Part 7

Of the sixty-five million inhabitants of the German Empire, Prussia has over forty millions. The Landtag of Prussia is composed of two chambers, the first called the Herrenhaus, or House of Lords, and the second the Abgeordnetenhaus, or Chamber of Deputies. This upper house is made up of the princes of the royal family who are of age; the descendants of the formerly sovereign families of Hohenzollern- Hechingen and Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen; chiefs of the princely houses recognized by the Congress of Vienna; heads of the territorial nobility formed by the King; representatives of the universities; burgomasters of towns with more than fifty thousand inhabitants, and an unlimited number of persons nominated by the King for life or for a limited period. This upper chamber is a mere drawing-room of the sovereign's courtiers, though there may be, and as a matter of fact there are at the present time, representatives even of labor in this chamber, but in a minority so complete that their actual influence upon legislation, except in a feeble advisory capacity, amounts to nothing. In this Herrenhaus, or upper chamber, of Prussia there are at this writing among the 327 members 3 bankers, 8 representatives of the industrial and merchant class, and 1 mechanic; 12 in all, or not even four per cent., to represent the industrial, financial, commercial, and working classes. Even in the lower chamber, or Abgeordnetenhaus, there are only 10 merchants, 19 manufacturers, 7 labor representatives, and 1 bank director, or 37 members who represent the commercial, manufacturing, and industrial interests in a total membership of 443.

In the other states of Germany much the same conditions exist. In Bavaria, in the upper house, or Kammer der Reichsraete, there is no representative, and in the lower house of 163 members only 29 representatives of the industrial world.

In Saxony, the most socialistic state in Germany, the upper chamber with 49 members has 5 industrials; the lower chamber with 82 members has 40 representatives of commercial, industrial, and financial affairs.

In Wuertemberg, in the upper chamber with 51 members there are 3 industrials; and in the second chamber with 63 members there are 17 industrials.

In Baden, of the 37 members of the upper house there are 6 industrials; of the 73 members of the lower house there are 23 representatives of commerce and industry.

This condition of political inequality is the result of the maintenance of the old political divisions, despite the fact that in the last thirty years the whole complexion of the country has changed radically, due to the rapid increase of the city populations representing the industrial and commercial progress of a nation that is now the rival of both the United States and Great Britain. In more than one instance a town with over 300,000 inhabitants will be represented in the legislature in the same proportion as a country population of 30,000. Stettin, for example, with a population of 245,000, which is a seventh of the total population of Pomerania, has only 6 of the 89 provincial representatives. Further, the three-class system of voting in Prussia and in the German cities, is a unique arrangement for giving men the suffrage without either power or privilege. According to this system every male inhabitant of Prussia aged twenty-five is entitled to vote in the election of members of the lower house. The voters, however, are divided into three classes. This division is made by taking the total amount of the state taxes paid in each electoral district and dividing it into three equal amounts. The first third is paid by the highest tax-payers; the second third by the next highest tax-payers, and the last third by the rest. The first class consists of a comparatively few wealthy people; it may even happen that a single individual pays a third of the taxes in a given district. These three classes then elect the members of an electoral college, who then elect the member of the house. In Prussia it may be said roughly that 260,000 wealthy tax-payers elect one-third; 870,000 tax-payers elect one-third, and the other 6,500,000 voters elect one-third of the members of the electoral college, with the consequence that the 6,500,000 are not represented at all in the lower house of Prussia. In order to make this three-class system of voting quite clear, let us take the case of a city where the same principle may be seen at work on a smaller scale. In 1910, in the city of Berlin, there were:

931 voters of the first class paying 27,914,593 marks of the total tax.

32,131 voters of the second class paying 27,908,776 marks of the total tax.

357,345 voters of the third class paying 16,165,501 marks of the total tax.

Roughly the voters in the first class each paid $7,500; those in the second class $218; those in the third class $11. The 931 voters elected one-third, 32,131 voters elected one-third, and 357,345 elected one-third of the town councillors. In this same year in Berlin there were:

521 persons with incomes between $25,000 and $62,500.

139 persons with incomes between $62,500 and $125,000.

22 persons with incomes between $125,000 and $187,500.

19 persons with incomes between $187,000 and $250,000.

19 persons with incomes of $250,000 or more. Or 720 persons in Berlin in 1912 with incomes of over $25,000 a year, and they are practically the governors of the city.

As a result of these divisions according to taxes paid, of the 144 town councillors elected, only 38 were Social-Democrats, though Berlin is overwhelmingly Social-Democratic, and consequently the affairs of this city of more than 2,000,000 inhabitants are in the hands of 33,062 persons who elect two-thirds of the town councillors.

In the city of Duesseldorf there were, excluding the suburbs, 62,443 voters at the election for town councillors in 1910. The first class was composed of 797 voters paying from 1,940 to 264,252 marks of taxes; 6,645 voters paying from 222 to 1,939 marks; and 55,001 voters paying 221 marks or less. These 7,442 voters of the first and second classes were in complete control of the city government by a clear majority of two-thirds.

It is this three-class system of voting that makes Prussia, and the Prussian cities as well, impregnable against any assault from the democratically inclined. In addition to this system, the old electoral divisions of forty years ago remain unchanged, and consequently the agricultural east of Prussia, including east and west Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, Posen, and Silesia, with their large landholders, return more members to the Prussian lower house than the much greater population of western industrial Prussia, which includes Sachsen, Hanover, Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Hohenzollern, Hessen-Nassau, and the Rhine. Further, the executive government of Prussia is conducted by a ministry of state, the members of which are appointed by the King, and hold office at his pleasure, without control from the Landtag.

How little the people succeeded in extorting from King Frederick William IV in the way of a constitution may be gathered from this glimpse of the present political conditions of Prussia.

The local government of Prussia is practically as centralized in a few hands as the executive government of the state itself. The largest areas are the provinces, whose chiefs or presidents also are appointed by the sovereign, and who represent the central government. There are twelve such provinces in Prussia, ranging in size from the Rhineland and Brandenburg, with 7,120,519 and 4,093,007 inhabitants respectively, to Schleswig-Holstein, with 1,619,673.

Each province is divided into two or more government districts, of which there are thirty-five in all. At the head of each of these districts is the district president, also appointed by the crown.

In addition there is the Kreis, or Circle, of which there are some 490, with populations varying from 20,000 to 801,000. These circles are, for all practical purposes, governed by the Landrath, who is appointed for life by the crown, and who is so fully recognized as the agent of the central government and not as the servant of the locality in which he rules, that on one occasion several Landraethe were summarily dismissed for voting against the government and in conformity to the wishes of the inhabitants of the circle in which they lived! Though the Landrath is nominated by the circle assembly for appointment by the crown, he can be dismissed by his superiors of the central hierarchy. As his promotion, and his career in fact, is dependent upon these superiors, he naturally sides with the central government in all cases of dispute or friction.

Further, and this is important, all officials in Germany are legally privileged persons. All disputes between individuals and public authorities in Germany are decided by tribunals quite distinct from the ordinary courts. These courts are specially constituted, and they aim at protecting the officials from any personal responsibility for acts done by them in their official capacity.

In America, and I presume in Great Britain also, any disputes between public authorities and private individuals are settled in the ordinary courts of justice, under the rules of the ordinary law of the land. This super-common-law position of the Prussian official is a fatal incentive to the aggravating exaggeration of his importance, and to the indifference of his behavior to the private citizen. There may be officials who are uninfluenced by this sheltered position, indeed I know personally many who are, but there is equally no doubt that many succumb to arrogance and lethargy as a consequence.

How thoroughly Prussia is covered by a network of officialdom, is further discovered when it is known, that the entire area of Prussia is some twenty thousand square miles less than that of the State of California. The whole Prussian doctrine of local self-government, too, is entirely different from ours. Their idea is that self-government is the performance by locally elected bodies of the will of the state, not necessarily of the locality which elects them. Local authorities, whether elected or not, are supposed to be primarily the agents of the state, and only secondarily the agents of the particular locality they serve. In Prussia, all provincial and circle assemblies and communal councils, may be dissolved by royal decree, hence even these elected assemblies may only serve their constituencies at the will and pleasure of the central authority.

It would avail little to go into minute details in describing the government of Prussia; this slight sketch of the electoral system, and of the centralization of the government, suffices to show two things that it is particularly my purpose to make clear. One is the preponderating influence of Prussia in the empire, due to the maintenance of power in a single person; and the other is to show how ridiculously futile it is to refer to Prussia as an example of the success of social legislation. The state ownership of railroads, old-age pensions, accident and sickness insurance, and the like are one thing in Prussia which is a close corporation, and quite another in any community or country under democratic government. What takes place in Prussia would certainly not take place in America or in England. To draw inferences from a state governed as is Prussia, for application to such democratic communities as America or England, is as valuable as to argue from the habits of birds, that such and such a treatment would succeed with fish.

It was with this autocratic Prussia at his back, that the greatest man Germany has produced, succeeded in bringing about German unity and the foundation of the German Empire. As the representative of Prussia in the Diet, as her ambassador to Russia, and to France, he gained the insight into the European situation which led him to hold as his political creed, that only by blood and iron, and not by declamations and resolutions, could Germany be united.

"During the time I was in office," he writes, "I advised three wars, the Danish, the Bohemian, and the French; but every time I have first made clear to myself whether the war, if successful, would bring a prize of victory worth the sacrifices which every war requires, and which now are so much greater than in the last century. ... I have never looked at international quarrels which can only be settled by a national war from the point of view of the Goettingen student code; ... but I have always considered simply their reaction on the claim of the German people, in equality with the other great states and powers of Europe, to lead an autonomous political life, so far as is possible on the basis of our peculiar national capacity." In 1863 he writes to von der Goltz, then German ambassador in Paris: "The question is whether we are a great power or a state in the German federation, and whether we are conformably to the former quality to be governed by a monarch, or, as in the latter case would be at any rate admissible, by professors, district judges, and the gossips of the small towns. The pursuit of the phantom of popularity in Germany which we have been carrying on for the last forty years has cost us our position in Germany and in Europe; and we shall not win this back again by allowing ourselves to be carried away by the stream in the persuasion that we are directing its course, but only by standing firmly on our legs and being, first of all, a great power and a German federal state afterward."