GERMAN "EFFICIENCY."

Matamata Record, Volume II, Issue 109, 5 December 1918, Page 1

GERMAN "EFFICIENCY."

# World Weary of Boast. Kaiser's People Much Outclassed. Mr E. T. Adams, author of the - following article, which appeared in the '' San Francisco Chronicle," is an engineer of national standing, professionally familiar with conditions which he describes. The world is weary ot all this talk of "German efficiency," with the implication that " effi- ! ciency " is typically German or that "German efficiency" is particularly commendable. This is not true. If the German appears to be more efficient than a Frenchman or an American it is chiefly because we give the name " German efficiency " to acts to which other people would give a very different name, regardless of whether they are efficiently performed or not. The German performance in Belgium is constantly quoted as a typical instance of German efficiency in making war. Why* efficiency? When the Sicilian saws off his shotgun and, from ambush, kills the neighbour by whom he has lived and worked for years we do not say '* Sicilian efficiency "; we exclaim, " A black-hand outrage." Much of this so-called German efficiency, when analysed, shows this same ruthlessness, this same disregard of moral values and human rights. The German is super-efficient only when we pronounce him efficient because of acts which are commonly and rightly considered as evidence of moral degeneracy. This war is largely to teach the Germans that disregard of the rights of others is not efficiency.

COMPARISON OF METHODS. The German is not mere efficient than the American, neither is he more efficient than the Englishman or the man of France. It is true that there is probably no class in Germany so worthless and inefficient as the thousands of defectives from the beaten nations of Europe whom we allowed the German shipowner for his profits to gather together and transport to our shores. But, considered class by class, business men or professional men, mechanics or farmers, I think we may fairly say that the American, for example, has dealt as efficiently with his condition here as has the German with the simpler problems of an older and more fully developed land. Is German farming carried out more efficiently than American farming? I doubt it. Consider the difference in conditions. The German population of over 300 per square mile, as against an American population of less than 30. The German farmer does efficiently, by hand, the labour that his father and his father's father did by hand, and he does it much as they taught him. The American farmer does his farming by machinery which the American developed, and without which his crop could neither be planted nor harvested. By a patient, plodding lifetime of toil the German chemist has perfected industries which are the wonder of the world. He lacked opportunity to do anything else or 'he was a fool; he was not efficient. The barons of the dye industry are not chemists ; if he had been efficient the German chemist would have emigrated to America. FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE UPPER CLASSES. German efficiency exists chiefly for the upper classes, for men of the so-called " upper class," for men of noble birth, men of wealth, or men of special attainments, life in Germany is made both pleasant and profitable, and it is made so at the expense of the masses lower in the social scale. Any educated German familiar with conditions both here and in Germany will admit that the mechanic, the man earning his living by skilled labor, is a fool to remain in Germany provided he can get to America. I know many Germans in Germany, who have made this statement. I do not recall one who has contradicted it. The care which is taken by the upper classes to conceal this fact from the lower classes is no

doubt evidence of the efficiency, or the ruthlessness of the German minority, who control the Press, the school, and the pulpit to the extent necessary to enable the few to exploit the skill and the labor of the many of their fellow Germans.

On the streets of any German city women with baskets and broom are the scavengers behind the horse. Doubtless the German will tell you that it is efficiency to use women rather than men for this purpose. Travellers are familiar with the sight of the German woman harnessed with dogs who go daily to market with the produce of the farms. Thousands of German women are so employed. The writer has seen-them in all parts of the empire. In "the German social scale the German peasant women and the German dog are perhaps not so widely separated as to make this appear unseemly to the German ; but we in our country desire no efficiency of this type. MAN VERSUS MAN-HIRE LABOR. German industries are not more efficient than American. They are different —so different it is difficult to compare them. Labor, both common and skilled, is cheaper in Germany than with us. Therefore Germany has the advantages with those industries where labor enters largely,, into cost. In America labor of all kinds is high. America has cheaper raw materials in many lines, and has a manufacturing advantage in those industries where material cost, and especially in those industries where the volume of business is great enough to allow us to secure the cost reductions the special laborsaving machinery makes possible where we can attain " quantity production." American industries are specialists in quantity production. The steel industry is one of the great German industries, but to an American the steel hills of T yssen (the Carnegie of Germany) or of Krupps seems small and crude with the mills and the methods of the United States Steel Corporation or ot Bethlehem. At Gary is a miracle of machine-made material; at Essen is a miracle of hand-made material, The one is typical of America, the other of Germany. It is evident that "cheap labor" is the foundation of German commercial efficiency. And, as the Kaiser and his aids pointed out to the Ballins, the Thyssens, or capitalists of Germany, a fundamental reason for the war was that thereby Germany was to acquire the coal of Belgium, the iron ores of France, the petroleum, the wheat, the cheap labor of Russia and the Balkans. To the end that raw material and labor may always be cheap and thereby the great of Germany be made greater. This may be efficiency, but even Germans are not wanting to call it ruthlessness.