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