and drinking. They return every year, are always
foreigners in Germany, and are very industrious, religious, contented,
and cheerful, but inclined to drink and fight.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] _Ein schlesisches Dorf und Rittergut_, von Gertrud Dyhrenfurth.
Leipzig, Duncker und Humblot.

CHAPTER XXV

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 Germ