Berlin is still in the throes of that sophomorical philosophy of life which believes that it is, from the point of view of sophistication, of age, when it is free to be befuddled with wine and befooled by women. But the German mind has no sympathy with hypocrisy. They may be brutal in their rather material views of morals, but they are frank. There may be mental prigs among them, but there are no moral prigs. In both England and America we suffer from a certain morbid ethical daintiness. There is a ripeness of moral fastidiousness that is often difficult to distinguish from rottenness. It is part of the feminism of America, born of our prosperity, for not one of these fastidious moralists is not a rich man, and Germany escapes this difficulty.
The government of a German city is so simple in its machinery that every voter can easily understand it. No doubt Seth Low and George L. Rives could explain to an intelligent man the charter under which New York City is governed, but they are very, very rare exceptions.
Our city government is bad, not because democracy is a failure, not because Americans are inherently dishonest, but because we are a superficially educated people, untrained to think, and, therefore, still worshipping the Jeffersonian fetich of divided responsibility between the three branches of the government. The judicial, the legislative, and the executive are, with minute care, forced to check and to impede one another, and we even carry this antiquated superstition, born of a suspicious and timid republicanism, into the government of our cities. With the exception of those cities in America which are governed by commissions, our cities are slaves as compared with the German cities. They are slaves of the predatory politicians, and they, on the other hand, are the bribed taskmasters of the rich corporations. The German asks in bewilderment why our men of wealth, of leisure, and of intelligence are not devoting themselves to the service of the state and the city. Alas, the answer is the pitiable one that the electoral machinery is so complicated that the voters can be and are, continually humbugged; and worse, many of the wealthy and intelligent, through their stake in valuable city franchises, are incompetent to deal fairly with the municipal affairs of their own city. Both in England and in America, the man in the street is quite sound in his judgment, when he declines to trust those who dabble in securities with which their own department has dealings. The British Caesar’s wife official, caught with a handkerchief on her person, woven on the looms of a company whose directors are dealing with the British government, can hardly claim exemption from suspicion, because she bought the handkerchief in America. We all know that when London sniffles the value of handkerchiefs goes up in New York. Caesar’s wife finds it difficult to persuade honorable men that she merely had a financial cold, but not the smallest interest in a corner in handkerchiefs.
In the great majority of German cities public-utility services, gas, water, electricity, street-railways, slaughter-houses, and even canals, docks, and pawn-shops are owned and controlled by the cities themselves. There is no loop-hole for private plunder, and there is, on the contrary, every incentive to all citizens, and to the rich in particular, to enforce the strictest economy and the most expert efficiency.
What theatres, opera-houses, orchestras, museums, what well-paved and clean streets, what parks Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco might have, had these cities only a part of the money, of which in the last twenty-five years they have been robbed! It is true that the older cities of Germany have traditions behind them that we lack. Art treasures, old buildings, and an intelligent population demanding the best in music and the drama we cannot hope to supply, but good house-keeping is another matter. Berlin, for example, is a new city as compared with New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and its growth has been very rapid.
It cannot be said for us alone that we have grown so fast that we have had no time to keep pace with the needs of our population. Berlin, all Germany indeed, has been growing at a prodigious rate. The population of Berlin in 1800 was 100,000; in 1832 only 250,000; hardly half a million in 1870; while the population now is over 2,000,000, and over 3,000,000 if one includes the suburbs, which are for all practical purposes part and parcel of Berlin. Charlottenburg, for example, with a population of 19,517 in 1871, now has a population of 305,976, and the vicinage of Berlin has grown in every direction in like proportions.
There were no towns in Germany till the eighth century, except those of the Romans on the Rhine and the Danube. In 1850 there were only 5 towns in Germany with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and in 1870 only 8; in 1890, 26; in 1900, 33; in 1905, 41; in 1910, 47; and nearly the whole increase of population is now massed in the middle-sized and large cities. The same may be said of the drift of population in America. “A thrifty but rather unprogressive provincial town of 60,000 inhabitants,” writes Mr. J. H. Harper, of New York, in 1810.
Between 1860 and 1900 the proportion of urban to rural population in the United States more than doubled. In the last ten years the percentage of people living in cities, or other incorporated places of more than 2,500 inhabitants, increased from 40.5 to 46.3 per cent. of the total; while twenty years ago only 36.1 per cent. of the population lived in such incorporated places.
As late as the thirteenth century the Christian chivalry of the time was spending itself in the task of converting the heathen of what is now Prussia; and it was well on into the nineteenth century before serfdom was entirely abolished in this region. It is the newness and rawness of the population, in the streets of the great German and Prussian capital which surprise and puzzle the American, almost more than the cleanliness and orderliness of the streets themselves. It is as though a powerful monarch had built a fine palace and then, for lack of company, had invited the people from the fields and farm-yards to be his companions therein.
“Jamais un lourdaud, quoi qu’il fasse
Ne saurait passer pour galaud.”