They accumulate comfort very slowly. The wages are small and the satisfactions are small. On the street-cars the conductor is grateful for a tip of five pfennigs, and his daily customers are handed from the car-steps and respectfully saluted in return for this tiny douceur. When you dine or lunch at a friend’s house you are expected to leave something in the expectant palm of his servant who sees you out.
Women carry small parcels of food to the theatre, to the tea and beer gardens, and thus save the small additional expense. Many a time have I seen these thrifty housewives pocket the sugar and the zwiebacks and Brödchen left over. In the hotels, soap, paper, and common conveniences of the kind are taken, so I am told, not, I maintain, as a theft, but as an economy. We are in the habit of carrying our small change loose in a trousers pocket, but the German almost without exception carries even his ten and five pfennig pieces carefully in a purse. Outside many of the big shops is placed a row of niches where you may leave your unfinished cigar till you return. The economy thus illustrated shows a certain disregard, of a not altogether agreeable chance of interchangeability, that might even be dangerous to health. On the other hand, it is a wise precaution that marks beer-glasses and beer-jugs with a line, to show just how much beer you are entitled to. This puts the foam-stealing vendor at your mercy.
The entertainments, dinners, luncheons, teas, except among the small cosmopolitan companies who do not count as examples of German manners and customs, are very prolonged affairs. There is much standing about. At ten o’clock, having dined at half-past seven, beer, tea, coffee, sandwiches are brought in, and you begin the gastronomics over again on a smaller scale. There is no occasion when eating and drinking are not part of the programme. If you go to the play or the opera you may eat and drink there; if you go for a walk the goal is not a bath and a rub-down, but beer or chocolate and cakes.
I am not sure that there is not something in the theory that their soil has less iron in it, being so intensively cultivated, and that our food is consequently stronger than theirs; at all events, they eat more frequently and more copiously than we do. It seems to me that both the men and the women show it in their faces and figures. They are a heavy, puffy, tumbling lot after forty; and with my prepossessions on the subject I am inclined to put it down to irregular eating, to too much eating of soft and sweet food, too much drinking of fattening beverages, and much, much too little regular exercise, and to the fact that they are still infants in the matter of personal hygiene. Dressing-gowns, slippers, proper care of the teeth and hair, regular ablutions, changing of clothes, all these dozens of helps to health are patiently neglected. It is just as troublesome to take care of yourself, to groom your person, to be regular in your habits, and restrained and careful in your diet as to take proper care of a horse or a dog. It shows a rather high grade of persistent prowess in a man just to keep himself fit, to keep himself in working or playing health. Without the drilling they receive in the army in these matters, one wonders where this population would be.
The doggedness, the patience of the German is notable, but the alertness, vivacity, the energy easily on tap, these are lacking both among the men and the women, and, as it seems to me, for these easily apparent reasons. There are more rest-cures, rheumatism, heart, liver, kidney, anaemic cures in Germany, and to suit all purses, than in all Anglo-Saxondom combined, even if subject territories are included. In Saxony alone, which is not renowned for its cures, the number of visitors at Augustus Bad, Bad Elester, Hermanus Bad, Schandau, and some seven others has increased from 13,000 ten years ago to 30,000 in 1910.
Between 1900 and 1909, while the population of Germany increased 15 per cent., the days of sickness in the insurance funds increased 59 per cent. and the expenditure 95 per cent. Some alterations were made in the law between those years permitting a certain extension of the days of sickness, but an accurate percentage may be taken between the years 1905 and 1909. During those years the population increased by 7 per cent., the days of sickness by 17 per cent., and the expenditure out of the sick-funds by 32 per cent. The total cost of sickness insurance in 1900 was $42,895,000 and in 1909 $83,640,000. What will happen in Great Britain when sickness insurance comes into thorough working order is worthy of caricature. The way my Irish friends will play that game fills me with joy. It is an abominable harness to put on the Anglo-Saxon, and he has my very best wishes if he refuses to wear it tamely. It is only another piece of tired legislation that solves nothing. Even Germany would be a thousand times better off without it. This attempting to make pills and powders take the place of love one another, is merely the politician sneaking away from his problem. Of course, it is impossible to tell how many people are sick by being paid for it, probably not a small number. We all have mornings when we would turn over and stick to our pillows if we were sure of payment for doing so. The German apparently is the only person in the world who is happy, aegrescit medendo. The Germans keep going, we must all admit that, but at a slower pace, with less energy to spare, and with far less robust love of life.
If the men are patient, the women must be more so, and they are. The marriage service still reads: “He shall be your ruler, and you shall be his vassal.” The women are not only patient with all that requires patience of the men, but they are patient with the men besides, a heavy additional burden from the American point of view. Beethoven writes: “Resignation! Welch’ elendes Hülfsmittel! Und doch bleibt es mir das einzige übrige.” They take resignation for granted as we never do.
Some ten years ago only, was formed the Women’s Suffrage League in Germany. It was necessary to organize in the free city of Hamburg, because women were not allowed either to form or to join political unions in Prussia! It is only within a very few years that the girls’ higher schools have been increased and cared for in due proportion to the schools provided for the higher education of the boys. The first girls’ rowing club was organized at Cassel in 1911. Even now as I write there are protests and petitions from the male masters against women teachers in the higher positions of even these schools. In the discussions as to the proper subjects to be taught to the girls, who in 1912 began attending the newly constituted continuation schools for girls in Berlin, there is a strong party who argue that all of them should be taught only house-keeping and the duties pertaining thereto. To the great majority of German men, children and the kitchen are and ought to be the sole preoccupations of women, with occasional church attendance thrown in.
There have been enormous changes in the place women hold in the German world in the last thirty years. The Red Cross organization of the women throughout Germany is admirable and as complete and efficient as the army that it is intended to help; one can hardly say more. There are many private charities in Berlin and other cities, managed entirely by women, and doing excellent and sensible work; such as the kindergartens, the Pestalozzi-Froebelhaus for example, where four hundred children are taken care of daily and fifteen thousand ten-pfennig meals provided, besides classes for the young women students under the supervision of the Berliner Verein für Volkserziehung, with courses in the elements of law and politics and other matters likely to concern them in their activities as teachers, nurses, or charity helpers; the invalid-kitchens; the societies for looking after young girls; the work in the Temperance League; the Lette-Verein, one of the most sane and sensible institutions in the world for the training of girls and young women, where they turn out some two thousand girls a year trained in house-wifely economy; the wonderful and pitiful colony at Bielefeld, founded by one of Germany’s greatest organizers and saints, Pastor Bodelschwing, and now carried on by his equally able son, and aided largely by the sympathy and resources of women. Only another Saint Francis could have imagined, and produced, and loved into usefulness such an institution.
The summer colonies, called gartenlauben colonies, where the outlying and unused land on the outskirts of the cities is divided up into small parcels and rented for a nominal sum to the poorer working people of the city, constitute a most sensible form of philanthropy. You see them, each named by its proprietor, with a flag flying, with the light barriers dividing them, and with the small huts erected as a shelter, where flowers and fruits and vegetables are grown, often adding no small amount to income, and in every case offering the soundest kind of work and recreation. These colonies were started by a woman in France, and the idea worked its way through Belgium to Germany, and they are now supported and helped by the direct interest of the Empress. The woman who put this scheme into operation ought to have a monument! At Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin, on a plot lent by the city, there are thirteen of these colonies divided into over a thousand plots.