THE PAUPER PROBLEM IN GERMANY.
BY BISHOP JOHN F. HURST.
The poorest Germans one sees are not here in Germany, but on the American side of the Atlantic, at Castle Garden and other landing places. All hours of the day and night I have been along the German thoroughfares of travel, and yet I can not recall that any one has put out his hand for alms, or that few have presented the appearance of extreme penury. There is no question that there has been a wonderful coming up of the general industrial life of Germany since the consolidation of the countries, and since the leadership of Bismarck has thrust new force into every part of the national civilization. But what with all the absorption of a million of men into the national army, and the coming and going from civil into military life of all the young in the land, there are multitudes to whom bread is the one supreme thought. There are millions for whom there must be work to-day for the loaf of to-morrow. There are two questions which constantly monopolize the thought of the Prussian government—to keep safe against the French, who do not forget the loss of Alsace and Lorrain, in 1871, and, then, how to keep the workingmen busy. Why all this talk about German colonies? Why does Prussia, with only a strip of the North Sea for its only outlet to the ocean, fill its days of Parliament and its periodical press, with discussions as to how to get more land, on some distant coast, where colonies may be planted? It is simply to furnish, as does India for Britain, an outlet for trade. Why did the old Kaiser Wilhelm, only the other day, declare that he had spent his reign in trying to develop the internal policy of the country, but that to his son and successor, Friedrich Wilhelm, would belong the mission of developing the German colonist policy? He meant, as does every Hohenzollern, that his people should be busy in peace, and therefore strong for war. But while there are few evidences in public of extreme poverty in Germany, and while there has been a singular elevation of the general cheerfulness of the lower classes, there is real pauperism, and a plenty of it. But it is not allowed to come to the light. No shrewder piece of management has ever been accomplished in Germany than the skillful dealing with the veritable pauper within the last ten years. It is as nearly a perfect work as one ever saw performed upon the man in rags. It is as exquisite an adjustment of legal and voluntary measures, an interlacing of what people choose to do and what they are compelled to do, as the sun shines on. But this must be said: the government could not manage the pauper alone. It was too great a task for even Bismarck and the Emperor. Christian people have done it, and of their own free will. In 1880 a body of earnest people, many of them evangelical Christians, formed themselves into an association for the care of the poor and for beneficiaries. Scattered societies had already existed, and for a long time. For example, in 1840, Gustav Werner founded an institution for the relief of the poor of Wurtemburg, which has grown into a mammoth affair, and now numbers one hundred and twenty-four houses for labor. Other benevolent spirits had followed in his footsteps. But here in Germany the watchword is now consolidation, and so the efforts to solve the pauper problem have been combined. The association which came into being only four years ago, to help the poor out of their misery, has held annual sessions, collected important statistics, presented themes for better methods, and has rallied to the standard men of the strongest hands and keenest minds in the Fatherland. They have told the government some things that the census taker knows nothing about. Each report of their annual meeting is a stout volume, and a more useful document can hardly be found in the current literature of even literary Germany.
I have said that there is but little semblance of extreme pauperism—the actual putting out the hand for the coppers with which to buy bread and cast off clothes. But this retirement of the pauper from public gaze is a new thing. What has he been doing? Until very lately, to every German square mile, which is four times the English mile, there were ten beggars, who averaged a mark, or twenty-five cents, a day, by the desperate plying of their craft. Now, the German empire covers just space enough to make the voluntary gifts to beggars amount to 36,500,000 marks, or $9,125,000. This state of things existed in much grosser forms when the gifts were simply enormous, until very recently, and since the beginning of the efforts to solve the question of beggary.
But the one great thing that has come to light, and which is now presented to the German people with tremendous force, is this: the cause of the pauperism is intemperance. This revelation has been slow in coming, but it has come at last, and the statistics show that where there is most beer there is most beggary. Hence the efforts made to do away with public pauperism touch upon the still broader and deeper one of intemperance.
The desperation of the beggar is well known. Here in Germany they have a proverb:
Es ist und bleibt die alte Geschicht;