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,