Poverty in German cities puts on a more respectable face than it does in London or Manchester. It herds in the cellars and courtyards of houses that have an imposing frontage; and when it walks out of doors it does not walk in rags. But you only have to look at the pinched faces of the children in the poorer quarters of any city to know that it is there. They are tidier and cleaner than English slum children, but they make you wish just as ardently that you were the Pied Piper and could pipe them all with you to a land of plenty. It would require more experience and wider facts than I possess to compare the condition of the poor in England and Germany, especially as the professed economists and philanthropists who make it their business to understand such things disagree with each other about every detail. If you talk to Englishmen, one will tell you that the German starves on rye bread and horse sausage because he is oppressed by an iniquitous tariff; and the next will assure you that the German flourishes and fattens on the high wages and prosperous trade he owes entirely to his admirable protective laws. If you talk to the Anglophobe, he will tell you that the dirt, drunkenness, disease, and extravagance of the English lower classes are the sin and scandal of the civilised world; that it is useless for you to ask where the poor live in Berlin, because there are no poor. Everyone in Germany is clean, virtuous, well housed, and well-to-do. If you talk to an honest, reasonable German, he will recognise that each country has its own difficulties and its own shortcomings, and that both countries make valiant efforts to fight their own dragons. He will tell you of the suffering that exists amongst the German poor crowded into these houses with the imposing fronts, and of all that statecraft and philanthropy are patiently trying to accomplish. Doctor Shadwell, in his most valuable and interesting book _Industrial Efficiency_, says that the American has to pay twice as much rent as the English working man, and that rents in Germany are nearer the American than the English level. As wages are lower in Germany than in England, and as meat and groceries are decidedly dearer, it is plain that the working man cannot live in clover. Doctor Shadwell gives an example of a smith earning 1050 marks, and having to pay 280 for rent. He had a wife and two children, and Doctor Shadwell reckoned that the family to make two ends meet must live on 37 pf. per head per day; the prison scale per head being 80 pf. I know a respectable German charwoman who earns 41 marks a month, and pays 25 marks a month for her parterre flat in the _Hof_. She lets off all her rooms except the kitchen, and she sleeps in a place that is only fit for a coal-hole. A work-girl pays her 6 marks a month for a clean tidy bedroom furnished with a solid wooden bedstead, a chest of drawers, a sofa, and a table. This girl works from 7.30 to 6 in a shop, she pays the charwoman 10 pf.