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inns, with their long stone corridors and their strong doors, one can imagine a traditional structure made for internal defence, if indeed in some instances the buildings were not erected at a time when that was practically kept in view. I never saw an old feudal castle better constructed for fighting each landing-place and each room against an attacking army, than the old hof of the Tiger in Salzburg, with its dismal corridors and iron gratings. The practice of locking up your room in a German inn, and taking possession of the key, is a relic of the old insecurity. There can be no doubt that the German inn of the middle ages had all these evil features more powerfully developed than they were among us. There would indeed be a natural excuse for this in the great highways of European transit; and whether from the same or other causes, they retain at the present day a rather odious resemblance to the medieval hostel. Crime, indeed, is rare enough in them-the potent police system everywhere at work drives that into places where there is less publicity; but they are frequented by large classes of persons who come to them for sensual gratification and for play.

On a former occasion* I ventured on the opinion that gambling is the vice of a lethargic people requiring strong stimulants to excite them to action. On this ground I accounted for its being rare among ourselves, since we have in our ordinary laudable pursuits sufficient excitement to supersede all of an adventitious kind. The more I look at German ways, the more I see that gambling is deeply rooted in the nature of the people. It is not alone seen at the great establishments which are renowned over the world as spots sacred to this pursuit. In any ordinary inn you will continually see the natives make up their cardparties with a seriousness and a solemnity, and a business-like ad

justment of the pecuniary casualties, which altogether are a curious phenomenon to the onlooker. It is something very different in its earnestness from what was common enough in this country, but is now little known-a few gentlemen sitting down to a careless game at whist after the exciting labours of the day are over. One may travel far and abide in many a tavern without seeing any gambling in Britain. Doubtless it exists. What vice is there that there will not be a specimen of in a population of many millions, and the richest population in the world? Sometimes, perhaps, the heir to a vast fortune getting loose, and pulling the devil by the tail, is ruined, after the formula of the romances; but how seldom do we hear of such a thing in real life!

The lottery is one of the shapes in which the gambling spirit is rife in Germany. The agencies are advertised in all sorts of obscure corners, where the large round sums to be realised by the fortunate adventurers seem strangely in contrast with the impoverished establishments in which you are to transact for them. In this shape German gambling manages to cross into our own country, in the shape of circulars of portentous dimensions, with heaps of possible fortunes set down in figures of thousands, and sometimes an estate, with a Schloss and vineyards in it, of which you may be the possible owner. This reminds one that we once had the lottery here, and that the institution was put down by Act of Parliament. This is an event from which extremely erroneous inferences have been drawn. The lottery has been put down, therefore you can put down everything else that is wrong-gambling,drinking, "the social evil," and so forth. Now the lottery, being the most public and so the most easily assailable form of gambling, was readily given up by a people among whom gambling in any shape is a

* 'Across the Channel,' July 1862, p. 30.

rare vice. In other shapes it is impossible to put it down, as it is impossible to put down the other vices. But we are not a gambling nation, and people don't rave, at present at least, about the suppression of gambling among us. So it is all the world over. The vice people are not given to, you can prohibit by the law-the vice they are slightly given to you can easily suppress one form of by the law. Try to grapple with the established vices and defects of a people, and you are baffled even worse, you change their direction, and generally increase their degrading tendency.

And this reminds me, by the way, that if we have in this country to complain that the comfortable classes who can bring influence to bear on the Legislature are too apt to dictate to their humbler brethren what they should eat and what they should drink, if not-as they used to do—wherewithal they should be clothed,-if there is a little too much of this among us, yet there is another thing that might be worse. It would be a sadder sight, for instance, to see the rich and powerful man-the feudal lord of a district-deliberately setting about the making of money by the promotion of vice. But what do we see at the great German gamblingplaces? The lord of such an establishment sets before his victim everything that can allure him to ruin. His passions are gratuitously fed that he may be excited up to the proper gambling mark, as game-cocks are fed to make them fight. No doubt it is all carefully distinguished from the sordid adjuncts of what we call a Hell. It is a State affair. It is not paltry money-making by a mercenary speculation, but a method of deriving a revenue for a principality; and yet somehow to simple minds that seems only to aggravate the offence by enhancing its extent.

The next count in this indictment is directed against that inordinate smoking which, besides any influence it may have on the health, carries away so much of the working

It

power of the people. Behold at the station that grave personage examining your luggage-ticket as minutely and slowly as if he had never seen such a thing before-his ostensible function, for which his government pays him, is to transact the business of his department; but he has a primary duty absorbing the better part of his attention and capacity, in the charge and tending of that gigantic pipe of his. Keeping its machinery in order and preserving its vitality is almost as serious a piece of engineer work as the taking charge of a small steam-engine. is an object of the deepest anxiety and apprehension as well as of trouble, and should it expire, there is no duty in life so important as not to be postponed to that of restoring its vitality. With us chronic smoking is extremely rare. The gentleman smoker takes his cigar after breakfast or after dinner, and is done; and so the working man with his pipe. Much nonsense is talked about the perniciousness to the health of smoking. I believe that practised moderately it does no injury, and that to some constitutions it is beneficial. But no one will have the face to stand up and say that it is good to smoke for fourteen hours of the day-for every minute when he is not either asleep or eating, like our frousy friend there.

And yet he and his practice might give a hint to our legislators to do a good turn to the working man of Britain. The German peasant and mechanic, though he indulges in too much of it, yet smokes like a gentleman by reason of the cheapness with him of good tobacco. Thus he escapes the filthy deleterious practices by which our workpeople try to make their bad expensive article go far. In the first place, the British workman purchases his tobacco of the coarsest, most pungent, and acrid kind. What a confirmed smoker in despair might not be induced to do to get at his darling narcotic, it would be perilous to predict; but it would be a strait indeed that would drive

the Bavarian or the Prussian to submit to the English pigtail. Nothing is so offensive to a cleanly smoker as the odour of old halfconsumed tobacco; yet the poor man preserves the ashes of the old pipe to place them on the new supply lest he should lose a little of the trash he has paid so dear for. Then he absorbs it through that abomination the short cutty, which lets in the smoke hot and harsh, and with it gives an occasional taste of the essential oil of tobacco a rank poison. The poor fellow could take three times as much of the mild and cleanly tobacco of the Germans without so much injury to his health. It is bad policy to drive people to sordid and unseemly enjoyments they degrade the appetites to their own level, and promote vice. It is both an evil-hearted and a dangerous practice to press hard on the cheap luxuries of the poor. Tell them forsooth that they are levying a tax on themselves and wasting money on what is not only valueless but pernicious! Why, what else are we all doing every day of our lives? What is it that we live and work for if we are to have no enjoyment in life? You, eminent lawyer, and you, rising physician, who each of you takes his glass of good port or claret to his liking, and pays for fifty other enjoyments, some of them perhaps more intellectual than anything the workman can aim at-is it not for these enjoyments that you have worked and become rich, and do you think it is a doctrine that can possibly go down, either with the burly blacksmith or the sallow tailor, that he who is so much poorer than you must abstain from the luxuries which even his poverty can achieve, and work on for the mere sake and satisfaction of working, as the anchorites of old prayed, denying themselves the good things of the world?

To the smoker, the tobacco manufactured in this country is as inferior to the foreign as the wine made from the produce of our gardens would be to good claret

or burgundy in the mouth of the connoisseur in wines. It is true that the enormous duty, amounting in some cases to 1500 per cent on the foreign manufacture, has been lately mitigated; but not to the extent. of bringing it within the reach of the working man. I know how monstrous is any suggestion of this kind in the eyes of those who set up a reputation for philanthropy by snubbing him whenever he attempts to enjoy himself, and I must of course be prepared to await the coming vengeance. I am deaf to the plea that our own people, if they had cheap tobacco, would saturate themselves in it as the Germans do. It is not in the British nature. We are too active and energetic to submit to such a slavery. That enormous and unintermitting consumption of tobacco is a type of a lazy unenergetic people, who would have showed the tendency in some other way if Raleigh had not found the narcotic weed for them.

It is a phenomenon which the new school of sanitary philosophers should be called upon to account for, that the German can be alive at all under the physical conditions in the midst of which he not only lives, but flourishes and enjoys himself. According to many of the doctrines now promulgated, the race ought to have been long ago extinct. We are told that the inhalation of so many cubic feet of pure air is necessary to existence; but the German dispenses with it utterly; he does not take a single gulp of air in its full purity if he can help it, unless during the short period when the sun is hot, and then to be sure it pleases him to sit a good deal in the open air. It makes one sick at heart sometimes when one joins five flabby-faced natives in a railway compartment heated by the sun, and all set a-smoking, and unanimously insist that every chink admitting the air from without shall be closed. Many are the ingenious devices of the people hermetically to seal themselves up. The shopkeeper, that he may not have

the door of his establishment ever and anon thrown open by a merciless public, communicates with his customers through a small hole in the window. When he opens it, there tumbles forth a sickly stream of hot smoky fœtid air; and the instant the business in hand is completed, he closes it with an expedition totally at variance with the even tenor of his ordinary motions. By a very inconvenient practice, on which our people would never waste time, the shopkeeper often does not remain in his shop, and you must summon him from above by a bell: this is to enable him to live in a close little stubé room which he has sealed up to his satisfaction. He issues from it to transact immediate business with you, but you are not to have the command over him and admit as much fresh air as you please into his place of permanent abode.

Our architects are cognisant of a specialty which will enable us to measure the extent of the German's civilisation in this matter of fresh air. In the building of a gentleman's house the problem is to let the inmates have the ventilation at their own absolute disposal, so that they may have fresh air supplied as abundantly or as scantily as taste and opinion dictate. Those, however, who build workhouses, hospitals, and prisons, know it to be the instinct of those who are to inhabit them religiously to close up every crevice by which the outer air may be admitted. Your German, therefore, of the upper rankssays a professor of physiology or a royal sanitary commissioner-is in this part of practice on the same level of civilisation with our paupers and jail-birds.

There are some other specialties of German habits and domestic arrangements on which few care to be explicit. Any good that can be done by writing about them is unlikely to compensate for the un

pleasantness of reading what would be written. The other day some one, giving anonymous advice to travellers, had the moral courage to go over the whole with a minuteness quite awful, insomuch that the newspaper press, anxious to echo his complaints, found it extremely difficult to give utterance to any of them, and preserve their place in society. The habits of the Germans proper in the matter of personal cleanliness are notably in contrast with those of their nearest neighbours. To sleep one night in Cologne and the next in Amsterdam is like going from a street gutter to a clear streamlet. And it is curious to observe how old the distinction is. Philip de Comines, who had a special propensity for noticing the true sources of political quarrels, and who thus sometimes reduced them from the sublime to the ridiculous, tells what occurred at a visit of the Count Palatine of the Rhine and some of his followers to the Duke of Burgundy, at Brussels, in the middle of the fifteenth century, and how "he was honourably received, nobly entertained, and lodged in an apartment richly furnished. The Duke's servants upbraided the Germans for their nastiness and incivility in laying their dirty clothes and their boots on those rich beds, and accusing them of want of neatness and consideration; and they never liked them afterwards so well as they had done before. The Germans being as much dissatisfied on the other side, reproached them for their pomp and extravagance, so that in effect they never loved or did any good office for one another afterwards."*

All these conditions detrimental to high physical and mental condition have been growing in the people from generation to generation, and the race have assimilated to them. They are bred to them, like our races of prize animals—the

* Mem., ch. viii.

boast of agricultural associations. Their appetites have thus extended to endure an unwholesome oversupply of food and stimulants. The Briton could not lead the same life; he must have had an ancestry gradually trained to it to endure

it.

Its influence is visible in those national peculiarities which have so long made the German the butt of other nations for phlegm, slowness, and a general mistiness of ideas. From the man of letters to the porter packing a parcel, you see the inferiority of the development both of the intellectual and physical capacities. Throughout the boasted literature of Germany, it would be difficult to find, besides Schiller, one writer who can describe either facts or thoughts with the rapid distinctness that has been the quality of our own authors from Addison downwards. Through every department where exertion of body or of mind is concerned, there is a slowness, an incompleteness, a fecklessness, in Germany's way of doing it. There are some who deliberately give the preference to this phlegmatic easy way of taking the world over this restless, feverish bee-hive of ours, in which the roar of toil never ceases, and the faculties, mental and bodily, are ever at their utmost strain.

Our ac

We

"We fret, we fume, would shift our skins, Would quarrel with our lot; Thy care is under polished tins To serve the hot and hot." But ours, I doubt not, is the true development of our race. tivity does not wear us out. thrive by it. It confers the health and strength proper to its own purposes, and after a longer lease of life sends us to our account with a far longer list of services to our race than the dozing devotee of laziness and sensual enjoyment can show. So is it that the high-spirited and high-bred hunter or racer-ever impelled to action, and often put to the utmost tension of his powershas a lighter and happier existence than the lazy hack of the huckster.

The superiority would not be very obvious to the tortoise or the hedgehog, but it is the right development of the nobler animal.

If the destiny of labour is to be accounted a curse, it often comes in a drearier form than that of effective hard work. One notices in Germany a great deal of sordid, profitless, dreary drudgery of the merely muscular kind, caused by the want of that harder but more genial work, in inventing and organising, which makes our own labour-market so productive. An enormous amount of work is performed by the human being which we get done by machinery or by animal power. To exemplify my notion of the German workmen, I propose to take an occupation pretty extensively followed both there and here, and notice one or two of the special distinctions between the German and the British worker who follows it; and one of the chief reasons for my selection of a pursuit is, that while in Germany it appears to have attracted towards it, or made for itself, about the best portion of the working population, its followers are among us in extremely bad odour. The pursuit I refer to embraces the extraction of minerals and their conversion into available metals; it includes the miners, smelters, and others with kindred occupations- the mining population, in short.

Every one knows that these are very numerous in northern Germany, especially in the region of the Harz. The miner there has nothing of the burly, ferocious, picturesque aspect which the translations of German legends -decorated, perhaps, with Retsch's outlines-have led us in youth to associate with him. He has the look of a poor devil- very poor both in purse and spirit. He is generally smallish in stature, dirty but shaven, with close-fitting shabby clothes, which from the nature of his labours have a greasiness about them which reminds one

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