THE INCREASE OF GERMAN PROSPERITY.
IN the Daily Mail of Thursday a writer gives a very interesting account of the remarkable increase of German industry. Since the foundation of the Empire Germany has undergone a silent industrial revolution more rapid than has been known in any other country, the United States not excepted. Our own industrial revo- lution may be said rightly to date from the middle of the last century, when the old cottage industries began to give place to the new inventions and the large methods of the factory. But it took us quite a century to accom- plish what Germany has effected in one-fourth of that time. The result is that Germany is so transformed that a resident of that country in the later sixties would not know it to-day. Not only has Berlin grown from a dull, provincial, badly paved town to a huge and splendid city crowded with wealth and industry, but old-fashioned places like Cologne, Frankfort, Nuremberg, Hanover, and Leipzig have been metamorphosed, and have doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled, their population. The trade of Hamburg has increased, as the writer in the Daily Mail says, twelvefold since 1870, that of Bremen fivefold, and that of Antwerp, largely dependent on Germany, eightfold. Not only is the German railway mileage by far the largest in Europe, and the stations and sidings on a far greater scale, but in electric transit Germany is even farther ahead, though very much behind the United States (the figures for electric railways are : the United States 12,000 miles, Germany 711, and Great Britain 98) One is also struck when in Germany, as the _Daily Mail writer observes, by the excellence of the work done. The railway-stations are far and away the finest in the world, the buildings in the towns are solid and well built, the factories and mills are in excellent condition. There is no appearance of any " scamped " work, and there is everywhere an appearance of elaborate design, of systematic planning, as though builders and contrivers had looked many years ahead. The successive industrial exhibitions at Berlin and Leipzig have been a revelation to those who saw them as to the growth of German machinery and the expansion of German trade.
Now, there is some danger lest the average Englishman who reads such facts as these should arrive at two con- clusions which are entirely erroneous and beside the mark, and the inferences from which would be, if worked out into practice, disastrous to this country. These con- clusions are,—that this extraordinary development of Germany is due to Protection, and that, in some unascer- tained way, it is hostile to the interests of England. As we know what evil results have already flowed from the silly "Made in Germany" scare, it is as well to point out exactly to what this wave of German prosperity is due, and once more to reinforce the sound and honest doctrine that the good of one country does not mean the injury of another, as the average man is so tempted to suppose.
The writer in the Daily Mail quotes Professor Blondel, of Paris, as giving the main reasons for this German expansion, which furnishes a lesson to France as much as to ourselves. He attributes it to three causes,—the temperament of the German people, the system of education, and the methodical adaptation of the results of scientific research to industrial and com- mercial practice. The German temperament may well he expressed in the famous words of the popular German poet,—ohne hast, ohne ra,st. The Germans are rarely excited, they are a plodding, exact, cautious people, who look at any problem all round before they deal with it. They have not, as a rule, made the brilliant discoveries made in France, Italy, and England, but they have a solidity, a balance, a staying power, which is perhaps the most important element of success in a world governed by incessant effort and competition. Their long era of mis- fortunes was due to historical causes, their present success is the outcome of their own national qualities. Like Scot- land and New England, the Germans have long enjoyed a thorough system of popular education very far ahead of that which we have even now attained to in England. And it is not a system imposed merely from without ; the people love learning, and they learn surely and steadily. Genera- tions of culture have rendered them well-informed and intelligent as a whole. Therefore, when the Empire was established and the time of warfare and incessant external strife was ended, Germany found herself able to deal with intelligence and precision with the problem of industry. Her people saw instinctively that their future was to be commercial, and they set about preparing for it in the same spirit of earnestness and thoroughness that they had set about the wars with Austria and France. We may add to this—what the writer in the Daily Mail does not mention—that Germany's industrial renascence was, fortunately for herself, synchronous with the growth of electric power, so that her industries began at once to be organised on a higher plane than in England, who had attained her supremacy under steam power, and who, rest- ing on her oars, is still very far behind in the application of electricity to industry. The accident of scientific develop- ment has thus greatly favoured Germany, as it has theUnited States. Another fact might be added, viz., that whereas English workmen have, obviously but foolishly, resisted improvements in machinery and brought about by their resistance great strikes which have involved immense losses and retarded our growth, this resistance to machinery has been almost unknown alike in Germany and the United States,—a result, doubtless, of the superior education of the working classes in those countries.
Now we begin to understand the reason for the German advance. It is not Protectionism; it is character, method, intelligence which have won this great victory under physical conditions less favourable than those existing in France or England. If we have anything to learn in this respect from Germany—and we have much—it is that we must insist on character, insist on education, insist on seriousness, on method, on diligence. There is a real danger that, seeing what great results have followed the splendid development of technical teaching in Ger- many, we shall build numbers of technical insti- tutes without reflecting that in Germany a great body of culture, of excellent secondary education, lies behind the technical school and renders its achieve.. meats possible. We cannot help thinking, too, that the over-cultivation of sport and amusement is partly responsible for our comparative lack of progress. The young German is often hard at work in the laboratory, the warehouse, the office, at 5 o'clock in the morning, and, though he wastes some time in the beer-garden, he gives, on the whole, an impression of being a harder worker, as well as a better-equipped student, than does the corresponding young Englishman. We believe that, in the light of German experience, three things above all are needed here,—a far better standard of secondary education, a greater seriousness and intenser application on the part of our young men, and a higher morale among our working classes. These are precisely the elements that have ma.de German life over again within a quarter of a century.
The other false inference which may be drawn—nay, which is widely drawn—from the picture of German industrial progress, is that this progress is in some way inimical to ourselves. It is constantly hinted, if not actually asserted, that Germany's gain is our loss. Now, so far as Germany, by superior business methods, by more patient energy, or by selling goods at lower cost, has secured markets formerly ours, we have none but ourselves to blame, and our first duty is not to grumble and scowl at our successful competitor, but to imitate her virtues. But if by our loss is meant the fact that our own home market has been inundated with German goods, then the word " loss " is a ridiculous and misapplied term. Do those who use it know that Germany does more business with England than with any other European country, or do they suppose that Germany gives her goods away ? If Germany sends us, as she does, an increasing quantity of her products, it is because we demand them, and because we, on our part, send increasing quantities of our products to Germany in return ; so that both she and we derive benefits from this growing exchange. This is the very alphabet of Free-trade, but it seems necessary to repeat that alphabet over and over again for the benefit of a generation which has not been subjected to the convincing dialectic of Cobden. No nation can grow rich without other nations in part sharing its gains. The quality of trade is like that of mercy,—it is not strained, but blesses him that buys as well as him that sells.
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