THE BERLIN POOR.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3169, 21 April 1909, Page 3

THE BERLIN POOR.

A SQUALID COMMUNITY. That the)*;' arc no poor is Berlin is easily said, so swept so set to rights, appears the life of the people. The average Prussian will assure you, saj'S a. London paper, that his is the most democratic country in the world. He will tell you that the State serves every man in it; that it meets the problem of the unemployed with municipal labour bureaux, which exchange lists twice a week; that it is labour colonies, which teach the vagrant to be useful, self-raspecting citizen; that it takes over and subsidises any investigation privately advanced which looks to it for the welfare of the poor; and that the Imperial Insurance provides J for the sick and aged; that the system of outdoor relief in Germany is the best in the world; that the police condemn unsanitary buildings. He will point to the technical high schools and continuation schools for apprentices; to the school doctor and to the feeding of unnourished children; to the 2| per cent fare; to the free baths; to the working men's days at the theatres, granted by order of His Majesty; to the guides provided at a minimum rate for the galleries, and to many pimilar advantages —above ail, to the mass of "legislative protection for the worker," initiated by Bismark, part of the gigantic scheme of Gemany's great stateman for establishing an efficient State, before which Europe should tremble.

But if Germany has, as it sometimes seems, studied everything that can be studied in the social order for the next 20 years; if she lias investigated everything, written everything in exhaustive books, and then results*into bureaux and embodies some of them into laws, what makes she, with all this scholarly assault? Let anyone who thinks that there are no unemployed in Germany stand some evening outside on the Beilii: Shelters for the Homeless,and watch the 700 men and the 150 women going in, "so clean, so polite along;" or let him watch the 3,500 coming out of the municipal night shelter some morning, 800,000 a year seeking *hese refuges at night in one city alone, in a country where professional vagabondage is punished sternly and begging is a penal offence. Poverty is guarded in Berlin. secret, hidden; it goes softly. It is clean and neatly clothed. Only the Salvation Army knows where it is; or the "Sickness Insurance of the Apothecaries, Merchants, and Tradespeople," or the "Bureau for the Redress of Private Griefs," or some of those other organisations with the highly comprehensive names dear to the German mind. There are no poor in Berlin like the London poor. Germany is a new country, so strangely both old anj new, but bom industrially in 1871, formerly overrun by every nation' in Europe, her mines never fully worked, her land untilled, her industries undeveloped. She is in what Prince Kropatkiu -calls, in a re;ent book, "a state of flight"— an industrial awakening protected by a high tariff and "begun with the improved machinery and technical education which England attained only after a century of groping experimentation." Germany has not the problems of an "Id countrv, nor has she immigration complicating e»ery question, as England and America have. But she has poverty common as sualight, all the horrors of sweating and home- , wortc in a clothing industry the greatest in Europe, long hours, where every girl in the department stores work until eight o'clock; the eigth-hour day in perhaps only onetenth of hsr industries, and thea it is a day without pause; great misery in many employments and a minimum living wage in almost all, espacially among women, fai iting over work deformity so common as to appall an American; ar.d the unguarded, uncherished childhood of the poor.