A well-known social authority, Mr. T. C. Horsfall, writing in the Spectator last December, told us that there is terrible overcrowding in nearly all large German towns, and that the overcrowded tall blocks of buildings are themselves too closely crowded together, and the effect is bad both for health and morality. The death-rate, including that of infants, is much higher with them than with us. And I cannot help thinking that the effect of giving families only two rooms and a small scullery, one living-room and one bedroom for all, must have its effect upon the morality of a population. Whatever the cause, we are told that in Berlin 17 per cent. of the births are registered as illegitimate, in Munich as many as 28 per cent., in Vienna over 40 per cent., while in London they are only 5 per cent.
“The effect on German town populations,” Mr. Horsfall states, “especially on the poorer inhabitants of Berlin, of the conditions existing in German towns is described in an appeal made in or about the year 1886 by Professor Schmoller to his fellow-countrymen to deal adequately and promptly with those conditions. The appeal has been reprinted in an important Report published in 1911 by Dr. Werner Hegemann:
‘The circumstances are so terrible that one can only wonder that the consequences have not been even worse. Only because a large part of these poor people have brought from their earlier life a store of good habits, of religious tradition, of decent feeling, into these dens, has the worst not yet been reached. But the children and young people who are now growing up in these holes must necessarily lose the virtues of economy, domesticity, family life, and all regard for law and property, decency, and good habits. He who has no proper dwelling, but only a sleeping-place, must fall a victim to the public-house and to drink.... The community to-day is forcing the lower strata of the factory proletariat of large towns by its dwelling conditions with absolute necessity to fall back to a level of barbarism and bestiality, of savagery and rowdiness, which our forefathers hundreds of years ago had left behind them. I maintain that there lies the greatest danger for our civilization.’”
With such examples as this before her we must trust that Russia will set about promoting the social well-being of her people with all her characteristic independence, and determine that in their housing she will have only those “great spaces” which are her characteristic features in so many other ways. We have to tread this same road of social reform also when the war is over, and it is good to think that we may, perhaps, be able to take it, just as we have carried on the war, without any party questions or party spirit connected with it, as will be the case also in Russia. It is even more inspiring to think, again let me say it, that we and our new friend may tread this path together: comparing notes and making plans together as we go. That would be indeed an Entente worth the name, when it was not in order that we might make war together, only that we had come to an agreement, but that we might help each other’s peoples in all the arts of peace. Mr. Baring tells us that he was once drinking tea with a Russian landowner who calls himself a moderate liberal, and when, in their conversation, the Anglo-Russian agreement was mentioned, he exclaimed (and I have no doubt he expressed the feelings of many others who desire the social good of Russia as he did so), “This is the most sensible thing the Russian government has done for the last forty years!”
The English Church of S. Andrew, at Moscow, with the Parsonage.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] “Anglitchanin” in The Contemporary Review, Nov., 1914.