Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

In a virile state, where the men take risks, where they play hazardous games, where they travel and seek adventure, where they emigrate to seek new opportunities, the women will greatly outnumber the men. The excess of females in England and Wales in 1871 was 594,000; in 1881, 694,000; in 1891, 896,000; in 1911, 1,178,000. The United Kingdom has the largest surplus of women of leisure in the world, and just now they are taking advantage of their numerical superiority in the most delightful and comical feminine fashion. They are proving their right to assist in coercing others to obey the laws, by disobeying the laws themselves. By pouring vitriol on golf-greens, by pinning their defiance to these dishevelled greens with hair-pins, they propose to provoke the recalcitrant to recognition of their right to pin their names to seats in the House of Commons. It is all so sweetly feminine, that the stranger is astonished to hear such women dubbed unwomanly. Pray, what could be more womanly in England, than to pin a protest to a golf-green with a hair-pin!

The German army, which is in itself a school of hygiene for the man, where the death-rate is the lowest of any army in Europe, and the many provisions for the state care of the population, all go to coddle the men and protect them. The various forms of labor insurance alone in Germany cost the state over $250,000 a day, and if we include the amount expended in compensation in all its forms, the yearly bill of the state for the care of its sick, injured and aged, amounts to nearly $170,000,000. No wonder that between the care of a grandmotherly state, and the attentions of a subservient womankind, the male population increases. I sometimes question whether there is not something of the hot-house culture about this male crop. Certainly consumption and other diseases are very wide-spread. A very detailed and careful investigation of certain forms of weakness is being made by our Rockefeller Institute at this time, and if I am not mistaken in the results of what these investigations have thus far disclosed, it will be found that Germany has her full share of rottenness to deal with. To those who care to corroborate these hints with facts I recommend the reading of certain recent numbers of the hygienic Rundschau, a German technical magazine of repute.

There is a lack of vitality and elasticity, a stodgy, plodding way of working, much indulgence in gregarious eating and drinking, and very mild forms of exercise and holiday-making, comparatively little sport, almost no game-playing where boys and men hustle one another about as in foot-ball and polo, and very long hours of application, from the school-boy to the ministers of state, all of which tend to and do produce a physical lack of alertness, vivacity, and audacity in the men of practically all classes.

The way to see the people of a country is to stand by the hour in the large industrial towns and watch them as they go to and from their work; to watch them flocking in and out of railway stations, and at work in large numbers in the fields of Saxony, Silesia, and other parts of Prussia; to spend hours, and I admit that they are tedious hours, strolling through factories, ship-yards, mines, and offices, paying no attention to the talk of your guide, but studying the faces and physique of the men and women. Having done this, an impartial observer is bound to remark that industrial and commercial Germany is taking a tremendous toll for the rapid progress she has made. It may be no worse here than elsewhere, but neither has the problem of a healthy, happy, toiling population been satisfactorily solved here, though perhaps better here than elsewhere. I have heard the women and girls in factories singing at their work, but the bird is no less caged because it sings.

Men who ought to know better set an example of long hours of confinement at their work which is quite unnecessary. They tell you with pride that they are at it from eight or nine in the morning till seven and often till later at night. That is something that no sane man ought to be proud of. On investigation you find that in industrial and commercial circles, and in the offices of the state, men take two hours for luncheon and then return to work till nightfall. Two hours in the open air at the end of the day could be managed easily, but they do not want it. There is no vitality left for a game, for exercise, for a bath, and a change.

They drug themselves with work, and slip away to the theatre, to a concert, to a Verein or circle, unwashed, ungroomed, and physically torpid, and the great mass of the population, high and low alike, outside the army officers, look it.

The army officer’s career is dependent upon his mental and physical vigor. The cylinder is quickly handed him and the helmet taken away if he grows too fat and too slow physically and mentally. There is no nepotism, no favoritism, and on reaching a certain rank he goes, if he falls below the standard required, and consequently he keeps himself fit. But a huge bureaucracy, with its stupid promotions by years and not by ability, with its government stroke, and its dangling pensions, positively breeds lassitude, laziness, and dulness. You may see it on every hand in government offices, in the railway and postal services, where men are evidently kept on not for their fitness but by the tyranny of the system. High officials admit as much.

In the little state of Prussia the railways pay well and are well managed, but they are clogged to a certain extent by inefficient and unnecessary employees, and were the system spread over the United States the chaos in a dozen years would be almost irreparable, and even here the complaints are many and vigorous. Probably one male over twenty-five years of age out of every four is in government employ. This alone would account for the general air of lassitude which is one of the most noticeable features of German life. The Germans as a whole are beginning to look tired. It is a German, not an Italian or a Frenchman, the philosopher Nietzsche, who writes: “Seit es Menschen giebt, hat der Mensch sich zu wenig gefreut; das allein ist unsere Erbsünde.”

There has been a great change in the status of women in the last twenty-five years. The apophthegm of Pericles, or rather of Thucydides, “that woman is best who is least spoken of among men, either for good or evil,” is not so rigidly enforced. Increased wealth throughout Germany has left the German woman more leisure from the drudgery of the home. She is not so wholly absorbed by the duties of nurse, cook, and house-maid as she once was. But even to-day her economies and her ability to keep her house with little outside assistance are amazing. Some of the most delightful meals I have taken, have been in professional households, where small incomes made it necessary that wife and daughters should do most of the work.

The German professor has his faults, but in his own simple home, the work of the day behind him, his family about him at his well-filled but not luxurious board, with some member of the family not unlikely to be an accomplished musician and with his own unrivalled store of learning at your service, when he raises his glass to you, filled with his best, with a smile and a hearty “Prosit,” he is hard to beat as a host, to my thinking. Perhaps there is nothing like overindulgence to make one crave simplicity, and no doubt this accounts for the fact that the really great ones of earth are satisfied and happy with enough, and abhor too much.