have never had before. Nor have these detailed parchment
solutions of social questions done away with all the tramps, poor,
sick, and destitute. Over a million persons passed through the
municipal night shelters in Berlin during the last year; and there are
still admittedly some 5,000 tramps in Germany. The vicious circle is
in evidence in Germany as elsewhere. It might be possible to regulate
men's earning power by legislation, but even when this colossal task
is done, there must follow the regulation of the spending power to
make it complete. What conceivable legislative regulation can efface
the difference between what A, B, and C will get out of five dollars
once they have them! That is the real problem, but no one proposes a
solution of it. A will use his five dollars to make him more powerful,
B will use his in dissipation, and C will lose his. How is that to be
regulated? And without that regulation you will have rich men and
tramps all over again.

In urban and rural districts containing over 10,000 inhabitants, some
$40,000,000 was expended for sick and poor relief, and this does not
include the hundreds of districts with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants
for which there are no figures. Even the wholly admirable Elberfeld
system of charity, known all over the world to charity-workers, which
is, briefly, investigation of cases by voluntary workers personally
and privately, and each dealing with a small number, has not solved
the problem. There were 1,537 strikes in Germany in 1909, and 2,109 in
1910. In 1910, 8,269 industrial plants were affected, in which 372,119
persons were employed, and 2,209 plants were obliged to shut down
entirely. There were as many as 154,093 persons on strike at the same
time. In 1910 there were also 1,121 lock-outs, affecting 10,381 plants
and 314,988 persons.

Here again, as in the case of the temperament of the German people,
one must look deeper than the average traveller has the time or the
necessary experience back of him to do, in order to see and to sift
the facts. Scores of travellers have told me: "I have never seen a
tramp, a beggar, a drunken man in Germany." I can only reply that I
have seen tramps at large, and colonies of them besides; that I have
seen hundreds of the poverty-stricken and diseased; that there are
more than thirty drunkards' homes in Germany; and that between 1879
and 1901 the number of persons under treatment for alcoholism had
increased from 12,000 to 65,