Political society is not all centred in Berlin, as it is in London, Paris, or Washington, nor is social life there representative of all Germany. Berlin’s stamp of approval is not necessary to play, or opera, or book, or picture, or statue, or personality. Indeed, Berlin often takes a lead in such matters from other cities in Germany where the artistic life and history are more fully developed, as, for instance, in other days, Weimar, and now Munich, Dresden, and, in literary matters, Leipsic. A recent example of this, though of small consequence in itself, is the case of the opera, the “Rosen Kavalier,” which was given repeatedly in Dresden and Leipsic, whither many Berlin people went to hear it, before the authorities in Berlin could be persuaded to produce it.
The nobility, the society heavy artillery, come to Berlin only for three or four weeks, from the middle of January to the middle of February, to pay their respects to their sovereign at the various court functions given during that time. They live in the country and only visit in Berlin. It is complained, that the double taxation incident to the up-keep of an establishment both in town and in the country, makes it impossible for them to be much in Berlin. They stay in hotels and in apartments, and are mere passing visitors in their own capital. They have, therefore, practically no influence upon social life, and Berlin is merely the centre of the industrial, military, official, and political society of Prussia. It is the clearing-house of Germany, but by no means the literary, artistic, social, or even the political capital of Germany, as London is the English, or Paris the French, or as Washington is fast growing to be the American, capital.
There is no training-ground for an accomplished or man-of-the-world journalist, and the views and opinions of a journalist who is more or less of a social pariah, and he still is that with less than half a dozen exceptions, and of a man who begs for crumbs from the press officials at the foreign or other government offices, are neither written with the grip of the independent and dignified chronicler, nor received with confidence and respect by the reader.
It may be a reaction from this negligence with which they are treated that produces a quality, both in the writing and in the illustrations of the German newspapers, which is unknown in America. Many of the illustrated papers indulge in pictorial flings which may be compared only to the scribbling and coarse drawings, in out-of-the-way places, of dirty-minded boys. With the exception of the well-knownFliegende Blätter,Kladderadatsch, and one or two less representative, there is nothing to compare with the artistic excellence and restrained good taste ofLifeorPunch, for example.
There is one illustrated paper published in Munich,Simplicissimus, which deserves more than negligent and passing comment. It has two artists of whom I know nothing except what I have learned from their work, Th. Th. Heine and Gulbransson. These men are Aristophanic in their ability as draughtsmen and as censors, in striking at the weaknesses, political, military, and official, of their countrymen. Their work is something quite new in Germany, and worthy of comparison with the best in any country. It is not elegant, it is Rabelaisian; and though I have nothing to retract in regard to coarseness, and no wish to commend the attitude taken toward German political and social life, in fairness one is bound to call attention to the pictorial work in this particular paper as of a very high order, and to recognize its power. If Heine could have turned his wit into the drawings of Hogarth, we should have had something not unlikeSimplicissimus, and any German annoyed at the criticisms of his national life from the pen of a foreigner, may well turn to his ownSimplicissimus, and be humbly grateful that no foreign pen-point can possibly pierce more deeply, than this domestic pencil, at work in his own country.
The danger for the critic and the wit, which few avoid, is that with incomparable advantages over his opponent he will not play fair. In spite of the awful reputation of our so-called “yellow press,” which is often boisterously impudent, and sometimes inclined to indulge in comments and revelations of the private affairs of individuals which can only be dubbed coarse and cowardly, there is seldom a descent to the indescribably indecent caricatures which one finds every week in the illustrated papers in Germany. As we have noted elsewhere, just as the citizens of Berlin, as one sees them in the streets and in public places, give one the impression that they are not house-trained, so many of the pens and pencils which serve the German press, leave one with the feeling that their possessors would not know how to behave in a cultivated and well-regulated household.
Every gentleman in Germany must have been ashamed of the writing in the German press after the sinking of theTitanic. There was a blaze of brutal pharisaism that put a bar-sinister across any claim to gentlemanliness on the part of the majority. When every brave man in the world was lamenting the death of Scott, the English Arctic explorer, one German paper intimated that he had committed suicide to avoid the bankruptcy forced upon him by England’s lack of generosity toward his expedition. It is almost unbelievable that such a cur should have escaped unthrashed, even among the German journalists. These two examples of lack of fine feeling mark them for what they are. Among gentlemen no comment is necessary. The mark of breeding is more often discovered in what one does not say, does not write, does not do, than in positive action. There was much, at that time, when fifteen hundred people had been buried in icy water, and scores of American and English gentlemen had gone down to death, just in answer to: “Ladies first, gentlemen!” that should have been left unsaid and unwritten. The quality of the German journalist, with half a dozen exceptions, was betrayed to the full in those few days, and many a German cheek mantled with shame.
However, a man may eat with his knife and still be an authority on bridge-building; he may tuck his napkin under his chin preparatory to, and as an armor against, the well-known vagaries of liquids, before he takes his soup or his soft-boiled eggs, and still be an authority on soap-making; he may wear a knitted waistcoat with a frock-coat to luncheon, and be deeply versed in Russian history. He may have no inkling of the traditions of fair play, or of the reticences of courtesy, no shred of knightliness, and yet be a scholar in his way. Indeed, in none of the other cultured countries does one find so many men of trained minds, but with such untrained manners and morals. In their hack of sensation-mongering, in their indifference to social gossip, in their trustworthy and learned comments upon things scientific, musical, theatrical, literary, and historical, they are as men to school-boys compared to the American press. They have the utter contempt for mere smartness that only comes with severe educational training. They have the scholar’s impatience with trivialities. They skate, not to cut their names on the ice, but to get somewhere, and the whole industrial and scientific world knows how quickly they have arrived.
Our newspapers make a business of training their readers in that worst of all habits, mental dissipation. The German press is not thus guilty. Despite all I have written, I am quite sure that if I were banished from the active world and could see only half a dozen journals on my lonely island, one of them would be a German newspaper. It may be that I have a perverted literary taste, for I can get more humor, more keen enjoyment, out of a census report or an etymological dictionary than from a novel. My favorite literary dissipation is to read the works of that distinguished statistician at Washington, Mr. O. P. Austin, the poet-laureate of industrial America, or the toilsome and exciting verbal journeys of the Rev. Mr. Skeat. The classic humorists do not compare with them, in my humble opinion, as sources of fantastic surprises. This, perhaps, accounts for my sincere admiration for that quality of scholarship, learning, and accuracy in the German press. Nor does the possession of these qualities in the least controvert the impression given by the German press of political powerlessness, of social ignorance and incompetence, and of boorish ignorance of the laws of common decency in international comment and controversy. A great scholar may be a booby in a drawing-room, and a lamentable failure as an adviser in matters political and social. “As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from his place.” Germany has put some astonishing failures to her credit through her belief that learning can take the place of common-sense, and scholarship do the tasks of that intelligent and experienced observation to which the abused word, worldliness, is given. Perhaps it is as well that the German press declines to keep a social diary; well, too, that it has no candidates for the office of society Haruspex, whose ghoulish business it is to find omens and prophecies in the entrails of his victims. In that respect, at any rate, both society and the press in Germany are as is the salon to the scullery, compared with ours. As for that little knot of illustrated weekly papers in England, with their nauseating letter-press for snobs inside, and their advertisements of patent complexion remedies and corsets outside, there is nothing like them in Germany or anywhere else, so far as I know. You may advertise your shooting-party, your dance, or your dinner-party, and thus keep yourself before the world as though you were a whiskey, a soap, or a superfluous-hair-destroyer, if you please, and, alas, many there are who do so. At least Germany knows nothing of this weekly auction of privacy, this nauseating snobbery which is a fungus-growth seen at its strongest in British soil.
I am bound, both by tradition and experience as an American, to discover the reason for such conditions in the lack of fluidity in social and political life in Germany. The industrials, the military, the nobility, the civil servants, and to some extent the Jews, are all in separate social compartments; and the political parties as well keep much to themselves and without the personal give and take outside of their purely official life which obtains in America and in England.
It is an impossible suggestion, I know, but if the upper and lower houses of the empire, or of Prussia, could meet in a match at base-ball, or golf, or cricket; if the army could play the civil service; if the newspaper correspondents could play the under-secretaries; if they could all be induced occasionally, to throw off their mental and moral uniforms, and to meet merely as men, a current of fresh air would blow through Germany, that she would never after permit to be shut out.
Personal dignity is refreshed, not lost, by a romp. Who has not seen distinguished Americans and distinguished Englishmen, in their own or in their friends’ houses, or at one or another of our innumerable games, behaving like boys out of school, crawling about beneath improvised skins and growling and roaring in charades; indulging in flying chaff of one another; in the skirts of their wives and sisters playing cricket, or base-ball, or tennis with the one hand only; caricaturing good-humoredly some of their own official business, or arranging a match of some kind where their own servants join in to make up a side; or, and well I remember it, half a dozen youths of about fifty playing cricket with one stump and a broom-handle for an hour one hot afternoon, amid tumbles and shouts of laughter, and a shower of impromptu nicknames, and one or two of them bore names known all over the English-speaking world. Nobody loses any dignity, any importance; but there is an unconquerable stiffness in Germany that makes me laugh almost as I make this suggestion. We have only a certain reserve of serious work in us. To attempt to be serious all the time is never to be at rest. This worried busyness, which is a characteristic of the more mediocre of my own countrymen also, is really a symptom of deficient vitality. Things are in the saddle and you are the mule and not the man, if you are such an one. The stiffness and self-consciousness of the Germans is really a sign of their lack of confidence in themselves. Youth is always more serious than middle age, for the same reason. A man who is at home in the world laughs and is gay; he who is shy and doubtful scowls. It is the God-fearing who are not afraid, it is the man-fearing who are awkward and uncomfortable.
The first thing to be afraid of is oneself, but after oneself is conquered why be afraid to let him loose!
It would be quite untrue to give the impression that there is no fun, no harking, no chaff, in Germany, although I am bound to say that there is little of this last. I can bear witness to a healthy love of fun, and to an exuberant exploitation of youthful vitality in many directions among the students and younger officers, for example. Better companions for a romp exist nowhere. Having been blessed with an undue surplus of vitality, which for many years kept me fully occupied in directing its expenditure, alas, not always with success, I can only add that I found as many youthful companions in a similar predicament in Germany, as anywhere else.
But with the Englishman and the American, both temperament and environment permit youthfulness to last longer. The German must soon get into the mill and grind and be ground, and he is by temperament more easily caught and put into the uniform of a constantly correct behavior. As for us, we are all boys still at thirty, many of us at fifty, and some of us die ere the school-boy exuberance has all been squeezed or dried out of us. Not so in Germany. One sees more men in Germany who give the impression that they could not by any possibility ever have been boys than with us. They begin to look cramped at thirty, and they are stiff at fifty, as though they had been fed on a diet of circumspection, caution, and obedience. They are drilled early and they soon become amenable, and then even indulgent, toward the drill-master.
This German people have not developed into a nation, they have been squeezed into the mould of a nation. The nation is not for the people, the people are for the nation. “By the word Constitution,” writes Lord Bolingbroke, “we mean, whenever we speak with propriety and exactness, the assemblage of laws, institutions, and customs derived from certain fixed principles of reason, directed to certain fixed objects of public good, that compose the general system by which the community hath agreed to be governed.” The Germans have no such constitution, for the community was scarcely consulted, much less hath it agreed to the general system by which it is governed.
Of course, in every nation its affairs are, and must be, conducted by officials. That is as true of America as of Germany. The fundamental difference is that with us these official persons are executive officers only, the real captain is the people; while in Germany these official persons are the real governors of the people, subject to the commands of one who repeatedly and publicly asserts that his commission is from God and not from the people. This puts whole classes of the community permanently into uniform, and the wearers of these uniforms are almost afraid to laugh, and would consider it sacrilege to romp.
Caution is a very puny form of morality. “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.” It is as true politically as of other spheres of life that “he or she who lets the world or his own portion of it choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.” Thus writes John Stuart Mill, and what else can be said of the political activities of the Germans? What journalist or what patriot indeed can take seriously a majority that has no power? What people can call itself free to whom its rulers are not responsible? The Social Democrats, at the moment of writing, have won one hundred and ten seats in the Reichstag, but the army and navy estimates are beyond their reach, the taxes are fixtures, a constitution is a dream, and if they are cantankerous or truculent the Reichstag will be dismissed by a wave of the hand. Say what one will, they are a mammillary people politically, and the strongest party in the Reichstag is merely an energetic political mangonel. Their leaders moult opinions, they do not mould them, and could not translate them into action if they did.
Not since 1874 has there been a Reichstag so strongly radical, but nothing will come of it. The Reichskanzler, Doctor von Bethmann-Hollweg, did not hesitate to take an early opportunity, after the opening of the new Reichstag, to state boldly that the issue was Authority versus Democratization, and that he had no fear of the result. It is customary for the newly elected Praesidium, the president and two vice-presidents of the Reichstag, to be received in audience by the Emperor. On this occasion the Socialists forbade their representative to go, and the Emperor, therefore, refused to receive any of them. As usual, they played into his hands.Hans bleibt immer Hans, and on this occasion his vulgar hack of good manners only brought contumely upon the whole Reichstag, and left the Emperor as the outstanding dignified figure in the controversy. Such behavior is not calculated to invite confidence, and not likely to induce this enemy-surrounded nation to put its destinies in such hands, not at any rate for some time to come. “Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.”
Intellectually Germany is a republic, and we Americans perhaps beyond all other peoples have profited by her literature, her philosophy, her music, her scientific and economic teaching. We have kneaded these things into our political as well as into our intellectual life. “Intellectual emancipation, if it does not give us at the same time control over ourselves, is poisonous.” And who writes thus? Goethe! But the intellectual freedom of Germany has done next to nothing to bring about political or, in the realm of journalism, personal self-control.
It is a strange state of affairs. Intelligent men and women in Germany do not realize it. Not once, but many times, I have been told: “You foreigners are forever commenting upon our bureaucracy, our officialdom, but it is not as all-powerful as you think. We have plenty of freedom!” These people are often themselves officials, nearly always related to, or of the society, of the ruling class. The rulers and the ruling class have naturally no sense of oppression, no feeling that they are unduly subject to others, since the others are themselves. I am quite willing to believe of my own and of other people’s personal opinions that they are not dogmas merely because they are baptized in intolerance. I must leave it to the reader to judge from the facts, whether or no the Germans have a political autonomy, which permits the exercise and development of political power. A glance at the political parties themselves will make this perhaps the more clear.
The official organization of the conservative party, may be said to date back to the founding of theNeue Preussische Zeitungin 1848, and the organization of the party in many parts of Germany. Earlier still, Burke was the hero of the pioneers of this party, whose first newspaper had for editor, no less a person than Heinrich von Kleist, and whose first endeavors were to support God and the King, and to throw off the yoke of foreign domination.
In 1876 was formed theDeutsch-Konservativparty supporting Bismarck. “Königthum von Gottes Gnaden” is still their watchword, with opposition to Social Democracy, support of imperialism, agrarian and industrial protection, and Christian teaching in the schools, as the planks of their platform. They also combat Jewish influence everywhere, particularly in the schools. Allied to this party is theBund der Landwirteand theDeutscher Bauernbund. In the election of 1912 they elected forty-five representatives to the Reichstag, a serious falling off from the sixty-three seats held previous to that election. The Free Conservative portion of the Conservative party, is composed of the less autocratic members of the landed nobility, but there is little difference in their point of view.
TheCentrum, or Catholic party, is in theory not a religious party; in practice it is, though it does not bar out Protestant members who hold similar views to their own. Its political activity began in 1870, and the first call for the formation of the party came from Reichensperger in theKölnischer Volkszeitung. The famous leader of the party, and a politician who even held his own against Bismarck, was the Hanoverian Justizminister, Doctor Ludwig Windthorst. The stormy time of the party was from 1873 to 1878, when Bismarck attempted to oppose the growing power of the Catholic Church, and more particularly of the Jesuits. The so-called May laws of that year forbade Roman Catholic intervention in civil affairs; obliged all ministers of religion to pass the higher-schools examinations and to study theology three years at a university; made all seminaries subject to state inspection; and gave fuller protection to those of other creeds. In 1878 Bismarck needed the support of the Centrum party to carry through the new tariff, and the May laws, except that regarding civil marriage, were repealed. The party stands for religious teaching in the primary schools, Christian marriage, federal character of empire, protection, and independence of the state. More than any other party it has kept its representation in the Reichstag at about the same number. In 1903 they cast 1,875,300 votes and had 100 members. In 1907 they had 103 members, and in the last election of 1912 they won 93 seats. Even this Catholic party is now divided. Count Oppersdorff leads the “Only- Catholic” party, against the more liberal section which has its head-quarters at Cologne, where the late Cardinal Fisher was the leader. At the session of the Reichstag in 1913, when the question of the readmission of the Jesuits was raised, the Centrum party even sided with the Socialists in the matter of the expropriation law for Posen, in order to annoy the chancellor for his opposition to themselves. Such political miscegenation as this does not show a high level of faith or of policy.
It may be of interest to the reader to know that in 1903 the population of Germany was 58,629,000, and the number qualified to vote 12,531,000; in 1907 the population was 61,983,000, and the number qualified to vote, 13,353,000; in 1912 the population was 65,407,000, and the qualified voters numbered over 14,000,000, of whom 12,124,503 voted. In 1903 there were 9,496,000 votes cast; in 1907, 11,304,000. The German Reichstag has 397 members, or 1 representative to every 156,000 inhabitants; the United States House of Representatives has 433 members, or 1 for every 212,000 inhabitants; England, 670 members, or 1 for every 62,000; France, 584, or 1 for every 67,000; Italy, 508, or 1 for every 64,000; Austria, 516, or 1 for every 51,000.
Despite the fact that the Conservative and the Catholic parties have much in common, and are the parties of the Right and Centre: these names are given the political parties in the Reichstag according to their grouping on the right, centre, and left of the house, looking from the tribune or speaker’s platform, from which all set speeches are delivered, they are often at odds among themselves, and Bismarck and Bülow brought about tactical differences among them for their own purposes. Their programme may be summed up as “As you were,” which is not inspiring either as an incentive or as a command.
The Liberal parties are the National liberale; Fortschrittspartei, or Progressives; and the Freisinnige Volkspartei, or Liberal Democratic party.
The National Liberal party was strongest during the days when Prussia’s efforts were directed mainly toward a federation and a strengthening of the bonds which hold the states together; “unter dem Donner der Kanonen von Königgratz ist der nationalliberale Gedanke geboren.” Loyalty to emperor and empire, country above party, a fleet competent to protect the country and its overseas interests, are watchwords of the party. The party is protectionist, and in matters of school and church administration in accord with the Free Conservatives.
The Liberal Democratic party demands electoral reform, no duties on foodstuffs, and imperial insurance laws for the workingmen.
The Fortschrittspartei finds its intellectual beginnings, in the condensing of the hazy clouds of revolution in 1848, in the persons of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Freiherr von Stein. Politically, the party came into being in 1861, and Waldeck, von Hoverbeck, and Virchow are familiar names to students of German political history; later Eugen Richter was the leader of the party in the Reichstag. This party is still for free-trade, in opposition to military and bureaucratic government, favorable to parliamentary government. Of the grouping and regrouping of these parties; of their divisions for and against Bismarck’s policies; of their splits on the questions of free-trade and protection; of their leanings now to the right, now to the left; of their differences over details of taxation for purposes of defence; of their attitudes toward a powerful fleet, and toward the Jesuits, it would require a volume, and a large one, to describe. Though it is dangerous to characterize them, they may be said without inaccuracy to represent the democratic movement in Germany both in thought and political action, and to hold a wavering place between the Conservatives and the Social Democrats.
The Social Democratic party, the party of the wage-earners only assumed recognizable outlines after the appeal of Ferdinand Lassalle for a workingman’s congress at Leipsic in 1863. In 1877 they mustered 493,000 voters. Bismarck and the monarchy looked askance at their growing power. It was attempted to pass a law, punishing with fine and imprisonment: “wer in einer den öffentlichen Frieden gefährdenden Weise verschiedene Klassen der Bevölkerung gegeneinander öffentlich aufreizt oder wer in gleicher Weise die Institute der Ehe, der Familie und des Eigentums öffentlich durch Rede oder Schrift angreift.” This was a direct attack upon the Socialists, but the Reichstag refused to pass the law. In May, 1878, and shortly after in June, two attempts were made upon the life of the Kaiser. Bismarck then easily and quickly forced through the new law against the Socialists .
Under this law newspapers were suppressed, organizations dissolved, meetings forbidden, and certain leaders banished. For twelve years the party was kept under the watchful restraint of the police, and their propaganda made difficult and in many places impossible. After the repeal of this law, and for the last twenty years, the party has increased with surprising rapidity. In 1893 the Social Democrats cast 1,787,000 votes; in 1898, 2,107,000; in 1903, more than 3,000,000; and in the last election, 1912, 4,238,919; and they have just returned 110 delegates to the Reichstag out of a total of 397 members.
It is noteworthy that in America there is one Socialist member of the House of Representatives; while in Germany, which combines autocratic methods of government, with something more nearly approaching state ownership and control, than any other country in the world, the most numerous party in the present Reichstag is that of the Social Democrats.
Freedom is the only medicine for discontent. There is no rope for the hanging of a demagogue like free speech; no such disastrous gift for the socialist as freedom of action. Imagine what would have happened in America if we had attempted to suppress Bryan! The result of giving him free play and a fair hearing, the result of allowing the people to judge for themselves, has been a prolonged spectacle of political hari-kiri which has had a wholesome though negative educational influence. The most accomplished oratorical Pierrot of our day, who changes his political philosophy as easily as he changes his costume, has seen one hundred and sixty cities and towns in America turn to government by commission, and has kept the heraldic donkey always just out of reach of the political carrots, until the Republican party itself fairly pushed the donkey into the carrot-field, but even then with another leader. No autocrat could have done so much.
As early as 1887 Auer, Bebel, and Liebknecht outlined the programme of the party, and this programme, again revised at Erfurt in 1891, stands as the expression of their demands. They claim that: “Die Arbeiterklasse kann ihre ökonomischen Kämpfe nicht führen und ihre ökonomische Organisation nicht entwickeln ohne politisehe Rechte.” Roughly they demand: the right to form unions and to hold public meetings; separation of church and state; education free and secular, and the feeding of school-children; state expenditure to be met exclusively by taxes on incomes, property, and inheritance; people to decide on peace and war; direct system of voting, one adult one vote; citizen army for defence; referendum; international court of arbitration. Their leader in the Reichstag to-day is Bebel, and from what I have heard of the debates in that assembly I should judge that they have not only a majority over any other party in numbers, but also in speaking ability. The members of the Socialist party always leave the house in a body, at the end of each session, just before the cheers are called for, for the Emperor. They have become more and more daring of late in their outspoken criticism of both the Emperor and his ministers. In consequence, they are replied to with ever-increasing dislike and bitterness by their opponents. At a recent banquet of old university students in Berlin, Freiherr von Zedlitz, presiding, quoted Barth and Richter: “The victory of Social Democracy means the destruction of German civilization, and a Social Democratic state would be nothing more than a gigantic house of correction.”
In addition to the four important political divisions in the Reichstag, the Conservative, Liberal, Clerical, and Socialist, there are many subdivisions of these. Since 1871 there have been some forty different parties represented, eleven conservative, fourteen liberal, two clerical, nine national-particularist, and five socialist. To-day, besides four small groups and certain representatives acknowledging no party, there are some eleven different factions.
So far as one may so divide them, the voters have aligned themselves as follows: In the last elections, in 1912, the Conservatives and their allies elected 75 members; the Clericals, 93; the Poles, 18; and the Guelphs, 5; and these come roughly under the heading of the party of the Right. Under the heading Left, the National Liberals and Progressive party elected 88, and the Social Democrats 110 members to the Reichstag. The parties stand therefore roughly divided at the moment of writing as 191 Conservative, and 200 Radical, with 6 members unaccounted for. The Poles with 18 seats, the Alsatians with 5, the Guelphs and Lorrainers and Danes with 8 seats, and the no-party with 2 seats, are also represented, but are here placed with the party of the Right. To divide the parties into two camps gives the result that, roughly, four and a half millions voted that they were satisfied, and seven and a half millions that they were not.
No doubt any chancellor, including Doctor von Bethmann-Hollweg, would be glad to divide the Reichstag as definitely and easily as I have done. Theoretically these divisions may be useful to the reader, but practically to the leader they are useless. Bebel, the leader of the Social Democrats, declares himself ready to shoulder a musket to defend the country; Heydebrandt, the leader of the Conservatives, and possibly the most effective speaker in the Reichstag, has spoken warmly in favor of social reform laws; the Clericals are for peace, almost at any price; the Agrarians or Junkers for a tariff on foodstuffs and cattle, and one might continue analyzing the parties until one would be left bewildered at their refining of the political issues at stake. Back to God and the Emperor; and forward to a constitutional monarchy with the chancellor responsible to the Reichstag, and perhaps later a republic, represent the two extremes. Between the two everything and anything. It is hard to put together a team out of these diverse elements that a chancellor can drive with safety, and with the confidence that he will finally arrive with his load at his destination. In addition to these parties there are the frankly disaffected representatives of conquered Poland, of conquered Holstein, of conquered Alsace-Lorraine, and of conquered Hanover, this last known as the Guelph party; all of them anti-Prussian.
It is not to be wondered at that the comments, deductions, and prophecies of foreigners are wildly astray when dealing with German politics. In America, religious differences and racial differences play a small rôle at Washington; but the 220 Protestants, the 141 Catholics, the 3 Jews, the 5 free-thinkers, and so on, in the last Reichstag are in a way parties as well. In that same assembly 2 members were over 80, 78 over 60, 271 between 40 and 60, 42 under 40, and 3 under 30 years of age. One hundred and six members were landed proprietors; 220 were of the liberal professions, including 37 authors, 35 judges or magistrates, 21 clericals, 7 doctors, and 1 artist; 13 merchants; 21 manufacturers; and 20 shopkeepers and laborers. Seventy-two members were of the nobility, a decided falling off from 1878, when they numbered 162. Two hundred and fifty members were educated at a university, and practically all may be said to have had an education equal if not superior to that given in our smaller colleges.
In the American Congress, in the House of Representatives, we have 212 lawyers, though there are only 135,000 lawyers in our population of 90,000,000. We have in that same assembly 50 business men, representing the 15,000,000 of our people engaged in trade and industry. Perhaps the German Reichstag is as fairly representative as our own House of Representatives, though both assemblies show the babyhood of civilization which still votes for flashing eyes, thumping fists, hollering patriotism, and smooth phrases. The surprising feature of elective assemblies is that here and there Messrs. Self-Control, Ability, Dignity, and Independence find seats at all. The members are paid, since 1906, a salary of 3,000 marks, with a deduction of 20 marks for each day’s absence. They have free passes over German railways during the session. The Reichstag is elected every five years.
The appearance of the Reichstag to the stranger is notable for the presence of military, naval, and clerical uniforms. It is, as one looks down upon them, an assembly where at least one-fourth are bald or thin-haired, and together they give the impression of being big in the waist, careless in costume, slovenly in carriage, and lacking proper feeding, grooming, and exercise. It is clearly an assemblage, not of men of action, but of men of theories. Not only their appearance betrays this, but their debates as well, and what one knows of their individual training and preferences goes to substantiate this judgment of them. There are no soldiers, sailors, explorers, governors of alien people; no men, in short, who have solved practical problems dealing with men, but only theorists. Such men as Götzen, Solf, and others, who have had actual experience of dealing with men, are rare exceptions. Probably the best men in Germany wish, and wish heartily, that there were more such men; indeed, I betray no secret when I declare that the most intelligent and patriotic criticism in Germany coincides with my own.
The electoral divisions of Germany, as we have noted elsewhere, have not been changed for forty years, with a consequent disproportionate representation from the rural, as over against the enormously increased population, of the urban and industrial districts. The Conservatives, for example, in 1907 gained 1 seat for every 18,232 votes; the Clericals or Centrum, 1 seat for every 20,626 votes; the National Liberals, 1 for every 30,635 votes; and the Social Democrats, 1 for every 75,781 votes. It may be seen from this, how overwhelming must be the majority of votes cast by the Social Democrats, in order to gain a majority representation in the Reichstag itself. In 1912 they cast more than one-third of the votes, and are represented by 110 members out of the total of 397.
For the student of German politics it is important to remember, that the Social Democrats are not all representatives of socialism or of democracy. Their demands at this present time are far from the radical theory that all sources of production should be in the hands of the people. Only a small number of very red radicals demand that. Their successes have been, and they are real successes, along the lines of greater protection and more political liberty for the workingman. The number of their votes is swelled by thousands of voters who express their general discontent in that way. The state in Germany owns railroads, telegraph and telephone lines; operates mines and certain industries, and both controls and directly helps certain large manufactories which are either of benefit to the state, or which, if they were entirely independent, might prove a danger to the state. The state enforces insurance against sickness, accident, and old age, and the three million office-holders are dependent upon the state for their livelihood and their pensions.
It is a striking thing in Germany to see human nature cropping out, even under these ideal conditions; for it is difficult to see how the state could be more grandmotherly in her officious care of her own. But this is not enough. Physical safety is not enough, the demand is for political freedom, and for a government answerable to the people and the people’s representatives. Rich men, powerful men, representative men by the thousands, men whom one meets of all sorts and conditions, and who are neither radical nor socialistic, vote the Social Democrat ticket. The Social Democrats are by no means all democrats nor all socialists. As a body of voters they are united only in the expression of their discontent with a government of officials, practically chosen and kept in power over their heads, and with whose tenure of office they have nothing to do.
The fact that the members of the Reichstag are not in the saddle, but are used unwillingly and often contemptuously as a necessary and often stubborn and unruly pack-animal by the Kaiser-appointed ministers; the fact that they are pricked forward, or induced to move by a tempting feed held just beyond the nose, has something to do, no doubt, with the lack of unanimity which exists. The diverse elements debate with one another, and waste their energy in rebukes and recriminations which lead nowhere and result in nothing. I have listened to many debates in the Reichstag where the one aim of the speeches seemed to be merely to unburden the soul of the speaker. He had no plan, no proposal, no solution, merely a confession to make. After forty-odd years the Germans, in many ways the most cultivated nation in the world, are still without real representative government.
Why should the press or society take this assembly very seriously, when, as the most important measure of which they are capable, they can vote to have themselves dismissed by declining to pass supply bills; and when, as has happened four times in their history, they return chastened, tamed, and amenable to the wishes of their master?
No wonder the political writing in the press seems to us vaporish and without definite aims. It is perhaps due to this weakness that the writing in the German journals upon other subjects is very good indeed. The best energies of the writers are devoted to what may be called educational and literary expositions. In the field of foreign politics the German press is less well-informed, less instructive, and consequently irritating. The poverty of material resources makes such writing as that of Sir Valentine Chirrol, and in former days that of Mr. G. W. Smalley, beyond the reach of the German journalist, and their press is painfully narrow, frequently unfair, and often purposely insulting to foreign countries. They are not only anti- English, but anti-French, anti-American, and at times bitter. If the American people read the German newspapers there would be little love lost between us.
He is a fortunate traveller who enters Berlin from the west, and toward the end of his journey rolls along over the twelve or fifteen miles of new streets, glides under the Brandenburger Tor, and finds himself in Unter den Linden. The Kaiserdamm, Bismarck Strasse, Berliner Strasse, Charlottenburgerchaussee, Unter den Linden, give the most splendid street entrance into a city in the world. The pavement is without a hole, without a crack, and as clear of rubbish of any kind as a well-kept kitchen floor. The cleanliness is so noticeable that one looks searchingly for even a scrap of paper, for some trace of negligence, to modify this superiority over the streets of our American cities. But there is no consolation; the superiority is so incontestable that no comparison is possible. For the whole twelve or fifteen miles the streets are lined with trees, or shrubs, or flowers, with well-kept grass, and with separate roads on each side for horsemen or foot-passengers. In the spring and summer the streets are a veritable garden.
Broadway is 80 feet wide; Fifth Avenue is 100 feet wide; the Champs Elysées is 233 feet wide; and Unter den Linden is 196 feet wide, and has 70 feet of roadway.
For every square yard of wood pavement in Berlin there are 24 square yards of asphalt and 37 square yards of stone. The total length of streets cleaned in Berlin, which has an area of 25 square miles, according to a report of some few years ago, was 316 miles; there are 700 streets and some 70 open places, and the area cleaned daily was 8,160,000 square yards. The cost of the care of the Berlin streets has risen with the growth of the city from 1,670,847 marks, [1] in 1880, to 6,068,557 marks, in 1910. The total cost of the street-cleaning in New York, in 1907, was $9,758,922, and in Manhattan, The Bronx, and Brooklyn 5,129 men were employed; while the working force in Berlin, in 1911, was 2,150. It should be said also that in New York an enormous amount of scavenging is paid for privately besides. In New York the street-sweepers are paid $2.19 a day; in Berlin the foremen receive 4.75 marks the first three years, and thereafter 5 marks; the men 3.75 marks the first three years, then 4 marks, and after nine years’ service 4.50 marks. The boy assistants receive 2 marks, after two years 2.25 marks, and after four years service 3 marks. The whole force is paid every fourteen days. The street-cleaning department is divided into thirty-three districts, these districts into four groups, each with an inspector, and all under a head-inspector. Attached to each district are depots with yards for storage of vehicles, apparatus, brooms, shovels, uniforms, with machine shops, where on more than one occasion I have seen enthusiastic workmen trying experiments with new machinery to facilitate their work.
[1] The mark is equal to a little less than twenty-five cents.
Over this whole force presides, a politician? Far from it; a technically educated man of wide experience, and, of the official of my visit I may add, of great courtesy and singular enthusiasm both for his task and for the men under him. What his politics are concerns nobody, what the politics of the party in power are concerns him not at all. That an individual, or a group of individuals, powerful financially or politically, should influence him in his choice or in his placing of the men under him is unthinkable. That a political boss in this or in that district, should dictate who should and who should not, be employed in the street-cleaning department, even down to the meanest remover of dung with a dust-pan, as was done for years in New York and every other city in America, would be looked upon here as a farce of Topsy-Turvydom, withAlice in Wonderlandin the title-rôle.
The streets are cleaned for the benefit of the people, and not for the benefit of the pockets of a political aristocracy. The public service is a guardian, not a predatory organization. In our country when a man can do nothing else he becomes a public servant; in Germany he can only become a public servant after severe examinations and ample proofs of fitness. The superiority of one service over the other is moral, not merely mechanical.
The street-cleaning department is recruited from soldiers who have served their time, not over thirty-five years of age, and who must pass a doctor’s examination, and be passed also by the police. The rules as to their conduct, their uniforms, their rights, and their duties, down to such minute carefulness as that they may not smoke on duty “except when engaged in peculiarly dirty and offensive labor,” are here, as in all official matters in Germany, outlined in labyrinthine detail. Sickness, death, accident, are all provided for with a pension, and there are also certain gifts of money for long service. The police and the street-cleaning department co-operate to enforce the law, where private companies or the city-owned street-railways are negligent in making repairs, or in replacing pavement that has been disturbed or destroyed. There is no escape. If the work is not done promptly and satisfactorily, it is done by the city, charged against the delinquent, and collected!
One need go into no further details as to why and wherefore Berlin, Hamburg, even Cologne in these days, Leipsic, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Munich, keep their streets in such fashion, that they are as corridors to the outside of Irish hovels, as compared to the city streets of America; for the definite and all-including answer and explanation are contained in the two words: no politics.
Berlin is governed by a town council, under a chief burgomaster and a burgomaster, and the civic magistracy, and the police, these last, however, under state control. The chief burgomaster and the burgomaster are chosen from trained and experienced candidates, and are always men of wide experience and severe technical training, who have won a reputation in other towns as successful municipal administrators.
In May, 1912, Wermuth, the son of the blind King of Hanover’s right-hand man, and he himself the recently resigned imperial secretary of the treasury, was elected Oberburgomaster of Berlin. Such is the standing of the men named to govern the German cities. It is as though Elihu Root should be elected mayor of New York, with Colonel John Biddle as police commissioner, and Colonel Goethals as commissioner of street-cleaning. May the day come when we can avail ourselves of the services of such men to govern our cities!
The magistracy numbers 34, of whom 18 receive salaries. The town council consists of 144 members, half of whom must be householders. They are elected for six years, and one-third of them retire every two years, but are eligible for re-election. They are elected by the three-class system of voting, which is described in another chapter. This three-class system of voting results in certain inequalities. In Prussia, for example, fifteen per cent. of the voters have two-thirds of the electoral power, and relatively the same may be said of Berlin.
Unlike the municipal elections in American cities, the voters have only a simple ballot to put in the ballot-box. National and state politics play no part, and the voter is not confused by issues that have nothing to do with his city government. The government of their cities is arranged for on the basis that officials will be honest, and work for the city and not for themselves. Our city organizations often give the air of living under laws framed to prevent thievery, bribery, blackmailing, and surreptitious murder. We make our municipal laws as though we were in the stone age.
These German cities are also, unlike American cities, autonomous. They have no state-made charters to interpret and to obey; they are not restricted as to debt or expenditure; and they are not in the grip of corporations that have bought or leased water, gas, electricity, or street-railway franchises, and these, represented by the wealthiest and most intelligent citizens, become, through the financial undertakings and interests of these very same citizens, often the worst enemies of their own city. The German cities are spared also the confusion, which is injected into our politics by a fortunately small class of reformers, with the prudish peculiarities of morbid vestals; men who cannot work with other men, and who bring the virile virtues, the sound charities, and wholesome morality into contempt.
We all know him, the smug snob of virtue. You may find him a professor at the university; you may find him leading prayer-meetings and preaching pure politics; you may find him the bloodless philanthropist; you may find him a rank atheist, with his patents for the bringing in of his own kingdom of heaven. These are the men above all others who make the Tammanyizing of our politics possible. Honest men cannot abide the hot-house atmosphere of their self-conscious virtue. Nothing is more discouraging to robust virtue than the criticisms of teachers of ethics, who live in coddled comfort, upon private means, and other people’s ideas.
Germany is just now suffering from the spasms of moral colic, due to overeating. All luxury is in one form or another overeating. Berlin itself has grown too rapidly into the vicious ways of a metropolis, where spenders and wasters congregate. In 1911 the betting-machines at the Berlin race-tracks took in $7,546,000, of which the state took for its license, 16 2/3 per cent. There were 128 days of racing, while in England they have 540 days’ racing in the year!
In 1911, 1,300,000 strangers visited Berlin, of whom 1,046,162 were Germans, 97,683 Russians, 39,555 Austrians, 30,550 Americans, and 16,600 English. Berlin killed 2,000,000 beasts for food, including 10,500 horses; she takes care of 3,000 nightly in her night-shelters, puts away $17,500,000 in savings-banks, and has deposits therein of $90,500,000. On the other hand, she has built a palace of vice costing $1,625,000, in which on many nights between 11 P. M. and 2 A. M. they sell $8,000 worth of champagne. No one knows his Berlin, who has not partaken of a “Kalte Ente,” or a “Landwehrtopp,” a “Schlummerpunsch,” or “Eine Weisse mit einer Strippe.” There is still a boyish notion about dissipation, and they have their own great classic to quote from, who in “Faust” pours forth this rather raw advice for gayety:
“Greift nur hinein ins volle Menschenleben!Ein jeder lebt’s, nicht vielen ist’s bekannt,Und wo Ihr’s packt, da ist es interessant!”
Berlin is still in the throes of that sophomorical philosophy of life which believes that it is, from the point of view of sophistication, of age, when it is free to be befuddled with wine and befooled by women. But the German mind has no sympathy with hypocrisy. They may be brutal in their rather material views of morals, but they are frank. There may be mental prigs among them, but there are no moral prigs. In both England and America we suffer from a certain morbid ethical daintiness. There is a ripeness of moral fastidiousness that is often difficult to distinguish from rottenness. It is part of the feminism of America, born of our prosperity, for not one of these fastidious moralists is not a rich man, and Germany escapes this difficulty.
The government of a German city is so simple in its machinery that every voter can easily understand it. No doubt Seth Low and George L. Rives could explain to an intelligent man the charter under which New York City is governed, but they are very, very rare exceptions.
Our city government is bad, not because democracy is a failure, not because Americans are inherently dishonest, but because we are a superficially educated people, untrained to think, and, therefore, still worshipping the Jeffersonian fetich of divided responsibility between the three branches of the government. The judicial, the legislative, and the executive are, with minute care, forced to check and to impede one another, and we even carry this antiquated superstition, born of a suspicious and timid republicanism, into the government of our cities. With the exception of those cities in America which are governed by commissions, our cities are slaves as compared with the German cities. They are slaves of the predatory politicians, and they, on the other hand, are the bribed taskmasters of the rich corporations. The German asks in bewilderment why our men of wealth, of leisure, and of intelligence are not devoting themselves to the service of the state and the city. Alas, the answer is the pitiable one that the electoral machinery is so complicated that the voters can be and are, continually humbugged; and worse, many of the wealthy and intelligent, through their stake in valuable city franchises, are incompetent to deal fairly with the municipal affairs of their own city. Both in England and in America, the man in the street is quite sound in his judgment, when he declines to trust those who dabble in securities with which their own department has dealings. The British Caesar’s wife official, caught with a handkerchief on her person, woven on the looms of a company whose directors are dealing with the British government, can hardly claim exemption from suspicion, because she bought the handkerchief in America. We all know that when London sniffles the value of handkerchiefs goes up in New York. Caesar’s wife finds it difficult to persuade honorable men that she merely had a financial cold, but not the smallest interest in a corner in handkerchiefs.
In the great majority of German cities public-utility services, gas, water, electricity, street-railways, slaughter-houses, and even canals, docks, and pawn-shops are owned and controlled by the cities themselves. There is no loop-hole for private plunder, and there is, on the contrary, every incentive to all citizens, and to the rich in particular, to enforce the strictest economy and the most expert efficiency.
What theatres, opera-houses, orchestras, museums, what well-paved and clean streets, what parks Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco might have, had these cities only a part of the money, of which in the last twenty-five years they have been robbed! It is true that the older cities of Germany have traditions behind them that we lack. Art treasures, old buildings, and an intelligent population demanding the best in music and the drama we cannot hope to supply, but good house-keeping is another matter. Berlin, for example, is a new city as compared with New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and its growth has been very rapid.
It cannot be said for us alone that we have grown so fast that we have had no time to keep pace with the needs of our population. Berlin, all Germany indeed, has been growing at a prodigious rate. The population of Berlin in 1800 was 100,000; in 1832 only 250,000; hardly half a million in 1870; while the population now is over 2,000,000, and over 3,000,000 if one includes the suburbs, which are for all practical purposes part and parcel of Berlin. Charlottenburg, for example, with a population of 19,517 in 1871, now has a population of 305,976, and the vicinage of Berlin has grown in every direction in like proportions.
There were no towns in Germany till the eighth century, except those of the Romans on the Rhine and the Danube. In 1850 there were only 5 towns in Germany with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and in 1870 only 8; in 1890, 26; in 1900, 33; in 1905, 41; in 1910, 47; and nearly the whole increase of population is now massed in the middle-sized and large cities. The same may be said of the drift of population in America. “A thrifty but rather unprogressive provincial town of 60,000 inhabitants,” writes Mr. J. H. Harper, of New York, in 1810.
Between 1860 and 1900 the proportion of urban to rural population in the United States more than doubled. In the last ten years the percentage of people living in cities, or other incorporated places of more than 2,500 inhabitants, increased from 40.5 to 46.3 per cent. of the total; while twenty years ago only 36.1 per cent. of the population lived in such incorporated places.
As late as the thirteenth century the Christian chivalry of the time was spending itself in the task of converting the heathen of what is now Prussia; and it was well on into the nineteenth century before serfdom was entirely abolished in this region. It is the newness and rawness of the population, in the streets of the great German and Prussian capital which surprise and puzzle the American, almost more than the cleanliness and orderliness of the streets themselves. It is as though a powerful monarch had built a fine palace and then, for lack of company, had invited the people from the fields and farm-yards to be his companions therein.
“Jamais un lourdaud, quoi qu’il fasseNe saurait passer pour galaud.”
One should read Hazlitt’s “Essay on the Cockney” to find phrases for these Berliners. It is a gazing, gaping crowd that straggles along over the broad sidewalks. Half a dozen to a dozen will stop and stare at people entering or leaving vehicles, at a shop, or hotel door. I have seen a knot of men stop and stare at the ladies entering a motor-car, and on one occasion one of them wiped off the glass with his hand that he might see the better. It is not impertinence, it is merely bucolic naïveté. The city in the evening is like a country fair, with its awkward gallantries, its brute curiosity, its unabashed expressions of affection by hands and lips, its ogling, coughing, and other peasant forms of flirtation. It should be remembered that this people as a race show somewhat less of reticence in matters amatory than we are accustomed to. In the foyer of the theatre you may see a young officer walking round and round, his arm under that of his fiancée or bride, and her hand fondly clasped in his. It is a commentary, not a criticism, on international manners that the German royal princess, a particularly sweet and simple maiden, just engaged to marry the heir of the house of Cumberland, is photographed walking in the streets of Berlin, her hand clasped in that of her betrothed, and both he, and her brother who accompanies them, smoking! Gentlemen do not smoke when walking or driving with ladies, with us, though I am not claiming that it is a moral disaster to do so. It is a difference in the gradations of respect worth noting, but nothing more. I have even seen kissing, as a couple walked up the stairs from one part of the theatre to another. In the spring and summer the paths of theTiergartenof a morning are strewn with hair-pins, a curious, but none the less accurate, indication of the rather fumbling affection of the night before.
To live in a fashionable hotel, in a land whose people you wish to study, is as valueless an experience as to go to a zoölogical garden to learn to track a mountain sheep or to ride down a wild boar. You must go about among the people themselves, to their restaurants, to their houses, if they are good enough to ask you, and to the resorts of all kinds that they frequent.
The manners are better than in my student days, but there is still a deal of improvised eating and drinking. There is much tucking of napkins under chins that the person may be shielded from misdirected food-offerings. There is not a little use of the knife where the fork or spoon is called for; but this last I always look upon as a remnant of courage, of the virility remaining in the race from a not distant time when the knife served to clear the forest, to build the hut, to kill the deer, and to defend the family from the wolf; and the traditions of such a weapon still give it predominance over the more epicene fork, as a link with a stirring past. Mere daintiness in feeding is characteristic of the lapdog and other over-protected animals. Unthinking courage in the matter of victuals is rather a relief from the strained and anxious hygienic watchfulness of the overcivilized and the overrich. The body should be, and is, regarded by wholesome-minded people, not as an idol, but as an instrument. The German no doubt sees something ignominious in counting as one chews a chop, in the careful measuring of one’s liquids, in the restricting of oneself to the diet of the squirrel and the cow. He would perhaps prefer to lose a year or two of life rather than to nut and spinach himself to longevity. The wholesome body ought of course to be unerring and automatic in its choice of the quantity and quality of its fuel.
A well-dressed man in Berlin is almost as conspicuous as a dancing bear. This comparison may lead the stranger to infer, in spite of what has been said of the orderliness of Berlin, that dancing bears are permitted in the streets. It is only fair to Berlin’s admirable police president, von Jagow, to say that they are not.
If one leaves the officers, who are a fine, upstanding, well-groomed lot, out of the account, the inhabitants of Berlin are almost grotesque in their dowdiness. This is the more remarkable for the reason that the citizens of Berlin, wherever you see them, not only in the West-end, but in the tenement districts, in the public markets, going to or coming from the suburban trains, in the trains and underground railway, in the cheaper restaurants and pleasure resorts, taking their Sunday outing, or in the fourth-class carriages of the railway trains, or their children in the schools, show a high level of comfort in their clothing. There is poverty and wretchedness in Berlin, of which later, but in no great city even in America, does the mass of the people give such an air of being comfortably clothed and fed.
We have been deluged of late years with figures in regard to the cost of living in this country and in that, and never are statistics such “damned lies” as in this connection. There is better and cheaper food in Berlin, and in the other cities of Germany, than anywhere else in our white man’s world. Having for the moment no free-trade, or protectionist, or tariff-reform axe to grind, and having tested the pudding not by my prejudices but my palate, and having eaten a fifteen-pfennig luncheon in the street, and climbed step by step the gastronomical stairway in Germany all the way up to a supper at the court, where eight hundred odd people were served with a care and celerity, and with hot viands and irreproachable potables, that made one think of the “Arabian Nights,” I offer my experience and my opinion with some confidence. You can get enough to stave off hunger for a few pfennigs, you can get a meal for something under twenty-five cents, and the whole twenty-five cents will include a glass of the best beer in the world outside of Munich. If you care to spend fifty cents there are countless restaurants where you can have a square meal and a glass of beer for that price; and for a dollar I will give you as good a luncheon with wine as any man with undamaged taste and unspoiled digestion ought to have.
There is one restaurant in Berlin which feeds as many as five thousand people on a Sunday, where you can dine or sup, and listen to good music, and enjoy your beer and tobacco for an hour afterward, and all for something under fifty cents if you are careful in your ordering. During my walks in the country around Berlin, I have often had an omelette followed by meat and vegetables, and cheese, and compote, and Rhine wine, with all the bread I wanted, and paid a bill for two persons of a little over a dollar. TheBrödchen, or rolls, seem to be everywhere of uniform size and quality, and the butter always good.
Paris is fast losing its place as the home of good all-round eating as compared with Berlin. Of course, New York for geographical reasons, and also because the modern Maecenas lives there, is nowadays the place where Lucullus would invite his emperor to dine if he came back to earth; but I am not discussing the nectar and ambrosia classes, but the beer, bread, and pork classes, and certainly Berlin has no rival as a provider for them.
After all our study of statistics, of figures, of contrasts, I am not sure that we arrive at any very valuable conclusions. American working-classes work ever shorter hours, gain higher wages, but they are indubitably less happy, less rich in experience, less serene than the Germans. This measuring things by dollars, by hours, by pounds and yard-sticks, measures everything accurately enough except the one thing we wish to measure, which is a man’s soul. We are producing the material things of life faster, more cheaply, more shoddily, but it is open to question whether we are producing happier men and women, and that is what we are striving to do as the end of it all. Nothing is of any value in the world that cannot be translated into the terms of man-making, or its value measured by what it does to produce a man, a woman, and children living happily together. Wealth does not do this; indeed, wealth beyond a certain limit is almost certain to destroy the foundation of all peace, a contented family.
A shady beer-garden, capital music, and happy fathers and mothers and children, what arithmetic, or algebra, or census tells you anything of that? The infallible recipe for making a child unhappy, is to give it everything it cries for of material things, and never to thwart its will. We throw wages and shorter hours of work at people, but that is only turning them out of prison into a desert. No statistics can deal competently with the comparative well-being of nations, and nothing is more ludicrous than the results arrived at where Germany is discussed by the British or American politician. Whatever figures say, and whatever else they may lack, they are better clothed, better fed and cared for, and have far more opportunities for rational enjoyment, and a thousand-fold more for aesthetic enjoyment, than either the English or the Americans. That they lack freedom, in our sense, is true, but freedom is for the few. The worldwide complaint of the hardship of constant work is rather silly, for most of us would die of monotony if we were not forced to work to keep alive, and to make a living.
The city, with its broad, clean streets, its beautiful race-course, shaded walks, its forests and lakes, toward Potsdam, or at Tegel, or Werder, when the blossoms are out, with its well-kept gardens, its profusion of flowers and shrubs and trees, is physically the most wholesome great city in the world; but Hans bleibt immer Hans! Goethe, after a visit to Berlin, wrote: “There are no more ungodly communities than in Berlin.” [2]
[2] “Est giebt keine gottlosere Völker als in Berlin.”
No one knows his Berlin better than that prince of German literary Bohemians, Paul Lindau, and he makes a character in one of his novels say of it: “untidy and orderly, so boisterous and so regulated, so boorish and so kindly, so indescribable-soBerlinish-just that!” [3]
[3] “Staubig und ordentlich, so Taut und geregelt, so grob und gemütlich, so unbeschreiblich, so berlinerisch, gerade so!”
In another place the same author writes: “Berlin as the Capital of the German Empire! There are many respects in which it nevertheless hasn’t yet succeeded in taking on the character of a cosmopolitan city.” [4] Not even literature finds material for a city novel. There is no Balzac, no Thackeray. Germany is still dominated by the village and the town. Goethe, Auerbach, Spielhagen, Heyse, Gottfried Keller, Freytag, my unread favorite “Fritz” Reuter, deal not with the life of cities. There is as yet no drama, no novel, no art, no politics born of the city. There is no domineering Paris or London or New York as yet.
[4] “Berlin als Haupstadt des deutchen Reiches: in mancher Beziehung hatte es sich dem weltstädtischen Charakter doch noch nicht aneignen können.”
After some years of acquaintance with Germany as school-boy, as student at the universities, and lately as a most hospitably received guest by all sorts and conditions of men, I do not remember meeting a fop. A German Beau Brummel is as impossible as a French Luther, an American Goethe, or an English Wagner. We have had attempts at foppery in America, but no real fops. A genuine fop, whether in art, in literature, or in costumes, must have brains, ours have been merely effigies, foppery taking the dull commercial form of a great variety of raiment. It is a strange contradiction in German life that while they are as a people governed minutely and in detail, forbidden personal freedom along certain lines to which we should find it hard to submit, they are freer morally, freer in their literature, their art, their music, their social life, and in their unself-conscious expression of them than other people. There is a curious combination of legal and governmental slavery, and of spiritual and intellectual freedom; of innumerable restrictions, and great liberty of personal enjoyment, and that enjoyment of the most naïf kind. They seem to have done less to destroy life’s palate with the condiments of civilization, and therefore, still find plain things savorous.
I am not sure that the ecumenical sophistication, known as world-etiquette, marks a very high degree of knowledge or usefulness anywhere. To know which hat goes with which boots, and what collar and tie with what coat and waistcoat, and what costume is appropriate at 10 A. M., and what at 10 P. M., and to know the names of the head-waiters of the principal restaurants, are minor matters. These are the conveniences of the gentleman, but the characteristic burdens of the ass. Such a mental equipment is not the stuff of which soldiers, sailors, statesmen, explorers, or governors are made.
We must not overrate the value of this feminine worldliness in judging the Germans. This effeminate categorical imperative of etiquette has not influenced them greatly as yet. But on the other hand, one must claim for the amenities of life that they have their value, that they are, after all, the external decorations of an inward discipline. It is not necessarily a fine disdain of material things, but rather a keen sense of moral and physical efficiency, which pays due heed to wherewithal ye shall be clothed, at any rate outside of Palestine. Those who dream and discuss may wear anything or nothing. It mattered not what Socrates wore. But men of action must wear the easy armor that fits them best for their particular task. Men who toil either at their pleasure or at their work must change their raiment, if only for the sake of rest and health. Now that government is in the hands of the vociferators rather than the meditaters, even politicians must look to their costumes, merely out of regard to cleanliness. Evening clothes with a knitted tie dribbling down the shirt front; a frock-coat as a frame for a colored waistcoat, such as at shooting, or riding, or golf, we permit ourselves to break forth in, as a weak surrender to the tailor, or to the ingenuity of our womenfolk who are not “unbred to spinning, in the loom unskilled”; the extraordinary indulgence in personal fancies in the choice of colored ties, as though the male citizens of Berlin had been to an auction of the bastards of a rainbow; the little melon-shaped hats with a band of thick velvet around them; the awkward slouching gait, as of men physically untrained; the enormous proportion of men over forty, who follow behind their stomachs and turn their toes out at an angle of more than forty-five degrees, whose necks lie in folds over their collars, and whose whole appearance denotes an uncared-for person and a negligence of domestic hygiene: these things are significant. No man who walks with his toes pointing southwest by south, and southeast by south, when he is going south, will ever get into France on his own feet, carrying a knapsack and a rifle. Cranach’s painting of Duke Henry the Pious, in the Dresden Gallery, gives an accurate picture of the way many Germans still stand and walk; while every athlete knows that runners and walkers put their feet down straight, or with a tendency to turn them in rather than out. The Indians of northwest India, and the Indians of our own West are good examples of this.
It is evident that the orderliness of Berlin is enforced orderliness and not voluntary orderliness. Both pedestrians and drivers of all sorts of vehicles, take all that is theirs and as much more as possible. There is none of the give and take, and innate love of fair play and instinctive wish to give the other fellow a chance, so noticeable in London streets, whether on the sidewalks or in the roadway. There is a general chip-on-the-shoulder attitude in Prussia, which may be said, I think not unfairly, to be evident in all ranks, from their recent foreign diplomacy, down to the pedestrians and drivers.
Many people whom I have met, not only foreigners but Germans from other parts of Germany, are loud in their denunciations of the Berliners. “Frech” and “roh” are words often used about them. There is a surly malice of speech and manner among the working classes, that seems to indicate a wish to atone for political impotence, by braggart impudence to those whom they regard as superior. When we played horse as children, we champed the wooden bit, shied, and balked and kicked, and the worse we behaved the more spirited horses we thought ourselves. There is a certain social and political radicalism verging upon anarchy, which plays at life in much the same way, with no better reason, and with little better result. Shying, balking, and kicking, and champing the political bit, are only spirited to the childish.
Their awkward and annoying attentions to women alone on the streets; their staring and gaping; their rudeness in pushing and shoving; the general underbred look, the slouching gait, the country-store clothes, hats, and boots; the fearful and wonderful combinations of raiment; the sweetbread complexions, as of men under-exercised and not sufficiently aired and scrubbed; their stiff courtesy to one another when they recognize acquaintances with hat-sweeping bows; their fierce gobbling in the restaurants; their lack of small services and attentions to their own women when they go about in public with them; their selfish disregard of others in public places, their giving and taking of hats, coats, sticks, and umbrellas at thegarde-robesof the theatres, for example; their habit of straggling about in the middle of the streets, like the chickens and geese on a country road: all these things I have noted too, but I must admit the surprising personal conclusion that I have grown to like the people. A good pair of shoulders and an engaging smile go far to mitigate these nuisances. It makes for good sense in this matter of criticism always to bear in mind that delicious piece of humor of the psalmist: “Let the righteous rather smite me friendly; and reprove me. But let not their precious balms break my head.” The “precious balms” of the lofty and righteous critic are not of much value when they merely break heads.
I have been all over Berlin, and in all sorts of places, by day and by night. I have found myself seated beside all sorts of people in restaurants and public places, and I have yet to chronicle any rudeness to me or mine. I like their innocent curiosity, their unsophisticated ways, their bumpkin love-making in public; and many a time I have found entertainment from odd companions who seated themselves near me, when I have strayed into the cheaper restaurants, to hear and to see something of the Berliner in his native wilds. Their malice and rudeness and apparent impertinences are due to lack of experience, to the fact that their manners are still untilled, I believe, rather than to intentional insult. They are not house-broken to their new capital, that is all, and that will come in time. Their malicious jealousy peeps out in all sorts of ways. In the lower house of the Prussian Diet, recently, a member protested vigorously against the employment of an American singer in the Opera House! Chauvinism carried to this extreme becomes comic, and is noted here only to indicate to what depths of farm-yard provinciality some of the citizens of this great city can descend.