Part 28

They accumulate comfort very slowly. The wages are small and the satisfactions are small. On the street-cars the conductor is grateful for a tip of five pfennigs, and his daily customers are handed from the car-steps and respectfully saluted in return for this tiny douceur. When you dine or lunch at a friend's house you are expected to leave something in the expectant palm of his servant who sees you out.

Women carry small parcels of food to the theatre, to the tea and beer gardens, and thus save the small additional expense. Many a time have I seen these thrifty housewives pocket the sugar and the zwiebacks and Broedchen left over. In the hotels, soap, paper, and common conveniences of the kind are taken, so I am told, not, I maintain, as a theft, but as an economy. We are in the habit of carrying our small change loose in a trousers pocket, but the German almost without exception carries even his ten and five pfennig pieces carefully in a purse. Outside many of the big shops is placed a row of niches where you may leave your unfinished cigar till you return. The economy thus illustrated shows a certain disregard, of a not altogether agreeable chance of interchangeability, that might even be dangerous to health. On the other hand, it is a wise precaution that marks beer-glasses and beer-jugs with a line, to show just how much beer you are entitled to. This puts the foam-stealing vendor at your mercy.

The entertainments, dinners, luncheons, teas, except among the small cosmopolitan companies who do not count as examples of German manners and customs, are very prolonged affairs. There is much standing about. At ten o'clock, having dined at half-past seven, beer, tea, coffee, sandwiches are brought in, and you begin the gastronomics over again on a smaller scale. There is no occasion when eating and drinking are not part of the programme. If you go to the play or the opera you may eat and drink there; if you go for a walk the goal is not a bath and a rub-down, but beer or chocolate and cakes.

I am not sure that there is not something in the theory that their soil has less iron in it, being so intensively cultivated, and that our food is consequently stronger than theirs; at all events, they eat more frequently and more copiously than we do. It seems to me that both the men and the women show it in their faces and figures. They are a heavy, puffy, tumbling lot after forty; and with my prepossessions on the subject I am inclined to put it down to irregular eating, to too much eating of soft and sweet food, too much drinking of fattening beverages, and much, much too little regular exercise, and to the fact that they are still infants in the matter of personal hygiene. Dressing-gowns, slippers, proper care of the teeth and hair, regular ablutions, changing of clothes, all these dozens of helps to health are patiently neglected. It is just as troublesome to take care of yourself, to groom your person, to be regular in your habits, and restrained and careful in your diet as to take proper care of a horse or a dog. It shows a rather high grade of persistent prowess in a man just to keep himself fit, to keep himself in working or playing health. Without the drilling they receive in the army in these matters, one wonders where this population would be.

The doggedness, the patience of the German is notable, but the alertness, vivacity, the energy easily on tap, these are lacking both among the men and the women, and, as it seems to me, for these easily apparent reasons. There are more rest-cures, rheumatism, heart, liver, kidney, anaemic cures in Germany, and to suit all purses, than in all Anglo-Saxondom combined, even if subject territories are included. In Saxony alone, which is not renowned for its cures, the number of visitors at Augustus Bad, Bad Elester, Hermanus Bad, Schandau, and some seven others has increased from 13,000 ten years ago to 30,000 in 1910.

Between 1900 and 1909, while the population of Germany increased 15 per cent., the days of sickness in the insurance funds increased 59 per cent. and the expenditure 95 per cent. Some alterations were made in the law between those years permitting a certain extension of the days of sickness, but an accurate percentage may be taken between the years 1905 and 1909. During those years the population increased by 7 per cent., the days of sickness by 17 per cent., and the expenditure out of the sick-funds by 32 per cent. The total cost of sickness insurance in 1900 was $42,895,000 and in 1909 $83,640,000. What will happen in Great Britain when sickness insurance comes into thorough working order is worthy of caricature. The way my Irish friends will play that game fills me with joy. It is an abominable harness to put on the Anglo-Saxon, and he has my very best wishes if he refuses to wear it tamely. It is only another piece of tired legislation that solves nothing. Even Germany would be a thousand times better off without it. This attempting to make pills and powders take the place of love one another, is merely the politician sneaking away from his problem. Of course, it is impossible to tell how many people are sick by being paid for it, probably not a small number. We all have mornings when we would turn over and stick to our pillows if we were sure of payment for doing so. The German apparently is the only person in the world who is happy, aegrescit medendo. The Germans keep going, we must all admit that, but at a slower pace, with less energy to spare, and with far less robust love of life.

If the men are patient, the women must be more so, and they are. The marriage service still reads: "He shall be your ruler, and you shall be his vassal." The women are not only patient with all that requires patience of the men, but they are patient with the men besides, a heavy additional burden from the American point of view. Beethoven writes: "Resignation! Welch' elendes Huelfsmittel! Und doch bleibt es mir das einzige uebrige." They take resignation for granted as we never do.

Some ten years ago only, was formed the Women's Suffrage League in Germany. It was necessary to organize in the free city of Hamburg, because women were not allowed either to form or to join political unions in Prussia! It is only within a very few years that the girls' higher schools have been increased and cared for in due proportion to the schools provided for the higher education of the boys. The first girls' rowing club was organized at Cassel in 1911. Even now as I write there are protests and petitions from the male masters against women teachers in the higher positions of even these schools. In the discussions as to the proper subjects to be taught to the girls, who in 1912 began attending the newly constituted continuation schools for girls in Berlin, there is a strong party who argue that all of them should be taught only house-keeping and the duties pertaining thereto. To the great majority of German men, children and the kitchen are and ought to be the sole preoccupations of women, with occasional church attendance thrown in.

There have been enormous changes in the place women hold in the German world in the last thirty years. The Red Cross organization of the women throughout Germany is admirable and as complete and efficient as the army that it is intended to help; one can hardly say more. There are many private charities in Berlin and other cities, managed entirely by women, and doing excellent and sensible work; such as the kindergartens, the Pestalozzi-Froebelhaus for example, where four hundred children are taken care of daily and fifteen thousand ten-pfennig meals provided, besides classes for the young women students under the supervision of the Berliner Verein fuer Volkserziehung, with courses in the elements of law and politics and other matters likely to concern them in their activities as teachers, nurses, or charity helpers; the invalid-kitchens; the societies for looking after young girls; the work in the Temperance League; the Lette-Verein, one of the most sane and sensible institutions in the world for the training of girls and young women, where they turn out some two thousand girls a year trained in house-wifely economy; the wonderful and pitiful colony at Bielefeld, founded by one of Germany's greatest organizers and saints, Pastor Bodelschwing, and now carried on by his equally able son, and aided largely by the sympathy and resources of women. Only another Saint Francis could have imagined, and produced, and loved into usefulness such an institution.

The summer colonies, called gartenlauben colonies, where the outlying and unused land on the outskirts of the cities is divided up into small parcels and rented for a nominal sum to the poorer working people of the city, constitute a most sensible form of philanthropy. You see them, each named by its proprietor, with a flag flying, with the light barriers dividing them, and with the small huts erected as a shelter, where flowers and fruits and vegetables are grown, often adding no small amount to income, and in every case offering the soundest kind of work and recreation. These colonies were started by a woman in France, and the idea worked its way through Belgium to Germany, and they are now supported and helped by the direct interest of the Empress. The woman who put this scheme into operation ought to have a monument! At Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin, on a plot lent by the city, there are thirteen of these colonies divided into over a thousand plots.

There are three-quarters of a million women in Germany who are independent owners and heads of establishments of different kinds, and some ten million who are bread-winners. Of the increase in the number of women students I have written in another chapter, and of their increasing participation in the political, economical, literary, and scholarly life of the nation there are many examples. Once or twice I have even heard them speak in public, and speak well, while if my memory serves me, this was practically unknown in my university days here. The problem of domestic apprenticeship is also being worked out by the women of Germany. In Munich, in Frankfurt-am-Main and elsewhere this most difficult and delicate question is being partially answered at least. Girls are apprenticed to families needing them, under the supervision of a committee of women. The girls and their families agree to certain terms, and the families agree also to teach them household duties, give them proper food, eight hours' sleep, their Sunday out, and so on. The German women's societies who have thus boldly tackled this problem are plucky indeed, and prove easily enough that there is a large and growing body of women in Germany, who have minds and wills of their own and great executive ability.

Let me suggest to some of our idle women that they pay a visit to the Hausfrauenbund at Frankfort and the Frauenverein-Arbeitererinnenheim at Munich, before they pass judgment upon this chapter. For I should be sorry to leave the impression that all the women of Germany are listless, oppressed, and without any feeling of civic responsibility.

All these things have been accomplished by women in Germany with far less sympathy from the men than they receive in America or in England. Cato wrote of women's suffrage: "Pray what will they not assail, if they carry their point? Call to mind all the principles governing them by which your ancestors have held the presumption of women in check, and made them subject to their husbands. ... As soon as they have begun to be your equals they will be your superiors." It is an older story than the unread realize, this of the rights of women. The bulk of Germany's male population still hold to Cato's view. It is not so much that they are antagonistic, except in the case of the teachers, where the women have become active competitors; they are in their patient way impervious. Nor can it be said that any very large number of the women themselves are eager for more rights; rather are they becoming restless because they receive so little consideration.

Their pleasures are simple and restricted, regular attendance at the theatre, at concerts, an occasional dinner at a restaurant to celebrate an anniversary, excursions with the whole family to a beer restaurant of a Sunday, and the endless meeting together for reading, sewing, and gossip -- no German woman apparently but what belongs to a verein or circle, meeting, say, once a week.

The women and the men are gregarious. Vae soli is the motto of the race. They love to take their pleasures in crowds, and I am not sure that this does not dull the enthusiasm for personal rights and gratifications, and for individual supremacy and dignity. It is rare to find a German who would subscribe to Andrew Marvell's misogynist lines:

"Two paradises are in one To live in Paradise alone."

It is typical of this love of being together that an independent member of the Reichstag, owing allegiance to no party, is called a Wilde, and this same word Wilde, or wild man, is applied to the student at the university who belongs to no corps or association of students. This love of being together, of touching elbows on all occasions, makes them more easily led and ruled. They hate the isolation necessary for independence and revolt.

Of the relations between men and women I long ago came to the conclusion that this is a subject best left to the scientific explorer. It is, however, open to the casual observer to comment upon the monstrous percentage of illegitimacy in Berlin, 20 per cent. or one child out of every five, born out of wedlock; 14 per cent. in Bavaria; and 10 per cent. for the whole empire. This alone tells a sad tale of the attitude of the men and women toward one another. There is a long journey ahead of the women who propose to lift their sisters on to a plane above the animals in this respect. In the matter of divorce Prussia comes fourth in the list of European nations. Norway, with the cheapest and easiest, and at the same time the wisest, divorce law in the world, has almost the lowest percentage of divorce. In 1910 there were 390 divorces out of 400,000 existing marriages, of which 14,600 had taken place that year. The percentage is thus only about 2 1/2 per year. The total per 100,000 of the population in Switzerland is 43; in France 33; in Denmark 27; and in Prussia 21. In industrial Saxony there are 32 and in Catholic Bavaria 13. The number of married people in Germany according to the last census shows an increase, the number of bachelors and widowed persons a decrease. Since 1871 the number of married persons has increased by 2 per cent. The birth rate shows a proportional decline. The problem that bothers all social economists is to the fore in Germany as elsewhere, for the people between sixty and seventy years of age number 14.65 per cent. of the population, while the young people under ten number only 11.12, and those between twenty and thirty 10.93 per cent. The birth rate therefore shows the same tendency as in France, England, and America. A recent investigation on a small scale seems to show that bureaucracy has a certain influence here. Of 300 officials questioned, only 10, or 312 per thousand, had more than two children. It is not an impossible, but certainly a laughable, outcome of state interference carried too far, should it result, in the state's becoming an incubator for the unfit, in a country where the pensions for officers and employees of the state have risen from 50,000,000 marks in 1900 to 111,000,000 marks in 1911.

Even in higher circles in Germany there is a gushing idealism about the relations of the sexes. In their songs and sayings, as well as in their mythology, there is a laudation of love that is overstimulating. The lines of that inconsequential philosopher, that irresponsible moralist, that dreamy Puritan, Emerson,

"Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit and the Muse-- Nothing refuse"

would be warmly praised in Germany.

"I could not love thee, dear, so much Loved I not honour more"

are lines more to our taste. Even love should have a deal of toughness of fibre in it to be worth much.

I must leave it to my readers to guess what I think of the German woman; indeed, it is of little consequence what any individual opinion is, if matter is given for the formation of an opinion by others. Truth cannot afford to be either gallant or merciless. There are women in Germany whom no man can know without respect, without admiration, without affection. There are the blue eyes, sunny hair, peach-bloom complexions of the north; there are the dark-eyed, black-haired, heavy-browed women of the Black Forest; there is often a Quakerish elegance of figure and apparel to be seen on the streets of the cities, and from time to time one sees a real Germania, big of frame, bold of brow, fearless of glance -- patet dea!

But we can none of us be quite sure of the impartiality of our taste in such matters. Our baby fingers and our baby lips were taught to love a certain type of beauty. Our mothers wove a web of admiration and devotion from which no real man ever escapes; our maturer passions lashed themselves to an image from which we can never wholly break away; our sins and sorrows and adventures have been drenched in the tears of eyes that are like no other eyes; and consequently the man who could pretend to cold neutrality would be a reprobate.

The German looks to Germany, the Englishman to England, the Frenchman to France, as do you and I to America, for

"The face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium."

VIII "OHNE ARMEE KEIN DEUTSCHLAND"