THE THRIFT OF GERMANY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15252, 15 March 1913, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE THRIFT OF GERMANY.

■ i.m i I. #' ; ■ ■ •• " GrotMANT," cays Mr. Price Collier in Scribner's Magazine, "is a rich, very rich, 1 country in .the sens© that it has the most intelligent, hardest-working,. most fiescely- , economical, and the most rationally and most easily-contented population of any of the great Powers., v But Germany not rich in surplus and liquid capital as comared with England,, France, or America, t is the more to her credit that her capital is all hard at work. 'There is just so much less for: luxury. The people in the .streets v the shop window? .; the scale of charges at places 7 of public resort and amusement the "very small number ' of well-turned-out'private vehicles the com- ■ paratively few people who \ live in ( houses and not in-apartments; : the- simplicity of .the gowns of the * women and their inexpensive jewellery and other -ornaments; the fewer servants; the salaries and wages of all classes, point decisively, to- plain .living on the part of practically everybody. Let. me say . very emphatically, however, that this economy means' no lack of generosity; I doubt if there are people anywhere so restricted as to means, and so delightfully hospitable at the same time. Berlin is not as yet under that cloud that covers the new," the uncultivated, and rich ~; society in America, that • tyranny of money which makes i men and women fearful of i being without it. j Such people shiver at the. bare thought of losing what money will buy, for the shameful reason ■ that 1 then there would be nothing left to them; and they are driven, many of them, both in London and in New York, to any humiliation, often to any degradation, to avoid -it.. They grossly over-rate the value of money, and, they exaggerate the terrors of being without it. .Professor William James, who succeeded in analysing what "is si th* hack of men'*, brains as well as anybody, writes We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any-

miiftmmtmmmmimmmmmmmmmmmmmm "i'i 1 ii. i ■"■ one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. r We have lost' the power even imagining what the ancient idealisation of poverty i could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the -manlier indifference, the paying our way by ~ what, we are or do, and not by what we „ have, the right to fling away our life at - any moment irresponsibly—the more • athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting ' shape. . . '"It is certain that the , prevalent fear of poverty among the eduj cated classes is the worst moral disease _ from which our civilisation suffers.* They t suffer from this malady less in Germany f than in America or in England. I should like to introduce such people into dozens ? of households in Berlin; alas, they could * not speak or understand the moral or mental language there, whore there \is 3 everything that : makes a home's heart r beat proudly and peaceably except money." 5 >'//■ —!■ /ii l" —