one of the great factors in German industrial development has been the opening up of her own home-markets, and this meant practically the facilitation of communications between the different dis- tricts producing different commodities. The industrial strength of Germany, like that of Greats-Britain, must be based on her "* ir^on and steel manufactures, the barometer of'lmlustfrial activity and progress. German ore and coal were neither so easily nor so cheaply brought together as in the case of England, and it was only the nationalization of railways and the cheapening of transport that made competition with English pig-iron possible. It was further facilitated just at the right moment, that is, about the date of the foundation of the Empire, by a discovery, the Thomas-Gilchrist process, which made ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 171 possible the separation of phosphorus, present in disturbing quantities in much of the German ore, particularly in the Lorraine district, which had just been added to the Empire. Lorraine had the additional advantage of combining coal and ore in fairly close proximity, so that it has been asserted that in the future this proximity and the con- sequent cheapening of the smelting process will transfer the chief centre of the iron industry from the Rhenish-Westphalian dis- trict to Lorraine. This Rhenish-Westphalian district has utilized its special product, coking coal, for the smelting of ores brought down the Rhine from the Siegerland district and the Nassau mines, but also by canal from abroad. The centre of the industry is Dort- mund. There is a third important smelting district in Silesia on the south-eastern frontier. Here coal and ore are also found in proximity, but the coal is said to be less suitable for smelting purposes though the ore is richer in iron. Hard coal is mined chiefly in Upper Silesia and Westphalia, the deposits of Lower Silesia and the Saar district being smaller and, according to some estimates, of lower value. Other mining properties in Germany are rock salt, copper, lead and zinc, all in small quantities and scattered. The total amount of silver, zinc, and lead ore mined in 1910 172 GERMANY OF TO-DAY amounted to about 3,000,000 tons, with a value of about 3,000,000 sterling, the princi- pal districts being the Rhine, Harz, Upper Silesia, and the Erzgebirge. The production of rock salt amounted in the same year to about 1,000,000 tons, with a value of 250,000, and of potassium salts over 8,000,000 tons, with a value of nearly 5,000,000. The home market for iron has been assisted very largely by the rapid development in Germany of the electrical industry, wherein the Empire has made remarkable strides, and wherein she has shown, as in the chemical industry, one result of the work of her technical schools. Some 60,000 people are now engaged in an industry which thirty years ago practi- cally did not exist. The value of electrical machinery and appliances exported from Germany now amounts to about 8,000,000 per annum. Great Britain alone takes about 750,000 worth of electric lighting globes, whilst in other classes of electrical appliances Austria, Russia, Italy, and South Africa appear amongst the best customers. The domestic consumption of electrical appliances has been largely forwarded by the growth of electric tramways, which in most of the large German cities (except Berlin) are in the hands of the municipalities. An important modern development is the use of electricity for agricultural purposes, farms being supplied ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 173 with light and especially motor power from large central stations. The work done by German technicians and scientists together in the forwarding of wireless telegraphy needs to be no more than mentioned. In the manufacture of steel ware and of machinery, Germany is usually credited, not without justice, with-being rather an imitator than an initiator. Her great success in this line has been achieved by the rapidity with which Germans have adopted the improve- ments invented elsewhere, and the fact that they have succeeded in producing the newest types of machinery at prices which enable their reproductions to compete successfully with the original manufacturers. The industry now employs over half a million people. Germany came late into the market as a producer of factory -made textiles : the auto- matic spindle in cotton spinning was intro- duced nearly thirty years later than in England, and weaving survived as a household industry much longer than elsewhere. That even to this day the old spinning wheel is only just vanishing from German villages is shown by the large number of wheels which at regular periods appear in the second-hand market. In other countries they have already become *' ornaments," in Germany they can be bought, at certain seasons, for a few pence. At the end of last century there were still 174 GERMANY OF TO-DAY nearly 100,000 hand weavers in Germany, but mostly employed in producing special fabrics such as silk cloths. The technical schools are rapidly asserting themselves in this as in so many other directions, particularly in the production of designs " with brains in them " (Times report, 1903). Saxony, which is the centre of the German cotton trade, has recently made great strides in the production of one special article, tulle, of which according to R. M. Berry (" Germany of the Germans," 1911), as little as twenty years ago not a yard was made in the German Empire. Now Saxony manufactures her own frames, and they turn out tulle to the value of roughly 2,000,000 per annum. The textile industry employs over 1,000,000 people, of whom nearly half are women. Other trades employing large numbers of people are the metal trade, with nearly 1,000,000 employees, and food-stuffs and clothing (with over 1,000,000 each). The building trade employs 1,500,000 people, and the production of food-stuffs over 200,000. There are also over 10,000 people employed in the fabrication of tobacco preparations. German industry is almost as much syndi- cated, that is, concentrated into syndicates and cartels, as the American, but curiously enough there is as yet no violent public feeling against the syndicate system. The ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 175 opposition, that is, does not run along the American lines, and the bulk of the protesting literature is socialistic and devoted to the general denunciation of capital as such, not of capital in its syndicated form. One reason for this may be that the German cartels were developed under the stress of industrial crises, particularly that of 1900-1901, which followed a period of rapid production. E. D. Howard says that the consumption of pig-iron sank from 262 pounds per head of the popula- tion in 1900 to 178 pounds in the following year. " The producers were forced to take combined action to prevent over-production, and the result was the establishment of strong syndicates." These syndicates still control the market, but the German cartels, unlike the American trusts, are not yet monopolies, that is, they do not control the market both for raw mater- ial and for the finished products, nor have they gone so far in merging the individual companies into one corporation ; the com- panies retain their legal and actual individu- ality, but they submit for certain purposes to the control of committees representing common interests. Moreover, organization and obedience to organized authority, as has already been suggested, are so thoroughly drilled into the German not only by the formalized and specialized school course, 176 GERMANY OF TO-DAY but also by his service in the army, that although the German is a " born grumbler," he becomes or is by nature (professors may dispute which is the correct formula) less disposed to give his grumblings effective force. The whole State system, especially in Prussia, is so much and so obviously a system wherein and whereto the individuality of its component individuals is sacrificed that when precisely the same principle is developed by modern capitalism for its own purposes, it no longer strikes the individ- ual so forcibly, and he is no longer acutely conscious of being outraged as an individual. It is also fairly obvious that the de- velopment of scientific machinery and the constantly increasing precision of a big manufacturing plant tends to reduce factory labour ever more to the level of that simple obedience to rule, the German " Vorschrift," which saves the individual German so much trouble and robs him of so much individuality. Howard observes truly enough that " the capitalist could scarcely ask a better training school for his employees than the German army." Partnerships give way to stock companies, and stock companies in turn to syndicates, but the nature of the agreement changes also. The syndicate develops into a public body, its executive becomes a Beamtenschaft, ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 177 or body of officials invested in the German mind with all the dignity and privileges of the official caste, and as such not lightly to be subjected to individual criticism. Hence there is a fair field in Germany for the growth of the syndicate as the normal form in economic development. In their own way the great stores, which are a feature of the commercial life of the country, especially of its big towns, and against which small shop- keepers constantly protest collectively and individually, are themselves another illustra- tion of the same process whereby the number of the employed increases, but the number of employers does not. The German syndicates are best known to English readers as a rule owing to the charge brought against them that they sell cheaper abroad than at home ; in other words, that they dump goods at a loss abroad in order to keep up the standard of price in their home market. " The German pays double prices for his goods that the foreigner may get his cheap." The defence is that the cartels are not actually monopolies, and that by restrict- ing output at certain periods they maintain a more even market at home, and thus a more even grade of employment than would be possible under a system of internecine com- petition between individual companies. It is also argued that the big companies, like H 178 GERMANY OF TO-DAY Krupps, can and do pay more attention to the welfare of their workmen than would be possible for small employers : they greatly exceed the legislative requirements both in respect of their pension schemes and in respect of housing, recreation and so forth. The counter claim to this is, of course, that what some do all should be legally compelled to do, if necessary with the assistance of the State funds. However, by the time the argument has reached this stage it is no longer a German question, but one concerning the whole relations between capital and labour. The development of capitalism shows a progressive increase in the number of large companies and businesses as against small, and also an increase in the number of limited liability and other stock companies as against individual ownership, but this is doubtless not an especially German feature of capital- istic development. Of the combinations of labour as opposed to capital, the Social Democracy is, of course, the most striking : it is at least an open question, however, whether it is also the most effective. Its devotion to Marxianism and to principles which could only be brought into practice by a complete overthrow of the existing social order has in the past prevented its parliament- ary representatives from acting as a Labour party ; the Socialist party in the Reichstag ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 179 has developed into a permanent opposition, making a valuable occasional ally for dis- contented groups in other parts of the house, but not itself an effective fighting unit. This ineffectivity has produced the South- German Revisionist movement within the Social Democracy, which aims at depriving the party of its purely negative force, and at enabling it to record a vote when desirable in favour of the lesser of two evils, particularly in financial legislation. That this Revisionist principle will in time prevail practically throughout the party may be taken perhaps for granted : it would prevail much sooner if the Prussian Government would adopt some of the more liberal spirit which prevails in other parts of Germany ; for it is precisely the absurdity of the Prussian feudalism in the bureaucracy and in the Prussian Diet, and the comparative harshness with which the executive works that makes Prussia the stronghold not only of the old feudal spirit, but also of the strict Socialist spirit, the stalwarts of the " Umsturz." Apart from the social democratic combina- tion, whereof the kernel is the Socialist Union, there are two other forms of Trades-Unions in Germany, the Christian Union and the Hirsch-Duncker Union. The former, with a present membership of about 350,000, is at variance with the Social Democracy mainly 180 GERMANY OF TO-DAY on the ground of the hard and fast doctrines of atheism accepted by the latter as part of the official creed and virtually enforced upon members. It is not, however, a confessional union, for it does not profess nor insist upon any particular form of creed, and tends on the whole to work with the Democratic Union locally whenever the latter succeeds in divorc- ing itself locally from its general political propaganda. The Hirsch-Duncker Union, organised roughly on the lines of the English unions, but holding more strictly aloof from political propaganda, has a membership of about 110,000, and its numbers, according to the latest available figures, appear to be upon the decrease. The Hirsch-Duncker Union, however, appears to include the highest class of workmen, and it also possesses a system of insurance against unemployment, at present a nut the imperial government confesses itself unable to crack. The figures on the following page show the material prosperity of the unions. In addition to the three chief centralised unions there is a group of " Independent Unions" with approximately 750,000 members, another group of " Economically peaceful Unions " (Wirtschaftsfriedliche Vereine) with 150,000 members, and some small local organ- isations with about 7,000 members. Finally, there are a large number of " Confessional ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY 181 Name of Unions. Socialist. Hirsch. D. Christian. Membership, 1911 2,339,785 107,743 340,957 Funds at end of 1911 .. 3,000,000 200,000 350,000 Income 3,600,000 130,000 310,000 Expenditure Sick pay, etc. 600,000 40,000 50,000 Unemployment . . 300,000 10,000 9,000 Strikes 850,000 (abroad 30.000) 17,000 60,000 Propaganda 120,000 10,000 Management, Cen- tral and Local 500,000 20,000 12.000 Unions," registering altogether 700,000 members. The total number of organized workmen in 1911 (excluding the confessional unions, which apparently sometimes overlap with the others) was 3,791,665 and their total income 4,000,000. The total number of adults of both sexes employed in businesses subject to inspection was 5,639,258. In addition there were employed 489,000 girls under 21, 476,000 182 GERMANY OF TO-DAY girls and boys between 14 and 16, and 12,000 children under 14. For the sake of completeness it may be added that there were in 1911 2,566 strikes, affecting 10,000 firms and 600,000 workmen. Combinations of employers for mutual assist- ance against strikes, and so forth, are less closely knit in Germany than in some other countries, and they have not yet centralised their affairs or reached the stage of appointing a central committee. In 1912 employers* combinations numbered rather more than 3,000, embracing about 180,000 members. In the spring of 1913 the two principal combina- tions, the " Haupstelle Deutscher Arbeit- geberverbande," representing the leading union of large concerns, and the " Verein Deutscher Arbeitgeberverbande," representing the middle-sized concerns, were combined for defensive purposes, the event being considered one of great significance. CHAPTER VIII AGRICULTURAL GERMANY ALTHOUGH Germany has developed into an industrial instead of a mainly agricultural nation, industry occupying at the present time about 42 per cent, of the whole popula- tion, there is stitt a large population occupied with agriculture. The change, however, is sufficiently striking, for at the beginning of the nineteenth century over 80 per cent, of the population was agricultural ; to-day less than thirty per cent, is so occupied. Even in 1895 the proportion was still 36 per cent., and ten years earlier 42 per cent. Of the 17,000,000 now reckoned to the agricultural population rather more than 2,000,000 are landed pro- prietors, great or small, whilst less than 150,000 are farmers of leasehold land. There are roughly 100,000 agricultural officials, over 3,000,000 agricultural labourers, and 10,000,000 members of families doing occa- sional work on the land or simply belonging to labouring or occupiers' families. Counting labourers' allotments there are nearly 6,000,000 separate agricultural properties. 183 184 GERMANY OF TO-DAY " The German Empire will collapse without firing a shot when German agriculture col- lapses." This assertion of the German mili- tary hero, Moltke, may be taken as the keynote of the German official attitude towards agriculture. It is true that less than a third of the population is concerned in agriculture, and that scarcely one-eighth of this third, or about four in every hundred of the population, personally owns a share of the soil great or large, yet to all appearances Germany's financial and customs policy as well as the political arrangements of many of the States are based on the assumption that the agricul- tural population is overwhelmingly the most important to the welfare of the individual States and of the whole Empire, and that the protection of agriculture even by measures bearing hardly upon the commercial and industrial population is the acme of political wisdom. " The farmers govern Prussia and Prussia governs Germany " is the trite but not very inaccurate summary of the situation as it appears to the workers in the big towns. In part no doubt it is an honest belief that the agricultural population is the real backbone of Germany, which accounts for the political power of x organised agriculture in Prussia and some other States, and this although the actual decrease in the population engaged in or supported by agriculture amounts to AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 185 about 50,000 per annum. In part also it is due to the fact that the old feudal habit or instinct which attributed chief weight to the man with " a stake in the country," the landowner and big farmer, is still alive. In part, finally, it may be due, as is claimed, to the fact that the German Emperor, the visible impersonification of the German unity, is identical with the more nearly absolute King of Prussia, whose throne in turn is based upon a feudal system and the props of whose throne are thought to be the great landlords. Politically, too, it is clear that a bureau- cratic Government, whereof neither the admin- istrative nor the executive is in any true sense responsible to an elected and representative Parliament, must base itself upon some reli- able support in the money-voting chamber, and must strive to make this support perman- ent in numbers and voting power as well as to keep it steadilyrepresentative of the desires and wishes of the*permanent Government. An inelastic system of Government must be repre- sented by an equally inelastic .and certainly not progressive, therefore conservative majority in the money -voting house. This appears to be the essential feature not only of the Prussian constitution, but also of the whole of German policy so far as Prussia can con- trol it. Now this inelastic, non-progressive, conservative support for the permanent 180 GERMANY OF TO-DAY Government is to be found almost alone in the organised agricultural system, which has replaced the organisation, of feudalism. It seems clear that the system must necessarily be opposed practically and theoretically to the industrial development, and therefore that actual damage done administratively to industrial development is not necessarily regarded by agriculture as an evil ; so that even where shortsightedness obviously prevails it may actually come to be regarded as patriotic. There is a further point of view from which it is possible to regard the part played by agriculture in the German system. Germany's essential theory of the most favourable posi- tion for herself in the world is that of complete self-sufficiency and independence, not that of international interdependence. Her customs- tariff was not conceived as a weapon for the opening of foreign markets, but as a wall to defend her home market against foreign aggression. So too, as has been seen, the essential feature of her army organisation is defence against aggression, and so too her support of agriculture is intended to maintain or create independence of foreign countries and foreign products. The German ideal is that Germany should feed and support her own people, and the colonial demand is in reality a part of this general design, namely for the possession of overflow departments, AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 187 whither she can send her surplus population, that part which her theory of independence makes it impossible for her to support. It is clear therefore that German agricul- ture, according to this general scheme, must be maintained at a pitch where it is capable in time of urgent need of supplying with agri- cultural products all the population of the Empire. And it is further natural that this fixed scheme should be exploited by agricul- tural magnates for their own advantage. The landowners have accordingly made this theory of national independence their own, and they are always prepared to defend it. At the time of the initiation of the new German naval policy the Agrarians, that is the party of the landlords, opposed the naval budget chiefly because they thought that the development of an extensive naval policy implied the increase of obligations abroad and a breach with the policy of concentration upon Germany or, as one may perhaps term it, of German self- containment. For a time the " props of the Prussian Throne " were at variance with the Emperor himself regarding the naval policy, and the reconciliation did not follow until certain of the Emperor's friends had succeeded in convincing the leaders of the Agrarian party that no breach with the self-contain- ment policy was intended. Similarly the Agrarians of East Prussia 188 GERMANY OF TO-DAY have steadily opposed the canal scheme, which was intended to cheapen and facilitate the exchange of products between the agricul- tural east and the industrial west. The Agrarians thought that the canal would affect their monopoly of agricultural supply as against foreign countries and that the eastern provinces would be flooded with cheap foreign produce brought by canal. In consequence of their opposition to the project, which was warmly supported by the Emperor, represen- tatives of Agrarian interests at court and in the civil service fell into disgrace. These two instances may serve to show the extent to which the Agrarian party is prepared to go in its opposition to international interdependence. It must not be forgotten that the Agrarians are led by the East Prus- sian aristocracy and that the civil service and the posts at court, honorary and salaried, are largely occupied by members of Agrarian families. It must not, however, be supposed that this influence of the agricultural magnates can be exercised solely by a few large land- owners in Eastern Prussia, aided by relatives in court or civil service posts. There is a political organisation behind the influence wielded by Agrarianism, and though its methods may be and frequently are challenged it is hardly less effective an organization than that of the Social Democracy. AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 189 Apart from the general tendency to provide appointments as officers for sons of landed gentry, or to find them billets in the civil service, and otherwise to show for the families with landed property fostering care, going sometimes to violent extremes, there is also a still more pronounced tendency to protect the interests of agriculture in every branch of legislation. The general tendency of the German customs system (a tendency which is not entirely carried into effect) is to prohibit the import of foreign agricultural produce. The duties appear at least to be raised more with a view to their prohibitive effect than as a means of raising revenue. In the case of certain products, such as fodder for cattle, the result of the prohibition is of no benefit whatever to the small farmer but rather the reverse : he is not as a rule in a position to store fodder, and since he cannot obtain it cheaply, a bad season for fodder in Germany compels him to sell off his cattle in the autumn to avoid the expense of keeping them over the winter. For a time meat may thus be cheapened, but the result in a few months becomes apparent in a rapid rise in the prices, especially of veal, beef and pork, the staple articles of German consumption. The small farmer is not in the least profited by the high prices, which go into the pockets of the big cattle farmers and the middlemen. 190 GERMANY OF TO-DAY It is plain that all increase of expense in food must react unfavourably upon industry unless the whole of the agricultural population of Germany is profiting so far by the rise of price that their demand for industrial products is increased. It is also evident that, on the widest view of them, not all the measures taken in Germany nominally for the protec- tion of agriculture have this general effect. Hence arises the complaint that the agricul- tural tariff in general benefits the large estates, and not the peasants or small farmers. The case of fodder is only quoted as one illustration of developments which appear to recur at intervals of a few years in Germany, and which hardly admit of argument as between Free Trade and Protection regarded as general economic principles. The importation of live cattle is subjected to restrictions which are not far from constituting prohibition ; the importation of frozen meat was prevented until recently by veterinary precautions, and is still subjected to high duties ; cornstuffs are heavily taxed upon introduction, and so also are mill by-products. But even in matters of taxation precautions are always taken that the pressure shall not fall too heavily upon agricultural land or upon the landed families. The long fight against the introduction of inheritance duties has so far always resulted in a victory for the AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 191 opposing Agrarians : capital invested in agriculture and income derived therefrom has a way of escaping the vigilance of the tax-commissioners, and even the police are wont to appear somewhat blind to lack of papers of identification or other omissions of a similar character if the offenders happen to be able-bodied employees of big estates. In general it may fairly be said that agriculture occupies a privileged position in Germany, but more particularly in North Germany : it has, however, to be added that this privileged position is not entirely due to remnants of feudalism or solely to the influence of the big country families. It is also based, as has been stated, upon the theory that the agricul- tural population is the backbone of the modern Empire, and that " German agricul- ture must and can feed the whole of the population of Germany " (Emperor at Agri- cultural Yearly Assembly in Berlin, 1913). The main influence, however, as we have seen, must be attributed to the large estates in East Prussia and Mecklenburg. Here are the big estates, whilst Baden, Bavaria and the Rhineland have for the most part small estates, in the case of Baden so small as actually to be a disadvantage. There is, however, a certain reason for this distribution. East Prussia is not very fertile, and to make agriculture profitable it has to be " extensive," 192 GERMANY OF TO-DAY just as is much of the cultivation of the sugar- beet, which is characteristic of the central portion of northern Germany. In the coun- tries with very small estates it will usually be found, as in Baden and the Rhineland, that the produce is largely of grapes, or that the soil is rich and nature lavish, as in a great part of Bavaria. This distribution of the agricul- ture of Germany may be easiest shown from the figures of the Statistical Department. The actual surface under agriculture (in- cluding viti-culture) is about 80,000,000 acres, excluding forest land and waste land not supporting cattle. Five per cent., or about 4,000,000 acres, is divided into small holdings of less than five acres each. Of these small holdings one-third is vine-growing land, and another third is garden land. Of the next largest holdings, up to ten acres, rather more than one-third is vineyard and ten per cent, is in corn land. The middle-sized holdings up to fifty acres show still one-third vineyard, and one-third corn land. Of the big estates up to 250 acres one quarter is in sugar beet, a third corn land, five per cent, vineyard, and the rest roots, and so forth. The biggest estates of all, 300 acres and beyond, are 58 per cent, sugar beet, and only 20 per cent, corn land. These are the huge North German properties of the " sugar-barons," as the Socialist press usually describes them. The AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 193 biggest estates include nearly one quarter of all the agricultural land in Germany, the 250 acre estates make up one-third, and the medium estates (up to 50 acres) also about one-third. The majority of the big estates are in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Saxony, Mecklenburg, and Pomerania. In Mecklen- burg-Schwerin, for example, sixty per cent, of all agricultural land is in the hands of proprietors with the largest estates (over 250 acres), whilst only fourteen per cent, is in the hands of farmers with less than 50 acres. In East Prussia 38 per cent, is held by farmers of over 250 acres, in Pomerania 53 per cent., and in Posen 46 per cent. In general in the South-German and Rhenish Provinces and States from forty to fifty per cent, of the land is in holdings of between twelve and fifty acres. By way of contrast it may be noted that in Wiirttemberg, Baden and Bavaria, only from one to two per cent, of the land is held in the big estates. The smallest " parcel " estates other than vineyard are usually producers of tobacco or fruit. From the above figures it will be clear first that the greater part of German agricultural land is not contained in the large estates of the north and east; secondly, that the customs and other privileges which advantage the big estates, are not therefore advantages 194 GERMANY OF TO-DAY necessarily to the great bulk of German agri- culture ; and that where certain features of German agriculture can be shown to be disad- vantageous to the small holdings or medium farms, the greater portion of German agricul- ture is thereby disadvantageously affected. In the south and west the political organization controlling the agricultural vote is very largely Catholic : in the north and east it is Prussian- Conservative. We have hitherto considered the distribu- tion of the population owning land (in Germany the renting of land is of comparatively little importance : there are only 130,000 rented farms as against over 2,000,000 proprietors) : the condition of the hired labourers is another matter. Of these there are approximately 3,000,000, and the majority are employed, of course, on the " extensive " northern estates. If it be remembered that little more than a century ago feudal serfdom was still not only actually but legally the condition of the agricultural population of Prussia (serfdom was abolished by the edict of October 9, 1807), it will be understood that the uses and abuses connected with serfdom have not all entirely disappeared within a century. The mal- treatment of agricultural labourers, chicanerie in connection with the payment of wages in money and kind, and particularly monstrous abuses in connection with the electoral laws, AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 195 are still subjects of complaint, though it must be added that the actual physical maltreatment of labourers is less frequently reported. But it probably required the industrial develop- ment of the Empire, with the threatening depopulation of the country, and the rush to the industrial centres to put an end to the period of de facto serfdom. It was and is the drainage of labour to the towns which pro- duced, or is producing tolerable conditions of life for the labourers on the big estates, since the landowners in their own interests must do something to stop the drainage. Labour organization has made but little progress in the country, and the Social Democracy admits its lack of success. Naturally every kind of obstacle is put in its way. Innkeepers who permit the use of their establishments for Socialist meetings suffer from the marked displeasure of the local magnates, and are thereby commended to the especial vigilance of the local police ; labourers who join the organization are subjected to innumerable petty tyrannies. Moreover, the " secret ballot " for the Reichstag is made a farce by the employment of utterly illegal receptacles as ballot-boxes : old cigar-boxes, worn-out chimneypot hats, soup-tureens and biscuit-boxes have been employed by the " proper authority " to hold the voting papers, not because the proper authority (that is the 196 GERMANY OF TO-DAY local squire) is too lazy to obtain a proper box, but because these quaint receptacles enable the committee controlling the voters to place the votes nicely one upon another, and thus to keep an exact check of the way in which each vote is cast. The Government has now introduced a measure under public pressure compelling the use of uniform ballot-boxes throughout the Empire, but the above is only one of innumerable abuses each of which has to be revealed, denounced, and often made the subject of public demonstrations before it is removed. Such abuses show, however, clearly enough the real condition of the dependent agricultural population. It is claimed that the influence of the Catholic clergy in South Germany is little less reactionary than that of the Junkers in the north, except that the former utilise mental pressure and the force of unenlightened superstition to control the voters. Hence, it is asserted, the Catholic or Centrist party has an almost impregnable position, whereas even the next most impregnable, that of the Conservatives, is sometimes shaken by general elections. At the end of the last century the daily wage of an agricultural labourer, taking the average for all Germany, was about twenty pence : to-day it is about two shillings. It is lowest in East Prussia, where the daily AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 197 wage is probably still not more than about eighteenpence, and it is highest in Schleswig- Holstein, where it reaches nearly half-a-crown. According to recent calculations a labourer whose wife also does field-work can make an income of from 40 to 45 per annum. A family with three full workers may make as much as 75. To this, however, has to be added some small payment in kind or the produce from a chicken-run and goose- breeding, and a certain amount of garden produce. On the big estates, particularly those devoted to the sugar-beet, work is more seasonal than elsewhere, and the result is that whilst at times the employers are glad of all the labour they can get, at other times there is no work available, even for the small village populations. This results in the em- ployment very largely of foreign seasonal labour. More than 700,000 foreign labourers come to Germany at certain seasons every year, and about sixty per cent, of these are employed in agriculture. The average wage of a foreign seasonal labourer is for a male from 2s. 2d. in East Prussia to 3s. 6d. in Schleswig-Holstein, and for a female from Is. 2d. in Silesia to Is. lOd. in Schleswig- Holstein. The annual influx of low-grade, often wholly illiterate, and sometimes semi- savage seasonal labour from abroad is always pointed to as one of the most disastrous 198 GERMANY OF TO-DAY features of the development of German agricultural conditions. It appears to be agreed that whilst in Baden and in certain other parts of South and West Germany, the " parcelling process " has been carried too far for the general ad- vantage of the country, the driving of the peasant from the land is an equally great evil in much of the north and east. The remedy, it is thought, may be found in the south by an increase of the principle of the right of primogeniture, as a compulsory legal institu- tion, and in the north by the diminution of the privilege of converting large properties into entailed estates (Fidei Kommisse). The en- tailment of small properties upon the eldest son instead of its division amongst several children or sale for the purpose of dividing the proceeds, and still more the maintenance of peasant properties intact and undivided (co-heirs being bought out or otherwise compensated), have been adopted in some districts as compulsory legal principles ; they are also wide-spread as peasant custom not based upon codified laws. The subdivision of properties in France AS a consequence of the " extremely equal inheritance laws " of that country are not infrequently pointed to by German writers as one cause of her falling birth-rate. They quote an observation attri- buted to Lord Castlereagh at a political dinner, AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 199 '* Gentlemen, we will leave to their own laws of inheritance the task of finally dealing with the French." On the other hand, the Reichstag has frequently attempted to secure an imperial regulation of the entailment system, which is particularly extensive in Silesia and in the pro- vinces of Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Posen. In the last nine years the number of such entailed estates has increased by 116 and the extent by nearly half a million acres. There are over 1,200 such estates in Prussia with total acreage of approximately 5,000,000. (It should be added, however, that entailment is less in proportionate extent than in Eng- land.) In April, 1913, the Reichstag passed a resolution brought forward on behalf of the Radicals inviting the Chancellor to lay before the House a bill " to forbid abso- lutely the creation of further entailments or the increase of those already existing, and to provide for the breaking up of estates already entailed." It is thought that the consequence of this resolution may be the acceptance of responsibility for some preven- tive legislation by the Prussian Diet ; and it appears to be admitted even by the Conserva- tives that further tying-up of land is far from being in the interests of the Agrarians them- selves, chiefly because in the last fifty years the creation of these entailed estates has been 200 GERMANY OF TO-DAY largely effected with capital made by business men in industry and has therefore no longer any connection with the maintenance of the old landed nobility and gentry. It is pointed out, too, by the economists that about half of the land entailed in Prussia is forest-land, not corn or sugar-beet. The gospel of German Agrarianism is stated by von Riimker (" Die Ernahrung unsres Volkes aus eigner Produktion," pub. 1912), as follows : " Germany's armaments by land and sea and her industrial and commercial development are pointless and hopeless from the national standpoint except upon the basis of Germany's national ability to feed her own population." The task thus set before the nation (which the Emperor said could and must be performed) is stated to be the increase of corn-production by about fifteen per cent., and of meat by about five per cent. These figures are, however, a little misleading, because they assume that the increase of consumption will not be continued at the same rate or at even nearly the same rate as in recent years. The consumption of wheat and spelt has risen, for instance, since 1885 from about 140 Ibs. per head of popula- tion to about 200 Ibs. The consumption of rye has not increased so considerably, chiefly, no doubt, owing to the manifest increase in the use of wheaten-bread. The consumption AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 201 of barley has increased from 120 Ibs. to 168 Ibs., and that of oats from 200 Ibs. to 250 Ibs. It is stated that the amount of rye, wheat, and spelt, the breadstuffs which Germany is obliged to import for her own consumption annually, is from 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 tons. Count Schwerin-Lowitz stated in the Reichstag (May 17th, 1912) that, deducting the amount of rye now exported from Germany, the total deficit was not more than 1,500,000 tons. " This deficit could be completely covered if on the 20,000,000 acres of land where we now grow wheat, rye, and spelt, we were to grow as little as one hundredweight more per morgen. People may say that it is impossible to grow an additional hundredweight per morgen, but as a matter of fact we have increased the production in the last twenty-five years by half a ton to every two and a half acres. In the last ten years the increase has been a hundredweight and a half to every morgen." (The figures in the above are approximate. The German text reads in hektars and morgen. A hektar is a little less than two and a half acres and a morgen is about five-eighths of an acre.) That is the economic gospel of German Agrarianism stated epigrammatically. The speaker also declared that by intensive cultivation peasant properties produce nearly six hundredweight more to the acre than the average (rye, 8 cwt. per morgen) for the 202 GERMANY OF TO-DAY whole Empire. Dr. Frost, however, points out that climatic and soil conditions make it highly improbable that German agriculture can replace the imported bread-corn by grow- ing more wheat. " It would, however, be a gigantic success if the German rye produc- tion could make up the deficit in question. We should then at least have the possibility of falling back upon an increased rye consump- tion in case of need." However economically mistaken such calculations may be they, at any rate, show sufficiently clearly what is the problem which agriculture sets itself in Ger- many, and it must be supposed, judging from appearances to which reference has already been made, that it is the problem also set itself by the Government. The increased production of meat is quoted as about 300,000 tons between 1904 and 1910, the importation of foreign meat in 1910 being about 140,000 tons. It is thus made to appear a simple matter to provide in Germany the additional quantity of meat required by the population as it stands at present; but the admitted failure of the German meat- supply in 1912, and the necessity under which the Government found itself of facilitating the importation of meat from abroad by decreasing the railway rates and lessening the frontier restrictions, would not appear to confirm the agricultural view. . AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 203 The effect of divorcing Germany from the " fluctuations " of the world-market for food- stuffs is apparently admitted to have been an increase of prices, particularly in districts at a distance from the centres of production, that is, industrial districts. Hence the prices of food-stuffs produced in Germany vary greatly in different towns. Rye, for example, shows a difference of 2 per ton between Silesia and Bavaria ; wheat shows a difference of about 38s. between the same districts ; barley, between East Prussia and Bavaria, 3 3s., and so forth. To combat this effect the Government are constantly engaged in efforts to cheapen the cost of inland trans- port, and to this may be attributed in part the rapid development of canalisation of rivers and construction of artificial waterways and light railways. Mannheim, thanks to its natural and artificial waterway provision, is one of the chief centres of the European corn trade, and that which Mannheim has naturally the Government desires to give to other German towns in some degree artificially, it being clear that Mannheim owes its corn trade very largely to its water access. In addition, various schemes are devised for reducing " middlemen's profits." that is of bringing the food-stuffs as directly as possible from farmer to consumer. The main question, however, is not that of 204 GERMANY OF TO-DAY cheapening existing prices, but of increasing or cheapening production, and especially of replacing the annual drain from the land. The use of machinery, and particularly the development of electric-driven agricultural machinery, is one, and, of course, one of the most important forms of this process. Recent statistics of the employment of electricity in agriculture were not available at the time of writing, but the increase in the use of steam machinery in the last ten years is an interesting illustration of technical develop- ment. The number of steam threshing machines, for instance, was doubled (250,000 to 500,000), and of steam ploughs nearly doubled (1,700 to 3,100). The use of artificial manure, which is greatest, proportionately to surface, in Prussia, also shows an astonish- ing development. Prussia used in 1908 nearly 1000 Ibs. of potash manure per acre, as against about 100 Ibs. eighteen years previously, whilst the Bavarian use rose in the same period from about 20 Ibs. to nearly 800 Ibs. Another institution benefiting those engaged in agriculture is that of the co-operative society, which flourishes greatly in Germany. In 1911 there were some 25,000 societies connected with agriculture and articles of consumption, with about 4,000,000 members. There were, to take one example, 8,193 AGRICULTURAL GERMANY 205 co-operative dairies with 288,699 members. These societies are for the most part affiliated in central unions, of which the most important are the Imperial Union (Darmstadt), the Schultze-Delitzsch Union, and the Raiffeisen Union (Neuwied). The German customs tariff is chiefly determined to-day by the Agrarian Gospel epitomised above. The tariff on the chief agricultural products is as follows : Wheat, 5s. 6d. per 100 kilos ; rye, 5s. ; oats, 5s. ; malt barley, 4s. ; fodder barley, Is. 4d. ; maize, 3s. ; meal, 10s. 2d. Live cattle pay 8s. to 9s. per double hundredweight, slaugh- tered cattle (meat), 27s. 6d. per double hundredweight ; butter, 20s., cheese 15s., eggs 2s. There are a number of regulations regarding the production and import of saccharine, margarine, wine, etc., intended to assist the home producer, though they are given and in most cases actually bear the additional character of hygienic measures. One of the commonest complaints in con- nection with the agricultural customs tariff is that exporters of cereals are given certificates entitling them to import similar or other cereals free of duty. The farmers, it is claimed, export cereals carrying a high duty, and import cereals or fodder carrying a low duty. Thus by exporting oats at 5s., and importing iodder-barley at Is. 4d., the farmer can make 206 GERMANY OF TO-DAY a big profit when fodder is at a high price after a dry season, and this profit is not pro- perly an agricultural profit at all, but a profit wholly unintended by the customs law, and also a direct encouragement to the export of bread cereals, a result certainly not intended even by the Agrarian Gospel. In conclusion it may be added that the value of the agricultural products of Germany is reckoned roughly at the following figures : Dairy produce, 142,000,000 ; sugar, 31,000,000 ; cattle and by-products thereof, 200,000,000 ; other products about 200,000,000. It follows that the total value of German agricultural produce of all kinds would be placed according to this calculation at between 500,000,000 and 600,000,000. In 1902 it was estimated (Muller, " Industrie- staat oder Agrarstaat," 1902), at seven and a half milliards of marks, that is 375,000,000, so that the value to-day is perhaps rather less than the amount suggested above. CHAPTER IX CASTES AND CLASSES THE change which has come over Germany, with her sudden development from an agricul- tural to an industrial country, could not remain without its effect on the character of the inhabitants and their occupations in leisure hours. Thirty years ago the country, even in the immediate neighbourhood of Berlin, was a treasure-house of quaint and delightful customs, relics of heathendom and of early Christianity ; to-day it may still be possible to find here and there a rare " manner " or a quaint " custom." In the open country near the Vistula corn is still ground with a stone hand-mill, and the bread baked in an open-air " parish bakehouse," and the fishermen still ply upon the river in canoes hollowed out of tree-trunks. In Southern Germany there are districts to which the railway has not yet penetrated, and where the yellow post chaise still runs on its huge wheels. In the valleys running up from the Rhine and Moselle into the hills 207 208 GERMANY OF TO-DAY one may still see the burning wheel hurtle down into the stream from a hill top at the turning of the year, and it is but a few weeks since there was a veritable witch-burning in Silesia. But now the old customs must be searched for diligently, and happy he that can still find them. The old cities of the Rhineland lose their beautiful timbered houses and their Gothic gables before the devastating horde of flat-builders, and the old country-dances under the trees or in the " Spiel-huise " make way for the Tango and Turkey-trot of the local palais de danse. In Germany, to put the matter succinctly, we are watching the loss of an old civilisation and the transfer to a new, not only in a shorter period of time than has happened elsewhere, but also with a violence of wrench which sets us gasping. German society in town and country is adopting extreme modernism and international ways of life and thought after having retained the ancient ways longer than the rest of the world. The development of Germany strikes us as resembling a syllogism with all the middle clauses suppressed. Thus one finds in German society not only all the stages we are accus- tomed to associate with centuries of develop- ment, but also a large number of imitative excrescences which seem out of keeping with the German character as a whole. Side by CASTES AND CLASSES 209 side with expensive efforts to raise the capital of the Empire to an " international cosmopo- lis " like Paris, and with tendencies to intro- duce French titles for German products, there is also a violent protestantism which objects to biscuits being called " cakes " in Germany, because " cakes " is not a German word, and which therefore adopts the Germanised " keks " ! Town-planning is developed along lines which would be almost beautiful if it were not for the survival of the worst horrors of the stucco period ; and the country costumes of the Spree wald jostle in the Berlin parks with the latest absurdities of the Paris mode worn by ladies whom the mode does not suit. But the most prominent feature of German society of the present day is a corollary of the paternal system of Government, namely the supremacy of the official caste. In town and country the uniform is supreme and chiefly the military uniform, because in Germany the army is the " senior service." Austria, which suffers from the same obsession, has invented a phrase " the witchcraft of the uniform " (Zauber der Montur) to describe the obsession, but the phrase is equally applicable to Ger- many. We have already seen that failure to pass school-examinations is penalized chiefly by inability to obtain the patent as officer of the reserve, and this penalization is o 210 GERMANY OF TO-DAY a social one, for it affects in equal degree the youth who will later have to struggle with his equals for his livelihood, and the youth who is " born with a silver spoon in his mouth." In the social hierarchy, then, it may be taken for granted that the officer comes first : he is followed by the civil official in his degree, and even the civil officialdom is given a measure of military prestige : the peaked cap of officialdom greets the visitor to Germany at the first customs-house, and follows him then throughout his visit. Social caste is determined by the position of the man or woman within the official hierarchy, and inasmuch as the State has taken for its own proper sphere so many departments of public life and activity it is plain that the grades of officialdom are infinite, and the ceremonial observances con- nected with them are as puzzling to the stranger within the gates as they are oft- times absurd, even in the eyes of Germans themselves. There is no need to insist here upon the well-worn, perhaps almost threadbare, jokes about the respective social positions of the wife of the upper postal assistant, and her humbler sister, the wife of a mere postal assistant without predicate, for the German press itself is sarcastic enough about these absurdities, though the condi- tions which could alone destroy the hierarchy CASTES AND CLASSES 211 are not present. It is true that the biting sarcasm of a Thackeray has been wanting to Germany, but it may be doubted whether the time has yet come when it would have its due effect. Next to the official castes and classes may be ranged the variety of honorary or semi- official designations, the long range of " handles " which represent much-coveted distinctions without any corresponding func- tions in the machinery of the State, or any actual power other than that of prestige. The Councillors of Commerce, Medicine, Architecture, and so forth, are in their degree one stage less distinguished than those who, to their councillorship add the predicate " Privy," but Councillors and Privy Council- lors alike are apt to be individuals of no very remarkable distinction socially. However, the prestige of a title goes so far that there is quite a competition for the honorary consular representation of small and undistinguished countries or principalities, the representative receiving in return for his services simply the predicate " Consul," which appears to be sufficient reward for not very onerous duties. Woe be to him or her who forgets the title in addressing the new dignitary ! After the titles come the medals and various decora- tions in their degrees, to be worn upon all occasions when there is the least excuse for , 212 GERMANY OF TO-DAY their production. In their way medals and decorations also are regarded as lifting the lucky wearer out of the ruck of common folk, and as establishing a measure of social prestige. They appear to be looked upon as an honour conferred by the State for distinguished public service, and thus as establishing the public character of the wearer or rather his right to be included vaguely in the machinery of government. It will be observed that positions represen- tative of the public, memberships of the vari- ous elected representative bodies, holderships of positions actually representing electoral confidence are neither so eagerly sought, nor do they carry the same prestige as much less important, and much less actively influential appointments or positions granted by the State. The conclusion to which the foreign observer is necessarily forced is that, socially as well as administratively, the State, and not the people comprisfng the State, is vested with the real attributes of sovereignty. It is characteristic that in some of the comments made in the German press at the time when members of the English House of Commons first became salaried functionaries this pay- ment of members, already existent in Germany, was described as a sign of the approaching decay of the idea of the sovereignty of the people in England. CASTES AND CLASSES 213 i The effort to maintain the hierarchical supremacy of the landed gentry in Germany shows signs at last of weakening. It is still true that the sons and cousins and nephews of German squires, particularly in Prussia, occupy the administrative, diplomatic, and court posts ; it is still true that titled candi- dates are preferred as officers of the premier regiments in the army, and that in general the nobility of Prussia forms the governing caste. But it is no longer true that this nobility is exclusively the old nobility of the feudal days. It can be shown that the German diplomatic service tends to be opened to men whose fathers were ennobled for services in commer- cial or industrial spheres, and that commerce and industry are gradually forcing their way into the administrative machinery, and thus to the top of the social scale. It is also true that to some extent the original feudal nobility is losing its supremacy. An interesting illustration might perhaps be found in the old nobility of Westphalia, which more and more appears to divorce itself from the court circle, and to establish a kind of court of its own, centring round the old noble " Hofe " of Miinster. The Emperor himself is frequently blamed for the importance he attaches to the advice of men prominent in commercial or industrial life, and it is said that of all those who are 214 GERMANY OF TO-DAY called his private advisers the director of a great shipping line is the only one who deserves the title. It may, therefore, not be too much to say that the Agrarian and noble supremacy in society, as in the functions of State, is rather more than merely threatened. But the system of castes and classes on which German society is obviously based, is rooted in the nature of the State-system, and though it may change in detail the system appears likely to withstand all the democratic shocks to which it is subjected as easily as it withstands the shafts of satire and criticism. The German people, as individuals, are characterized by a great degree, not only of sociability, but also of apparently psychologi- cal necessity for concerted or combined action in all phases of their social life. Possibly the army -training, whose effects we have already observed in industrial and political life, makes itself felt here also : there appears to be a certain distaste for the impromptu, and Ger- mans are apt to circumscribe the simplest functions with a fence of rules, regulations, and restrictions, which may appear galling to foreigners, but appear to excite very little vexation amongst the Germans themselves. The taste for combination and the dislike for impromptu and individual action is best seen in the curious development of the verein, association, or club. CASTES AND CLASSES 215 It was, I think, a German writer who declared that if two Frenchmen, two English- men and two Germans were cast away on three different points of a deserted island, the two Frenchmen would, within five minutes, be discussing their respective amours, the English- men would have climbed two hills and be waiting for some one to introduce them across the intervening valley, whilst the Germans would have founded a verein for the exploration of the island. The discussion of the affairs of the verein is one of the first topics which Germans have in common every- where and anywhere, and they have invented a wholly untranslateable phrase for this club " shop " vereinsmeierei. Certain it is that very few German males count less than three or four vereins to which they belong, and vereins are founded with very little provoca- tion or none. In reality this is merely the working out of the inclination for concerted action. For the Singleton the Germans have also a charmingly characteristic word, derived from political life. They say that the isolated individual is " unbekleidet " or unclothed ! It is not, however, true to assert, as has been done, that one German will take another upon credit : it is true that he is rather inclined to take a title of any kind as a guarantee of respectability, but this is really a compliment to German officialdom, which does stand on 21fl GERMANY OF TO-DAY the whole for incorruptibility and honesty. On the other hand Germans do seek and find companionship, and they do not demand that the companion or friend of an excursion shall " grapple them to his soul with hoops of steel." Casual acquaintance is a recognized institu- tion, involving no necessary subsequent obliga- tions on either side. But it is not true that Germans, speaking generally, obtrude them- selves. They are accustomed to sociability, and are apt to express surprise when they do not find it, but they do not force themselves upon those who for one reason or another prefer to " keep themselves to themselves." It is, for example, the custom that newcomers to a town or village shall call first upon older residents, not vice versa, and it would appear that this custom depends upon the assump- tion that the visitors should first express a wish to make the acquaintance of the residents, without which an attempt at rapprochement might be regarded as a social solecism. The position of women in Germany is a question often discussed and usually, by foreigners at least, somewhat contemptuously. There is, perhaps, a pronounced survival of the " goods and chattels " treatment of German womenfolk, which strikes visitors as sometimes silly and sometimes merely barbarian. An American writer (Mr. Price Collier) says : " One observes everywhere and among practi- CASTES AND CLASSES 217 cally all classes an attitude of condescension toward women among the polite and polished, an attitude of carelessness bordering on contempt among the rude." But he also observes that " these gross manners " are at least partially explained by the fact that the German people are only just emerging from poverty, not only the poverty of possessions, but the poverty of experience. " They are as awkward in this new world of theirs of greater wealth and opportunity, as unyoked oxen that have strayed into city streets." At the bottom of this criticism therefore remains the fact which we have already seen in so many spheres, namely that socially, except in certain broad outlines, Germany has not yet developed her new imperial machinery of society : uniformity of education is producing a certain uniformity of character and of action, but it is neither true to say that the German is essentially discourteous in his feelings towards women because he is apt to be dis- courteous (judged by other standards) in his attitude towards them in trams and trains and public resorts ; nor is it prudent to draw the conclusion that except in the event of a huge social upheaval woman will never take the prominent place in the life of the nation which she has made for herself elsewhere. That the German male does on the whole re- gard his women folk as having missed their one 218 GERMANY OF TO-DAY true function if they are not " broad-bosomed mothers of stout sons," it would be absurd to deny, and it is no less true that the beauty of motherhood is apt to be almost officially subordinated to the mechanical " duty " of women to provide males for the service of the State, its defence or its economic pros- perity. Hence it is also true that the whole State system of protection for mothers by factory legislation, regulation of midwifery and so forth is much less dictated by humane sentiment than by economic considerations, and it is not impossible that this attitude may partly account for the appalling statistics of German illegitimacy. Germany has in- herited a certain excessive materialism in this matter from the days of Frederick the Great, and it appears unlikely that she will soon shake off an attitude to this subject which, it must be supposed, is hardly really in the interests, qualitatively, of the nation. None the less the mere surplus of women over men in Germany (at present about 800,000), although it appears to be decreasing, must act as a compulsory agent in the expansion of women's sphere of activity in the Empire. Women's education has not yet received the same degree of Government attention as that of men. Doubtless this has been mainly due to the conception prevailing from highest to lowest that in a well-ordered State there CASTES AND CLASSES 219 ought not to be any necessity for the same development of special education of women as of men. But as already stated the majority of German universities are now open to women students, and the schools graded parallel to the gymnasial and modern schools for boys are increasing in number, though the effort is still mainly left to private or at most municipal enterprise. In industrial life there are regular vereins, including some well-known people, who desire to restrict women's professional wage-earning activities to " typically feminine employments," and to diminish the " female competition by con- fining the competitors to unmarried women." In reply to a ridiculous pamphlet to this effect it was pointed out that there are approximately 10,000,000 women in Germany earning wages " haupt-beruflich," that is, as their life's work, and not merely as a more or less unnecessary additional occupation. Of these one-third, or over 3,000,000, are married women. It is unnecessary to add to these convincing figures in order to show that the admittedly widespread German conception of woman's place in the German State is confounded by the mere facts. Except in charitable concerns, and to some extent in municipal inspectorates and in the care of children thrown upon the State for protection, women do not take a 220 GERMANY OF TO-DAY pronounced public position in Germany, but it must be remembered that even the modest amount of legal emancipation which German women possess dates only from the beginning of the century. Up to 1900 in most of the German States women had no legal right over their own children : they could in many cases neither act as witnesses to contracts of any kind nor commence proceedings in a law- court without special permission. It is not necessary to review the nineteenth century disabilities, especially of married women, in detail, and it may be enough to add that in the intervening decade they have assumed a much more prominent position, not only actually, but also in the eyes of the public. Women are now practising as doctors, jurists, professors, architects, and engineers in Ger- many, and there is a gradual though slow growth in the political organisation of women, not only by Liberal and Socialist groups, but also by Conservatives. In fine it may be said that Germans are being obliged, even if it be a little against their will and convictions, to recognize the competition and the competi- tive ability of women in all classes of life. There is therefore no very long step to the disappearance of the old German Hausfrau ideal, and also to the end of the system under which the German woman was " a doll before marriage, and a drudge afterwards." CASTES AND CLASSES 221 In the pre-imperial days German ladies were accustomed to doing the greater part of their own housework and practically all their own cooking. With the increase of wealth and the consequent increase of a more elaborate kind of social entertainment the old personal attention to the affairs of the household has become less and less possible in many cases, but at the same time there did not and does not exist in Germany what an Englishman has called ** a dynasty of domestic servants," that is a regular caste of often highly-trained servants of the better class. The domestic drudge exists equally in both countries, whether she be called a cook-general as in England, or as in Germany simply, and even less preten- tiously a " Madchen fur alles." In Germany she usually does a little simple cooking, and she possesses an amazing capacity for very hard and very ill-paid labour. It is not surprising that the " Madchen fur alles " also tends to disappear and to give way to a simple drudge lacking the " Madchen's " fidelity, cleanliness, and willingness. The German lady no longer finds time to do the work herself and there is no one upon whom she can fall back to do it for her, for there has not yet been produced a new class of domestic servant which can and does take a pride in the work. The attractions of the factory and still more of the big warehouse or stores with 222 GERMANY OF TO-DAY " freedom " after 7 p.m., even with a miserable shake-down called a " Schlafstelle " into the bargain, are as great, apparently, in Germany as elsewhere, and the efforts of various municipalities to correct the tendency educa- tionally are not sufficient to stem the general tide. It is perhaps because there is no tradition of domestic service in Germany that in all except the newest houses or flats arrangements for servants' rooms are so primitive as to be a national scandal. The police do now forbid putting maidservants in narrow rooms, without any window except one opening into another room, usually the kitchen, and so low that the occupier of the room cannot stand upright, but they do not forbid house-owners to continue to advertise six-room flats " with servants' room " where the latter is the old swindle fresh painted and with a hole cut in the outer wall. One result of the departure of the old regime and of the increase of prosperity and social duties without a corresponding increase in the number of people willing to undertake for a fair wage the duties that the housewife used to perform for herself, has undoubtedly been the extraordinary development of the restaurant habit. German families in towns habitually resort to restaurants for the family meal on Sunday and holidays, and in the big cities it is often impossible for the casual CASTES AND CLASSES 223 stranger to find a seat until late in the after- noon. There would naturally be a certain decay of what Englishmen understand by home life arising from this development, and this decay is furthered, of course, by the lack of single-family houses. Nor does it seem to be true that the Germans themselves are particularly enthusiastic about this develop- ment, for their pres,s frequently contains admiring and admirably written descriptions of English homes, to which the writers have had access. It is frequently asserted that the " German is very easily amused," whereby no aspersion on his risible faculties is intended, but simply reference to the fact that he takes his recrea- tions and his pleasures easily, finds them easily, and enjoys them in general not too critically. Criticism he is apt to leave to professional critics, perhaps too much so, especially in matters of art. At any of the German seaside resorts on the Baltic the visitor may see the whole strand covered with little bamboo masts and strings of coloured flags erected upon or within great sand-redoubts, tricked out with seaweed, pebbles, and other flotsam of the shore, such as children are wont to collect in England. These little redoubts, which are treated as inviolable territory by neighbour- ing squatters, have been constructed chiefly by the hands of the elderly Germans who have 224 GERMANY OF TO-DAY brought their children to the seashore. They are by no means ashamed of being seen digging with a child's spade, and in fact are rather proud of their competitive exertions. But the most striking feature in the develop- ment of the Germans at play is the place they have taken as a travelling people. Not many years ago Germans could still be considered stay-at-homes ; that is to say, when they travelled it was almost always within the Empire, and usually within their own State or its neighbourhood. Now there is as big an annual exodus from Germany to the various *' playgrounds of Europe " as from England, and perhaps now the Germans head the list of summer travellers. It is true that holiday travellers from England do not notice the extent of the German invasion of Italy, Switzerland, Norway, and so forth, because the German travelling season begins a month earlier than the English, since it corresponds to the German school holidays, which begin in the first week of July and end about the tenth of August ; but many well-known holiday re- sorts, especially in Northern Italy, which were once completely Anglicized, are now equally completely Germanized. Moreover, the Ger- mans now flood the Italian and French Riviera as the English used to do ; they are found in Egypt, Algiers, Spain, Greece, and all the other tourist resorts as frequently or more CASTES AND CLASSES 225 frequently than the travellers of any other nation. That this is a development caused by increase of national wealth is obvious, but the development and cheapness of the special summer seaside trains run by the imperial railways in the summer has also produced an exodus from Berlin, which is actually much more noticeable than the summer exodus from London. One result is certainly a widening of the mental horizon of the bulk of the middle-class population, and its ultimate effect is perhaps in the direction of tolerance. The Germans of pre-imperial days knew also' the " Wanderlust," a word which happily translates itself, but the character of their wanderings is shown, not as in England by remnants of old travelling coaches and memories of the Grand Tour, but by stout- knobbed sticks, sometimes provided with an old-fashioned measure, and sometimes with a kind of pocket for a knife, which may be discovered by the fortunate in second-hand shops. The remarkable strides made by Germans j in the way of sport need no emphasis. On \ the road and the river, on the cinder-track and the field they are rapidly becoming, or are even now competitors of the nations that once had the domain of sport almost to themselves. Football, to take one example, is by now 226 GERMANY OF TO-DAY almost a national sport of Germany since the Crown Prince and others in authority en- couraged the formation of regimental football teams. On Easter Monday, which is the great day for big football matches in Germany, there is scarcely an open ground in the periphery of Berlin which has not its game in progress, although a few years ago it would have been hard to find more than one or two games. Cricket has never flourished, chiefly perhaps because it is difficult to maintain good grass pitches. Golf is rapidly growing in popularity in the neighbourhood of the big towns, but it is still not the game of the middle-class German. There are work- men's rowing clubs, skating clubs, athletic clubs, football clubs, and so forth, and they are ^/-steadily increasing, so that by degrees the old i type of German who was said " to take all the exercise he would ever get during his military service," and thereafter to walk a mile or two at most, and then subside into a chair ujwith a beermug is vanishing. That the sporting movement receives the warm support of the authorities is natural, if only because it keeps the reservist in some measure of training. There are, of course, less pleasant aspects of the increase of general prosperity. Berlin, Hanover, and other cities have to complain of a steady increase of gambling, which appears to be especially a military vice, if one may CASTES AND CLASSES 227 judge from the frequency with which officers are found mixed up in gambling scandals. Nor are the crowds which throng the German race-courses any less " mixed " in character than those to be found in other countries where the popularity of the race-course is, on the whole, of older date. It can hardly be necessary to insist upon such features, because they appear inevitably to accompany national prosperity, and it could not be expected that Germany should remain exempt. The virtue of frugality does, however, remain to a large extent with the Germans. German housewives are, on the whole, as thrifty as ever, though the whole standard of living in all classes has risen greatly in the last thirty years. There is still no more remarkable sight than a great German open-air beer garden on a summer evening. Its neatly decked tables are thronged with neatly dressed men and women of the working class, there is usually an excellent band, and these throngs of Germans are content to sit quietly listening; and drinking slowly a big pot of light beer! to the accompaniment of a very mild cigar. Or if a still more striking example of German orderliness and cleanliness be required, it might be found in one of the great annual Socialist meetings under cover. Some huge covered restaurant is usually chosen, and 228 GERMANY OF TO-DAY there a thousand or two men and women will assemble in their Sunday clothes, will sit at the little tables and sip their beer whilst the speeches are thundered at them from the platform. These characteristics appear not to be greatly affected by the increase of prosperity, and they may perhaps therefore be taken as virtues which are not very likely to be " civilized " out of the country. It would seem, however, that if the solidity remains, the excess of that virtue, stolidity, is gradually diminishing. Possibly the growth of city life and the change of Germany from an agricultural to a mainly industrial people may account in part for the fact that the Germans in general appear to be growing more excitable (perhaps more " neurasthenic " would be a more acceptable term). It is certain that the German public no longer maintains that philosophic tranquillity which was so convenient to the State machinery. Events both at home and abroad produce demonstrations of public opinion not always in accord with their intrinsic importance, and there have been noticeable instances of an inclination on the part of the public to " take the bit between its teeth." What is true of the nation generally is almost equally true of individuals, though in the one case as in the other the nervous strain of modern competitive life may be chiefly to blame. GERMANY OF TO-DAY 229 In Germany not less than in other countries, the changes are necessarily most apparent in the towns. Village life, especially in districts lying off the main lines of railway, still retains its picturesque characteristics and many of its ancient customs. From the foregoing observations on German agriculture it will readily be gathered that Northern Germany in particular retains many of the aspects of decaying feudalism, whilst in southern Germany, particularly in Baden, there will be found a communal independence of spirit reminding one almost of Swiss conditions. A great kindliness of character, especially towards foreigners, is characteristic, however, of north and south alike. It is a pity that the stream of foreign visitors is steadily directed into a few main channels, and that the beautiful Mecklenburg country, the fascinating Baltic coast villages, and the forest-girt lakes of Brandenburg, for example, are for the most part wholly neglected. The conception of discourtesy, jealousy, and bar- barism, which appears to prevail regarding Prussia in general would be modified if there were a wider knowledge of these Prussian villages, which so far have escaped the regret- table barbarization of that most un-German town, Berlin. CHAPTER X INTELLECTUAL LIFE IT is perhaps questionable whether any one not a native of a country has adequate qualifications to review, much less to criticize, that country's intellectual life. Germany's intellectual attainments are the common property of the world (he may run that reads), but the process of German intellectual develop- ment at the present day is another matter. It might be hard, for instance, to say what share religion, faith beyond the forms of faith, plays in the life of the nation. A foreigner attempting to form some judgment thereof might be tempted by the constant and increasing complaints of desertions from the Lutheran Church to express doubt whether Lutheranism has any longer a deep hold on the religious feelings of northern Germany. Equally constant complaints regarding the obscurantism of the South might tempt him into problematic discussions of the effects of Roman Catholicism. He would find cer- tain pronounced incidents of recent years, 230 INTELLECTUAL LIFE 281 the expulsion from the Lutheran ministry of latitudinarian pastors, the ban of the synods placed upon men like Pfarrer Jatho, who died whilst this chapter was being written, and the support of these intellectual nonconformists by a large portion of the best edited press, and he might be tempted perhaps to over-estimate the importance of such inci- dents. Broadly speaking, a German student of the religious life of his own time would perhaps admit that in Germany as elsewhere, in the nation as in the individual, deep-seated religious feeling is apt tcfmid open expression rather in moments of stress than in moments of prosperity, and that one prominent and undeniable feature of the religious life of Germany is ii\differentism. He would perhaps question whether this or indeed any feature is peculiarly German, and not rather a general feature of intellectual development throughout Europe. He would note that the problem of religious education is as little solved in Germany as elsewhere, and that the struggle of the creeds for the ...control of education and the demands of the Free- thinkers that there should be no religious education of any kind in the schools main- tained at the public expense, are as keen as elsewhere. The foreigner, again, moving through town and country, would find many 282 GERMANY OF TO-DAY country churches in a state of neglect or at least of apparent neglect ; he would perhaps not be greatly impressed by the numbers or the reverence of northern congregations and still less impressed by the respect paid to the ministry. And so noting, he might arrive at the false conclusion that religion plays very little part in the life of the community. Outwardly, since it is only the outward aspects we have any right to comment upon, there are many points worthy of note. Despite the " secularization of Sunday," great care is taken that the charge of the churches shall not be made the burden of a few. A church- tax is raised based upon the State income-tax, and it must be paid by all who do not declare themselves " diffident," in plain English, atheists or unbelievers. Each taxpayer's mite is transferred by the synodal collectors to the religious community to which he belongs, that is to the local authority for that community, but members of the non-recog- nized religious communities are relieved of payment on showing that they subscribe regularly to the funds of some such com- munity. Certain excrescences, if one may employ the word, such as Mormonism, are, of course, not recognised at all, but seat- holders of English churches, for example, are exempt from the tax. Socially the Lutheran ministry ranks probably next to INTELLECTUAL LIFE 233 the Juristic profession ; in practically all States the Pfarrer has a guaranteed minimum income of 90 per annum, rising at the end of twenty years' service to some three times that amount. Superintendents-General and Ecclesiastical Councillors receive from 500 to 700 per annum. Pastors of the Lutheran Church must be university graduates, and must also have spent some months in study of pedagogy of the elementary sort, the reason being that the local Pfarrer, at any rate in Prussia, is as a rule deputed by Govern- ment to exercise the overseership of the local elementary school. Lutheran pastors almost unanimously re- fused the exemption from military service which was offered them in 1891, but instead of being called upon to serve with the reserve they may be summoned as field-chaplains. The Roman Catholic clergy, though nominally subject to military service, are actually exempt. In general, the north and east of Germany are Lutheran districts, the south and west Catholic. If it is difficult to judge of the religious side of German intellectual development, it is perhaps no less difficult to form an estimate of the general tendency of German secular thought and therefore also of German secular literature. The " nation of Thinkers and Poets " has become a great industrial y/ 234 GERMANY OF TO-DAY nation, and it does not appear that industrial and commercial competition is as fruitful of literary results as was the long period of physical struggle against foreign enemies. It might be fair to question whether modern German literature, that is, belles lettres, can show at present any pronounced direction. Nietzsche, Zola, and Tolstoi have their followers, if not actually their schools. , Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and Pierre Loti, French, Italian, and Russian writers, have also their pro- nounced disciples. From which it would appear that German intellectual taste is as catholic as any other. It has already been pointed out that the growth of industrialism has enabled German thinkers to Jiarness themselves to the car of progress, and indeed the part taken by German professors in the public life of the nation, particularly in its political life, has given rise to the sarcastic German commentary, " Germany will one day be destroyed by her professors." Realism is perhaps the prevailing feature at the present of German narrative-literature, but German novels, despite their realism, can scarcely be said to stand on a very high level of merit. There are, of course, brilliant exceptions, and amongst the exceptions the apostles of confidence and quietness hold an honoured place. Amongst brilliantly imagina- tive writers Michael Conrad might perhaps INTELLECTUAL LIFE 235 be called the H. G. Wells of southern Germany, and Detlev von Liliencron, who died recently, was termed Germany's Kipling, owing to the military character of his romances. Gerhart Hauptmann is, of course, better known as playwright than as novelist, and his later novels, " The Fool in Christ," and " Atlantis," have not added greatly to his reputation. Like other countries Germany has become impressed with the dangerous character of much of the cheap literature, and the " Asso- ciation for fighting Filth in Word and Pic- ture," though it frequently overshoots the mark, does good work in its efforts to remove obnoxiously suggestive literature from the book-market. Unfortunately sex problems are still the happy hunting ground (here as elsewhere) for many writers who are not or do not appear properly equipped for the very delicate task they have undertaken. Gustav Frenssen, the writer of ^lorn^-Unl, who is a Lutheran pastor, is deservedly one of the most popular of modern German novelists, but his reputation is already inter- national. There is as great a flood of some- times rather rubbishy military and naval novelists of " Wars of 19 ," " Wars in the clouds, the seas, and the stars," as in any other European country. They are scarcely litera- ture, though at times they appear to enjoy a large sale. 236 GERMANY OF TO-DAY Possibly the amazing knowledge possessed by very many Germans of the-jdassic.al, litera- ture of other countries should rather find due notice under the head of education, but it should be noted that the liking for foreign classics and the ability to read them in the original is a striking feature of German culture generally, and not merely of German study. Cheap editions of classics and of foreign classics in good translations were a feature of the German book market long before cheap editions of good books were a pronounced feature of the English market. Probably the most remarkable of these series is the Reclam edition, with its several thousand volumes of the best literature of all countries at prices from twopence upwards to about a shilling. Germany at present lacks an institution quite taking the place of the library of the British Museum, though the Royal Library of Berlin ancTthe big libraries of other towns hold high rank amongst the libraries of the world. The facilities for consulting the former are, however, by no means to be compared to those offered in London. Here, as elsewhere, officialdom imposes absurd restrictions, which render study at the Berlin Library a trial of patience to the most equable temperament. It is now proposed to commence an Imperial Library at Leipzig, which is the " Booksellers' town " par excellence. INTELLECTUAL LIFE 237 From literature it is natural that one should turn to the drama, and here one reaches ground that has already been touched in foregoing chapters. We have already seen that opera and the drama, as a part of the intellectual development of the nation, are cared for in part by the municipalities. The encouragement of the drama and opera by the German sovereigns is another not less important, .leature of modern German "intel- lectual life. The veteran Duke George of Saxe-Meiningen developed in the court theatre of Meiningen a uniformly realistic presentment of the world's greatest dramatic masterpieces which has become internationally famous under the title of the " Meiningen Tradition." The " Meininger," as theTtravel- ling company was called, may properly be regarded as the forerunner of modern German theatrical tradition, which finds its best expression perhaps in the Berlin Deutsches Theater, for which Max Reinhard, the well- known international regisseur, is responsible. Amongst modern German playwrights Suder- mann and Hauptmann are probably the best known outside, and even in Germany ; Wede- kind, the author of the brilliant but all too realistic Fruhlings Erwachen, has become a name for somewhat eccentric defence of himself against the censorship ; Hugo von Hoffmannsthal and Ernst von Wildenbruch ?38 GERMANY OF TO-DAY appear also in the front rank with Ludwig Thoma, the South-German satirist ; Ernst Hardt, who sprang into fame with his prize drama " Tantris der Narr," and Karl Sehon- herr, the now well-known author of " Glaube vmd Heimat." These are only a few amongst the names of Germany's foremost dramatists. If, how- ever, we turn to the problem of German dramatic development, we are faced by the fact that either the German public is turning from the drama, even from light comedy of manners, to very blatant Germanized versions of not always irreproachable French farce, or to musical comedy, such as is not comedy at all and only masquerades under the ridiculously misapplied title of light opera, or that German theatrical managers are hopelessly incompe- tent. One theatre after another in Berlin has closed its doors within the last six months, and given way to operetta or the cinemato- graph : others struggle on with an increasing load of mortgage and debt. Eight Berlin theatres closed their doors in the year 1912- 1913. Manifestly to attempt a review or a criticism of the German drama within the narrow limits here necessarily prescribed would be an impertinence. There are, how- ever, one or two outward features commonly enumerated in this connection whereto refer- ence may be justified. INTELLECTUAL LIFE 239 First it is pointed out that German life has changed almost completely since the founda- tion of the Empire, but the tone of theatrical criticism has not. Once the stage undoubted- ly played a great part in education, wher textual education was still defective. That part of the German people which attended the theatres at the beginning and in the middle of the last century desired or submitted to be treated as students, expenditure except in a few cases was not extravagant, and the " theatres of the twelve hundred, or the two or the six thousand " were not dreamed of. In a word the drama, like opera, was supported largely by patronage, not by the appeal it made to the desire of the mass of the people for recreation. That is all changed. The great majority of playgoers have no longer the time, even if they had the inclination, to take their post-graduate education in homoeopathic theatrical doses. The German business man, be he clerk or manager or chief, works a long day, and the Berlin shop assistant's day is much longer than that of his or her English colleague. City life nowadays has a much greater effect on the nerves of the town- dweller, and when the day's work is done, the city dweller does not desire more education but relief, change, entertainment. He does not want to think out problems, and he does usually want to laugh. The German stage 240 GERMANY OF TO-DAY has, it is claimed, failed to take account of the fact that the proper function of the stage to-day is to entertain or to amuse rather than to instruct. It is further urged that German dramatic criticism is largely to blame for this state of things. The critics, " a pack of lean and hungry wolves ever ready to sharpen their teeth on a playwright's bones and their wits on a manager's failures," exercise through the medium of the press a great influence on the fortunes of any play, and their criticisms are determined not by what they conceive to be the demand of the public for light and wholesome entertainment, but by a certain dramatic purism which no longer bears any relation to the public taste. This is, of course, as much as to say that the critic's only proper function is to tell the public what a play is about, whether the audience is likely to laugh or to cry, whether the staging is adequate and the actors impressive ; it is to deny to criti- cism any educative raison d'etre. Possibly the critics err on the one side as much as the critics' critics err on the other. In fine, however, it would appear that the German public wants rather more amusement or entertainment than it is apt to get from the German stage. Secondly, it is complained that the whole tendency of German dramatic development of INTELLECTUAL LIFE 241 the last twenty-five years has been too " literary " and too little theatrical. Towards the end of the last century there was developed in Germany a movement intended to release the theatre or the dramatist from the routine which had gradually standardized and re- stricted dramatic art; the drama was once more to be permitted to reflect the times in which it was written ; it was " to make the soul the protagonist in every tragedy." Psychological nuances, the expression of a general feeling, what Germans call untranslate- ably " Stimmung," problems of ethics and morals, not only of action and passion, were to be the proper stuff for the dramatist. The comedy of manners, such as they are, was to be restored. Gerhart Hauptmann in " Hannele " and " Die Weber," and the Junker characteri- zation of Biberpelz commenced a dramatic treatment of the social conditions of the age, Schonherr reproduced in the form of a historic play the religious differences which still exist, and Maxim Gorki and the Russian school were brought over as representatives of the same development. But whilst making the soul the protagonist in the play this modern school, it is claimed, omitted to make their soul-plays playable. In other words, in seeking to emancipate the stage from old restrictions they emancipated it also from its one essential feature, stage-craft. Lest the Q 242 GERMANY OF TO-DAY plays should be too theatrical they have made them not theatrical, that is not dramatic at all. The enormous popularity of Beyerlein'-s "Zapfenstreich," Meyer-Forster's " Alt Heidel- berg," and a few others, and the failure of the majority of the rest showed or are taken to have shown that the modern school had simply deprived the drama of all stage prac- ticability altogether. They had accounted action the one undramatic element, and were left facing a public tKSt demanded action if it were to frequent the theatres. Failing a general drama that could attract the public on its own merits, it is further claimed, German stage-craft has striven to replace it by stage-management. "Mid- summer Night's Dream" is played at the Deutsches Theater in a woodland that is " almost as real as life " ; Juliet's garden is a plastic copy of one existing in Florence, and the " Merchant of Venice " is a succession of scenes which almost deceive the eye. But Puck, instead of being Shake- speare's imagined sprite, is a Berlin hooligan, Juliet apes the manners of a Berlin " flapper," and Shylock is the ole clo' merchant of the Friedrichstrasse. And as for the public it goes to see crowd-scapes organized in circuses, and is interested by these and not by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal's versions of ancient Greek classics. INTELLECTUAL LIFE 243 Here, then, are the principal complaints raised against modern German drama by its principal critics. Their cry is or seems to be, " Give the public stage-plays that are really dramatic, really playable, and really interest- ing in action, and they will go again to the theatre and the Kino-craze will prove its own antidote." Mention must be made in conclu- sion of the efforts to enable the less wealthy town-dwellers to enjoy good plays well played at low cost. The " Der^craticJ^orJ^P^ople's Stage " is the most remarkable effort on the part of the working classes themselves to provide for themselves good and well acted dramatic fare. The performances are ar- ranged by the society in theatres hired usually on Sunday afternoons : the seats are dis- tributed to members by lot, and the drudgery connected with the performances is largely performed by volunteer members themselves, though good, and often first-class actors are engaged to take the parts so that there shall be no symptom of sheer amateurism. The society is now said to number nearly Ij^OOO members. In general a leading feature of German representation is the attention paid to minor parts and, as a consequence, the evenness of the representations. There are two special features of the educational work of the German stage which appear to deserve more attention, than they 244, GERMANY OF TO-DAY receive abroad, namely, the educational travelling troupes and the open-air perform- ances. The former is best illustrated by the " travelling theatre " of the Mark Branden- burg, callecTtIie""* t ~Mark Players," established and maintained for the purpose of presenting classical pieces and other plays of a good class in the villages of the Mark Brandenburg and adjoining districts. Very little is heard of the work of these organizations, but there appears to be little doubt of their value. They are far removed from the fifth-rate travelling companies or variety troupes, which usually occupy the " barns " of little local towns. The second feature, wherein one may in- clude for convenience the local pageant-plays and the periodical productions of passion-plays and other derivatives or imitations of The mediaeval mystery-play, receives more atten- tion in Germany and abroad but, from foreign visitors at least, by no means as much atten- tion as it deserves. Both in the Harz moun- tains and elsewhere there are numerous open- air theatres (Frei-Licht Theater) where suit- able plays, usually such as adapt themselves readily to processional and pageant character, are presented, though adaptations of Greek play and series of scenes from German classical plays are also frequently presented- Hitherto the largest of these regular open-air theatres INTELLECTUAL LIFE 245 was near Leipzig, but at present the largest European open-air theatre is situated in a valley near Prague in Bohemia. Usually hill-country is selected so that a chorus timed to appear at the end of the act is seen in the distance on the hill side at the beginning. In the Prague theatre it is stated that the chorus can be seen approaching from the distance throughout an act lasting forty-five minutes. The effect thus produced is said to be quite unique. South Germany, in particular, possesses a number of annually repeated pageant plays usually recording leading incidents of local history. Rothenburg, on the Tauber, is one of the most famous of these pageant towns. Its annual pageant-play, produced on Whitmonday, records the history of the capture of the town by Tilly in 1631. The town still retains all its ancient walls and gateways as well as the beautiful streets of timbered and gabled houses, and the principal events of the day of the capture of the town are reproduced in their natural settings, and more or less in their original order. (The play has been produced annually since 1881, and has thus already a respectable history.) Dinkelsbiihl, Landshut, and other towns have similar annual pageants, some of them very beautiful. Probably these pageants, which select one day's events out of the history 246 GERMANY OF TO-DAY of the town, leave a more lasting impression than a long series of short incidents. The Rothenburg festival, in particular, attracts large numbers of visitors every year, much to the profit of the beautiful town. Like the drama, German music in the twentieth century tends to extend its bounds, and to overleap the restrictions which char- acterized it at the end of the last century. Striking illustrations of this tendency may be seen in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, and the operas of Richard Strauss. It would appear, however, that not even in Germany has the attempt to give musical expression to the increased mental and physical stress of modern life achieved any pronounced success. German operatic music is for the most part under the influence of Wagner, but his modern disciples have hardly produced works for which long life can reasonably be predicted. The work of Engelbert Humper- dinck is of a rather lighter texture, whilst Albert Lortzing and Eugene Albert may be quoted as other popular exponents of a light genre. Of the great operatic centres Dresden unquestionably holds the front place, chiefly owing to its readiness to accept or, at any rate, to give a hearing to works of a novel character, such as are apt to be rejected by the more conservative traditions of Berlin. Germany is still the home of the finest INTELLECTUAL LIFE 247 chamber-music in the world, and since the industrialization of Leipzig Berlin is now the centre for this branch of composition. Berlin criticisms are the most sought and, it may be added, as a rule the most severe. So, too, the Philharmonic Society of Berlin is the focus for orchestral composers, though excellent orchestral performances are given frequently throughout the season in almost all German towns. German teachers and German schools pro- duce probably more first-rate singers than those of any other country, though the stamp of success is usually followed by the engage- ment of the successful singer for a number of years by one of the wealthy American organizations. Probably the small operas and schools of the old provincial capitals should still be accounted the most valuable educational asset ; it is only necessary to mention the work done, for instance, at the Grandducal opera-house at Coburg. Of the 50,000 professional musicians in Germany only 2,500 are employed, according to R. M. Berry, in state and municipal orchestras, and some 10,000 in private orchestras. The earnings of all are usually very moderate, as also are those of actors and actresses. The complaint not infrequently heard to-day that even in Germany the public taste is " deserting " the high levels of musical 248 GERMANY OF TO-DAY art, and seeking recreation in performances of a lower grade, is perhaps due to the same development we have already noted in the drama, namely, the extension of the privilege of music to a much wider class of people, and simultaneously the demand of this wider class for relaxation rather than education. The patronage of music is more widely based, and therefore its appeal must also be to a wider range of requirements and of comprehension. One of the most difficult problems in the intellectual domain in Germany, as elsewhere, /is that of the Press. Here, as in other / matters, the existence of the old capitals of the independent States and the lack of any- thing resembling the concentration upon one capital that has taken place in England, has hitherto prevented the development of a metropolitan press, such as is found in London. Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, and Hamburg, to mention only four leading instances, possess national newspapers which rank more nearly with the Times, Telegraph, Morning Post, and so forth, than anything that can be found in Berlin itself. On the other hand, Berlin possesses the three most enterprising and most widely circulated newspapers of the modern type, the " Lokal-Anzeiger," " Berliner Tageblatt," and " Morgenpost," whose circulations run into the hundreds INTELLECTUAL LIFE 249 of thousands, but whose political influence, it is thought, is not in reality very considerable. The other Berlin papers are not, as a rule, either very widely circulated, nor are they distinguished by any considerable enterprise. Many of them, even papers constantly quoted in the foreign press, are really no more than daily printed agency reports attached to one or other of the various parties and factions represented in the Reichstag. There is also a large class of local newspapers which subsists chiefly owing to the support of the local authorities of the permanent civil service, obtaining official advertisements in return for scrupulous adherence to the views the permanent Government desires to inculcate. It is clear that this system deprives these papers of all value as " organs of public opinion," but it is itself only a part of the general effort to force ideas upon, the public from the top downwards instead of encouraging their development from the people upwards. We have already seen this process at work in connection with legislation, and the Government does its best to maintain the same tendency in connection with the press. Hence, too, arises the confusing and fre- quently mischievous system of the " semi- official press," that is papers maintained solely for the purpose of propagating the 250 GERMANY OF TO-DAY opinions of the imperial or State-Governments, but without the precise official character of gazettes. There are all grades of this semi- official character. Some papers, such as the lately instituted Bavarian Government paper, are frankly official ; others, like the North German Gazette, have an official and an unofficial part ; others again, like the Cologne Gazette, are occasionally " inspired," but in such a way that the inspiration can be denied if the article produces an undesired effect. Even the Lokal-Anzeiger, an essen- tially sensational newspaper, is understood to be used not infrequently for the communica- tion of semi-official views. It is significant, however, that the papers which are known thus to open their columns to inspiration, for which they are prepared, if need be, to accept editorial responsibility, are gradually losing their popularity, and thus also their value to the officials themselves. Originally, no doubt, the object of inspiration was to create the impression that the views thus " formulated " were actually those of a large section of the public. This object is no longer attained, and the only result of this concealed inspiration is now to create confusion not as to what is the real sentiment of the people, but as to what is the intention or opinion of the Government itself. Despite the editorial and contributory INTELLECTUAL LIFE 251 energy of many professors and men of admitted social standing, the profession of journalism has still not obtained the social recognition which its importance might seem to justify. If writers in the daily press are admitted to court and to court functions, they obtain entrance not as journalists but in other capacities, and the contemptuous phrase, " Hunger-candidates," once applied to press- men, still has a certain currency, even though the very people who adopt such an attitude are themselves forced to recognize its lack of justification. The German press, particularly the satiric press, is accused commonly of excessive vulgarity and lack of refinement. The accu- sation is undoubtedly justified to a great extent. The wittiest of all German satiric papers, Simplicissimus, is at times so vulgar that it certainly would not be tolerated by British readers. It is, however, frequently vulgar or immodest out of a curious spirit of reaction against the mock-purism of certain kinds of officialdom. The gross personal tone which sometimes characterizes the German press is largely a result of Bismarckian influence, and of the theory then prevailing that if a newspaper were encouraged to spit its venom at persons instead of condemning vicious principles, its effect was lessened and its danger to the institutions criticized reduced 252 GERMANY OF TO-DAY to a minimum. Hence personalities were rather encouraged than the reverse, and the resultant tendency has not disappeared. Neither in art nor in architecture can it be fairly claimed that Germany has developed a style which is characteristic of her rapid progress in other directions. The secession- ists, revolting against the narrow formalism and limitations of the old school, have them- selves split into opposing groups and produced chaos rather than the promised " new world." Although there are famous German portrait- ists still, and a number of famous art centres, it would be difficult to trace a distinctive German art. In architecture possibly the most interesting development is the application of a kind of Gothic to big industrial buildings. In general it may be said that in Germany architects are feeling their way towards a style of building which adapts itself to the prevalence of the use of iron and yet avoids insignificance. Berlin has several great stores which are graceful and distinctive, without being overloaded with meretricious ornament, as are too many of the stucco facades of the blocks of flats. The attempt made by the Emperor to encourage the development of a neo-classic architecture, the spirit of the old adapted to the requirements of the new, must be confessed a failure, for the statuary produced INTELLECTUAL LIFE 253 under his encouragement has little except enthusiasm to recommend it, and Berlin is full of productions which do not generally commend themselves to critical observers. The conception which the Emperor formed, of the modern duty of a patron of art, was indeed high, and might have led to results more enduring and more satisfactory. He epitomized that conception himself in his speech on the opening of the Avenue of Victory in the Thiergarten, that avenue which is lined with a series of more or less faulty statues portraying the Emperor's ancestors. " I had it in mind," he said, " to show the world if I could that the most favourable means for the solution of an artistic purpose lies not in the summoning of commissions nor in the establishment of all kinds of prize- juries and competitions, but in the old system of the classical period and the middle ages, the direct relations between the artist and the person giving the commission." With this quotation, which shows at least the intentions of the Emperor at a period when German art was, and is, shaking off its old trammels and conventions, and has not yet formed for itself the new restrictions to which all characteristic art must subscribe, it may be well to close this brief review. June, 1913. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THE literature dealing with Germany is now so extensive that it is possible to study most departments of German life and activity at home and abroad in excellent English works. For the same reason, however, it might seem an impertinence to make any selection, since the works not mentioned may be of equal or even greater special value than those included. The following recent works will, however, be found useful : HENRI LICHTENBERGER. Evolution of Modern Germany (in French and English). G. H. FERRIS. Germany and the German Emperor, R. M. BERRY. Germany of the Germans. W. H. DAWSON. Modern Germany. A. SIDGWICK (MRS.). Home Life in Germany. The following special works may also be recommended : B. E. HOWARD. The German Empire. (A constitutional review with a translation of the text of the Imperial Constitution.) E. D. HOWARD. Cause and Extent of Industrial Progress in Germany. DR. J. RIESSER. The German Great Banks (published by the Government Printing Office, Washington, U.S.). DR. J. FROST. Die dzutsche Landwirtschaft. DR. ROBERT BRUTSTHUBER. Das deutsche Zeitungswesen. DR. HANS ROST. Das moderne Wohnungsproblem. PAUL GOLDMAN. Vom Rilckgang der deutechen Buhnc, 254 INDEX AOEARIAKTSM, 183-8, 199- 202, 205, 214 Airships and Aeroplanes, 83-5 Alsace-Lorraine, 9, 20-21, 88 Army Bill, 1913, 71, 83, 91 Art and Architecture, 252-6 Bavarian privileges, 35, 71 Bethmann Hofiweg, Herr von, 50 Berlin described, 100-123 Cartels and Syndicates, 174-8 Centre Party, The, 30-1 Chemical Industry, 168-170 Colonists, Germans as, 97-8 Education, German and Eng- lish, compared, 136, 138- 146, 148-9, 151 Electrical Trades, 172 Empire, Formation of the, 17-19, 21 Franchise : Reichstag, 26-7, 195 States, 40-1, 44-5 Prussian, 41-3 Geographical influences and differences, 7-11 Holy Roman Empire, 12, 15 Housing, 101, 116-128 Income-tax, Prussia, 90 Insurance, State, 93-6 Iron and Steel manufactures. 170-1 Jews, Position of, 74 "Junkers," The, 7, 184-7, 196, 213 Legal processes, 62-8 Liberalism (and Radicalism), 30-1 Literature, 233-6 Local Government in Prussia, 52-4, 107 Matricular Contributions, 87, 91 Military Service, 71-7 Music, 246-8 Navy, The, 49, 77-82 North German Confedera- tion, 15-19 Officials, Status of, 54-5, 209 Police System, 55-62 Press, The, 248-252 253 256 INDEX Prices and Protection, 189- 190, 203, 205 Railways and Canals, 165-8, 188 Religious life, 230-3 - Rural exodus, The, 108, 195 Socialism, 30-1, 51, 162-3, 178-9, 195 Sport, 225-6 Stein, Baron von, 52 Textile trades, 173-4 Theatre, The, 114, 237-246 Thirty Years' War, 14 Tirpitz, Admiral von, 79 Trade Unions, 179-182 Village life, 229 " War Lord," The Kaiser as, 36, 39, 69 War Treasure, 92-3 Women, Position of, 148, 216-222 Zollverein, The, 13 THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY of Modern Knowledge Is made up of absolutely new books by leading authorities. The editors are Professors Gilbert Murray, H. A. L. Fisher, W. T. Brewster, and J. Arthur Thomson. Cloth bound, good paper, clear type, 256 pages, per vol- ume, bibliographies, indices, also maps or illustrations where needed. Each complete and sold separately. Per volume. LITERATURE AND ART. [Order Number] 73. EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE. By Gilbert Murray, Regius Pro- fessor of Greek, Oxford. 101. DANTE. By Jefferson B. Fletcher, Columbia University. Aa interpretation of Dante and his teaching from his writings. 2. SHAKESPEARE. By John Masefield. "One of the very few in- dispensable adjuncts to a Shakespearean Library." Boston Transcript. 81. CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES. By Grace E. Hadow, Lecturer Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; Late Reader, Bryn Mawr. 97. MILTON. By John Bailey. 59. DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE. By John Bailey. Johnson's life, character, works, and friendships are surveyed; and there is a notable vindication of the "Genius of Boswell." 83. WILLIAM MORRIS: HIS WORK AND INFLUENCE. By A. Glutton Brock, author of "Shelley: The Man and the Poet." William Morris believed that the artist should IOL for love of his work rather than the gain of his employer, and so he turned from making works of art to remaking society. 75. SHELLEY, GODWIN AND THEIR CIRCLE. By H. N. BraiUford. The influence of the French Revolution on England. 70. ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL. By Jane E. Harrison, LL. D., D. Litt. "One of the 100 most important books of 1913."- Nen> York Times Review. 45. MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE. By W. P. Ker, Professor of English Literature, University College, London. "One of the soundest scholars. His style is effective, simple, yet never dry." The Athenaeum. 87. THE RENAISSANCE. By Edith Sichel, author of "Catherine de Medici," "Men and Women of the French Renaissance." 89. ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. By J. M. Robertson, M. P., author of "Montaigne and Shakespeare," "Modern Humanists." 27. MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE. By G. H. Mair. 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PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR. By William Mc- Dougall, of Oxford. A well digested summary of the essen- tials of the science put in excellent literary form by a leading authority. 42. THE PRINCIPLES OF PHYSIOLOGY. By Prof. J. G. McKendrick. A compact statement by the Emeritus Professor at Glasgow, for uninstructed readers. 37. ANTHROPOLOGY. By R. R. Marett, Reader in Social An- thropology, Oxford. Seeks to plot out and sum up the general series of changes, bodily and mental, undergone by man in the course of history. "Excellent. So enthusiastic, so clear and witty, and so well adapted to the general reader." American Library Association Booklist. 17. CRIME AND INSANITY. By Dr. C. Mercier, author of "Test Book of Insanity," etc. 12. THE ANIMAL WORLD. By Prof. F. W. Gamble. 15. INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS. By A. N. Whitebe.d, author of "Universal Algebra." PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 69. A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT. By John B. Bury, M. A., LL. D., Regius Professor of Modern History in Cam- bridge University. Summarizes the history of the long struggle between authority and reason and of the emergence of the prin- ciple that coercion of opinion is a mistake. 96. A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By Clement C. J. Webb, Oxford. 35. THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY. By Bertram! Russell, Lecturer and Late Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge. 60. COMPARATIVE RELIGION. By Prof. J. Estlin Carpenter. "One of the few authorities on this subject compares all the re- ligions to see what they have to offer on the great themes of re- ligion." Christian Wor\ and Evangelist. 44. BUDDHISM. By Mrs. Rhys Davids, Lecturer on Indian Philoso- phy, Manchester. 46. ENGLISH SECTS: A HISTORY OF NONCONFORMITY. By W. B. Selbie, Principal of Manrhpuler Cr>llr?i. Oxford. 55. MISSIONS: THEIR RISE AND DEVELOPMENT. By Mrs. Man- dell Creighton, author of "History of England." The author seeks to prove that missions have done more to civilize the world than any other human agency. 52. ETHICS. By G. E. Moore, Lecturer in Moral Science, Cam- bridge. Discusses what is right and what is wrong, and the why and wherefores. 65. THE LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. By George F. Moore, Professor of the History of Religion, Harvard Uni- versity. "A popular work of the highest order. Will be profit- able to anybpdy who cares enough about Bible study to read a serious book on the subject." American Journal of Theology. 88. RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT BETWEEN OLD AND NEW TESTA- MENTS. By R. H. Charles, Canon of Westminster. Shows how religious and ethical thought between 180 B. C. and 100 A. D. grew naturally into that of the New Testament. 50. THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By B. W. Bacon, Professor of New Testament Criticism, Yale. An authoritative summary of the results of modern critical research with regard to the origins of the New Testament, SOCIAL SCIENCE. 91. THE NEGRO. By Wo E. Burghardt DuBois, author of "Souls of Black Folks," etc. A history of the black man in Africa, America or wherever else his presence has been or is important. 77. CO-PARTNERSHIP AND PROFIT SHARING. By Aneurin Wil- liams, Chairman, Executive Committee, International Co-opera- tive Alliance, etc. Explains the various types of co-partnership or profit-sharing, or both, and gives details of the arrangement! now in force in many of the great industries. w POLITICAL THOUGHT: THE UTILITARIANS. FROM BENT- HAM TO J. S. MILL. By William L. P. Davidson. 98. POLITICAL THOUGHT: FROM HERBERT SPENCER TO THE PRESENT DAYc By Ernest Barker, M. A. 79. UNEMPLOYMENT. By A. C. Pigou, M. A., Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge. The meaning, measurement, distribution, and effects of unemployment, its relation to wages, trade fluctu* ions. and disputes, and <-ime proposals of remedy nr rfVtf.f. 80. COMMON-SENSE IN LAW. By Prof. Paul Vinogradoff. D. C. L. LL. D. Social and Legal Rules Legal Rights and Duties Facts and Acts in Law Legislation Custom Judicial Prece- dents Equity The Law of Nature. 49. ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. By S. J. Chapman, Professor of Political Economy and Dean of Faculty of Com- merce and Administration, University of Manchester. II. THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH. By J. A. Hobson, author of "Prob- lems of Poverty." A study of the structure and working of the modern business world. 1. PARLIAMENT. ITS HISTORY, CONSTITUTION, AND PRAC- TICE. By Sir Courtenay P. Ilbert, Clerk of the House of Com- 16. LIBERALISM. By Prof. L. T. Hobhouse, author of "Democracy and Reaction." A masterly philosophical and historical review of the subject. 5. THE STOCK EXCHANGE. By F. W. Hint, Editor of the London Economist. Reveals to the non-financial mind the facts about investment, speculation, and the other terms which the title sug- gests. 10. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. By J. Ramsay Macdonald, Chairman of tlie British Labor Party. 28. THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY. By D. H. MacGregor, Professor of Political Economy, University of Leeds. An out- line of the recent changes that have given us the present conditions of the working classes and the principles involved. ?9. ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW. By W. M. Geldart, Vinerian Professor of English Law, Oxford. A simple statement of the basic principles of the English legal system on which that of the United States is based. J2. THE SCHOOL: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF EDU- CATION. By J. J. Findlay, Professor of Education, Manches- ter. Presents the history, the psychological basis, and the theory of the school with a rare power of summary and suggestion. 6. IRISH NATIONALITY. By Mrs. J. R. Green. A brilliant account of the genius and mission of the Irish people. "An entrancing work, and I would advise every one with a drop of Irish blood in his veins or a vein of Irish sympathy in his heart to read it." /Wn> Ynrlf T'tmp*' Rf\>tfn> GENERAL HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY. 102. SERBIA. By L. F. Waring, with preface by J. M. Jovanovitch, Serbian Minister to Great Britain. The main outlines of Serbian history, with special emphasis on the immediate causes of the war, and the questions which will be of greatest importance in the after- the-war settlement. 33. THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By A. F. Pollard, Professor of English History, University of London. 95. BELGIUM. By R. C. K. Ensor, Sometime Scholar of Balliol College. The geographical, linguistic, historical, artistic and lit- erary associations. 99. POLAND. By W. Alison Phillips, University of Dublin. The history of Poland with special emphasis upon the Polish question of the present day. 34. CANADA. By A. G. Bradley. 72. GERMANY OF TO-DAY. By Charles Tower. 78. LATIN AMERICA. By William R. Shepherd, Professor of His- tory, Columbia. With maps. The historical, artistic, and com- mercial development of the Central South American republics. 18. THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA. By Sir H. H. Johnston. 19. THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA. By H. A. Giles, Professor of Chinese, Cambridge. 36. PEOPLES AND PROBLEMS OF INDIA. By Sir T. W. Holderness. "The best small treatise dealing with the range of subjects fairly indicated by the tille." The Dial. 26. THE DAWN OF HISTORY. By J. L. Myers, Professor of Ancient History, Oxford. 92. THE ANCIENT EAST. By D. G. Hogarth, M. A., F. B. A., F. S. A. Connects with Prof. Myers's "Dawn of History" (No. 26) at about 1000 B. C. and reviews the history of Assyria, Babylon, Cilicia, Persia and Macedon. 30. ROME. By W. Warde Fowler, author of "Social Life at Rome," etc. 13. MEDIEVAL EUROPE. By H. W. C. Davis, Fellow at Balliol Col- lege, Oxford, author of "Charlemagne," etc. 3. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By Hillaire Belloc. 57. NAPOLEON. By H. A. L. Fisher, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University. Author of "The Republican Tradition in Europe." 20. HISTORY OF OUR TIME (1885-1911). By C. P. GoocL 22. THE PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES. By Rev. William Barry, D. 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By Sir John Murray, K. C. B., Naturalist H. M, S. "Challenger," 1872-1876, joint author of "The Depths of the Ocean," etc. 64. THE GROWTH OF EUROPE. By Granville Cole, Professor of Geology, Royal College of Science, Ireland. A study of the geology and physical geography in connection with the political geography. , AMERICAN HISTORY. 47. THE COLONIAL PERIOD (1607-1766). By Charles McLean AD- drews, Professor of American History, Yale. 82. THE WARS BETWEEN ENGLAND AND AMERICA (1763-1815). By Theodore C. Smith, Professor of American History, Wil- liams College. A history of the period, with especial emphasis on The Revolution and The War of 1812. 67. FROM JEFFERSON TO LINCOLN (1815-1860). By William MacDonald, Professor of History, Brown University. The author makes the history of this period circulate about constitu- tional ideas and slavery sentiment. 25. THE CIVIL WAR (1854-1865.) By Frederic L Paxson, Professor of American History, University of Wisconsin. 39. 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