Chapter 26

HOW THE POOR LIVE

Poverty in German cities puts on a more respectable face than it does in London or Manchester. It herds in the cellars and courtyards of houses that have an imposing frontage; and when it walks out of doors it does not walk in rags. But you only have to look at the pinched faces of the children in the poorer quarters of any city to know that it is there. They are tidier and cleaner than English slum children, but they make you wish just as ardently that you were the Pied Piper and could pipe them all with you to a land of plenty. It would require more experience and wider facts than I possess to compare the condition of the poor in England and Germany, especially as the professed economists and philanthropists who make it their business to understand such things disagree with each other about every detail. If you talk to Englishmen, one will tell you that the German starves on rye bread and horse sausage because he is oppressed by an iniquitous tariff; and the next will assure you that the German flourishes and fattens on the high wages and prosperous trade he owes entirely to his admirable protective laws. If you talk to the Anglophobe, he will tell you that the dirt, drunkenness, disease, and extravagance of the English lower classes are the sin and scandal of the civilised world; that it is useless for you to ask where the poor live in Berlin, because there are no poor. Everyone in Germany is clean, virtuous, well housed, and well-to-do. If you talk to an honest, reasonable German, he will recognise that each country has its own difficulties and its own shortcomings, and that both countries make valiant efforts to fight their own dragons. He will tell you of the suffering that exists amongst the German poor crowded into these houses with the imposing fronts, and of all that statecraft and philanthropy are patiently trying to accomplish. Doctor Shadwell, in his most valuable and interesting book _Industrial Efficiency_, says that the American has to pay twice as much rent as the English working man, and that rents in Germany are nearer the American than the English level. As wages are lower in Germany than in England, and as meat and groceries are decidedly dearer, it is plain that the working man cannot live in clover. Doctor Shadwell gives an example of a smith earning 1050 marks, and having to pay 280 for rent. He had a wife and two children, and Doctor Shadwell reckoned that the family to make two ends meet must live on 37 pf. per head per day; the prison scale per head being 80 pf. I know a respectable German charwoman who earns 41 marks a month, and pays 25 marks a month for her parterre flat in the _Hof_. She lets off all her rooms except the kitchen, and she sleeps in a place that is only fit for a coal-hole. A work-girl pays her 6 marks a month for a clean tidy bedroom furnished with a solid wooden bedstead, a chest of drawers, a sofa, and a table. This girl works from 7.30 to 6 in a shop, she pays the charwoman 10 pf. for her breakfast, 10 pf. weekly for her lamp, and another 10 pf. for the use and comfort of the kitchen fire at night. Her dinner of soup, meat, and vegetables the girl gets at a _Privatkueche_ for 40 pf. So the workgirl's weekly expenses for food, fire, and lodging are 5 marks 20 pf., but this does not give her an evening meal or afternoon coffee. The charwoman reckoned that she herself only had 15 marks a month for food, fire, light, and clothes; but she got nearly all her food with the families for whom she worked. She was a cheerful, honest body, and though she slept in a coal-hole was apparently quite healthy. She looked forward to her old age with tranquillity, because before long she would be in receipt of a pension from the State, a weekly sum that with her habits of thrift and industry would enable her to live.

A German lady who chooses to teach in a _Volksschule_, because she thinks the _Volk_ more interesting than Higher Daughters, described a home to me from which one of her pupils came. The parents had eight children, and the family of ten lived in two rooms. That is a state of things we can match in England, unhappily. But my friend described this home, not on account of its misery, but for the extraordinary neatness and comfort the mother maintained in it. "Every time I go there," said my friend, who lived with her father and sister in a charming flat,--"every time I go there I say to the woman, if only it looked like this in my home"; and there was no need for me to see the rooms to understand what she meant; for I know the air of order and even of solidity with which the poorest Germans will surround themselves if they are respectable. They have very few pieces of furniture, but those few will stand wear and tear; they prefer a clean painted floor to a filthy carpet, and they are so poor that they have no pence to spend on plush photograph frames. I cannot remember what weekly wage this family existed on, but I know that it seemed quite inadequate, and when I asked if the children were healthy as well as clean and tidy, my friend admitted that they were not. In spite of the brave struggle made by the parents, it was impossible to bring up a large family on such means, and the maladies arising from insufficient food, fire, and clothing afflicted them. The case is, I think, a typical one. English people are always impressed when they visit German cities by the tidy clothes poor people wear, and if they are shown the right interiors, by their clean tidy homes. But you need most carefully and widely collected facts and figures to judge how far the children of a nation are suffering from poverty. It was found, for instance, in one German city, that out of 1472 children examined in the elementary schools, 63 per cent. of the girls and 60 per cent. of the boys were _nicht voellig normal_.

Moreover, there are whole classes of poor people in Germany whose homes are not tidy and comfortable, who are crowded into cellars and courtyards, and who have neither time nor strength for the decencies of life. The "Sweater" flourishes in Berlin as well as in London, and his victims are as overworked as they are here. He is usually a Jew, it is said in Berlin, but I will not guarantee the truth of that, for I have not observed that the Jew is anywhere a harder task-master than the Christian. As Berlin grew, these spiders of society increased in numbers, finding it easy and profitable to employ home workers and spare themselves the expenses of factories and of insurance. Women who could not go out to work were tempted by the chance offered them of earning a trifle at home, and woman-like never paused to reckon whether it was worth earning. As the city gets larger every evil connected with the system increases. The worst paid are naturally the incompetent rough peasant women who swarm into Berlin from the country districts, because they think that it will be easier to sit at a machine than to labour in the fields. These people have to buy their machines and their cotton at high prices from their employers, and then they get 10 pf. for making a blouse. A lady who spends her life in working amongst poor people told me that many of them worked for nothing in reality, because the trifle they earned only just paid the difference between the food they had to buy ready cooked and the food they might with more leisure prepare at home. They pay high rents for wretched homes, L15, for instance, for a kitchen and one room in a dark courtyard. Under L13 it is impossible to get anything in the poorest quarter of Berlin.

"The house itself looked respectable enough from outside," says Frau Buchholz, when she went to see a girl who had just married a poor man; "but oh! those steep narrow stairs that I had to mount, those wretched entrances on each floor, the miserable door handles, the sickly bluish-grey walls, the shaky banisters! It was easy to see that the outside had been devised with a view to investors, and the inside for poverty." In houses of this class there are often three courtyards, one behind each other, all noisy and badly kept. The conditions of life in such circumstances are no better than in our own notorious slums, but a slum seven storeys high, and presenting a decent front to the world, does not suggest the real misery behind its regular row of windows, nor does the quiet well-swept street give any picture of the rabbit warren in the courtyards at the back. In the enormous "confection" trade of Berlin the home-workers are nearly all widows and mothers of families, as the unmarried girls prefer to go to factories. A skilled hand can earn a fair wage at certain seasons of the year, as the demand for skilled work in this department always exceeds the supply. But the average wage of the unskilled worker is only 10 marks a week, while it sinks as low as 4 marks for petticoats, aprons, and woollen goods. A corset maker, who has learned her trade, can only make from 8 to 10 marks a week in a factory, while a woman who sits at home and covers umbrellas gets 1 mark 50 pf. _a dozen_ when the coverings are of stuff, and slightly more when they are of silk. The extreme poverty of these home-workers is a constant subject of inquiry and legislation, but for various reasons it is most difficult to combat. The market is always over-crowded, because, badly paid as it is, the work is popular. Women push into it from the middle classes for the sake of pocket-money, and from the agrarian classes because they fancy a city life. Efforts are being made to organise them, and especially to train the daughters of these women to more healthy and profitable trades. I went over a small _Volkskueche_ in Berlin, and was told that there were many like it established by various charitable agencies, and that the effect of them was to make the children ready to go into service; a life that has some drawbacks, but should at any rate be wholesome and civilising,--a better preparation for marriage, too, than to sit like a slattern over a machine all day, and buy scraps of expensive ready-made food, because both time and skill are wanting for anything more palatable. In the kitchen I visited there were sixteen children from the poorest families in the neighbourhood, and, assisted by a superintendent and two teachers, they were preparing a dinner that cost 30 pf. a head for 250 people. The rooms were clean and plainly furnished. A small laundry business was run in connection with the kitchen, so that the girls should be thoroughly trained to wash and iron as well as to cook. Of late years the working classes of Berlin have adopted what they call _Englische Tischzeit_, and no one who knows the ways of the English artisan will guess that the German means _late dinner_. He now does his long day's work, I am told, on bread alone, and has the one solid meal in the twenty-four hours when he gets home at night. _Durch Arbeiten_, he calls it, and people interested in the welfare of the poor say it is bad for all concerned, but especially bad for the children, who come in too exhausted to eat, and for the women, who have to cook and clean up when the day's business should be nearly done. It is quite characteristic of some kinds of modern Germans that they should in a breath condemn us, imitate us, and completely misunderstand our ways.

The business women of Germany have organised themselves. _Der Kaufmaennische Verband fuer Weibliche Angestellte_ was founded by Herr Julius Meyer in 1889, and, beginning with 50 members, numbered 17,000 in 1904. Its aim has been to improve the conditions of life for women working in shops and businesses, to carry on their education, and to help them when ill or out of work. It began by opening commercial schools for women, where they could receive a thorough training in book-keeping, shorthand, typewriting, and other branches of office work. These have been a great success, have been imitated all over Germany, and have led to an expansion of the law enforcing on girls attendance at the State continuation schools. The society was founded to remedy some crying abuses amongst women employed in shops and offices, a working day of seventeen hours, for instance, dismissal without notice, no rest on Sundays, no summer holiday, and not only a want of seats but an actual prohibition to sit down even when unemployed. All these matters the society, which has become a powerful one, has gradually set right. A ten-hours' day for grown-up women, and eight hours for those under age, the provision of seats, an 8 o'clock closing rule, a month's notice on either side, some hours of rest on Sunday, and a summer holiday are all secured to members of the organisation. The system of "living in" does not obtain in Germany. Shops may only open for five hours on Sundays now, and large numbers do not open at all. They may only keep open after ten on twenty days in the year. Other reforms the society hopes to bring about in time; and meanwhile it occupies itself both in finding work for members who are out of place, and in protecting those who are sick and destitute.

The ladies of Germany have taken to philanthropic work with characteristic energy and thoroughness. There is one society in Berlin that has 700 members, some of whom devote their whole time to their poor neighbours. I am not going to give the name of the society; so I may describe one of its secretaries, who personified the best modern type of German woman. She was about 27, a dark-haired, slim, serious-looking person with delicate Jewish features and beautiful grey eyes; a girl belonging to the wealthy classes, and able if she had chosen to lead a life of frivolity and pleasure. But she had chosen instead to give herself to the sick, the afflicted, the needy, and even to the sinning; for she was a moving spirit of the organisation that dives down into the depths of the great city, and rescues those who have gone under. Her society also does a great deal for the children of the very poor, not only for babies in creches, but for those who go to school. The members help these older ones with their school work, and when the children are free teach them to wash, cook, and sew, and to play open-air games. They teach the blind, they look after the deserted families of men in prison, and the older members act as guardians to illegitimate children; for in Germany every illegitimate child must have a guardian, and women are now allowed to act in this capacity. The secretary said they found no difficulty in getting both married and single women to take up these good works.

"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.