that the town or the village should grow in. At present everything was done haphazard. In Germany the authorities corresponding to our councils refused to pass a plan for a house to be built in a district which the town had not marked out and arranged the order of its design. The streets were made and the drain pipes were laid down before the houses were built, and, therefore, they got symmetry, ventilation, proper open spaces, and all the rest of it. (See Western Mail, 26th September, 1904.)

Mr. Horsfall's book must be referred to for the various ways in which the "environment" is kept more wholesome, and for the other agencies which favourably affect the habits of the residents. On this last head his language echoes that of Mr. Beutler :

As might be inferred from the great superiority of the working-class inhabitants of German towns to the inhabitants of that class in English towns in respect of cleanliness of person and of clothing, dirty and neglected dwellings are far less common in German than in English towns. English observers who visit the homes of German workpeople are generally surprised at the high average of orderliness and apparent comfort which they find in them; and, on the other hand, Germans who visit the homes of English workpeople in the poorer districts of our large towns are surprised to find so many dirty and neglected dwellings, and ask how it is that English workpeople, as a rule, have homes less well-cared for than those of German workpeople.1

The present position of the housing problem in Germany is a question to which we shall return later. Meanwhile, there is one aspect of it which must be

referred to in supplement to the general observations just quoted. No one who visited the Düsseldorf Exhibition in 1902 can fail to have been struck by the activity which the great "industrialists" in the iron and steel industries of Westphalia have displayed in providing better accommodation for their workpeople. They probably felt that, in a sense, they were on trial before public opinion; and their "exhibits" certainly did not err on the side of modesty ! Still, the facts are in themselves considerable; and they are hardly less conspicuous in some of the other newer manufactures of whose competition with us we hear so much. I take the following from a report presented in 1901 by Professor Fuchs, who is certainly not over-sympathetic towards the capitalists, and is careful to point out that they are acting in their own interest :

According to an inquiry made for the Paris Exhibition the total number of dwellings built by the manufacturers up to 1898 was 143,000. That is, if we omit businesses employing less than 5 persons, 18 for every 1,000 German workpeople. In some districts the number is considerably above this average : thus in the administrative district of Oppeln, 106; Arnsberg, 60; Lothringen, 57; Trier, 50; Oberpfalz, 47; Osnabrück, Hanover, Aurich and Stade, 40; Düsseldorf, 36. The number, however, is less significant than the quality; and we must freely recognise that we can reckon up a considerable number of employers in Germany who have built houses that are both models of construction and æsthetically satisfactory. I mention only Krupp, the Baden Aniline and Soda Works, the

Höchst Colour Works, and the United Machine Works of Augsburg and Nuremberg.1

The dwellings so provided have called forth the warmest expressions of admiration from representative English working men. Thus Mr. Cronin, the Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Steel and Iron Workers of Scotland, who was a member of the Delegation in 1896 already mentioned, describes the situation at one of the greatest of the steel works in the following terms :—

We met to inspect the dwellings of the workers. We went through what are called the "colonies," and stopped at several of the houses, and inspected the interior arrangements. The great majority of the houses occupied by the men are such as in Scotland are occupied by some of the foremen of iron and steel works, consisting of from four to five and six to seven rooms, with cellar. All the houses have gardens attached, where flowers and vegetables are grown. I have never seen such houses in the working manufacturing districts of either England or Scotland.2

We have now gone through all the topics usually discussed in relation to "the comparative welfare of the working classes" in Germany and Great Britain. We have seen that-putting quite on one side the independent peasantry which simply does not exist in England, and limiting our view to the industrial

1Referat at the meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik at Munich, Schriften, xcviii., p. 32.

2 Report, p. 55.

population-it will be extremely difficult to arrive at a judgment even when we have got far better statistical material than is yet at our disposal. We have seen that even those large and general conclusions with regard to wages and diet which can be reached require so much interpretation when set in relation to the actual facts of life, that the supposed British superiority tends again and again to fade away. It becomes apparent that in some ways a good case can be made out for German superiority. It is indeed a balance of advantages and disadvantages which does not strike itself but depends on our own philosophy of society. Supposing it to be the case-and there is much which makes it look probable that England possesses both a higher industrial élite and a lower residuum than Germany, who shall say how the one is to weigh against the other?

If we turn now to some of the obvious tests of national "prosperity," we are struck by the same absence of clear evidence for British superiority. No one of them indeed is conclusive for or against: social causation is too complex for that. Still, taken together, they produce a certain impression. Thus the burden of the public relief of the poor is about twice as great in England as in Germany; but the amount thus spent naturally depends on the wealth that can

1

1 According to Schmoller, Grundriss, ii., p. 325.

be drawn upon as well as on the needs of the people. The deposits, again, in the savings banks of Great Britain are only about half as large as those in the public institutions of that character in Germany;1 though the differences in the classes using them and in their place among other forms of saving may possibly be such as to weaken the force of the comparison. I do not, however, know what explanation favourable to England is to be given of the fact that the average longevity of English men and women is less than that of Prussians. Of men and women: for it need hardly be said that the total mortality, including all ages, is larger in Germany-to some extent, no doubt, because the relative number of births is larger.2 But those who reach maturity have a better "expectation of life," as is shown by the following figures of Dr. Ballod, one of the most competent of the younger scientific statisticians:—3

1

According to Schmoller, Grundriss, ii., p. 251.

21902, United Kingdom: births, 28; deaths, 16.5 per 1,000. Germany births, 351; deaths, 194. Report of the RegistrarGeneral, 1902, pp. clxiii.-clxxiii.

3 They are apparently drawn from the years 1894-1897; Ballod, Die mittlere Lebensdauer (in Schmoller's Forschungen, 1899), pp. 23-26.