Part 22

The German army, which is in itself a school of hygiene for the man, where the death-rate is the lowest of any army in Europe, and the many provisions for the state care of the population, all go to coddle the men and protect them. The various forms of labor insurance alone in Germany cost the state over $250,000 a day, and if we include the amount expended in compensation in all its forms, the yearly bill of the state for the care of its sick, injured and aged, amounts to nearly $170,000,000. No wonder that between the care of a grandmotherly state, and the attentions of a subservient womankind, the male population increases. I sometimes question whether there is not something of the hot-house culture about this male crop. Certainly consumption and other diseases are very wide-spread. A very detailed and careful investigation of certain forms of weakness is being made by our Rockefeller Institute at this time, and if I am not mistaken in the results of what these investigations have thus far disclosed, it will be found that Germany has her full share of rottenness to deal with. To those who care to corroborate these hints with facts I recommend the reading of certain recent numbers of the hygienic Rundschau, a German technical magazine of repute.

There is a lack of vitality and elasticity, a stodgy, plodding way of working, much indulgence in gregarious eating and drinking, and very mild forms of exercise and holiday-making, comparatively little sport, almost no game-playing where boys and men hustle one another about as in foot-ball and polo, and very long hours of application, from the school-boy to the ministers of state, all of which tend to and do produce a physical lack of alertness, vivacity, and audacity in the men of practically all classes.

The way to see the people of a country is to stand by the hour in the large industrial towns and watch them as they go to and from their work; to watch them flocking in and out of railway stations, and at work in large numbers in the fields of Saxony, Silesia, and other parts of Prussia; to spend hours, and I admit that they are tedious hours, strolling through factories, ship-yards, mines, and offices, paying no attention to the talk of your guide, but studying the faces and physique of the men and women. Having done this, an impartial observer is bound to remark that industrial and commercial Germany is taking a tremendous toll for the rapid progress she has made. It may be no worse here than elsewhere, but neither has the problem of a healthy, happy, toiling population been satisfactorily solved here, though perhaps better here than elsewhere. I have heard the women and girls in factories singing at their work, but the bird is no less caged because it sings.

Men who ought to know better set an example of long hours of confinement at their work which is quite unnecessary. They tell you with pride that they are at it from eight or nine in the morning till seven and often till later at night. That is something that no sane man ought to be proud of. On investigation you find that in industrial and commercial circles, and in the offices of the state, men take two hours for luncheon and then return to work till nightfall. Two hours in the open air at the end of the day could be managed easily, but they do not want it. There is no vitality left for a game, for exercise, for a bath, and a change.

They drug themselves with work, and slip away to the theatre, to a concert, to a Verein or circle, unwashed, ungroomed, and physically torpid, and the great mass of the population, high and low alike, outside the army officers, look it.

The army officer's career is dependent upon his mental and physical vigor. The cylinder is quickly handed him and the helmet taken away if he grows too fat and too slow physically and mentally. There is no nepotism, no favoritism, and on reaching a certain rank he goes, if he falls below the standard required, and consequently he keeps himself fit. But a huge bureaucracy, with its stupid promotions by years and not by ability, with its government stroke, and its dangling pensions, positively breeds lassitude, laziness, and dulness. You may see it on every hand in government offices, in the railway and postal services, where men are evidently kept on not for their fitness but by the tyranny of the system. High officials admit as much.

In the little state of Prussia the railways pay well and are well managed, but they are clogged to a certain extent by inefficient and unnecessary employees, and were the system spread over the United States the chaos in a dozen years would be almost irreparable, and even here the complaints are many and vigorous. Probably one male over twenty-five years of age out of every four is in government employ. This alone would account for the general air of lassitude which is one of the most noticeable features of German life. The Germans as a whole are beginning to look tired. It is a German, not an Italian or a Frenchman, the philosopher Nietzsche, who writes: "Seit es Menschen giebt, hat der Mensch sich zu wenig gefreut; das allein ist unsere Erbsuende."

There has been a great change in the status of women in the last twenty-five years. The apophthegm of Pericles, or rather of Thucydides, "that woman is best who is least spoken of among men, either for good or evil," is not so rigidly enforced. Increased wealth throughout Germany has left the German woman more leisure from the drudgery of the home. She is not so wholly absorbed by the duties of nurse, cook, and house-maid as she once was. But even to-day her economies and her ability to keep her house with little outside assistance are amazing. Some of the most delightful meals I have taken, have been in professional households, where small incomes made it necessary that wife and daughters should do most of the work.

The German professor has his faults, but in his own simple home, the work of the day behind him, his family about him at his well-filled but not luxurious board, with some member of the family not unlikely to be an accomplished musician and with his own unrivalled store of learning at your service, when he raises his glass to you, filled with his best, with a smile and a hearty "Prosit," he is hard to beat as a host, to my thinking. Perhaps there is nothing like overindulgence to make one crave simplicity, and no doubt this accounts for the fact that the really great ones of earth are satisfied and happy with enough, and abhor too much.

They tell me that the Dienstmaedchen is no longer what she used to be, but to my untutored eye her duties still seem to be as comprehensive as those of a Sioux squaw, and her performances unrivalled. As is to be expected, Germany is not blessed with trained servants. They are helpers rather than professional servants. In the scores of houses, public and private, where I have been a guest, only in one or two had the servants more than an alphabetical knowledge of what was due to one's clothes and shoes. The servants are rigidly protected by the state: they must have so much time off, they cannot be dismissed without weeks of warning, and they themselves carry books with their moral and professional biographies therein, which are always open to the inspection of the police; and they must all be insured.

In many towns, and cities too, there are hospitals and bands of nurses who for a small annual payment undertake to take over and care for a sick servant. If the doctor prescribes a "cure" for your servant, away she goes at the expense of the state to be taken care of. Wages are very small as compared with ours. Ten dollars a month for a cook, five for a house-maid, ten for a man-servant, forty to fifty for a chauffeur, and of course more in the larger and more luxurious establishments; though a chef who serves dinners for forty and fifty in an official household I know is content with twenty dollars a month. A nursery governess can be had for twelve, and a well-educated English governess for twenty dollars a month. Even these wages are higher than ten years ago. To be more explicit, in a small household where three servants are kept the cook receives 30 marks, the maid-servant 25 marks, and the nursery governess 35 marks a month. In the household of an official of some means the man-servant receives 45 marks, the cook 30 marks, and the maid-servant 30 marks a month. When dinners or other entertainments are given, outside help is called in. In the household of a rich industrial, whose family consists of himself, wife, and four children, the man-servant receives 80 marks, the chauffeur 200, the cook 45, the lady's maid 35, the house-maid 25, kitchen-maid 12, and the governess 30 marks a month.

I carry away with me delightful pictures of German households, big, little, and medium; and though it does not fit in nicely with my main argument, households whose mistresses were patterns of what a chatelaine should be. But I must leave that loop-hole for the critics, for I am trying only to tell the truth and to be fair, and not to be scientific or to bolster up a thesis.

I can see the big castle, centuries old, with its rambling buildings winging away from it on every side, and in the court-yard its regal-looking mistress positively garlanded with her dozen children. There is no sign of the decadence of the aristocracy here. We sit down twenty or more every day at the family luncheon. Tutors and governesses are at every turn. A French abbe, as silken in manner and speech as his own soutane, bowls over all my prejudices of creed and custom, as I watch him rule with the lightest of hands and the softest of voices a brood of termagant small boys; to turn from this to a game of billiards, and from that to the Merry Widow waltz on the piano, that we may dance. An aide-de-camp trained in India and a French abbe, I am convinced that these are the apotheosis of luxury in a large household. My Protestant brethren would, I am sure, throw their prejudices to the winds could they spend an evening with my friend, Monsieur l'Abbe! Nor Erasmus, nor Luther, nor Calvin would have had the heart to burn him. He is just as good a fellow as we are, knows far more, can turn his hand to anything from photography to the driving of a stubborn pony, knows his world as few know it, and yet is inviolably not of it. I have chatted with Jesuit priests teaching our Western Indians; I have travelled with a preaching friar in Italy on his round of sermonizing; I have seen them in South America, in India, China, and Japan, and I recognize and acclaim their self-denying prowess, but no one of them was a more dangerous missionary than my last-named friend among them, Monsieur l'Abbe!

"For ever through life the Cure goes With a smile on his kind old face-- With his coat worn bare, and his straggling hair, And his green umbrella-case."

There was a profusion at this castle, a heartiness of welcome, a patriarchal attitude toward the countless servants and satellites, an acreage of roaming space in the buildings, that smacked of the feudalism back to which both the castle and the family dated. How many Englishmen or Americans who sniff at German civilization ever see anything of the inside of German homes? Very few, I should judge, from the lame talk and writing on the subject. Let us go from this mediaeval setting for modern comfort to a smaller establishment. Here a miniature Germania, with blue eyes and golden hair, presides, looking like a shaft of sunlight in front of you as she leads the way about the paths of her gloomy forest. In these, and in not a few other houses, there is little luxury, no waste, a certain Spartan air of training, but abundance of what is necessary and a cheery and frank welcome.

I sometimes think the Germans themselves lose much by their rather overdeveloped tendency to meet not so often in one another's homes as in a neutral