"What do the parents say when their daughters take it up?" I asked, for I could not picture the German girl as I had always known her going out into the highways and byways of the city, leaving her cooking, her music, her embroidery, and her sentiment, and battling with the hideous realities of life amongst the sick, the poor, and the more or less wicked of the earth.
"The parents don't like it," my girl with the honest eyes admitted. "When girls have worked for us some time they often refuse to marry; at least, they refuse the arranged marriages proposed to them. But we cannot stop on that account. If a girl does not wish to marry in this way it is better that she should not. No good can come of it."
Then she went on to tell me how well it was that a child born to utmost shame and poverty should have a woman of the better classes interested from the beginning in its welfare, and responsible for its decent upbringing. It implied contact with various officials, of course, but she said that the ladies who took this work in hand met with courtesy and support everywhere.
You have only to place this type of young woman beside the Backfisch, who represents an older type quite fairly, to understand how far the modern German girl has travelled from the traditional lines. If you can imagine the Backfisch married and mentally little altered in her middle age, you can also imagine that she would find a daughter with the new ideas upsetting. At present both types are living side by side, for there are still numbers of women of the old school in Germany, women who passively accept the life made for them by their surroundings, whether it suits their needs or not; and who would never strike out a path for themselves, even if by doing so they could forget their own troubles in the troubles of others.
The State and Municipal establishments for the poor and sick have been so much described lately, that everyone in England must be acquainted with all that Berlin does for its struggling citizens. There are, of course, large hospitals and sanatoriums for consumption; and the admirable system of national insurance secures help in sickness to every working man and woman, as well as a pension in old age. "The club doctor and dispensary as we have them here do not exist," say the Birmingham Brassworkers in their pamphlet. "In their stead leading doctors and specialists (with very few exceptions) are at the service of the working man or woman."
"Yes," said a leading doctor to me when I quoted this; "we get about three half-pence for a consultation, and we find them the most impossible people in the community to satisfy. As they get medical advice for nothing they run from one doctor to another, and consult a dozen about some simple ailment that a student could set right. We all suffer from them." So that is the other side of the question.
But Berlin certainly manages its Submerged Tenth both more humanely and more wisely than we manage ours. It begins, as one thinks any civilised country must, by separating those who will not work from those who cannot. The able-bodied beggar, the drunkard, and other vagrants are sent to a house of correction and made to work. The respectable poor are not driven to herd with these people in Germany. They receive shelter and assistance at institutions reserved for the deserving. In one of these old married people who cannot support themselves are allowed to spend the evening of their lives together. Anyone desiring to know more about the charitable institutions of Berlin will find a most interesting account of them in the pamphlet written by the Birmingham Brassworkers, and published by P.S. King & Son. The bias of the authors is so strongly German that when you have read to the end you begin to lean in the opposite direction, and look for the things we manage better over here. "In 1900," they say, "there was such a shortage of houses (in Berlin) that 1500 families had to be sheltered in the Municipal Refuge for Homeless People." That is surely a worse state of affairs than in London. But when you walk through London or a London suburb in winter, and are pestered at every crossing and corner by able-bodied young beggars of both sexes, you begin to agree with the brassworkers. Berlin is clear of beggars and crossing-sweepers all the year round, and you know that as far as possible they are classified and treated according to their deserts. It is not possible for the individual bent on his own business to know at a glance whether he will encourage vice by giving alms or behave brutally to a deserving case by withholding them. The decision should never be forced upon him as it is in England every day of his life.