Why should the press or society take this assembly very seriously, when, as the most important measure of which they are capable, they can vote to have themselves dismissed by declining to pass supply bills; and when, as has happened four times in their history, they return chastened, tamed, and amenable to the wishes of their master?
No wonder the political writing in the press seems to us vaporish and without definite aims. It is perhaps due to this weakness that the writing in the German journals upon other subjects is very good indeed. The best energies of the writers are devoted to what may be called educational and literary expositions. In the field of foreign politics the German press is less well-informed, less instructive, and consequently irritating. The poverty of material resources makes such writing as that of Sir Valentine Chirrol, and in former days that of Mr. G. W. Smalley, beyond the reach of the German journalist, and their press is painfully narrow, frequently unfair, and often purposely insulting to foreign countries. They are not only anti- English, but anti-French, anti-American, and at times bitter. If the American people read the German newspapers there would be little love lost between us.
V BERLIN
He is a fortunate traveller who enters Berlin from the west, and toward the end of his journey rolls along over the twelve or fifteen miles of new streets, glides under the Brandenburger Tor, and finds himself in Unter den Linden. The Kaiserdamm, Bismarck Strasse, Berliner Strasse, Charlottenburgerchaussee, Unter den Linden, give the most splendid street entrance into a city in the world. The pavement is without a hole, without a crack, and as clear of rubbish of any kind as a well-kept kitchen floor. The cleanliness is so noticeable that one looks searchingly for even a scrap of paper, for some trace of negligence, to modify this superiority over the streets of our American cities. But there is no consolation; the superiority is so incontestable that no comparison is possible. For the whole twelve or fifteen miles the streets are lined with trees, or shrubs, or flowers, with well-kept grass, and with separate roads on each side for horsemen or foot-passengers. In the spring and summer the streets are a veritable garden.
Broadway is 80 feet wide; Fifth Avenue is 100 feet wide; the Champs Elysées is 233 feet wide; and Unter den Linden is 196 feet wide, and has 70 feet of roadway.
For every square yard of wood pavement in Berlin there are 24 square yards of asphalt and 37 square yards of stone. The total length of streets cleaned in Berlin, which has an area of 25 square miles, according to a report of some few years ago, was 316 miles; there are 700 streets and some 70 open places, and the area cleaned daily was 8,160,000 square yards. The cost of the care of the Berlin streets has risen with the growth of the city from 1,670,847 marks, [1] in 1880, to 6,068,557 marks, in 1910. The total cost of the street-cleaning in New York, in 1907, was $9,758,922, and in Manhattan, The Bronx, and Brooklyn 5,129 men were employed; while the working force in Berlin, in 1911, was 2,150. It should be said also that in New York an enormous amount of scavenging is paid for privately besides. In New York the street-sweepers are paid $2.19 a day; in Berlin the foremen receive 4.75 marks the first three years, and thereafter 5 marks; the men 3.75 marks the first three years, then 4 marks, and after nine years’ service 4.50 marks. The boy assistants receive 2 marks, after two years 2.25 marks, and after four years service 3 marks. The whole force is paid every fourteen days. The street-cleaning department is divided into thirty-three districts, these districts into four groups, each with an inspector, and all under a head-inspector. Attached to each district are depots with yards for storage of vehicles, apparatus, brooms, shovels, uniforms, with machine shops, where on more than one occasion I have seen enthusiastic workmen trying experiments with new machinery to facilitate their work.
[1] The mark is equal to a little less than twenty-five cents.
Over this whole force presides, a politician? Far from it; a technically educated man of wide experience, and, of the official of my visit I may add, of great courtesy and singular enthusiasm both for his task and for the men under him. What his politics are concerns nobody, what the politics of the party in power are concerns him not at all. That an individual, or a group of individuals, powerful financially or politically, should influence him in his choice or in his placing of the men under him is unthinkable. That a political boss in this or in that district, should dictate who should and who should not, be employed in the street-cleaning department, even down to the meanest remover of dung with a dust-pan, as was done for years in New York and every other city in America, would be looked upon here as a farce of Topsy-Turvydom, with Alice in Wonderland in the title-rôle.
The streets are cleaned for the benefit of the people, and not for the benefit of the pockets of a political aristocracy. The public service is a guardian, not a predatory organization. In our country when a man can do nothing else he becomes a public servant; in Germany he can only become a public servant after severe examinations and ample proofs of fitness. The superiority of one service over the other is moral, not merely mechanical.
The street-cleaning department is recruited from soldiers who have served their time, not over thirty-five years of age, and who must pass a doctor’s examination, and be passed also by the police. The rules as to their conduct, their uniforms, their rights, and their duties, down to such minute carefulness as that they may not smoke on duty “except when engaged in peculiarly dirty and offensive labor,” are here, as in all official matters in Germany, outlined in labyrinthine detail. Sickness, death, accident, are all provided for with a pension, and there are also certain gifts of money for long service. The police and the street-cleaning department co-operate to enforce the law, where private companies or the city-owned street-railways are negligent in making repairs, or in replacing pavement that has been disturbed or destroyed. There is no escape. If the work is not done promptly and satisfactorily, it is done by the city, charged against the delinquent, and collected!