THE STRIKES IN GERMANY.
THE correspondents of the London papers are right in the great attention which they are paying to the strikes in Westphalia. Those strikes are not more exten- sive than many similar movements have been in England, which attract no international attention ; but in the cir- cumstances of Germany, they indicate the arrival of an economic crisis which, as may be perceived from its action, seriously disquiets the Imperial Government. That discontent with their poverty which has recently been manifested by the German peasantry, and which has pro- duced a series of Protectionist laws intended to keep up the price of agricultural produce, has now extended to the classes which live by weekly wages. As we have repeatedly pointed out, they are for the most part very badly off, their wages in coin being far lower than those of unskilled labourers in our own cities, while their hours of work may be taken, in the rough, to be one-fifth longer. Fathers of families, in fact, often labour twelve and fourteen hours a day for twelve shillings a week, having, in addition, to walk a considerable distance to their place of work. With certain exceptions, these conditions are general—in Baden, for example, rather a comfortable little State, work from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. is by no means uncommon—and owing partly to the rise in grain due to Protection, partly to the increase of know- ledge as to conditions in other countries, and partly, perhaps, to the general decay of the old spirit of acquiescence so observable throughout Europe, the
labourers begin to find their lot intolerable. The Westphalian miners, who are the most numerous and the most determined of all who work hard, have naturally been the first to strike ; but the movement is spreading fast into other trades, until the Berlin correspondent of the Daily News reports that the tailors, carpenters, furriers, basket-makers, brewers, and omnibus-drivers of Berlin, with the builders of Sprottau, the carpenters of Bunzlau, KOnigsberg, and Wiirzburg, and the tailors of Bremer- haven have either actually struck, or are coming out on strike. In all eases the demands are for higher wages and shorter hours, the latter grievance being in some instances positively monstrous. The omnibus-drivers, in parti- cular, declare that they work seventeen hours a day for seven days a week, and then have to clean the cars ; and there are whole classes of respectable labourers worked as in England only the poorest victims of the most wretched sweaters are made to work. Toil, in fact, is protracted in many parts of Germany, as it also is in many districts of Switzerland and Italy, as it never would be protracted for horses or ploughing oxen.
The Government, as is most natural, is seriously dis- turbed by these occurrences. The Hohenzollerns, besides feeling to the full the influence of that sentiment which induces all Kings who really govern to feel most for the classes at the base of society, have always been conscious of the comparative poverty of their people, whose great estate, their country, is much of it sand and forest, and have, besides, one pressing administrative interest in their economic condition. The extreme poverty of Germany has greatly facilitated her military system, has made hard fare and low pay bearable to the conscripts, and has enabled her to surmount her grand recruiting difficulty, which is to obtain non-commissioned officers in numbers sufficient to make entire divisions, or, indeed, entire
armies, by themselves, without unendurable expense. You cannot conscript a hundred thousand good corporals and serjeants. If there is to be a serious and universal change in the rate of wages, the cost of the Army will soon become unbearable ; while the conscription will appear to households which count in pfennigs to be a much more oppressive tax. The Emperor is Com- mander-in-Chief as well as Sovereign, and in both capacities he dreads a great economic movement, a dread greatly increased by the belief, which he shares with his grandfather William, the founder of the Empire, that the true cause of the spread of Socialism is the over-anxious position of the great body of working men. To this must be added a fear lest the soldiers should come into hostile and sanguinary conflict with the popula- tion. There is no fear whatever of discipline breaking down, for that has become in Germany a sort of religion ; but all the workmen are old soldiers—the men who went on deputation to the Emperor were covered with
medals—the fighting, if there is any, would be most desperate ; and a bloody collision on a great scale, though it could only end in one way, would break, perhaps permanently, the sympathetic and kindly relation now existing between the great body of workmen who have been through the Army, and the same kind of men still borne upon its rolls. A German riot is, in fact, and always must be, a struggle between soldiers and half-armed Landwehr men ; and no ruler of Germany, even if he were personally callous, could regard such a struggle without horror. It is not only civil war ; it is almost war in the barracks. The Emperor, therefore, pays close personal attention to the strikes, and while warn- ing the men with his own lips that if they resist the authorities or make the movement Socialist, they will be shot down, he assures them of protection while they are orderly, and signifies to the great employers that they are expected by the Government to be reasonable. It is clear that the pressure thus applied is considerable, and it is assisted by pressure from the great customers of the mines—for instance, the Krupp factory is reported to be at its wits' end for coals, and to be sending large orders to distant mines—and by the bankers, who finance half the Companies, and who are impeded in all their calculations by such disturbances. The employers, therefore, will make concessions if they can ; but they are full, like all other Germans, of ideas of their own dignity, and of the necessity of resistance to coercion ; and in many cases the concessions demanded are beyond their power. The workers in Germany, as in England, are not wholly reasonable, and their inclination to press both claims at once—that for shorter hours and that for higher wages— though under the circumstances natural enough, makes the total demand a heavy one. The traditional " day " of the Continent is much longer than ours, even in Switzerland, and employers have not yet learned the amazing difference between the output of fairly worked and overworked labourers, a difference which constitutes much of the difference between English and Continental work- men when employed on tasks which require the application of continuous strength. The margin, too, in many of the trades is not large, and the sensitiveness of the shareholders about their dividends is far greater than it is in England, or, at all events, far more formidable to directors.
The Government being so irresistibly strong, and the men being entirely unable to wait long without wages, there will, we presume, be a compromise, based mainly upon a reduction of hours ; but the struggle may have many permanent effects. It will check the present tendency of all Germans to plunge into industrial undertakings, a tendency stimulated even more than with us by the steady fall in the interest to be derived from all passive invest- ments ; and it may seriously interfere with German com- petition with the rest of the world. The success of that competition, so far as success is obtained, a point upon which much exaggeration is current, is due in part to painstaking, and in part to energetic pushing, German bagmen being the most ubiquitous of mankind ; but it rests ultimately upon the superior cheapness of German labour. If that is to become a thing of the past, the working faculty of the English, and the ingenuity of the Americans in saving labour, will retain for them their ascendency, and manufacturing progress in Germany may even receive a check. That will be overcome, no doubt ; for a sensible people -with the habits both of organisation and steady work are not easily defeated in the industrial struggle, and, as we said before, there is a margin to be gained by more energetic work for fewer hours ; but, pending the readjustments, the discontent of the labouring class will increase, and with it the tendency to emigration and to Socialism, which already counts more than 500,000 votes. Germany appears from the outside to be very strong and very prosperous in all international affairs, but? she has internal troubles as serious, though not as worrying, as any of our own. No journalist can think so, because of the wearisomeness of Parnellism, a wearisomeness without a precedent in political history ; but we are not sure that a great statesman would not rather have to deal with Ireland, even under the present condition of diseased conscientious- ness in England, than with the social problem in Germany. We are quite sure Prince Bismarck would ; though that is, of course, no comfort to Mr. Balfour, who, if he spoke like the German Emperor, would be considered insane.
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