My Four Years in Germany

by James W. Gerard

The workingmen in the cities are hard workers and probably work longer and get less out of life than any workingmen in the world. The laws so much admired and made ostensibly for their protection, such as insurance against unemployment, sickness, injury, old age, etc., are in reality skilful measures which bind them to the soil as effectively as the serfs of the Middle Ages were bound to their masters' estates.

I have had letters from workingmen who have worked in America begging me for a steerage fare to America, saying that their insurance payments were so large that they could not save money out of their wages. Of course, after having made these payments for some years, the workingman naturally hesitates to emigrate and so lose all the premiums he has paid to the State. In peace times a skilled mechanic in Germany received less than two dollars a day, for which he was compelled to work at least ten hours. Agricultural labourers in the Central Empires are poorly paid. The women do much of the work done here by men. For instance, once when staying at a nobleman's estate in Hungary, I noticed that the gardeners were all women, and, on inquiring how much they received, I was told they were paid about twenty cents a day. The women in the farming districts of Germany are worked harder than the cattle. In summer time they are out in the fields at five or six in the morning and do not return until eight or later at night. For this work they are sometimes paid as high as forty-eight cents a day in harvest time. Nevertheless, these small wages tempt many Russians to Germany during the harvest season. At the outbreak of the war there were perhaps fifty thousand Russians employed in Germany; men, women and girls. These the Germans retained in a sort of slavery to work the fields. I spoke to one Polish girl who was working on an estate over which I had shooting rights, near Berlin. She told me that at the commencement of the war she and her family were working in Germany and that since the war they all desired to return to Poland but that the Germans would not permit it.

This hard working of women in agricultural pursuits tends to stupefy and brutalise the rural population and keeps them in a condition of subjection to the Prussian Church and the Prussian system, and in readiness for war. Both Prussian Junkers and the German manufacturers look with favour upon the employment of so many women in farm work because the greater the number of the labourers, the smaller their wages throughout the country.

When I first came to Germany I, of course, was filled with the ideas that prevailed in America that the German workingman had an easy time. My mind was filled with pictures of the German workingmen sitting with their families at tables, drinking beer and listening to classical music. After I had spent some time in Germany, I found that the reason that the German workingmen sat about the tables was because they were too tired to do anything else.

I sincerely hope that after the war the workingmen of this country will induce delegates of their German brothers to make a tour of America. For when the German workingmen see how much better off the Americans are, they will return to Germany and demand shorter hours and higher wages; and the American will not be brought into competition with labour slaves such as the German workingmen of the period before the war.

As one goes through the streets of Berlin there are no evidences of poverty to be seen; but over fifty-five per cent of the families in Berlin are families living in one room.

The Germans are taken care of and educated very much in the same way that the authorities here look after the inmates of a poor-house or penitentiary. Such a thing as a German railway conductor rising to be president of the road is an impossibility in Germany; and the list of self-made men is small indeed,--by that I mean men who have risen from the ranks of the working-men.

The Socialists, representing the element opposed to the Conservatives, elect a few members to the Prussian Lower House and about one-third of the members to the Reichstag, but otherwise have no part whatever in the government. No Socialist would have any chance whatever if he set out to enter the government service with the ambition of becoming a district attorney or judge. Jews have not much chance in the government service. A few exceptions have been made. At one time Dernburg, who carried on the propaganda in America during the first year of the war, and who is a Jew, was appointed Colonial Minister of the Empire.

In my opinion, the liberalisation of Prussia has been halted by the fact that there has been no party of protest except that of the Socialists, and the Socialists, because they have, in effect, demanded abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic as part of their programme, have been unable to do anything in the obtaining of the reforms.

Up to the beginning of the war there was great dissatisfaction. The people were irritated by certain direct taxes such as the tax upon matches, and because every Protestant in Prussia was compelled to pay a tax for the support of the church, unless he made a declaration that he was an atheist.