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CITY GOVERNMENT
IN EUROPE

HOUSTON'S INQUIRY INTO

Municipal Organization and Administration in the Princi-
pal Cities of Great Britain and Germany; with a
Report of Findings and Recommendations for
Houston's Guidance in Developing a
Great Seaport City on the
Gulf of Mexico

47972

FRANK JPUTNJM

Special Commissioner of the City of Houston
to the Cities of Europe

Published by
THE CITY OF HOUSTON, TEXAS

191.1

THE IDEA

{Editorial, The Manufacturers Record, August, 1912)

Mayor Eice and the City Commissioners of Houston have done a
very wise thing. Recognizing that Houston is to be a big city, and
that in its development many problems will have to be met, they have
engaged Mr. Frank Putnam to go to Germany and make a study of
the leading municipalities of that country. It is believed that Hous-
ton can leam many important lessons in the handling of municipal
improvements and the betterment of the city by a study of the methods
which have been so successful in many of the most progressive cities of
Germany. Every city in the country could well afford to employ a
first-class axpert to study city improvements in this covmtry and abroad.
In this way the mistakes which have been made could be avoided and
the successes achieved could be followed. Houston has set a good
example.

FOREWORD

In this l>ook the writer makes no pretense to have done more than

afford some glimpses of municipal organization and management in

some of the chief cities of Xorthern Europe. It was the purpose of

the city government of Houston to learn by means of this inquiry

something about the means by which older cities have acquired good

") public services and it is the hope of the writer that his report, in the

^ following pages, will to a degree serve that purpose. He has learned,

"^ in brief, these main facts :

First — That Houston's location with reference to national and
international trade routes insures very large future city growth at this
point on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

Second — That Houston, in order to afford a suitable foundation for

private enterprise which must be depended upon to utilize its ad-

,^ vantage of location, must through its city government expend a large

^ amount of money during the next few years laying city foundations

■^ and perfecting its public services.

Third — That (accepting the experience of older cities as a guide)
the only way the City of Houston can get the money with which to do
this work is by issuing bonds and by assessing the cost of improvements
against owners of abutting property, enhanced in value by the making
of such improvements.

Fourth — That (again accepting as a guide the experience of the

"^-^ older cities) money borrowed by bond issues should, so far as possible,

v^ be invested in revenue-producing properties, so that hereafter a sub-

* stantial portion of the cost of making non-revenue-producing improve-

^- ments may be borne by the surplus revenues of public properties pro-

-i ducing such surplus.

Fifth — That any changes in the form of our city government should
be directed to the end of producing more certain continuity of con-
structive municipal policies, and to the employment, in all responsible
positions, of technically trained men, when these can be obtained.

In making up this volume I have placed the final report with
summary of findings and recommendations at the fore, to accommodate
those readers wlio want a mere digest of the work. The letters sent
home each week for pul)]ication in Houston newspapers are given sub-
stantially as first written, for those readers who may wish to trace the
inquiry in details. F. P.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I : Eeport of the City's Special Commissioner to the Mayor
and City Commissioners of the City of Houston.

Chapter II : The Ancient City of Cork.

Chapter III : The Capital of Ireland.

Chapter IV : Glasgow's Municipal Philosophy.

Chapter V : Glasgow's Municipally Owned Public Utilities.

Chapter VI : Glasgow's Battle With the Slum.

Chapter VII : London, the World Capital.

Chapter VIII : The International Municipal Congress in Dusseldorf ,

Chapter IX : Hamburg a Proof of German Initiative.

Chapter X : Phases of Municipal Administration in Hamburg.

Chapter XI : Official Statistics of Hamburg.

Chapter XII : The Land Increment Tax in Hamburg.

Chapter XIII : Looking Into Houston's Future.

Chapter XIV : The Appreciation of Art in the German Cities.

Chapter XV : Facts and Figures From Hanover's Government.

Chapter XVI : Hanover's Municipal Kestaurants.

Chapter XVII : Munich's Model Municipal Reports.

Chapter XVIII : German Management of a Difficult Problem.

Chapter XIX : Dusseldorf, "The Sheffield of Germany."

Chapter XX : Berlin, the City Magnificent.

Chapter XXI : Latest Official Data on Berlin.

Chapter XXII : Humanity Moving to Towti.

Chapter XXIII : Houston's Inland Harbor.

Chapter XXIV : An Appreciation of tlie Theme : Editorial From the
Dallas-Galveston Daily News.

CHAPTER I.

Eepoet of the City's Special Commissioner to the Mayok and
City Commissioners of the City of Houston.

Houston, Texas, January 20, 1913.

To the Mayor and City Commissioners of the City of Houston:

Being commissioned by you for the City of Houston to spend six
months studying and reporting upon the organization and manage-
ment of the public works and governments of the cities of Europe, so
far as the task could be covered within the period named, and with a
view to learning lessons from the experience of those cities which
might be made of use in developing the public works of Houston, I
undertook the work on August 7, 1912. I have visited Cork and
Dublin, in Ireland; Sheffield and London, in England; Paris, in
France, and most of the larger cities of Northern and Central Ger-
many, Under your orders I have sent you twenty-one letters for
publication in the Sunday newspapers of general circulation in Hous-
ton, in each letter discussing some phase of municipal organization or
management in one or more of the cities of Europe. Thus the larger
portion of my report has already been given to you and through you
to the people of Houston by way of the newspapers. I submit here a
brief summary of my findings, with some recommendations :

I find municipal taxes (levied mostly on incomes), in the cities
which I visited, to run 25 to 100 per cent higher than in Houston and
other cities of Houston's class in Texas.

I find the cities of Europe which I visited are all supplied with
complete or nearly complete systems of street paving, water, drainage
and sanitary sewers.

I find them as a rule owning their gas and electric light works, and
many of them owning and operating also their street railways. I find
the principle of municipal ownership and operation of these public
utilities, both in Great Britain and in Germany, to be well established,
and where exceptions to this rule exist, these are due to the non-
completion of contracts entered into years ago between the private
o\^Tiors of these utilities and the city governments. I find it to be the
settled policy of tbe cities which I visited steadily to extend tlie ])olicy
of munici])al owTiership and operation of public utilities until all shall
have been taken over by the cities. I find the leaders in the popular
demand for municipal ovsTiership and operation of such utilities are
not there, as hero, radical politicians, but solid, substantial, conserva-
tive men of affairs, backed, of course, by the majority of their fellow

citizens of all groups and classes. The propriety and the success of
municipal ownership and operation of public utilities in these leading
cities of Europe is not any longer a debatable subject; their complete
transference from private to public ownership is apparently only a
question of a few years.

I find this principle of municipal ownership and control of public
utilities to extend to and include the municipal ownership and control
of at least a large portion of dock and harbor property. In the German
cities the municipalities own and control all or nearly all of such
property, leasing it to transportation and industrial companies at
rentals which are planned to enable the cities to pay off debt incurred
by them to provide harbors, and thereafter to turn a steadily increasing
flow of revenue from that source into the municipal treasury.

I find the cities of Germany (all of them have been modernized and
enormously increased in population during the past forty-two years)
have issued bonds to borrow money with which to build public services,
in amounts far beyond the average bonded debt incurred by American
cities for such purposes. Of especial interest to Houston, as a city
which hopes to become one of the great harbor cities of the world, I
find that the cities of Hamburg and Bremen, the chief seaports of
Northern Germany, have borrowed enormous sums with which to
create and equip their harbors. Hamburg (directly and through a
company in which it owns a stock control) during the past thirty
years has expended $130,000,000 on its harbor. Bremen a few
years ago issued bonds, for making an enlargement of its harbor
facilities, amounting to $132 for each inhabitant of the city-state; this,
of course, in addition to a bonded debt already far larger than that of
Houston or any other Texas city. Hamburg's harbor, situated about
seventy miles inland, on the river Elbe, has been cut out of a meadow,
exactly as Houston's harbor, about fifty miles inland, must be made, if
Houston's ambition to become a great seaport city is to be realized.
Inasmuch as Houston, at the head of the Houston-Galveston sea-and-
rail shipping district, brings tidewater several hundred miles nearer,
for more than one-fourth of the United States, than any other possible
great seaport, I am convinced Houston's ambition will be realized, step
by step, during our own and the next generation, and that here in the
Houston-Galveston district will arise one of the world's great cities,
rivaling Hamburg, San Francisco, Glasgow, Boston and New York.

I find the cities of Europe which I visited are so organized as to
procure that continuity of constructive policies which is essential to
their economical development. In the cities of Great Britain, as a
rule, only one-third of the city council is elected each year, thus
assuring that at least two-thirds of the councillors shall be familiar
with municipal policies and pledged to their continuance. I find the
administrative officers of these British cities — clerk, treasurer, auditor,
etc., are installed in office for life, the theory being that each year of
their added experience in this work is an asset to the city, by reason
of making them more efficient public servants,

I find in the cities of Germany that this purpose to prociire con-
tinuity of constructive policies is more strongly emphasized than in
Great' Britain, and that city management in the German cities is a
profession, ranking with the most honored professions.

I find that the taxpayers of German cities, and a few other citizens
to whom for special service of one kind or another the privilege has
been awarded, are the only citizens privileged to vote for members of
the city councils. I find that the German city council employs a
mayor, who can best be described as a general manager subject to the
control of the council, acting as a board of directors for the people,
and that under civil service organization the mayor and city council
employ all other city officials, from top to bottom,

I find that mayors of German cities are employed precisely as presi-
dents and general managers of American railway companies and other
great privately owned companies are employed, namely, upon proved
ability to perform the work. These German mayors, and most of the
other higher officials of German cities, are all not only men of the
highest technical education, but must have proven their executive
capacity as well before they can rise to the rank of mayor-general-
manager of any considerable town.

I find that German cities often compete for the services of men who
have won high repute as mayors, and that in such cases the city which
succeeds in hiring the man sought usually ties him up wnth a life
contract, in order to prevent some other city from taking him away
with an offer of larger salary.

I find that in some instances the mayors of German cities are per-
mitted to add to their incomes by acting as officials or consultants of
private industrial companies.

In the cities of Prussia mayors are employed for terms of twelve
years', but it is well understood that if the mayor has served satisfac-
torily during his term he will be re-employed, unless he shall in the
meantime have reached the retiring age. In Munich the mayor is
employed for a trial term of three years, and if he makes good he is
then re-employed for life, or until he reaches the retiring age.

I find that all employes of German cities are employed for stated
long terms of years, with the understanding that good work will insure
retention in office term after term until the retiring age is reached,
when all shall retire on pensions sufficient to maintain ihciu as long
as they may live.

I find the cities of Great Britain and Germany making a stout
effort to a})olish crime and disease-breeding slums, both by enacting
laws which require private owners of slum tenements to remodel them
in conformity with sanitary science, and, when this cfi'ort fails, by con-
demning such buildings and replacing them with municipally owned
tenements, which are rented to the people at cost plus interest.

1 find it to he the settled policy of the leading cities of both nations
to extend the princij)le f)f municipal nwnershij) and operation not only
to water, light, transportation and those utilities which in most

American cities are privately owned, but also to markets, housing,
playgrounds, baths, gymnasia and any other community needs which
are not adequately served by private enterprise.

I find the cities of Germany nearly all conducting municipal savings
banks. There are more than 20,000,000 individual deposits in these
banks, with total deposits exceeding $700,000,000. Deposits are
guaranteed by the municipalities.

I find most of the German cities owning and conducting public bath
houses, including Turkish baths, in which the citizens get good service
at prices ranging from 20 to 40 per cent of the cost of such service in
American privately-owned baths.

I find the cities of Great Britain and Germany conducting labor
exchanges or public employment agencies, which serve employers and
men seeking work at low cost or none, thus protecting them from
extortionate charges and fraud often inflicted upon American working-
men seeking employment through private agencies.

I find the American public free school system to be, in theory as to
all youths, and in practice as to a small minority of our youths, more
liberal, more fully equipped, and more democratic in spirit, than the
free public schools of either Great Britain or Germany. American
public schools, giving to all children alike, whether of rich or poor
families, identical education, free to all whose means permit them to
take advantage of it, from primary through the high school which
prepares them for college, has the supreme merit of being the world's
most conspicuously successful agency for asserting the natural right
of all human beings to an equality of opportunity. Caste and class
spirit have no part or place in it. Whatever its shortcomings, it is still
this country's noblest single contribution to human civilization.

In Germany, where education in the primary or common schools, up
to the pupil's fourteenth year, is compulsory, and where 14,000,000
children below fourteen years of age are in attendance, tuition is free.
It is possible, in my opinion probable, that the Germans, directing the
pupil's attention during the last j'ear or two of this primary schooling
toward the trade or craft or calling which he seems best fit for, or which
is most available for him, have improved upon our common school
system devoted wholly or mainly, during this period of the pupil's life,
to text-book learning. The so-called continuation schools of Germany,
including afternoon sessions three days a week, night sessions and
Sunday sessions, aim to extend the primary school graduates' knowledge
of the craft, trade or calling in which they have enlisted as wage-
earners, and in these schools, too, attendance is compulsory up to
seventeen years of age. Employers of these pupils are required by law
to allow them to attend the afternoon school sessions.

All schools in Germany are under state supervision, but most of
them are conducted by municipalities subject to such supervision. The
cities derive a considerable portion of their yearly revenues from tuition
fees paid for pupils in the higher schools and colleges.

Summed up, it can be said that the cities of Germany are at once
the youngest (in their new planning and organization), and the most
completely equipped and beautiful cities in Northern Europe. They
have got these advantages because :

(1) The Germans were the first people to perceive that the migra-
tion of millions of village and farm people into city manufacturing
centers, following the invention and application of the great product-
multiplying machines of modern industry, had created a new problem
(the problem of decently and healthfully housing, feeding, entertaining
and governing these millions ia their strange new environment), and
were therefore the first people who attempted to solve that problem,
and have gone much farther than any other people toward a solu-
tion of it.

(2) In order to accomplish the end desired, the German cities
have borrowed vastly larger amounts of money on bond issues than
American cities, excepting only New York.

(3) As a rule, the German cities have invested this borrowed
money, or most of it, in revenue-producing properties — those public
utilities which theretofore in Germany were, and today in American
cities still are, privately owned and operated for private profit.

(4) Taxes' in German cities were and are high, as compared with
taxes in American and especially in Texas cities, on the principle that
it is cheaper to have and enjoy the foundation decencies of city life,
at any price, than not to have them; and most public improvements,
not of a revenue-producing character, have been paid for out of cur-
rent revenues, by assessing a share of the cost against abutting prop-
erty, and from the surplus earnings of the revenue-producing public
services.

(5) The general welfare being made paramount to private profit
in serving most of the common needs in the modern German cities,
city planning, to meet these needs, and to procure for each inhabitant
the maximum of health, comfort, beauty and sane entertainment at the
minimum cost, as well as to provide manufacturers witli the best
shij)ping facilities and labor supply at minimum cost, has advanced in
Germany beyond other nations. It has, indeed, become one of the pro-
fessions, distinct from architecture and landscape gardening, both of
which arts' it supplements and employs. The modern cities of Ger-
many have been consciously planned, by their governments employing
the best ol)tainable professional skill, to get these results; and their
subserpient and future growth has been and will be on lines hiid down
in tliose comprehensive city plans. A man with $10,000,000 could not
go to Dusseldorf, the chief steel and iron manufacturiiig city of
Germany, and locate a factory costing that amount on any spot where
it would impair the health or the property rights of the humblest
citizen, or anywhere else, in fact, except in a section of the city set
apart by the city government for such industries. But in that section
tlie investor would find that the city government had provided him
with the best possible rail and river shipping facilities, and adjacent
to an industrial pojiulalion, decently housed, that was adajjted to his

need. American cities expanding under pressure of the desire for
private profit, like Topsy, "just growed.'"' So far as I can learn, the
modernized cities of Germany are the only ones which have been
consciously and intelligently planned, subordinating private profit,
from the increment in land values, to the general welfare. Many of
the German cities, and the imperial government as well, have entered
upon the policy of appropriating for the public treasuries a portion of
this land value increment, and it apparently is their purpose to extend
this policy imtil it covers all or nearly all of such increment socially
created.

(6) The German cities have been able to get their huge municipal
investments intelligently and honestly expended (not without some
notable exceptions in both respects, however, since our German cousins
are human like the rest of us), because they have from the beginning
of their new era (dating from the revival which followed the Franco-
Prussian war and the formation of the German Empire) treated
municipal government as a profession, and not, in the American
fashion, as a cross between an exciting sport and a scramble for the
spoils of office. The Germans have been able to procure men pro-
fessionally trained, to fill their municipal offices, because they are the
best educated people, in the middle and upper levels, in Europe, and
because they recruit the talent in these levels with a steady, small, but
constantly increasing stream of talent rising from the industrial levels
of their society. Four of the principal German cities maintain munici-
pal service colleges in connection wuth their city governments ; in these
colleges aspirants for city positions, high or low, are given training to
fit them for the posts to which they aspire. None is appointed until
he has completed his period of training and proven his efficiency.

II.

Six years ago, viewing Houston for the first time, and observing
that this city had nearly if not quite a hundred excellent churches,
but had very few sewers, less than one-half the necessary city water
service that was needed for people then here, a scant one-eighth of
the needed pavement, and only a small percentage of scattering side-
walks, I gained the impression that while the people of Houston were
admirably equipped for living in Heaven, they were rather poorly
equipped for living in Houston.

Since that day an energetic effort has been made by the city admin-
istration to perfect our arrangements for living in Houston. Those
years have witnessed the erection of numerous fine public school build-
ings, the rapid extension of the city water and sanitary sewer systems,
the making of a good beginning on the task of underground drainage,
the laying of a small amount of permanent pavement, the construction
of several hundred miles of sidewalks. Those years witnessed, too, a
long and finally successful (after two attempts in popular elections)
campaign for the adoption, here in Houston, of the front-foot paving
plan, the plan by which all American cities, with few exceptions and
none of the larger size, have been able to pave their streets. Until that

plan was adopted by vote of our citizens, it was impossible for Houston
to hope to pave any considerable mileage of streets under the old plan,
which required the city to pay the whole cost of paving.

The new plan, the all-but-universally used American plan, having
been at last adopted here, and the people having recently voted a few
hundred thousand dollars with which to pay the city's share of the
cost of paving laid under the front-foot system, the way is now, for
the first time in Houston's history, opened for really paving the city.
The money in hand will make a beginning, and if the people of Hous-
ton are not content to dwell forever in the mud, if they want good
streets, they will no doubt hereafter from time to time vote additional
bonds for this work, or will submit to increased taxation for it, if they
do not approve bond issues for paving, since the experience of the old-
world cities proves there is no other way to get paving except by
paying for it.

I offer the following recommendations, not with the hope that all
or any of them will be immediately adopted, but with the desire that
they go on record as the best counsel for Houston that I can formulate
after twenty-five years' study of American municipalities and a brief,
hasty glance over the organization of some successful old-world cities :

First — I recommend that the salary of the mayor of Houston be
raised from $4,000 a year to $10,000 a year, and that the charter
provision requiring candidates for this office to have been o^\Tiers of
Houston real estate for two years, and resident property taxpayers five
years, be eliminated, in order that the ablest men for the place, whether
rich or poor, may feel that they can afford to become candidates for it,
and to occupy the office without fear of bankruptcy if elected. The
office of general manager of a corporation touching intimately the lives
of 100,000 to 125,000 people (soon to be a quarter million) and which
has an annual turn-over of more than $2,000,000 (soon to be $5,000,000
or $6,000,000), is at lowest calculation a $10,000-a-year office, and
calls for a $10,000-a-year man to fill it acceptably.

Second — I recommend that the term of office of the mayor of Hous-
ton be extended from two years to four, or, even better, to six years, in
order that the city's executive head, having laid down, with the advice
and consent of the commissioners, certain far-reaching constructive
municipal policies, shall be free for a reasonable term of years to
develop those policies, without being, as now, compelled every two
years to fight for his political life in order to finish anything which he
hai3 begun.

Third — I recommend tliat the four city commissioners be exempted
from the charter provision which now requires them to devote their
whole time to city service and to have no other business, in order that
these offices may thus be opened to men of greatest ability, who now
are unable to accept service on the commission because to do so would
force thorn to abandon their private business or profession.

Fourth — I recommend that the term of office of the four city com-
missioners be extended from two to four years, and that one commis-
sioner, and one only, shall be elected each year, in order that there may

at all times be in the city government a majority, three members of
the commission, acquainted with municipal policies and pledged to
their continuance. It seems to me we assume an unnecessary and un-
businesslike hazard so long as we risk electing every two years an entire
new commission, of men wholly unacquainted with municipal policies
or affairs.

Fifth — I recommend that the four city commissioners be not re-
quired to serve as the active heads of city departments, but that they
act as a board of directors of the city corporation, together with the
mayor, outlining main policies; execution of these policies to be com-
mitted to the mayor's hands, and he held by the board of directors to a
strict accounting for executive management. Active heads of city
departments should be emploved, on merit, during good behavior.

Sixth — I recommend that the four city commissioners be paid $20
each for attendance at one weekly session of the board, or $10 each
(per session) for attendance on two weekly sessions of the board,
instead of the $2,400 yearly salary now paid commissioners for giving
their whole time to the city service. ''

Seventh — I recommend that the initiative, referendum and recall be
embodied in our city charter ; the recall to apply to all elective officers',
and to be available upon petition for a recall election signed by not
less than 30 per cent of the number of voters polled at the last preced-
ing election. Inasmuch as Houston, with 17,000 men of voting age,
seldom polls as many as 6,500 votes in a municipal election, it seems
to me that 30 per cent of that number, or less than 2,000 voters out of
17,000, is as low as it would be safe to set the figure if we wish to keep
"the gun behind the door," as Governor Wilson puts it, and at the
same time escape the temptation to use it hastily and without due
reflection. San Francisco has the recall at 10 per cent; Los Angeles,
20; Seattle, 25; Denver, 25; Portland, Ore., 25; Oakland, 15; Birm-
ingham, 3,000 voters; Omaha, 30; Lowell, Mass., 20; Spokane, 20;
Trenton, 25; Lynn, 25; Des Moines, 25; Lawrence, 25; Tacoma, 25;
Kansas City, Kan., 25 ; Duluth, 25 ; St. Joseph, 20.

Eighth — That as speedily as possible a way be found to issue city
bonds with which to take over into municipal ownership and operation
the gas and electric lighting services and the street railway ; and in the
meantime — since I have little hope that this desirable change will
come to pass in the near future, in view of the city's absurdly limited
bond-borrowing capacity under the state constitution — I recommend
that the city borrow every obtainable dollar, by bond issues, and that it
gradually advance the tax rate, to obtain funds with which to complete,
at the earliest possible day, our drainage, sanitary sewer, water supply
and paving systems.

Xinth — I recommend that the management of the public free schools
of Houston, in obedience to tlie spirit in which the bond money was
voted, and in conformity with the actual needs of a large majority of
the pupils, shall so organize the work of the public high schools, and
especially of the junior high schools, as to enable all pupils who want
it to obtain the maximum vocational training which will equip them

when graduated to become wealth-producers and self-supporting mem-
bers of society. The democratic ideal which always has and always
should animate our free public school system will not, in my opinion,
be impaired if our schools, like our other public services, manifest an
increasing tendency to prepare their beneficiaries for living in Houston
instead of in a state of mind.

Tenth — I recommend that the City of Houston procure authority
from the legislature of Texas to obtain ownership of ample territory
on either bank of the ship channel to provide for necessary enlargement
of the ship-turning basin and to prevent monopolization by private
interests of channel frontage which will ultimately be needed to accom-
modate railroads, warehouses, factories and other industrial institu-
tions. The city should ovm. at least 5,000 acres of land, lying on both
sides of the channel, at the point finally chosen for a harbor site. I
recommend as such site the point where Green's bayou enters Buffalo
bayou, 11>4 miles in an air line from Main street in Houston. I further
recommend, in this connection, that the city at the proper time shall
employ the best obtainable harbor engineer, to make a thorough tech-
nical study and report upon the best European harbors, to make sure
that in the development of Houston's harbor and wharfage equipment,
the best modem services shall be installed. The success of our future
harbor will depend quite as much upon its ability to handle a ton of
freight at minimum cost as upon our extremely favorable location.

Eleventh — I recommend that the city government create a city-
planning commission for Houston, to outline, for adoption by the city
government, a general plan providing for Houston's future growth, as
the German cities have done. I regard this as by long odds the most
vital of all my recommendations, since I am firmly convinced, having
studied Houston's situation in comparison with those of the great
developed inland harbor cities of Xorthem Europe, that Houston is
certain to become a city of more than a million inhabitants within
fifty years. It would be nothing less than purblind folly for the gen-
eration now in control of Houston's destiny to neglect to make pro-
vision for a sane, beautiful, healthful, economical plan of future city
growth — now, while the first foundations of the future great city are
being laid. The city of Dusseklorf, Germany, the cleanest, best-
housed, most healthful, most prosperous and one of the most beautiful
cities in the empire, has just paid out something over $25,000 to
competing city-planners whose plans for the city's future growth were
submitted to the city council in response to a call and the offer of large
cash prizes. Houston's city-planning commission should be composed
of our most enlightened citizens, serving patriotically without pay for
prifle in their privilege of helping plan a city, primarily to conserve the
health and comfort, and to minister to the sense of beauty, of genera-
tions who, coming after them, will honor them for this service. This
city-planning commission should include one or more women in its
membership. It should be provided with means to employ the best
obtainable professional talent. Inasmuch as its work would probably

be concluded within two or three years, it could not be held to conflict,
as to its duties, with the existing park commission, nor with any other
body of city othcials. Its final plan, formed after hearing from all
sections of the present city, and from all classes and groups of citizens,
should be officially adopted by the city government, and that govern-
ment should insist upon a strict observance of the plan in the city's
subsequent industrial, residential and park and playground expansion.

Twelfth — I recommend that the city government establish a munici-
pal labor agency or employment bureau, to serve Houston employers
and Houston workers seeking employment, without charge. These
agencies have made good in the old-world cities ; a service of this kind,
which can be rendered better by the city than by private individuals,
and which rightly managed would reduce vagrancy and the out-of-work
problem that now creates a heavy charge upon the public treasury, i&
in my opinion one which the city can properly establish.

Thirteenth — I recommend that the city government, so soon as may
be possible, establish and operate not less than four public bath houses
in different portions of the city; one of the four, to be situated in or
near the city center, to provide facilities for Turkish baths. This
service to be given at cost plus interest. For 40 cents in a municipal
bath house in any of the larger German cities, one gets an excellent
Turkish bath; for two or three cents a cold tub and for four cents a
hot tub, with soap, towels and access to a big swimming pool. Days
are set apart in these public bathing establishments for women and
girls. The charges are calculated to pay cost of operation. Houston,
a sub-tropical city lacking river or lake bathing facilities, and provided
(and certain for many years of construction turmoil, under any ad-
ministration, to be provided) with an overplus of blowing dirt of all
sorts, needs adequate public bathing facilities as badly as it needs any
other public service after drinking water, which we have, ample, of best
quality and low in price.

Fourteenth — I recommend that the city government establish a
municipal slaughter house, and require that all animals whose flesh is
to be offered for sale in this city shall be slaughtered therein, subject
to competent inspection before and after slaughtering, to guarantee our
citizens against the sale of diseased meats.

Fifteenth — I recommend that the city government establish public
comfort stations at various places in the city center; wanting these
stations, no city is fitly equipped to entertain large crowds of visitors.

My services for six months cost the city of Houston $1,800; my
expenses during the service, chargeable to the city, were $2,700, making
the total cost to the city $4,500.

The city, as a going business institution, competing with hundreds
of other ambitious American cities for new population, capital and
enterprises, has derived, directly from this mission, the best kind of
newspaper and magazine publicity, in a volume which could not have
been bought for $500,000 in cash.

I submit herewith a statement of my expenses :

EXPENSE ACCOUNT OF FRANK PUTNAM, TRIP TO EUROPE IN SERVICE OF
CITY OF HOUSTON, AUGUST 7, 1912, TO JANUARY 7, 1913.

Cash received from City of Houston, account expenses $2,700.00

Spent in service of City of Houston, for —

Traiuportatian — Visiting and working (to procure publicity
for Houston and to obtain information concerning mu-
nicipal governments), in Kansas City, Mo.; ^Yaterloo,
Iowa ; Chicago, 111. ; Xew York, X. Y. ; Boston, Mass. ;
Cork and Dublin, Ireland; Glasgow, Scotland; Sheffield
and London, England ; Paris, France, and the principal
cities of Germany, including charges for steamship, rail-
road, motor boat, carriage, taxicab and other conveyances,
covering 15,600 miles $ 870.05

Entertainment — Hotel, cafe, restaurant, theatre, dining cars,
clubs, and social functions to which, as Houston's special
commissioner, I was invited, and in entertaining in my
turn people who thus aided me in my task of inquiry 1,036.15

Service — Translators, typists, secretary, couriers, porters, and

gratuities to other servants 437.40

Purchases — Xecessitated by the work in hand and the exigen-
cies of travel : books, papers, clothing, postage, pictures,
maps, printing, cable and telegrams and other incidentals. 356.40

Total amount expended $2,700.00

Learning since my return home that some taxpayers think the ex-
penditure of this money was ill-advised, or wasteful, I insist here upon
my right to say to such taxpayers, if there be any, that I stand ready
on their demand, and on presentation by them of a properly certificated
voucher from the city tax collector, to refund to each his pro rata
share of the cost of the undertaking. For five years, a private citizen,
I have served Houston in as many hours daily as I could spare from
the task of earning a living; have done it for sporting pride in the
town and to make it a more beautiful, more healthful and comfortable
place to live in. The only reason I did not make the city a present of
this trip and inquiry was because I could not afford to do it. Rather
than have any taxpayer feel I have wasted a penny of his money, I
stand ready to take the trifling burden off his hands on demand.

Respectfully submitted,

Frank Putnam.

CHAPTER 11.
The Ancient City of Cork.

Cork, Ireland. — It seemed desirable that one who had undertaken
the task of extracting precise information, official in character, from
the managers of cities in several European countries, should first kiss
the Blarney Stone. So, instead of proceeding direct to Liverpool, as
first planned, I quit the Caronia at QueenstowTi and came the same
day, Saturday, August 31, to Cork by rail.

Sunday morning, however, discovering that in order to kiss the
stone one has to climb by a winding stone stairway 120 feet to the top
of an ancient tower and then hang down, head first, on the outer
wall at that height, ankles in the grip of one or more friends who lean
backward with feet braced, I decided it was not in keeping with my
personal and official dignity to assume such a position for such a
purpose, and stood aside for more reckless individuals. The effect of
kissing the Blarney Stone was exhibited by an old man who met us at
the entrance to the castle grounds.

"How long have you lived here ?" he was asked.

"Sixty-four years," he replied.

"And have you ever visited America ?"

"No, sir, I have never yet breathed the air of freedom."

Next day, at city hall, Lord Mayor O'Shea and City Clerk McCarthy
made the Houstonian free of the hall and the city. "I think," said
the lord mayor, "we'd better be sending a commissioner to Houston,
to learn from a city so enterprising that it seeks facts for the people's
business at so great a distance. I have never heard of anything like
it before. It's a fine idea, and I can easier believe now that you really
have a great city in the making, as I've been told often."

Cork, like Houston, was rated at about 78,000 in the last census,
and like Houston has more than 100,000, including its overflow popu-
lation around the edges. It seemed to mo, tlierefore, to afford a good
opportunity for placing the municipal development of a young Amer-
ican city in contrast with that of a very old European city of aboiit
the same size. Cork, like Houston, is back a few miles from the
seacoast, and like Houston has a ship channel leading inland from the
coast city near it. Cork's channel is the River Lee, deepened and
improved by the government to 31 feet at low tide.

Houston is less than eighty years old. Cork's oldest existing char-
ter was granted in l^OO, and that charter was in ])art an extension of
powers granted in earlier charters Father Cashnian of Chicago, here
to pay his thirty-seventh annual visit to his old mother, four miles
from Cork, and who knows the history of Ireland from Cork to Belfast

in detail, told me the Celts had a vast empire reaching from the Black
Sea to the Baltic before the Christian era, and possessed a high
civilization before the coming of 8t. Patrick in the fifth or sixth cen-
tury, A. D. Cork has long been known as the Athens of Ireland, and
even more than Dublin is the center of Nationalist sentiment.

Today Cork is declining while Houston advances. But Cork is
making a strong effort to stay her decline, and is doing it by means of
vocational education, locally, while her representatives in the British
parliament fight for home rule for Ireland and a larger measure of
local self-government. Cork like Houston wants new industries, to
enlist the energies and spur the hope of her people, Cork, following
the German example, has beaten Houston to the establishment of a
trade school, and in this trade school, or technical school as it is called
here, I find perhaps the best affirmative lesson which Houston can
learn from the ancient metropolis of South Ireland. Beginnings in
technical education — artistic and mechanical — were made in Cork
seven years ago, in three scattered buildings. It was recognized that,
whoever might hold the reins of government, the economic hope of
the people must rest upon industrial efficiency, and so they began
breaking away from the exclusively classical ideal of education.

The three scattered schools of seven years ago are now assembled in
one large building. The site was given to the city by a generous citizen.
The nation granted a yearly allowance for the maintenance of the
school and confided its management, subject to the approval of the
national board which controls mechanical and agricultural education,
to a committee of the citizens of Cork. The committee capitalized the
national allowance and realized a lump sum of approximately $100,000,
with which the school was built and equipped. It has been in opera-
tion on the new basis one year.

This school was intensely interesting to me, as the first out and out
trade school I had ever seen. Its purpose is frankly to train boys and
girls, men and women, for the skilled trades. Thus far it has con-
fined its appeal to youths already apprenticed in the various mechan-
ical trades in Cork. It has made no effort, chiefly for want of space,
to call in and give a complete trade education from the ]>eginning to
youths who have not already made a start as craftsmen. The labor
unions have been friendly to the school; they are represented on its
managing committee. They do not see in it a menace to the stability
of wages, so much as a promise of higher wages ultimately, to follow
advanced standards of skill in the several crafts. They are far-seeing,
these Cork unionists. They realize that with the increasing com-
plexity of many of the crafts it is not possible for a craftsman who has
learned his trade in the old way, through practice alone, and in ignor-
ance of the scientific principles which underlie practice, to give the
best service or demand the highest pay. Some of the union men have
objected to the work of the school, but most of them have thought
for their sons as well as for themselves. They realize, as we in America
have begun to realize, that the old plan of giving all children the
same kind and amount of free education — education leading not to

the useful trades but to the overcrowded professions — has ceased to
meet the needs of an increasingly complex civilization — the civiliza-
tion of the vast machines which have superseded old-time hand tools,
and which require the attendance not of the old-time all-around work-
man but of highly trained specialists.

Cork, nearly or quite 1,000 years old, like Houston, less than 80,
has suddenly realized the vital necessity to provide, in her public
free schools, the kind of education which will equip public school
graduates to take their places without loss of time in the established
industries, as wealth-producers and self-supporting members of society.
Beyond that, Cork like Houston realizes that in order to acquire new
industries she must create in her own citizenship a body of skilled
workers, competent to grasp the principles of the new machinery of
industry, and to apply them.

Texas timber owners, and Houston citizens who are studying the
problem of paving materials there at home, will be interested to know
that Cork is repaving a portion of St. Patrick street, the principal
business highwa}^, with creosoted wood blocks. Granite is being taken
up to give place to wood. The blocks are of soft pine from Norway,
by no means equal in durability to the creosoted cypress blocks pro-
duced in Southern Texas. But they are deemed so great an improve-
ment over granite (after a dozen years of trial in other streets), for
minimizing noise of traffic, for cleanliness and in other ways, that the
change is being made with general public approval.

The Cork corporation owns none of its public utilities except the
water works. Street railways and electric light plant are owned by a
private corporation, which manages to pay 4 or 5 per cent dividends
on its capital izati(m, of which one to one and one-half per cent is
earned by the street railways. In Cork one travels from end to end of
any of the lines — a maximum distance of little more than three miles —
for two cents of American money ; if you mean to make the round trip,
your ticket going out and coming back will cost you three cents of our
money, or one pence and half-penny of English copper. There are no
transfers given from one line to another, and there is very little de-
mand for them. The city has charter authority to acquire title to these
utilities and operate them, but does not deem the investment an at-
tractive one, rates considered. The mass of the peoi)le of Cork are
undeniably very poor; naturally, they do not patronize street cars so
liberally as do the Americans, few of whom, in or around Houston,
know what actual poverty may mean to its victims. The dollar not
only goes much farther here than in Texas, but it is a lot slower making
up its mind to start at all. Considering that Ireland's population has'
declined over 4,()00,()()() — nearly 50 per cent — in 70 years, and that
most of those wiif) have departed, otherwise than by death, have been
th(! strongest and most daring, Cork's ability to hold her own in ])opu-
lation, and her courageous attempt to remedy her case by applying the
doctrine of educational efficiency (while never ceasing from the fight
for home rule), is an amazing proof of the ])eople's extraordinary
vitality and their grip upon their ancient ideals.

So much for the official side of the case. Now for just a paragraph or
two dealing with the human side of the picture. Perhaps, too, it has a
bearing on the official side. At any rate, it points the moral that the
city which neglects to appreciate and cherish its artists is overlooking
a good money bet, and that is something we can all understand. Thus :
Cork is a Mecca for tourists from all over the world, and I am told a
very large number of them — as many, probably, as come to kiss the
Blarney Stone — are drawn here to see the church in whose tower are
the Bells of Shandon, celebrated in Father Front's famous poem.

"All day long and every day," said the old man who showed me
through the church, "people come here from all over the world to see
the church and to hear the bells. Weekdays I play jigs on the bells,
but Sundays (I was there Sunday afternoon) we play only hymns."
Whereupon he played "Lead, Kindly Light" and "Abide With Me."
He said he had frequent requests for these hymns from American
visitors. These were the favorite hymns of the late President Me-
Kinley. I am going to violate official tradition by quoting the poem
here, in order for my fellow Texans to get a line on the kind of talent
we ought to encourage with a view to drawing a profitable tourist trade
our way hereafter.

THE BELLS OF SHANDON,

With deep affection and recollection

I often think of the Shandon Bells,
Whose sounds so wild would, in days of childhood,

Fling 'round my cradle their magic spells —
On this I ponder, where'er I wander.

And thus grow fonder, sweet Cork, of thee;
With thy bells of Shandon,
That sound so grand on
The pleasant waters of the River Lee.

I have heard bells chiming full many a clime in,

Tolling sublime in cathedral shrine;
While at a glib rate brass tongues would vibrate.

But all their music spoke naught to thine ;
For memory dwelling on each proud swelling
Of thy belfry knelling its proud notes free,
Made the bells of Shandon
Sound far more grand on
The pleasant waters of the Eiver Lee.

I have heard bells tolling "old Adrian's mole" in.

Their thunders rolling from the Vatican,
With cymbals glorious, swinging uproarious

In the gorgeous turrets of Xotre Dame ;

But thy sounds were sweeter than the dome of Peter

Flings o'er the Tiber, pealing solemnlv.

0 ! the bells of Shandon

Sound far more grand on

The pleasant waters of the River Lee.

There's a bell in Moscow, while on tower and kiosko,

In St. Sophia the Turkman gets,
And loud in air calls men to prayer

From the tapering summits of tall minarets ;
Such empty phantoms I freely grant them,
But there's an anthem more dear to me :
It's the bells of Shandon,
That sound so grand on
The pleasant waters of the River Lee.

And while we stood on a classic stone arch bridge above the dark
flowing waters of the Eiver Lee, listening to the bells of Shandon, my
friend, Judge O'jSTeil of Scranton, Pa., who was lured across the wide
waters to hear those bells, recited the poem that has touched the hearts
of millions and which is now, let us not forget, bringing each year
thousands of perfectly good tourist guineas into the tills of the inn-
keepers and shopkeepers of the city in which the poet was born.

CHAPTER III.
The Capital of Irelaxd.

Dublin, Ireland. — The Irish capital is another city which, like Cork
and Houston, has utilized a small stream to give it an inland harbor.
The River Liffey, back from Dublin, is an inconsiderable stream. In
and below Dublin to the sea it has been widened, deepened and walled
with rock, giving the city a broad water highway traversed by seagoing
ships of large size.

Dublin has a half million people. It is one of the handsomest, best-
built cities that I have seen. Its streets are broad and well paved.
Most of them are paved with granite blocks. Here as in Cork some of
the do\\Tito^\Ti streets have recently been repaved with creosoted wood
blocks; indeed, the Shelbourne Hotel, the city's leading caravansary,
advertises the fact that the streets upon which it fronts have been re-
paved with wood blocks, thus procuring more quiet for its guests.
Drivers praise the wood block, saying it doubles the working life of
their horses (as compared with the granite blocks), and the taxicab
men tell me it is far easier on tires.

The British government maintains in Ireland forty-two administra-
tive boards, each charged with the duty of governing the people in one
way or another. The local government board holds a check on munici-
pal administration. The cities of Great Britain obtain charters from
the British parliament. The powers of the city councils elected by
the people of the cities are limited and very strictly defined. The
function of the local government board for each of the three chief
divisions of the United Kingdom — England and Wales, Scotland and
Irehmd — is to see to it that city councils do not exceed their charter
authority. For example: a Dublin philanthropist donated to the city
a gallery of fine arts. The city council accepted the gift and levied a
small tax to maintain the gallery. The Irish local government board's
responsible officer cut that item out of the budget. He surcharged
it back on the city councillors who voted the tax and they were obliged
to pay it out of their own pockets. The local government board man
said he appreciated the usefulness of a municii)al gallery of fine arts;
he wished it were possible for him to approve the tax for its main-
tenance, but since the city's charter contains no specific reference to
tliat subject he was bound to strike it out of the budget. The local
government board's decision is binding. There is no judicial court to
which the Dublin city council can appeal. Its one chance for a refund
is to procure an act of parliament for the settlement of this small
purely local transaction — if such an act can be jammed through when

parliament is distracted with consideration of vast, revolutionary fiscal
schemes affecting the whole 40,000,000 people of the United Kingdom.

Thus, through its local government boards, whose members are
appointed by the national government, the nation conducts an audit
of all expenditures by British cities, and exercises a degree of control
over details of their local administration which no American legisla-
ture would dare attempt to enforce upon an American city. Women
taxpayers vote on equal terms with men taxpayers on all municipal
affairs in the cities of Great Britain. There have been two women
mayors of big English towns — one larger than Houston — but govern-
ment in practice is to a large extent handed dovm to the people from
the national capital. Each city has a board of aldermen and council-
lors, elected by the people. This board in turn elects the lord mayor,
who is usually a mere figurehead. In practice, British cities have long
since adopted the custom of re-electing the city clerk, the city treas-
urer and the other city officials who really manage the business, terra
after term, as long as they care to serve, thus enabling men who have
prepared themselves for it to make a career in such offices, and pro-
curing for the city business the benefit of trained public servants. In
Cork, for example, there are seven city wards. Each ward elects two
aldermen and six councillors, making a legislative body of fifty-six
members. It is esteemed a high honor to be chosen to one of these
offices, and as a rule the best men in the cities are proud to be chosen.
It is readily seen, however, that between the supervision of the local
government board and the exercise of customary authority by the prac-
tically permanent officials — town clerk, treasurer, chamberlain, col-
lector, etc. — little remains for the city councillors to do but follow the
lines laid down by the routine officials and track the parliamentary
charters as closely as they can. Here is a wide difference from the
Texas city commission plan, where the people elect five men to admin-
ister all municipal affairs, with a free hand to manage the public
business, unhampered by higher authorities, within charter limits, and
responsible for results only to the citizen stockholders in the municipal
corporation.

The City of Dublin owns its own water works and electric lighting
system. Its gas plant and street railways are privately owned. The
water is inferior in appearance to that which we get through city
mains from artesian wells in Houston; a glance at a glass of it dis-
closed so much organic life that I did not taste it. The electric light-
ing service is not cheaper than that given by a private company in
Houston. Advocates of municipal ownership are not numerous in
Dublin. This, I gathered from talks with several representative citi-
zens, is not because of any distrust of public ownership as a general
proposition, but to distrust of it as applied to Dublin under existing
governmental conditions. As folks used to say in some American
cities, "there is too much politics" in Dublin. The charter of the city
authorizes it to acquire ownership of the street railways at the end of
a term of years, but there is little or no demand for such change of
control.

The street railway system is the one conspicuously excellent public
utility of Dublin. It runs double-decked cars (top deck enclosed on
the longer lines), on sixteen different routes. These cars are about
one-fourth shorter than the cars we have in Houston. They are very
comfortable, propelled by trolley, and run swiftly. Cars on all routes
run from three to twelve minutes apart, on most routes three to five
minutes apart. Fares range from one pence (two cents of our money)
for all trips within a radius of one and one-half miles, up to five pence
(ten cents) for the long trips of ten miles into the suburbs. The com-
pany's charter was granted by an act of parliament, the act being based
upon the terms of an agreement between the company and the city
corporation. The charter, granted in 1896 to terminate in 1925, fixed
the maximum fare at one pence for all rides inside the then city lim-
its. This distance was nowhere, in 1896, greater than one and one-
half miles. Since then the city's limits have been extended several
miles and there is a vigorous demand that the one-pence fare be
applied everywhere within the enlarged city limits.

Mr. C. W. Gordon, who has managed the system for thirteen years,
told me he would be glad to exchange the zone system of fares for the
straight five-cent fare charged by American street railways. "We
would earn larger profits'," he said. "Under our zone system each
passenger pays for the service he gets. Under your American plan
the short-distance rider pays a part of the cost of transporting the
long-distance rider, and the average — there being many more short-
distance than long-distance riders — is in favor of the company. Our
company pays 6 per cent dividends on its stock, which is mostly held in
small blocks throughout Ireland." The company's published fiscal
statement for the past year shows that after paying 6 per cent on
stock it set aside $50,000 for renewals, $5,000 for accident insurance
reserve and added $56,000 to its reserve fund — not so bad for a com-
pany which is assessed for taxation on a total income valuation of less
than $80,000.

Transfers are not given on the Dublin trams. They have not been
demanded as yet, but there is a lively demand for half-penny fares
within the one and one-half miles limit, for workingmen. Children
under three years of age pay half-fare; none ride free. It is the chief
fault of the zone system of fares that it tends to prevent workingmen
from seeking homes in the suburbs and concentrates them with their
families inside the crowded one-pence-fare limit. This is fine for the
owners of close-in tenements but it is not good for the workers who
want lower rents farther out.

The Dublin United Tramways Company pays the City of Dublin a
fixed sum per street mile per year rental for tlie use of streets which
it occupies with its tracks. The charter stipulates that this payment
shall not be less than $50,000 a year; last year it exceeded $60,000.
In addition the tram company paid its share of tlie general taxes. The
rate is ten shillings and sixpence, or $2.52, on each pound ($4.85) of
assessed value. A city tax of fifty dollars on the hundred sounds high,
but it is not as bad as it looks, since i)roj)erty in Dublin is assessed

for taxation at an average of only one-fortieth of its actual value.
Figured down to an American basis, it is about the same as the $1.70
on the $100 rate levied by the City of Houston; and it is to be borne
in mind that these old cities have long since completed the huge, costly
task of building their undergi-ound city foundations, and have now
to do little more than maintain them, while Houston, and other young
American cities, growing rapidly from a village start only a few decades
ago, have to meet, out of their current taxation, the big expense of
laying these foundations, plus the normal cost of administration. It
strikes me residents of fairly Avell governed American cities get more
for their money, dollar for dollar, than the residents of these Irish
cities.

Texas street railway employes will be interested to learn that con-
ductors and motormen here work the first year, with no day off, for
24 shillings and sixpence ($5.96) per week. Then, if their record
for the year is good, they get promoted to 27 shillings and sixpence
for the second year, and to 30 shillings ($7.20) per week for the third
year and thereafter. They get one day off in twelve, after the first
year. The company provides uniforms, overcoats and raincoats for the
men free of charge. It o^wtis groups of cottages situated near its out-
lying terminals, which it rents to its men at three to five shillings per
week, and is building more. These men, the car men, work an average
of nine and one-half hours daily. Three attempts have been made to
organize a union of the carmen, but without success. As Manager
Gordon put it, with unconscious humor, "Our carmen hold themselves
a class above the common laborers with whom it was sought to unite
them in a national transport union."

It is commonly asserted that the cost of living for workingmen is
far lower in Ireland than in the United States; that $7 a week will
buy more than $14 in the States. I have visited the provision markets
and clothing stores in the Irish cities and the prices quoted on the
simple necessaries of life in those places do not bear out the fore-
going assertion. The difference in price of most foods, here and at
home, averages less than 20 per cent, and on some items it is in favor
of the States. The plain fact is that these workingmen do not begin
to live as well or independently as men similarly employed in our
country. The burden of supporting many overlapping and often con-
flicting governing bodies bears heavily upon the working people of
British, and particularly of Irish, cities. A distinguished Irish labor
leader, formerly a member of parliament, told me the workers of the
Irish cities would be glad to have a chance to adopt the Texas com-
mission form of government, so that they might fix responsibility for
results upon a few men chosen directly by the people, and get rid of the
army of tax-eating place-holders now saddled upon the people without
their desire or consent. "We could then,'" he said, "take up municipal
ownership as Glasgow has done, and turn the surplus revenues of the
public utilities into the public treasury. As matters stand with us,
municipal ownership M^ould probably not give us lower rates or better
service and would certainly be made an excuse for creating many new
public jobs."

CHAPTER IV.

Glasgow's Muxicipal Philosophy.

''We object to anybody growing rich through ownership of a monop-
oly of any of the necessaries of our common life. We do not conduct
our municipal services with a view to making profits for the treasury,
but with the purpose to give the maximum of service for the minimum
of cost. When any public service here shows a profit on operation, after
it has earned interest on its outstanding obligations and made its
yearly contribution to its sinking fimd, we reduce the charges for its
service."

In those words, John Lindsay, town clerk of the Glasgow city cor-
poration, stated the principle in pursuance of which Glasgow has car-
ried municipal ownership farther than any large American city, and
farther, it is said, than any in Europe.

In dealing with the municipal affairs of Glasgow, I shall be obliged
to separate my notes into three articles, lest one tax the reader's
patience by reason of its length. In this, the first of the three articles,
I shall present main outlines of the theme and some general con-
siderations. In the second article the tramways and other public
utilities of Glasgow will be discussed. In the third article the attempt
of Glasgow to find a solution of the slum problem will be taken up.

It may be stated frankly, at the outset, that municipal ownership of
public utilities is a success in Glasgow — a success tested through many
years; as much of a success as commission government of cities in
America; a success socially and financially. The people of Glasgow
would no more think of abandoning municipal ownership of their
public utilities than the people of Houston would of al)andoning com-
mission government. In both instances there was strong opposition to
adoption of the new system, and in both there has been and is a
dwindling minority still unreconciled ; but in both instances the new
system has won lasting favor with the majority by "delivering the
goods."

The city corporation of Glasgow, at this writing, contains within
its geographical limits more than 780,000 inhabitants. In November
several adjoining boroughs', with 250,000 inhabitants, will be taken
into the city, giving a population of more than 1,000,000. All of this
population is now served by the water, gas, electric lighting, street
railway and other public "utilities of Glasgow, so that Glasgow's
experimfnt in [)uh]ic ownership and operation of those services can be
said truthfully to have made good under metropolitan conditions.

The following are the public utilities owned and operated by the
city corporation of Glasgow:

1. Street railways.

2. Gas.

3. Electric lighting.

4. Water.

5. Parks.

6. Slaughter houses and markets for meat and vegetables'.

7. Baths and washhouses.

8. Art galleries and museums and public libraries.

9. Hospitals.

10. Tenements and lodging houses.

11. Police and fire departments,

12. Drainage and sanitary sewers and sewage disposal stations.

13. Farms, on which city sewage is utilized in growing forage crops

for live stock owned by the city.

14. Streets and bridges.

15. Public health bureau.

Education is controlled by a separate board, chosen by the people.

The city owned and operated a telephone system, in competition
with a powerful British system privately owned, until the national
government recently took over the telephone service of the United
Kingdom and made it a national monopoly, a bureau of the postoffice
department, like the telegraphs. Similarly, Glasgow owned and oper-
ated a system of employment offices until this, too, was made a branch
of the national service.

The city government of Glasgow consists of a lord provost, or mayor,
seventy-eight councillors, three elected from each ward or borough,
and the usual complement of clerical and departmental employes, all
chosen by the council. Theoretically it is more like a parliament than
a city council. Actually, the fact that here as elsewhere in large
legislative bodies a few men do the real work is proved by a glance at
those pages of the City Blue Book on which appear the names of
members of the council's committees. Significantly, it is stated that
three members shall constitute a quorum, even though the committee
has fifteen or twenty members.

Councillors are elected for three-year terms. They receive no pay
for their services. The lord provost or mayor is elected by the council
and must be one of their number. He holds office for three years.
If chosen lord provost during the last year of his three-year term as a
councillor he holds the office of lord provost three years without having
to go back to his constituents during that period for re-election as a
councillor. He receives no salary. The rule here is to elect only men
of wealth to the office of lord provost — men who can afford to spend
ilOjOOO to i50,000 a year in entertaining distinguished visitors, roy-
alty and the like. There is a city fund, the "common good" fund it
is called, from which appropriations are made by the council for these
purposes when necessity arises. These Glasgow folk trade with the

whole world and are well aware of the value of favorable advertising
for their city. Presumably the expense incurred by ]\Ir. Daniel Scrim-
geour, who as Mr. Lindsay's deputy, escorted the Houston visitor to
the city's big public services in a taxi, and otherwise made the Glasgow
visit one long to be cheerfully remembered, will be charged against the
city's "common good" fund.

The town clerk, treasurer and other departmental chiefs are by
custom, and in order to procure trained service, chosen by the council
practically for life. Similarly, in order to insure continuity of munici-
pal policies, only one-third of the members of the city council are
elected each year. There is thus always in the council two-thirds of its
members acquainted with city policies and committed to them. The
Scotch are cautious; they never rock the boat; they take no such risk
as of putting an entire new government in charge of their public affairs
at one time.

The question of municipal ownership, once a warm issue in ward
or borough elections of councilmen, is no longer an issue. Councillors
are chosen on national or personal issues. All candidates as matter
of course stand committed to maintaining municipal ownership ; they
differ only in the degTee to which they wish the policy carried forward.

Glasgow is an industrial city, a great manufacturing center. It has
been built up on factors all of which Houston possesses, namely, plenti-
ful cheap fuel near by (soft coal here ; fuel oil and lignite for producer
gas at Houston) ; iron ores easy of access, and a navigable stream
down to the sea. Glasgow, as the world's greatest ship building city,
u.«es vast quantities of timber, which her ship builders bring from
Norway. Xo customs tariff stands between manufacturers and raw
material ; they get it cheaply.

The Clyde river is to Glasgow what Buffalo bayou is to Houston — or
can become for Houston. The Clyde is a man-made stream. When
Glasgow folk began improving it the Clyde had only enough water to
float very small vessels up to Glasgow. Under the guidance and
control of the Clyde Trust, which has charge of Glasgow's water in-
terests, millions of pounds have been spent improving the Clyde chan-
nel, until today Glasgow yards build the world's largest ships and send
tliem down the river to the sea. The Lusitania and the Maur(>tania,
32,000-ton vessels, were built here. Sailing up the Clyde from Dublin
a few days ago, I passed miles of shipyards on either bank of the Clyde,
all busy, all turning out vessels big or little to carry the freight or fight
the battles of the nations. In one yard we saw the hull of the Aqui-
tania, the 40,000-ton Cunarder, which will l)e a new giant of the sea
when launched ; and it was a comforting thought, for one who has very
great faith in the future usefulness of the Houston ship channel, that
there was less than three feet of water in the Clyde, before imjirovement
was begun, at the very point where tiie Acpiitania, drawing near forty
feet, will be launched, two dozen miles inland from the sea. Glasgow
builds 300 to 3G0 ships yearly. Almost any day one can see a big liner
take the water. And the river in which they get their baptism wasn't
one-fourth as big, before men took it in hand, as Buffalo bayou was
before Undo Sam spcnf a dollar on il.

Glasgow has, to be sure (what Houston lacks), an army of skilled
workers, with the tradition of technical success in their blood. But
Glasgow created this army here at home, just as she made the river,
and Houston can do the same, by adopting Glasgow's methods. Glas-
gow long since recognized that public education confined to the head
alone would not insure her prosperity. Today more than 17,000 men
and boys, employed in the industries of the Glasgow district, are
being given special education for their several callings in the so-called
continuation schools maintained at public cost. Some attend night
classes ; more attend an hour or two during the day, with the consent
and co-operation of their employers, who realize the truth that human
skill is worth more than any amount of rich raw materials in building
up and holding industrial leadership for a city.

The one outstanding fact in any contrast between the condition of
the workers here and at home is revealed in the plan of assessment for
taxation. At home we assess property on its sale value. Here in
Glasgow real estate is assessed on its rental value. The last assessment
of Houston's real estate — as I recall it — totaled above $90,000,000.
The Glasgow papers a day or two ago published the new assessment
for Glasgow, totaling £6,000,000, or less than $30,000,000. This,
however, is rental value — the amount of rent the property assessed
will or should earn in a year.

This method of assessing property means that in Glasgow — and in
all the other chief cities of the United Kingdom — the very great
majority of the people have no hope whatever of becoming owners of
the homes they inhabit. They must look forward to paying rent,
either to a private estate or to the city, as long as they live. In Cork,
Lord Mayor O'Shea told me 95 per cent of the people pay a double
rent. That is, the land is owned by one man, the house by another
who has leased the land for anywhere from 100 to 500 years, and the
tenant's rent is calculated to pay liberal interest on both investments.
A Glasgow city official told me the condition here is almost, if not
quite, as bad as in Cork.

These facts explain why the rich landholders in Scotland hate the
single tax theory worse than they do the ordinary "sins of the flesh"
(and the Scotch are a very religious people) ; and it explains also why
the progressive city government of Glasgow was forced many years ago
to undertake through municipal ownership a solution of the problem
of housing the poor who bear the burden of this eternal land monopoly.
The progressive policies' which have made Glasgow rich and famous
were not formulated by the land-holding class, but by the more alert
manufacturing and commercial groups of society.

The city corporation of Glasgow is far and away the richest property
owner within its limits. From the corporation balance sheet last
issued I learn that the city corporation's assets total £24,596,045, or
approximately $122,980,225 — all public property. The city corpora-
tion's debts on this property total £16,601,187, or approximately $83,-
005,935. Its sinking fund created to pay off these debts totals £8,151,-
168, or approximately $40,755,840. This leaves a net debt of $42,-
270,095, on properties worth $122,980,225, or net assets totaling

$80,710,130. These assets (including as they do a large amount of
real estate which steadily increases' in value, and a wide range of
revenue producing public services, nearly all of wliich are self-
supporting, several of which earn a yearly profit and all of which gain
in value with increasing population), are gradually paying off the debt
incurred for their purchase. They provide better and cheaper service
for the people than was to be had luider private operation of the public
services. They promote the general health. They stimulate payment
of better wages in private industries by raising the standard of living
among the workers.

But they do not go to the root of Glasgow's problem, since every time
the city tramways reduce fares, or the city gas works cuts the price of
gas, the small number of large estates which own thousands of tene-
ments can raise rents to absorb these savings. And I'm told they do.

CHAPTEE V.
Glasgow's Muxicipally-Owned Public Utilities.

Glasgow, Scotland. — Like Houston's municipally-owned water works,
Glasgow's municipally-owned street railways give better service, at
lower cost, than was given by the private owners from whom the two
cities acquired the properties. Further, in both instances the munici-
pally owned public utility not only gives better service at lower cost,
but also, after earning its operating cost, and providing each year for
its own bonded debt, turns a surplus into the general fund. In the
case of Glasgow this is known as the "common good" fund.

Yet Mr. John Dalrymple, general manager of the Glasgow cor-
poration tramways, said to me :

"Your city, enjoying a five-cent fare with universal transfers, and
the excellent service for which the Stone & Webster Syndicate is noted,
is doing as well, with respect to tram service, as any American city can
expect to do. Doing very well indeed."

Mr. Dalrymple was keenly interested in my brief recital of the
large-scale development in the Houston-Galveston district. He has
visited America and studied the political organization of our cities.
The movement for public ownership of street railways in Chicago,
which resulted after years of struggle in vast improvement of the
privately owned service, and the payment to the city of a large yearly
revenue for the use of its streets was greatly stimulated by a visit
Mr. Dalr}niple paid to the Chicago city government a dozen years ago.
He told them frankly that Chicago could not hope for any betterment
through municipal o^vnership, so long as the affairs of the city should
be controlled by groups of professional politicians struggling for the
spoils of office.

Mr. Dalrymple was keen to learn about the commission form of city
government. Its adoption of tlie private corporation princij)le of con-
centrated authority with direct responsibility appealed to him as a
business man and an executive. And, believe me, John Dalrymple,
judged by his works, is a great executive.

"Your compact central government," he said, "is free to employ
technical experts to manage its departments?" he inquired.

"That is as it should be. The people's business, like any other in
our day. calls for skilled s[)Ocialists."

Mr. Dalrymple showed me through the shops attached to the Glas-
gow tram system — shops in which the city's cars arc made and re-
paired. In these shops 500 men are employed. The system entire
employs /),400. Men in the shops nre all on piece work. They earn the

47972

standard wage of the district in their several trades, but the shops are
not closed against non-union workers. The carmen — conductors and
motormen — get 24 shillings (about $5) weekly the first year — plus
free uniforms, overcoats, etc., and in four years rise to the maximum
of 33 to 35 shillings.

Eighteen months ago, Mr. Dalrymple said, the system had its first
strike. On a Friday night the carmen assembled and voted unani-
mously to demand higher wages and shorter hours. Saturday morning
Qjily a few cars were taken out and these were stoned by strikers and
by the hoodlum element in the city. The council committee on tram-
ways met and resolved to leave the situation in the hands of Mr.
Dalrymple. He served instant notice on the strikers that if they did
not at once return to work their places' would be filled — and the cars
were all running as usual within the time he fixed. Three hundred and
fifty of the strikers lost their jobs, these being the men, Mr. Dalrymple
said, who were most active in organizing the union and in attacking
the cars. Mr. Dalrymple's curt account of the crushing of this strike
made it clear that it is a more serious undertaking to coerce a public
than a private employer.

However, since that strike the system has quietly granted most of
the demands that were made by the men. They now — thanks to an
order of the city council — work only eight and one-half hours daily
Bix days in the week, and these eight and one-half hours, divided into
two shifts, are brought within twelve hours of elapsed time in most
cases.

The system has 196 miles of track in Glasgow and the surrounding
towns and operates 850 cars. All of these cars are double-decked, most
of them having the upper deck enclosed. This type of car is the
standard. It seats sixty-six passengers — and by the way when the
seats in a Glasgow street car are all filled, no more passengers are
admitted. Your carfare in Glasgow buys a seat, not standing room.

Fares range from a half -penny (one cent American money), for an
average of a mile ride, up to sixpence for the longest suburban trips.
The average cost of the service per passenger during the year ending
May 31, 1913, was .508 pence, or a trifle over one cent of our money.
Mr. Dalrymple said the recent reduction of the minimum fare from
one pence to a half-penny would cut heavily into the surplus earnings
of the system, since the large majority of all fares are for the shorter
distances.

The finances of the system are exhibited in the following report on
income and expenditure for the year ending May 31, 1912 :

"The result of the year's working shows that the ordinary income
amounted to £991,073 ($4,955,375), and the working expenses to
i582,639 ($2,913,195), thus leaving a net revenue of £408,435 ($2,-
042,126). The ordinary income of the previous year was £949,488,
and the working expenses £533,178, leaving a net revenue of £416,309.
After adding interest on investment and rent of lines let to Dum-

barton Burgh and County Tramways Co., Lid., the net revenue of
i4o8,207 has been applied in meeting rental of Govan and Ibrox
tramways, payment to Paisley District Tramways Co., interest on
capital, sinking fund, income tax, parliamentan' expenses, and amount
carried to depreciation and permanent way renewal fund, these sums
amounting in all to £406,129. The net balance amounting to £52,067,
falls under Section 30 of Glasgow Corporation Act, 1909, to be paid
over to the Common Good."

In the tabulated statement it appears that the Glasgow City Tram-
way System paid £13,027 ($65,133) of national income tax during
the year, that it paid £75,092 interest on borrowed capital, £93,863 to
sinking fund for same account, put £128,072 in its depreciation fund
and £85,631 in its permanent way renewal fimd, and after meeting all
charges of every character had a clear net surplus of $260,133, to turn
over to the Common Good fimd.

Municipal ownership of tramways is no new thing in Glasgow.
From an official publication I learn that "The first tramway in Glas-
gow was constructed by the corporation, and opened on 19th August,
1872. From 1872 to 1894 the lines were leased to the Glasgow Tram-
way and Onmibus Company. On 1st July, 1894, the corporation
commenced to operate the tramways as a municipal undertaking."

The water, gas', electric lighting and market departments are the
other chief revenue producers for the City of Glasgow. In the year
ending May 31, 1912, the markets department showed revenue £37,-
743; expense, £37,515; surplus, £227. The markets department con-
trols three public markets and four or five slaughter houses. The
main slaughter house is situated in a thickly settled portion of the
city, yet so clean is it kept that one passing near it would not be aware
of its existence. Within this main abattoir are pens for 15,000 sheep,
and facilities (the most modern and efficient) for killing 1,800 cattle,
5,000 sheep and 2,000 pigs daily. The city does not buy or sell the
products. It merely provides facilities for doing the work, inspects all
animals brought in to be killed and all meats offered for sale, and rents
its stalls to private individuals and companies at rates which enable
it to pay cost of operation, while safeguarding its people against pesti-
lential odors and infected meats. This service is regarded in Glasgow
a.s' one vital to the public health.

The water works, witli £259,450 gross revenue for tlie year, paid
operating cost, sinking fund and interest charges, carried £12,674
forwanl as surplus, to meet interest and sinking fund on new works
in progress. Citizens of Glasgow buy city water (clear cold mountain
water it is) for fourpence on each pound of rent they pay yearly. If a
working man occuf)ying two or three rooms in a tenenient jiays £15 a
year rental, his water rental will be four times that maTiy pence, or
$1.20. The water supply is not melered. To large consumers — fac-
torifjs, railrojuls, etc. — the rate is one pence per poiuid of jinnual rental.
To suburbanites who get city water the charge is tenpence per |)ound

of yearly house rental. Their desire to get the reduction to fourpence
per pound was one of the causes that popularized the movement for
the anne-xation of several outlying hurghs, which will take place in
Xovember (1912), adding 250,000 to Glasgow's population.

By the way, there was no vote of the people on this annexation,
either in Glasgow or in the towns annexed. Glasgow asked the British
parliament for an act permitting her to swallow her smaller neighbors,
and after some spirited arguments before committees parliament passed
the annexation act.

Gas' for lighting and cooking sells for 22.52 pence (45.04 cents
American) per thousand feet. It cost the city one pence less per
thousand feet to make and deliver the gas in the year ending May 31,
1912. That one pence per thousand feet profit enabled the gas de-
partment, with a gross revenue of i924,102 (nearly as large as the
street railways), to put aside a net surplus of i27,503, after meeting
all charges. The preceding year the city spent 45 cents American to
make 1,000 feet of gas, and delivered it for 46.74 cents per thousand.
Gas is popular for heating and cooking in Glasgow, both because of its
low cost and because the city gas department supplies heaters and
stoves free of cost to its patrons. It figures the cost of the stoves
into the cost of the gas and is able after selling gas cheaper than any
American householder buys it to throw in the stoves as a special in-
ducement to burn its product.

Glasgow's gas and electric lighting plants are competitive. The elec-
tricity department, on gross revenue of £276,659 for the year, met all
charges and carried £6,524 to surplus, which now totals £34,870. The
"board of trade unit"' is the basis of current measurement I am told ;
here the rate is very low, about 50 per cent of the average in American
cities. The official reports of the Glasgow city departments, recently
placed on file in our Houston Public Library, will afford interested
persons opportunity to scrutinize details expertly.

Glasgow has a police force of 1,800 men, who serve in three shifts
of eight hours per day so arranged that no man works more than six
days a week.

The fire department will have 200 men when suburbs are annexed
in November. They work six days weekly, but of course are subject to
call for special service in an emergency. The department provides free
housing with free light, heat and water for all its firemen, in its own
buildings. Their wages run from 24 shillings weekly upward. This
department maintains its own shops in which it makes and repairs all
its equipment except its big motor combination fire engine and ladder
trucks, of which it has seventeen. No horses are used in the depart-
ment. Fire losses in Glasgow, as in other European cities, are trifling
compared with losses in American cities, due to the fact that over here
stone, brick, concrete and other non-burning materials are used in
place of wood in l)uilding construction.

Summed up, the balance sheet of the Glasgow city corporation
shows it to be a going and a paying concern, providing the necessaries
of community life to its citizens more efficiently and cheaply than
these were formerly supplied by private enterprise. Beyond this the
city corporation, through its city improvement department and its
municipal lodging and tenement houses, is vising surplus earnings of
its revenue-producing services in an attempt to eliminate the slums.

Glasgow's city managers believe city slums are due to private monop-
oly of the necessaries of life. They believe a city which o^^tis and
operates its public utilities can and should mitigate if not wholly abol-
ish the evils of slum life. To this end they are working under the
steady pressure of intelligent public opinion.

My third and concluding article on Glasgow will deal with this work.

CHAPTER VI.

Glasgow's Battle With the Slum.

Glasgow, Scotland. — Glasgow's battle with the slum began in 1866.
That year parliament created the Glasgow City Improvement Trust.
The conditions which led to this action were stated in the preamble of
the act creating the trust, as follows :

"Whereas various portions of the City of Glasgow are so built, and
the buildings thereon are so densely inhabited, as to be highly inju-
rious to the moral and physical welfare of the inhabitants, and many
of the thoroughfares are narrow, circuitous and inconvenient, and it
would be of public and local advantage if various houses and buildings
were taken down and those portions of said city reconstituted, and new
streets were constructed in and through various parts of said city, and
several of the existing streets altered and widened and diverted, and
that in connection with the reconstitution of those portions of the
city provision was made for the laboring classes who may be displaced
in consequence thereof,'' etc.

In short, land monopoly, high rents, want of cheap transportation
to enable wage workers to find homes beyond walking distance from
the shops and stores they served in, created in Glasgow, as they have
done in all our big American cities, slum conditions. I am told the old
slums of Glasgow were the worst in the world. Those which remain
are bad enough; it would not be easy to match them outside of
New York. But the City Iin])rovement Trust of Glasgow, honestly
trying to iK'tter the living conditions of tlie worthy poor, has done
some good and will doubtless be able hereafter, as the funds at its com-
mand increase, to do more despite the fact that it can not remove the
chief source of the slum, which is landlordism.

The trust ha.s bought for the public several tracts of land in the
most densely populated sections of the old (Glasgow slums. It has
torn down the old buildings (in which, to enlarge owners' profits,
little or no provision was made for light, ventilation or sanitation),
and has erected new buildings in which these essentials to sound liealth
arc assured. It has erected and operates seven big lodging bouses, for
both men and women wage earners. It has widened and opemnl to the
cleansing sunlight numerous narrow, tortuous, pestil(>iitial alleys which
were liotberls of crime ami disease, and it has done these things so as
to procure not alone the profit of social amelioration but a direct
financial gain as well.

Incidental!}', it has gained knowledge of human nature. It has
learned that while a majority of the poor of Glasgow will eagerly accept
any betterment brought within their reach by social action, there is a
considerable minority which has through generations of slum breeding
sunk below the level of self-respect and which will therefore not make
use of the new improvements. The city's model tenements and its
lodging houses do not lack for tenants, at profitable rentals, but that
element of society which had most need of a change to decent living
conditions' has refused to enter the new places. Where the trust tears
down a reeking old rookery and replaces it with a clean, new, modern
tenement, the occupants of the rookery flee like rats to other hiding
places of the old sort.

It is the inevitable working of the social law of compensation : strong
individuals of earlier generations, housing their inferiors for profit in
tenements unfit for habitation, have created in the slow course of years
a slum type, which breeds like rabbits, produces no wealth, lives in
squalor by beggary and crime, and constitutes a heavy and an increasing
charge upon the sons and the grandsons of the original exploiters.

One night in August I rode on the "rubber neck" wagon through the
Bowery and Ghetto districts of lower New York. The guide in sing-
song megaphoned his trite tale to us, and I paid little heed to it until,
as we passed opposite a small park, I heard him say :

"This is Park. It was formerly the site of slum tenements,

in which 5000 little children died of tuberculosis. During the time
when Colonel Theodore Roosevelt was Police Commissioner, and on his
initiative, the city bought the land, tore dowTi the tenements and made
this park, which is now a breathing spot and playground for thou-
sands of the children of this district."

Slums, in a word, are created to make private profit. They in turn
create a slum class, Avhich becomes a charge upon the whole com-
munity. The slum in its physical aspects, as Glasgow has learned, can
be abolished (at heavy cost to the community, and especially to the
heirs or successors in ownership of those who for private profit created
the slum) ; but the slum class remains an even greater problem and
menace than the slum buildings.

Here in Glasgow the improvement trust has cleansed some of the
city's worst slum districts, but it has not reformed nor benefited any
but a few of the slum class. These folks have fled before the trust to
new haunts of the old character. Apparently the only way a city can
get rid of its slum class is to buy up and abolish every piece of property
of the kind they prefer to live in, driving them finally out of the city,
since they will not (or can not) inhabit decent tenements on the terms
offered by the community.

Houston and the other cities of Texas have not yet got any real
slums. In view of the experience of Glasgow, New York and other
cities, it seems highly desirable that the governments of Texas cities
shall adopt and enforce such building regulations as will forever pre-
vent the creation of slum districts within their borders.

Houston is destined to become one of the world's greatest cities.
That fact is recognized not only in Houston but in places far distant
from Houston. It is within the power of the people who are now in
Houston laying the foundations for the future great city to forestall
some of the costly and socially destructive evils which through blind
private greed and social neglect have grown up in older cities to burden
and perplex them. Among these preventable evils the slum is the
worst and most costly. Here is where a ton of prevention will cost
less than an ounce of cure and an ounce of prevention do more good
than a ton of cure.

The most imiformly quiet, peaceful, industrious, prosperous and
orderly cities are those in which the largest percentage of wage earners
own the homes they live in. Milwaukee is typical. Years ago, in
Milwaukee, thousands of German working men walked two to three
miles to and from work, morning and night, to save carfare. They
were buying little homes. They practiced the old-fashioned self-denial
and got homes. The average wage worker in any Texas city can get a
home on even easier terms. Our American system of carfares — five
cents for any distance traveled within the city — encourages workingmen
to leave the crowded inside districts, and to get homes where ground
space and pure air are cheaper.

Here no such hope is held out to the workers. Their wages as a
rule are little if any above the level of bare subsistence. The land is
monopolized, most of it is leased for very long terms, and very little of
it is for sale in small tracts. This indeed was one of the first things
that impressed me in reading British newspapers, namely, the almost
entire absence of land for sale advertisements. The big London dailies
carry a few announcements of large estates which have been put on
the market in consequence of the death or bankruptcy of owners, but
almost no small homes, in city or country, are offered for sale.

The Glasgow working man, therefore, being condemned to pay rent
to a landlord all his life, has not the same incentive as Houston work-
ers have to get out into the suburbs, away from the noise, dirt and
crowding of city centers. The Houston worker, in order to get his own
roof over his family's head, will forego the night lights and make the
longer morning and evening journey to his work; whereas in Glasgow,
1 am told by men in authority, it would be useless for the improvement
trust to erect model tenements in the suburbs, for the reason that
the workingmen would not go out there to rent them. They lack that
most powerful incentive — ambition of ownership.

So they continue to live in the crowded city, and the best that can
be done for them under Glasgow's program of munici))al socialism is to
provide them with sanitary living conditions in publicly owned tene-
ments which (because of high land values) are only a little less
crowded than the old rookeries privately owned.

A very large majority of the families of Glasgow live in two-room
and three-room tenements. Even the city's so-called model teneuicnts
are mostly divided into two-room apartments, one of the two rooms
being a kitchen-bedroom, the otlier a bedroom-living room.

It is precisely because of these conditions that a little group of
daring single taxers, led by Lloyd-George, has been able to seize and
hold the leadership of the great Liberal party, which now governs
Great Britain. Premier Asquith and others of the ruling class who
can see the drift of the time realize that the monopoly of the land
held under entail and feudal leaseholds for centuries by a few thousand
families must somehow be broken down to afford a field of opportunity
for enterprising and self-denying workers who desire to become their
o^Ti landlords. The alternative obviously is a farther advance toward
state socialism, with a strong bureaucracy in control, suppressing wage
strike disorders (as we have seen in Glasgow) even more vigorously
than private employers have done. And here as elsewhere the demand
for state socialism evidently does not spring from the natural instinct
of the workers, but is their only available weapon of defense against
endless rent exploitation by a small, powerful class of hereditary and
law-protected land monopolists. It seems to be the case that the work-
ers, finding they must surrender ancient individual privileges, choose
to surrender them to a bureaucracy ostensibly at least of their own
election, rather than to hereditary landlords.

The moral of this old-world experience for our new-world city build-
ers and legislators is so plain it need not be stated here.

As for details of the Glasgow municipal housing enterprise, these
can be obtained, by any person interested, from the official documents
which I shall send to the Houston Public Library. It has seemed to me
to be better worth while, in preparing this l^rief paper, to present main
outlines and some of the chief meanings of the situation, than to tax
you with a mass of statistical information.

CHAPTEK Til.

LoxDOx, THE World Capital.

London, England. — Mr, Harry Selfridge, formerly manager of the
Marshall Field retail store in Chicago, the greatest in the world, and
now chief proprietor of the greatest department store in London, states
that within a circle of twenty miles in diameter, dra^Ti with his store
as its center, over 8,000,000 human beings live and work.

London, the world's greatest city, is not one city, but a group of
twenty-seven cities and to^^ns shoulder to shoulder, each within its own
limits maintaining its own municipal government, all collectively sub-
ject to governmental control and supervision, first by the London
County Council, second by the British national local government
board, of which the Et. Hon. John Burns, erstwhile fighting labor
leader, is chairman.

One would need not six months but six years to learn thoroughly
the whole complex network of municipal administration in Great
Britain. I had six working days on the ground in London. Men, who,
because of their official station, and the British precedent to the con-
trary, are never interviewed by the press, admitted me to ask ques-
tions, as the official representative of an American city, and tried
patiently to make me see and understand the main outlines of British
municipal administration.

I have reason to believe the general letter of introduction which
Eugene V. Debs gave me to the radical leaders of Europe was influ-
ential in opening to me some doors which might otherwise have re-
mained closed against my inquiries. For example, a leader of the
powerful socialist group in the German reichstag, whom I was intro-
duced to at the international inunici])al congress at Dusseldorf, discov-
ered some interest in my mission when he learned I had a letter from
the American leader of liis party.

London, because it is not one city but a group of cities, has lagged
behind other English cities in adopting municipal ownership. At
home we are accustomed to hearing our conservatives deride municipal
ownership of public utilities and especially the suggestion that the
munici[)ality ouglit to own nioflcl lodgings for poorly paid workers, as
"socialistic."

Over here one fipe(;dily leams that these "socialistic" advances have
been made by or under tlie guiflance of the conservatives. I find in
this day's Tx>ndon Daily Telegraph an article written by Sir John
Benn in defense of the tramways (street railways), M'hich arc o^^^^ed
and operated by the Tx)ndon County Council.

In this letter (a reply to a public statement made by Sir William
Treloar) Sir John makes more clear than any wandering foreigner
could hope to do the facts concerning the results of municipal owner-
ship in British cities.

I qiiote the following paragraphs :

"Since the municipal corporations act of 1835 — the advantages of
which were, alas ! denied by the old city to Greater London — the cities
of the provinces have uniformly adopted this principle : that services
partaking of the nature of a monopoly and particularly affecting the
use of the streets shall be removed from the purview of the financier
and the company, and carried on by the people themselves for the
common good.

"Experience shows that this rule has greatly benefited the traders
within those urban areas. In cities thus equipped — i. e., the water,
lighting, power and trams conducted on Birmingham lines — private
enterprise has gone ahead by leaps and bounds and the cost of munici-
pal government all round is much less than in dismembered and
blundering London.

"In Birmingham local government (apart from the poor law) costs
43s 2d per head per annum; in London it costs 63s 9d. The 'night
population' answer to this startling fact, strengthens my statement,
for Birmingham shows exodus figures of 60 per cent, against London
51 per cent.

"So we pay for the inferior local amenities of London £4,500,000 a
year more than does Mr. Chamberlain's well-ordered city. Manches-
ter, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, out of water, gas, electric lighting
and tramways, transfer to relief of rates (reduction of taxes) an
average of no less than two shillings in the pound, and they all charge
less than the old company prices.

"A like relief to London — which should be, and is, the El Dorado
of such enterprise — would mean over £4,000,000 per annum. Sir
"William, after the 'moderate' manner, dubs all such efforts 'socialism.'
If he inquires he will find that the 'municipal trading' which he so
condemns, is mainly carried on — as in Birmingham — by conservatives,
and they don't call it 'socialism.'

"One would imagine from his article that the wicked progressives
were responsible for his hete noir wherever it showed its head in
London. This is by no means so. It was the conservatives, under the
act of 1898, who gave the borough councils power to set up isolated
municipal electric light undertakings.

"And the same party refused to grant London County Council the
power to supply the necessary electricity in bulk wherewith to make
these undertakings successful. What is the result? Today London is
producing in piecemeal fashion by borough council and company 212
millions of units at cost of, roughly, 1)4^; while we are producing at
Greenwich for our tramways the same article at 34*^ ^ unit. So we
see that 212 millions of pennies (making £800,000) are annually
thrown away in the production of this necessity of commercial life.

"Sir William is gravely concerned as to the financial stability of the
council's tramway imdertaking. As to finance I can not do better than
quote the statement made by the present chairman of the finance com-
mittee, Mr. K. C. Xorman, an eminent moderate, when he presented
this year's London County Council budget.

"He said of our tramway undertaking: 'it is at present in a sound
condition. It provides all working expenses ; it pays the interest on the
money raised for it ; it is building up an adequate renewals fund ; it is
repaying year by year large amounts of borrowed capital ; and, beyond
all this, it is able to put aside something to a general reserve fund.
This can not but be regarded as a satisfactory state of affairs. No
company-managed tramway could have such a record.' "

Each London tramcar in service (publicly owned, mind you) pays
192 pounds, or nearly $1,000, a year from its earnings in taxes to the
several cities, to the county and the nation, most of this amount being
used for maintenance of municipal charges. The motor omnibuses
pay no such public rates; they pay $200 to $250 a year petrol tax
(which is collected by the national government) and use the city
streets free of charge.

The main point of all of this, quite aside from ownaership and taxes,
is the apparent probability that in large cities throughout the world
the motor omnibus will in large measure supplement and supplant the
tram, as being cheaper and more efficient — a distinct advance in urban
transport.

It seems to me likely to make the problem of urban transport, ulti-
mately, one of paved streets rather than of steel tracks. The growing
city which fails to give intelligent consideration to this new develop-
ment of city passenger traffic is liable to find it has overlooked a very
important bet.

In London I visited some municipal works, the slums celebrated
throughout the world, the public parks, and w^as especially interested in
the way the problem of city transportation has been worked out, since
transportation, with 8,000,000 people living on less than 400 square
miles of land, is inevitably the hardest problem to solve.

I found the celebrated slums, with Petticoat Lane at their center, far
less forbidding in external appearance than many slums in American
cities. For one thing, most of the buildings in these slum streets, lanes
and alleys are only two to four stories high; the air has a free sweep
through them, the sun shines into them (when it shines at all on
London), and all these slum highways are ])aved with rock or asphalt
and kept clean by city workmen. Large public parks are near the worst
of the slums, and in these parks, on one sunny day, I counted over 100
men lying at length on their l)acks on the grass, sleeping.

My guide informed me they were "out-of-works," most of them, men
who lacked the price of a lodging and probably of a meal. The fact
that they were permitted to sleep in the public park struck me force-
fully; since in most American cities such men are expected to sleep
standing or to snatch a nap while "moving on" ;il cotninand of a well-
fed policeman.

That feature of London life which seemed to me most significant,
from the point of view of a student of municipal services, was the
motor omnibus system. The trams, owned and operated by the London
City Council, have never been able to obtain from the City of London
(that small municipality which is at the heart of the vast group of
sister cities constituting the world's metropolis) a franchise to lay
rails and run cars there.

Thus the public tram system is unable to deliver its passengers from
suburban districts into the heart of the great city, where scores of
thousands of them have their daily work. Crippled thus, the tram
system has, nevertheless, as Sir John Benn points out, been able to give
a service unmatched in volume, and seldom surpassed in cheapness,
while at the same time it has thus far kept financially sound.

The London General Omnibus Company, operating over 3,400 big
double-decked omnibuses, motor driven, is privately owned. Its cars,
each capable of seating about forty passengers, have several advan-
tages over street cars. The omnibus comes to the sidewalk, at fixed
intervals, to take on and discharge its passengers. They thus avoid
the hazard of going to the middle of a crowded street to enter a tram.
When traffic blockades a street and the tram is forced to halt for two
or five minutes, the omnibus, not being confined to a pair of rails,
either worms its way through the jam like an ordinary motor car or it
circles around the block and gets forward without delay.

The owners of the motor omnibus are spared the vast initial capital
outlay for trackage and power houses, trolleys and other necessities of
tram traffic, and thus have no need to earn interest upon such invest-
ment.

All they need is a system of good, permanent roads and streets to
nm on, the same as a farm wagon, a carriage or an automobile. It is
a fact, I think a very significant fact, that during the first ten months
of 1912 the earnings of the London General Omnibus Company showed
a gain, over the same months in 1911, of £594,000, or almost
$3,000,000, while the earnings of the mimicipally owned tram system
during the same period showed a decline of several thousand pounds as
compared with 1911.

The omnibus company's gain was due in large part to extension of
service, many new cars being put on, but it goes without saying that
the service would not have been extended, with private capital footing
the bills, unless it had made good as a service and as an investment.
There is no denying the superior attractions of an omnibus over the
tram. Moreover, the omnibuses have been given permission by the
several cities which constitute the metropolis to run on any, or almost
any, street which they may wish to use, whereas the trams are con-
fined to relatively a few streets.

I rode away out into the country, in several directions, on omni-
buses, for a maximum fare of eightpence, or 16 cents, each way. Eiding
atop of an omnibus one gets a perfect view of the city and the people,

gets fresh air, gets a sense of free motion not obtainable in a tram con-
fined to a track, and, above all, escapes the grinding racket inseparable
from the operation of heavy, iron-wheeled cars over steel rails.

John C. Mitchell, secretary of the London General Omnibus Com-
pany, informed me that the cost of a motor omnibus is "in the neigh-
borhood" of £700, or about $3,500; that the fare averages something
less than one penny (two cents American) per mile.

He did not give me desired information on the cost per mile per
passenger of operating the omnibuses, but the fact that the two cents'
a mile charged for riding enables the company to extend its service so
rapidly, and the further fact that the stock of the company is rising
in market value almost as rapidly as its service is extended, despite the
public tram competition, indicates very clearly that there is a consid-
erable margin of profit for the company in the two cents per mile.

During September the London papers published many articles dis-
cussing the competition of privately owned omnibuses with publicly
owned trams. It has been freely predicted that the public tram sys-
tem would have to be abandoned, as a dead loss, because it could not
compete with the omnibuses.

Tliis is, of course, absurd, because traffic in London is subject to
frequent congestion, even with all the marvelous service of trams, omni-
buses and the vast underground tube system, which collects hundreds
of millions of fares each year and bears one at express train speed
long distances below the level of the city.

Defenders of municipal ownership — and these include not only or
principally the radicals, but also some of the strongest conservatives —
retort by saying it may become necessary for the London County
Council to take over the motor omnibus service, and make it an ad-
junct of the tram system, for the public rather than for private profit.

This probably is what will be done, after the conservative British
mind has been satisfied that the private citizens who first made the
omnibus service available have been fairly compensated for their enter-
prise and their courage.

This letter, written looking backward toward London after the
writer has spent twenty days in half a dozen German cities, must con-
clude with the observation that British cities — or rather the British
central government, which largely dominates the administration of
British cities — are making rapid progress in an attempt to catch up
witli the advances made l^y the cities of Germany during tliirty years
past.

The letters dealing with German cities, coming next in order, will em-
phasize, probably, this the chief lesson which American cities seeking
efficient government have to loam in Germany: that they must some-
how procure continuity of administrative policy; must obtain the
serv-ico of trained municipal experts; must make it possible for such
men to look forward to life careers in such service, well paid and sus-
tainf'd. as they are in Germany, by honorable Inidilions and public
confidence.

CHAPTER VIII.
The Ixterxatioxal Municipal Congress in Dusseldorf.

Dusseldorf, Germany. — This place is commonl}' termed "the model
city of Germany."' It is one of a group of large cities, separated from
each other by only a few miles, which owe their rapid growth and pros-
perity to the development of the German steel industry in the north-
western quarter of the empire. During the last week of September
Dusseldorf entertained an international congress of municipalities.

There were present more than 350 delegates from large cities'
throughout the world. The convention was incidental to the Pan-
German municipal exposition, which was in progress in Dusseldorf
during the summer and autumn of 1912.

This exposition was fairly stunning in its exhibition of the modern
art of procuring, on small bits of city land, the maximum of housing
space, of light, air, grass, shrubbery, trees, view — in general, of indi-
vidual comfort plus social charm.

Here were scores of models, in relief, of German cities, with every
street, every building, every wall and gateway, reproduced in miniature.
In these models was exhibited the transformation of mediaeval towns
into modern cities.

Dusseldorf's slow forward march of more than a thousand years to
the last quarter of the Nineteenth century could be read in the minia-
ture representation of the city far more readily than in any printed
page. City planning was tlie chief theme of the exposition.

The treniondous event of our time is the vast migration, common
throughout the civilized world, of uncounted millions of people from
the farms and viUages into the cities where capital, utilizing inventive
skill, has assembled the huge machines of modern collective industry.

America and Great Britain have done little, as yet, through their
governmental agencies, to control the conditions of this migration, or
to protect the mighty army of farm and village folk against untoward
treatment in their new environment.

In the l*]nglish-sj)eaking countries the change has Ijeeii allowed to
be controlled by the law of private profit almost exclusively, with little
or no regard for the welfare of the individual worker or for the orderly
develojjinent of the city.

With us, where individual initiative in the organization, location and
dovclo[)inent of industries and in [)lanning new city additions, are vir-
tually unrestricted by any contrnjling miniicipal inlelligiMiee, there has
been a larger and freer field of opportunity for individuals to rise from

poverty to affluence and power, but there has been, on the other hand,
a lower average of health and comfort for the masses, employed in
these industries, who lacked ability to lift themselves above the general
level of useful wage labor.

Taking the larger American cities collectively, and it is a moderate
statement of truth to say that in these cities at least three or four
million men, women and children wage earners, decent, industrious
people, are housed under conditions so adverse to their own health and
to the social welfare than these conditions would not be permitted to
exist in any modern German city longer than it would take for the
mimicipal government to condemn the land, tear down the houses and
erect new buildings better fitted for human habitation.

Germans, in short, have been first among civilized people to recog-
nize that with the passing of hand tools, used by their owners in small
shops in villages and on farms, and the rise of huge industrial ma-
chines in factory cities, a new set of human problems was presented
for solution.

And the Germans, with characteristic thoroughness, have advanced
far beyond any other people in finding a solution for this problem — the
problem of providing an environment for the vast army of factory
workers, in their new city homes, which should assure their efficiency
as wealth producers by assuring to them healthful living conditions.

Probably had the Germans been, like the Americans, a nation of
political equals, with universal manhood suffrage, electing city govern-
ments new every two years, with a newspaper press (too often serving
selfish private interests), and enjoying extraordinary freedom to make
and break those city governments, they would not have done much if
any better than we have done.

It is pretty clearly apparent that government, in any land, any time,
is and must be the reflex of the character, the temperament and the
political status of the people.

With vastly larger individual political freedom than the Germans,
the American has made a rank foozle of modern city building as com-
pared with the German. Here even more than in Great Britain
government is the concern of a ruling class; it is handed down to the
rank and file of the people, paternally.

We could no more adopt the system under which the Germans have
obtained such wonderful results in city building than we could all fly
to heaven in a group at a given signal.

We Americans have the kind of government (subject to frequent
slight modifications) that we want and as good government as we
deserve. Under the German system, government, and especially mu-
nicipal government, being a profession, for which men of the upper
classes undergo rigorous special training and serve long apprentice-
ships, the man of the rank and file has little or no incentive to ambi-
tion in this field.

He takes what is given to him and asks few questions. He enjoys the
blessings of that form of government which has, unquestionably, been
described as the best, namely, benevolent despotism. City oflficials in
Germany, from lowest to highest, are not public servants, but public
oflScials. The suggestion that they are public servants would be in-
dignantly resented. They govern, and if they also serve it is as a
father serves his children.

While we Americans can not hope to, nor should we wish to, trans-
plant paternalism to our soil, we can, and should, learn from German
cities many valuable lessons in planning and administering municipal
services.

America was represented at the international municipal congress
in Dusseldorf by only four men — three from Xew York, one from
Houston.

The Xew York delegates were Messrs. Bruere and Sheppardson of
the bureau of municipal research, a privately endowed institution which
is doing a most valuable work in studying and reporting upon the
government of American cities', and by Mr. Frank Koester, a consult-
ing engineer, who read a paper on "City Planning in America."

It is my deliberate judgment that at least fifty of our large American
cities ought to have been represented at this congress by their best
engineering experts; Houston should have been represented, not by a
journalist ignorant of engineering, but by a technical man competent
to grasp, assimilate and bring back home the essential features of the
exhibit displayed in the exposition, and of the addresses delivered in
the sessions of the congress.

Nevertheless, while unable to perform this service for my city, I feel
that my attendance on the convention and the exposition was not wholly
a waste of time and money, because I can at least emphasize, from the
viewpoint of the fairly well informed lay citizen, the wisdom of send-
ing better qualified men to such congresses and expositions hereafter.

There were largo delegations from most of the principal cities of
Great Britain; Ghisgow n<)tal)Iy was represented by iier lord provost
(mayor), her town clerk, two or three coimcillors, an engineer and a
representative of her health department.

I have written to President Edgar Odell Ijovett of the Rice Institute,
urging him to establish in our great college a cliair or a bureau of
iiiuiiicij»al engineering and administration, so that we may have, at
lionie, at least one institution in wliidi young iiicii can pn'|tan' tlieni-
pelveH for expert city service.

I do not know to what extent .Knicrican colleges have recognized
the importance of this modern field of research, but am informed by
one who should know that it has been very generally neglected by them.
It seems to me no other dcfiartment of our coiiiiinin life olfers a larger
opportnnitv [ny n-eful ln-l riK (idri fli;m this one.

Tlie one outstanding advantage possessed by European cities, which
we in American cities can obtain without departing from the dem-
ocratic spirit of our existing city governments, is continuity of admin-
istrative policy, assured by continuity of service l)y trained municipal
experts.

If we are to obtain that degree of scientific efficiency, and considera-
tion for the humane housing of the workers which are apparent every-
where in these German cities, we must first create a supply of trained
men to draw upon for such administration.

We must abandon the Jacksonian ideal of rotation in office, based
upon the fallacious idea that the honors and emoluments of office
should be "passed around among the boys," and must make it possible
for trained men to aspire to life careers in municipal service.

It must be made possible, in brief, for the people's municipal business
houses to obtain and retain, during life or good behavior, the service,
increasingly valuable with added years of experience, of high grade
experts, just as our great privately owTied business corporations obtain
and retain the service of such men.

Here in Germany, where the service of the municipalities is a career
of honor, the standard of such service is high. Municipal officials are
not required to run every two years the gauntlet of a fierce partisan
or personal attack ; they are paid liberal salaries ; they enjoy a measure
of freedom of action, and freedom from captious and ill-informed
criticism, in administering municipal affairs, far beyond anything of
the kind permitted to the officials of any American city.

For example, the City of Dusseldorf has just expended $35,000 in a
competition of architects for the privilege of supplying that city with a
plan for its future development.

The plan deemed best won for its designer a first prize of $5,000;
for the second best a prize of $3,750 was awarded; prizes of $2,500
each were awarded to the third and fourth, $1,775 each to the next
two men, and lesser sums for several other plans. In addition to the
prize awards, the city government bought, at agreed prices, a dozen
or more additional plans which were submitted in the competition.

In 1880 Dusseldorf had 94,000 inhabitants; in 1911, 376,000. In
part the gain was due to the enlarged boundary lines, in larger part
to accretions of citizens attached to new industries. Dusseldorf's ex-
pansion has been rigidly controlled by the municipal government.
Companies are not permitted to locate factories where they please.

Such institutions must be located where they will best fit into the
general city scheme adopted by the city government, and adopted, please
keep in mind, with a view solely to safeguarding the health of the
workers and to procuring the maximimi of l)eauty for the city as a
whole. Xoble land and water parks (the Rhine flows through Dus-
seldorf) adorn the center of the city; boulevards nm out into every
section, dotted with minor playground and small park rest and recrea-
tion places.

The effect of the whole is to minister not only to the health and com-
fort of the masses of the people, but to educate them in the appreciation
of beauty.

The Dusseldorf city government, in conducting a competition for
plans for further expansion of the municipality, wished to get the best
expert aid. in planning such expansion. It is believed the city will
have half a million inhabitants in another twenty-five years, and the
city government wished to make sure that the new growth shall har-
monize with the general plan now in effect.

Xone of the fifteen or sixteen city plans bought by the city govern-
ment will be followed entire. The government in council will after
discussion adopt a plan composed of parts of all the plans which were
bought, and this general plan, the net result of the competition, will
not be made public.

As rapidly as it becomes necessary for the city government to buy
lands for parks, for municipal housing, and for other purposes, to keep
pace with industrial development in new districts set apart for that
purpose, a special secret committee of the council, representing the
administration, will make such purchases, without publicity, in order
that land owners may not know it is the city which is buying and that
prices may therefore not be raised too high.

Officials of cities in Britain and in Germany tell me this secrecy is a
necessary precaution, since it is the custom of land owners to "gouge"
the cities as much as possible when occasion offers.

The cities have, of course, power to condemn lands for various uses,
but they have learned from experience that condemnation proceedings
are more costly than private and secret purchases made in the manner
indicated.

Houston papers just to hand indicate local dissatisfaction with the
way in which privately owned public service corporations repair city
pavements which they have torn up in order to improve or extend their
underground equipment.

It may be worth noting, in this connection, that it is the all but uni-
versal practice, in German and British cities, for the city government
to open the paving in such cases, and to make the subsequent ro]:)airs,
charging the cost to the privately owned corporation, l)ut not ]iormitting
that corporation to touch the paving on its own account.

CHAPTER IX.

Hamburg a Proof of Germax Initiative.

Hamburg, Germany. — All the big cities of Germany are "special
charter" cities. There is no set of imperial rules regulating or setting
bounds to municipal administration in the German Empire. There
are twenty-six states composing the Empire. These states range in
political character from the absolute monarchy like Prussia (which
by sheer bulk overshadows and dominates the other twenty-five states
in imperial affairs) up to the city republics (so-called) of Hamburg,
Bremen and Lubeck, which are sovereign states (in domestic affairs)
like the states of the American Union. In two or three of the lesser
kingdoms the crown still literally owns everything, and, potentially,
everybody. In none of the German states is there anything like the
democratic equality of the American electorate. Government, and
especially municipal government, even in the free cities of Hamburg,
Luljeck and Bremen, is shared in only by the taxpayers and by most
of them indirectly. Government is regarded as a business for quali-
fied experts, the members of the upper classes who alone receive the
educational training essential to meet its requirements.

I spent three days in Hamburg, visiting its remarkably beautiful
land and water parks, studying its form of government and touring
its magnificent barbor, the largest in Europe, in a motor boat.

I have sent to the Houston Public Library, to be framed and hung
there, three panoramic views of Hamburg's most striking municipal
improvements. I advise all Houstonians who entertain any vision of
a future "Houston beautiful"' to visit the library and study these views.
It will probably make you homesick for the future, at first, as it did
me, but it will undoubtedly afford light on the path for us all.

I suppose there is no more lovely night vista on earth — at least
none in any city — than the prospect of the Alster basin from the upper
windows of the Hamburgerhof or the Atlantic, magnificent hotels
which stand just across the main street of the city from the basin, and
facing it. Looking from my fifth-floor room onto the basin, at i) p. m.,
I saw a fairyland of water dotted with snuiU pleasure steamers,
electric launches electrically lighted, white-winged sailing yachts, row-
boats and canoes, all moving hither and thither, in and out, like a
throng of fireflies and night moths. A handsome, huge cafe, bril-
liantly lighted and filled with pleasure-seekers, jutted into the basin
on a long pier projecting from the street, while an orchestra ministered
to the Germanic love of music with Mueiichner beer and kalbsbraten.

The Alster basiu was mostly man-made; the low flat tlirough which
the Kiver Alster flowed into the mighty Elbe was dredged out, trans-
forming it into lakes which adorn the center of the great city as noth-
ing else conceivable by man could adorn it.

Hamburg harbor has six vast basins, cut at large cost back from the
banks of the Kiver Elbe. There are at all times hundreds of vessels,
large and small, in these basins. Hamburg, like Houston, lies more
than fifty miles inland from the sea, on a river channel, thus having
security against storms for its shipping and for its vast rail terminals.
Some day Houston, like Hamburg, will possess half a dozen huge inland
shipping basins, on either bank of its ship channel. Mayor Eice's
recently published suggestion that the City of Houston (or a Houston
harbor district) should as early as possible obtain ownership of a strip
of land on either side of our ship channel, is sound counsel. It is in
line with his policy for eight years past, which more than any other
single factor has resulted in carrying Houston forward to her destiny,
which is to become one of the world's great seaport cities. These
great man-made river seaports of Germany have had to obtain such
ownership (likewise the numerous big river ports along the Rhine,
the Elbe and the \Ves?r) in order to open the way on favorable terms
for the entrance of railroad connections and for new industries to
make use of the shipping facilities thus provided by the cities.

The one fact above all others which this voyage of discovery drives
home to me is that Houston can never again afford to listen to the
counsels of the shortsighted, of those who are unable to understand
the mighty demands laid upon us by our situation commanding the
southern (and through the Panama Canal the western) sea routes
for nearly one-third of the continental United States. We have gigan-
tic tasks ahead of us. Whether or not we adopt any part of the German
system of municipal government we must — there is no escape from it
— make up our minds to spend tens of millions of dollars of borrowed
money during the next dozen years, laying, in land and water, the
civic foimdations for a city of a million people which we shall become
within fifty years.

These astounding modern industrial cities of Germany are more
heavily bonded in proportion to population, than any of the American
cities. They assume burdens of debt for borrowed capital, to be in-
vested in revenue-producing and industry-stimulating public works,
which outclass even the vast bond issue made by Los Angeles to bring
a river 150 miles down from the mountains to fill its water maias.
These German cities, notwithstanding their long historic past, are
today the youngest, most virile, most daring, most farsighted munici-
palities on earth, and I do not except the best of our American cities
when I set dovra that posititve statement. There are no pikers in the
list of them.

I have been told, for years, by travelers and in books dealing with
modern Germany — several such books, the best obtainable, now on my
work table, repeat the sage statement — that the German people 'Tiave

little or no initiative/" individually. Having read and heard that
statement so often, on such apparently excellent authority, I accepted
it and started in to study the German organization of life from that
viewpoint.

After a month in the country, I am convinced no statement ever
made was further from the truth. The Germans possess individual
initiative plus — more than any other people 1 have ever seen. Their
initiative is lifting them irresistibly upward through an adaman-
tine crust of political officialdom, toward a full measure of work-
able personal liberty. It is substituting for the age-old scholastic
servitude of modern minds to Greek and Latin classics the universal,
slirewd and thorough study of the earth we live on and the life of our
own times. It is giving elfect (in the creation and equitable distribu-
tion of material wealth) to the mighty visions of the poets and phil-
osophers of the classic age of the German people. It is producing a
people who stand and walk erect almost without exception, who breathe
deeply, who dress neatly, work long and sturdily and live with wise
economy, and who front life with magnificent confidence in the future
of their nation. It is making their cities centers of artistic beauty
which attract increasing thousands of visitors and permanent resi-
dents from all the other lands on earth. It is assuring to every cliild
in Germany several years of practical public free education — education
for living now and here, and it is providing for the sons of the well-to-
do, who can bear a part of the extra cost, higher education in every
branch of applied science inferior to none given elsewhere. If the
Germans have apparently surrendered a part of their individual ini-
tiative in the organization and administration of their municipal gov-
ernments (or have failed as yet to claim that full measure of indi-
vidual participation in such governments that they have asserted in
other departments of their common life), why, in this more than in
any other way, they have demonstrated their possession of individual
initiative — because they have made this concession, with open eyes,
in recognition of its wisdom, on their own initiative.

Some French and English critics have discovered that the German
people lack the quality of charm. Using that word to express the
quality which in France and England is known as charm, this may be
a true criticism, in degree; it probably is. But the German people,
and the average German individual of the creative and masterful type,
possesses another kind of charm — tlie charm that inlieres in creative
genius, in power, in common sense applied to practical affairs. If
Kipling could forget his prejudice, he is precisely the one man living
who could do full Justice to this dominant quality of the German char-
acter. Individual initiative has enabled the German people, thirty
years ahead of any other, to lead the world in the work of minimizing
human risk in inchistry, in abolishing the worker's fear of want in age
by working out a vast system of sick, death and out-of-work benefits
and old-age insurance, thus reducing tremendously the (piantity of
preventable and deplorable involuntary poverty. That precisely, as
Theodore Koosevelt has been telling his countrymen during the cam-

paign now past, is the next big problem which must be undertaken by
prodigally wasteful America, and we should thank our stars that we
have, to light us on the way, the exajiiple afforded by this remarkable
people who, their critics assure us, "possess no individual initiative."

Some readers may wonder just what such generalizations as the fore-
going have to do with a study of municipal government. The answer
is that we can't understand how the German people got the wonderful
results they did unless we partially at least understand the character
of the people. The situation here implies leadership amounting to
genius, plus a rank and file sufficiently intelligent to submit to regi-
mentation— socialization — for the individual and the common good.
Until we become intelligent to that degi'ee we shall probably not obtain
any svich results from our city governments as have been obtained by
the cities of Germany. We at home are all born sovereigns — poten-
tially— and never forget the fact. The Germans are all born workers
— even the emperor's sons are each required to learn a useful trade
(the crown prince is a carpenter and said to be a mighty good one, the
kaiser a bookbinder) — and they never forget it. The Germans are so
far from being ashamed of trade that they glory in it. It is their en-
grossing interest — the creation and diffusion of new wealth. They
begin work early in the day, they keep at it steadily, without undue
speeding up ; they knock off work for a couple of hours at midday, and
they go back to it and stay at it until supper time, with few exceptions.
Their evenings and Sundays and their relatively few holidays' are
social opportunities fully utilized. Very sanely, too, with little ap-
parent excess. I wish we had their cafe life transplanted to our
Southern cities, where the mild climate, and, I think but am not quite
certain, the temperament of our jDeople are most favorable for it. I
hope to see it introduced — not gaudily and expensively but modestly
and within reach of the purses of all our people — into Houston in the
near future. We lack entertainments accessible to the majority, such
as one finds provided by municipal governments on every hand in the
German cities. Our municipal auditorium free concerts and our park
band concerts have made a notable and commendable beginning in
this field.

Municipal government in Germany is an evolution from the me-
diaeval system in which the overlord o'mied everything and everybody.
Today the people's city governments, exercising a part of the ancient
landlord's vanished powers for the general welfare of the community,
performs functions which in America are left to profit-seeking indi-
viduals to fulfill. Thus, the City of Hamburg, when additional
housing space is needed for its increasing population, buys a tract of
suburban land, plats it artistically, and with a view to obtaining the
maximum of health and comfort for its future inhabitants, and sells
lots at auction, stipulating that houses built thereon shall comply with
regulations fixed by the government, and shall cost not less than a
stated amount, dependent of course upon the character of the addi-
tion.

Hamburg some years ago surrendered its right of free trade to the
German imperial customs union, receiving in payment therefor several
millions of dollars which it invested in extensions of its harbor facil-
ities. The city-state retains a portion of its early free trade rights.
Most of its harbor basins are lined with huge warehouses into which
foreign goods can be brought for storage, without payment of customs
tariffs, pending their transshipment to other countries. If brought
into the Empire, these goods must pay the German imperial customs
duties. This system enables Hamburg to handle a vast quantity of
commodities at minimimi cost to manufacturers and shippers, to be-
come, in fact, a gigantic warehouse and transshipping point.

My trip around the harbor in a motor boat lays over anything else
I ever experienced, as a sporting proposition. I have ridden in city
taxis (notably through the narrow, winding streets of Xew Orleans,
at forty miles an hour, with my scant hair standing on end), and have
had, in earlier days, a few bone-breaking, nerve-killing experiences on
unladylike horses ; but for sheer thrill that harumscarum dash in and
out among the shipping of Hamburg has the edge on city taxicab,
wild horse or airship. My motor boat was handled by a young fellow
born and reared in Columbus, Ga., who said he proposed to give me a
run for my money, he was so tickled to see anybody from Dixieland
and to hear the speech of his own section. The harbor was uncom-
monly rough that day, big tugs were racing in and out, up and down,
past us and across our bow, and the way we ducked and dodged and
darted in between and aroxmd them afforded as complete a test of one's
heart action as anything could do. At times nothing much more than
the propeller of our tiny craft was in the water; it stood on its nose
and on its hind legs like a wild pony. Again, we cut in between two
big tugs, racing toward us in opposite directions, and so close together
that I could reach out a hand on either side and touch their bows.
Two seconds delay and either one or both would have cut us down like
a paper box and sent us into twenty-seven feet of mighty wet, cold
water. We went past big dry docks, in which battleships and huge
liners were taking repairs, and circled around the Imperator, the
50,000-ton Hamburg-American liner which is expected to begin service
in 1913 and give Germany the blue ribbon of the high seas, out-
classing the 32,000-ton Cunarder now in service and the 40,000-ton
Cunarder which I passed in the stocks at Glasgow when sailing up the
River Clyde from Dublin. The same company has laid down the keel
of a second 50,000-tonner, the Europa, thus affording our Scotch and
English friends a mark to aim at in future efforts to regain sea su-
premacy. The Imperator is over 900 feet long, has eight decks of
cabins up and four more to build whore she rides the water like a
leviathan, ' ■ l^"[

Some day our children and our grandchildren will see a develop-
ment at Houston like that now to be seen in Hamburg. It is up to us
now on the ground to grasp the full bigness of our job, which is to get
title to enough pul)lic land for foundations, and to shape at least the
outlines of those foundations for our successors to build upon.

CHAPTEE X.

Phases of Municipal Admixistration in Hamburg.

Hamburg, Germany. — American consuls are outposts of American
trade, chiefly. Occasionally a consul, of the abler sort, makes a valua-
ble special study of his foreign environment — not the formal required
"reports" with which state department archives are laden, but a keen
and illuminating analysis of conditions. Consul Robert P. Skinner,
American representative in Hambiirg, a veteran in the service and
rated all along the line as one of the ablest men in the service, was
interested in Houston's attempt to learn from the experience of pro-
gressive German cities, and besides promptly indorsing my inquiries
addressed to the Hamburg government he placed at our city's disposal
copies of special reports which he had written, on the organization
and administration of affairs in Hamburg. Inasmuch as Hamburg
seems to me most like of all the European cities to the kind of city
which Houston must become, I include two of these brief reports in
this chapter, so that they may be studied by our municipal adminis-
trators, and by our citizens, when confronted hereafter with problems
like those which have been Avholly or partially Avorked out in the great
German seaport city.

The Disposition of Garbage in Ilanihurg. — In the northern and
northwestern sections of the City of Hamburg, garbage and house
refuse are collected and carted to districts beyond the city boundaries
to be spread over fields and eventually to be plowed under as fertilizing
material; while in the central, eastern and southern boroughs, includ-
ing the harbor, such material, after being collected, is incinerated in
a municipal establishment commonly regarded as a model of its kind
and one which has given entire satisfaction during the entire fourteen
years of its practical use. I am convinced that American munici-
palities can study ])rofitably the experience of Ilaiuhiirg in this very
important matter.

The refuse reduced to ashes in the municipal phiiit is conveyed
thereto in four-wlieeled, watertigiit, iron carts, cacli of wbich has a
capacity of about four cubic meters. The cart bodies can he lifted
from the wliecis by means of electrical traveling cranes, and the con-
tents discharged directly into the furnace. There are thirty-six of
these furnaces, built according to the method of the Ilorsl'all Refuse
Co., Ltd., of Leeds, England, all of which burn continuously, except

when they require cleaning. Wlien the fires are once started no com-
mercial fuel is required and, therefore, the consumption of coal in the
plant is insignificant.

The slag is removed from the furnaces in small iron carts and con-
veyed therein to a cooling apparatus, where the contents are sprinkled
witth cold water, and thence to the slag breakers, which are capable
of producing broken slag in three sizes in the following proportions:
16% passing through a 5 mm. mesh screen; 50% passing through a
35 mm. mesh screen ; 34% passing through a 60 mm. mesh screen.
An electro-magnet is in operation in connection with the slag breakers,
and it removes small pieces of iron, the larger pieces having been re-
moved from the refuse before passing into the furnaces; or, if such
are contained in the slag, they are thrown out of the rotary sieve drum
at the lower end of the breaker.

The scrap iron recovered is sold at public auction, and the slag
itself is disposed of at a fixed price of 23.8 cents per ton of 1,000 kilos
(2,200 pounds). There is always a great demand for this slag, for
Vvhich there are numerous applications. The fine cinders are used as
a top dressing for promenades, the coarser grades for establishing the
drainage foundation of roads, and the middle size for the top dressing
of the roads. Used in this way, garbage slag is cheaper than any sub-
stitute material, and it serves its purpose perfectly. It is used very
advantageously in mixing concrete, five parts of coarse slag, one part
of cement, and three parts of sand being the ordinary proportions ; or,
one part of cement and seven parts of middle sized slag.

The very fine garbage slag may be utilized wherever coarse sand may
be used; for example, to form a bed for street paving blocks, for the
manufacture of slag bricks, as anti-slipping material on city streets
in winter; as filling material in buildings imder floors and over ceil-
ings. Many other applications could be named.

As a filling material between floors and ceilings this slag is used
very extensively in the docks and warehouses of Hamburg, for the
particular reason that it is absolutely sterile and, unlike other kinds
of slag, contains no sulphur by which merchandise in storage is some-
times damaged.

The garbage incinerating furnaces furnish sufficient power to drive
all the electrical machinery in the establishment to operate the cranes,
slag breakers and light plant, furnishing also electricity for the
accumulators of an electric motor launch, and an electric motor cart
used in the transportation of garbage. At present only one motor
cart is in use; it is proposed to purchase a number of others, so
that within a few years horses will be eliminated entirely in the
handling of garbage.

Such city garbage as is not burned is utilized, frequently, to fill up
marshes and swamps, as well as for fertilizing purposes.

Contracts for the removal of garbage, whether for destruction by
fire or for other disposition, are awarded by the government to private

firms upon public tenders and in several lots, described according to
the distances to be covered in transporting the refuse. The two firms
which, for years, have secured such contracts are F. Schmidt, 210
Steilshoperstrasse, and Messrs. Baustian and Dreyer, 12 Lubecker-
strasse. These firms o^ti the necessary horses and stables and rolling
stock, and furnish the men; the carts in which refuse is conveyed to
the incinerating plant are municipal property placed at the disposi-
tion of the contractors. Having very considerable outfits, the two
firms named seem also to control the transportation of sand, gravel,
paving stones and bricks within the city. The present contracts for
the removal of garbage were made in 1905 for a period of five years.
The city pays from 450 to 555 marks ($107.10 to $132.09), according
to distance, per 1,000 inhabitants served. (The City of Hamburg
has a population of 895,80-1.) Xew contracts were made this year
with the same concerns, according to which the contractors will re-
ceive from 572 to 850 marks ($136.13 to $202.30) per 1,000 inhabi-
tants ; but these contracts are to run for two years only, for the reason
that a second incinerating plant is in course of construction and will
be ready for use within two years.

The new destruction plant is being arranged much like the old one
except that the experience of fourteen years has been utilized, and in-
stead of Horsfall furnaces the so-called Hamburger ofen will be em-
ployed. The new ovens are not unlike the Horsfall ovens but are
believed to have been improved upon to such an extent that whereas
the Horsfall furnaces can dispose of only nine tons of material per
twenty-four hours, the new ovens will dispose of from twenty-two to
twenty-five tons during the same period.

Householders in Hamburg are required to provide themselves witli
metal receptacles which tliey place upon the curb line, usually twice a
week, between 8 and 9 o'clock p. m. The garbage gatherers empty the
cans into their carts between 9 p. m. and the early morning hours.
The cans themselves are very seldom stolen, and it is possible, and
indeed quite common, to purchase numbered cans from private firms
which, if stolen, are replaced by the insuring firai.

The conditions in Hamburg are such that ordinary householders re-
duce the amount of garbage to be carried away as much as possible by
destroying in kitchen stoves everything that can be burned.

The Commercial Planning of Ilamhurg. — The agglomeration of
Hamburg now comprises 1,212,299 inhabitants, thus divided: With-
in the political limits of the State of Hamburg, 977,144, of whom
895,804 are within the city limits; in the City of Altona, whicli
although in Prussia, immediately adjoins Hamburg, lG9,4fi4; and in
Harburg, Prussia, on the opposite side of the Elbe, 65,G91.

The city lies at the junction of the upper and lower Elbe, a dis-
tance of seventy-five nautical miles from the sea, and in the thousand
years of its history has become the chief commercial city of CJcrnumy.
The city consists of an ancient town in whicli many of the streets arc
crooked and narrow, and which grew up in the vicinity of the port

where now the chief business of the community is carried on, and the
vaster and newer section which has developed on both sides of the
Alster river, which here flows into the Elbe. As the Alster widens
to the proportions of two large lakes where it traverses the City of
Hamburg, the result has been that the residential districts lie around
the shores of the upper lake, so that the general aspect of the city
somewhat resembles that of Geneva, upon a much more imposing scale.
From the Alster lakes, navigable canals extend in numerous direc-
tions, and over these lakes and canals a very large and probably chief
part of the local traffic of the city, both freight and passenger, is car-
ried on. With the exception of Venice, it is doubtful whether any
city in the world possesses a system of water routes so commonly util-
ized as that of Hamburg.

The port of Hamburg is a meeting place for oceangoing ships, craft
from the upper Elbe, canal barges, and the German state railway sys-
tem. Tracks, wharves and warehouses are so cleverly constructed as
to facilitate the rapid and economic handling of the vast volume of
merchandise which passes through Hamburg, while, at the same time,
the evidences of this great business are less apparent than in many
similar cities which are less well organized.

The commercial section of Hamburg is subdivided into two divi-
sions, in one of which free trade prevails, while in the other the ordi-
nary taxing system of the Empire is in full application. The free port,
as it is called, is the last vestige of the ancient free city, that is to say,
free as respects goods imported therein. Upon the organization of the
Empire, which the State of Hamburg joined as a constituent member,
it became necessary to abandon the policy of free trade, and to accept
the fiscal system of the union; but, in order to protect the shipping
business of the city, a free zone was set aside within which free trade
still prevails. For the physical organization of the free port, it became
necessary to remodel the harbor entirely. A population of thousands
of people was moved from the islands of Kchrwieder and Wandrahm,
and upon these islands and certain adjacent territory, free accommo-
dation was provided for the handling of the largest ships afloat, as
well as their cargoes, while, at the same time, equal facilities had to be
provided for the handling of merchandise in the region subject to
ordinary tariff taxes. The original facilities of the free port were out-
grown rapidly and, at the present time, the port, as a whole, is under-
going very extensive and costly improvements.

As the State of Hamburg is one of the smallest in the German
Empire, the government is doing everything possible to recover every
inch of waste and marsh land, and to acquire, by purchase or other-
wise, all unimproved lands. The result of this policy, which is one of
long standing, is that the residential portion of the city seems like one
immense park. Where public holdings have not been converted into
gardens, promenades and the like, and where the land is unlikely ever
to be needed for handling the coinmerce of the city, lots have been
laid out and sold at auction for the erection of dwelling houses. The

character of the dwelling houses to be erected is controlled, to some
extent, by the government, the bviyers being required to build on a
uniform line, with an allowance for a small front garden, and being
forbidden to erect apartment houses except in certain districts.

The provisions for air and light in the modern part of the city are
excellent, and in these portions the streets are wide and are admirably
maintained. Hamburg is undoubtedly a model of careful organization,
for which it is indebted to an enlightened government composed of its
ablest citizens, who consecrate their entire lives to their special tasks,
and who covet no higher honor than the approval of their fellow
citizens.

Mr. Skinner also supplied the City of Houston with a long, detailed
analysis of "Taxation in Germany." This report has been filed for
reference in the Houston Public Library, where it can be consulted by
students of the subject.

CHAPTER XI.

Official Statistics of Hamburg.

Hamburg, Germany. — Before taking np the tliird section of my
report on Hamburg, the great German seaport which is what I am
convinced Houston-Galveston will in due time become, let me set
down one or two general observations on city government which sug-
gest themselves at this point :

1. The human race has not yet learned to live as sanely and health-
fully in cities as it has for thousands of years done in the coimtry
places, because the city as we know it is relatively a very recent
development of human society.

2. Our cities, and especially our American cities, are too often
wanting in publicly owned and operated services ministering to the
general health and welfare, and too seldom possess adequate equipment
of permanent imderground utilities, solely because we, moving lately
into the cities from the country places, where life was and is lived
on simpler terms, have brought with us standards of economy in social
expenditure which are not high enough to meet the demands of city
life. In a word, we have not been willing to pay for first-class service,
so naturally we have not had first-class service, in our cities.

3. A high city tax rate is an unavoidable incident of any plan of
city construction and administration under which city dwellers shall
receive first class public service. A high rate means a high standard
of civilization in cities. A low rate means a low standard. Here in
Germany, as in America, cities which are competing for new industrial
enterprises do to some extent offer as an inducement the fact of a
comparatively low tax rate; but they do not give it anything like the
emphasis which it is commonly given on our own side of the ocean.
Indeed, their chief claim to attract new factories and new selling enter-
prises which will employ considerable numbers of people is the com-
ploieness and excellence of their streets and their public services, in-
cluding water, schools, sewers, parks and playgrounds, amusement
places, trans[)ortation, and, often above everything else, their ability
to provide comfortable, sanitary housing and good food at low prices
for tlie work people who are to be employed in the new enterprises.

In a word, the German city builders of the past thirty years have
been first to recognize that not cheap living, on a low scale, but com-
forfahlf living, on the highest attainable scale, wouh] most certainly
attract now population and capital. They have not been afraid to

play the game the way they figured it out. And they have made it
win. Citizens of German cities often complain that tliey are very
heavily taxed, but they always add : "We get value for our money."
And they do.

Xow let us have a look into the fiscal affairs and the methods and
motives of the government of Hamburg, as set forth in a series of
replies prepared by Consul Skinner in answer to a group of specific
inquiries which, through him, I addressed to the Hamburg city gov-
ernment. The replies, which indicate the line of my inquiry, are as
follows :

In reply to Frmik Putnam, Esq., Special Com'missmier of the City
of Houston, Texas, now at Hanover, Germany. — Information Relat-
ing to the Free and Hanseutic City of Hamburg, Germany:

1. The population of the State of Hamburg on October 1, 1911,
was 1,038,931; the population of the city, 953,179. (From Official
Anzeiger, 252.)

2. The total income of the State of Hamburg in 1911 amounted to
144,987,226 marks; in 1912, to 160,167,280 marks. Expenditures in
1911 amounted to 161,819,668 marks; in 1912, 172,535,711 marks.

3. The income of the State of Hamburg under the head of taxes
for the year 1908 was as follows :

Eeal estate tax 18,558,857.46 marks

Income tax 39,206,484.03 marks

Stamp revenue 2,986,062.40 marks

Eegistration dues 560,701.06 marks

Tonnage dues 3,273,161.67 marks

Inheritance tax 4,548,209.95 marks

Tax on sales of property 4,268,361.33 marks

Amusement tax 79,386.98 marks

Dog tax 311,722.14 marks

Contributions for fire department 919,455.14 marks

Share of customs revenues 6,805,163.76 marks

Share of federal receipts from distillers'

tax and imperial revenue law 2,942,819.48 marks

In addition to these ordinary sources of income, the state obtains
large revenues from what is called the state domain. The anticipated
income from this source, according to the budget for 1913, is as fol-
lows :

Groimd rents 894,700 marks

Building rents 4,080,000 marks

Pastures 179,900 marks

Woods, hunting and fishing riglits 24,900 marks

Abattoirs ^ 1,839,000 marks

Petroleum harbor 163,100 marks

Lighting 14,687,000 marks

Water ? 5,603,500 marks

Customs 313,600 marks

Eailway shares 54,500 marks

Eailways 1,054,400 marks

Street railways 1,443,000 marks

Quays '^. 0,-^--i3,400 marks

Theatre bonds 3,400 marks

Pawnshops 335,000 marks

Lottery 3,500,000 marks

Wood harbor rents 38,300 marks

Free port warehouses 974,500 marks

4. After the payments into the interest and sinking funds accounts,
and special expenditures for harbor construction, etc., a considerable
number of the more important expenditures of the city, according to
the budget for 1913, will be as follows :

Police department 13,436,416.80 marks

Building police department 559,341.50 marks

Fire department 3,373,736.00 marks

Prison in Fuhlsbuettel 1,646,033.83 marks

Detention prison 377,995.43 marks

Medical college 1,673,736.15 marks

Hospital, St. George 3,564,313.67 marks

Hospital, Eppendorf 3,848,917.73 marks

Hospital, Barmbeck 404,590.00 marks

Hospital, Friedrichsberg 1,771,839.00 marks

Hospital, Langenhorn 3,179,636.00 marks

Poor support 5,531,994.00 marks

Workhouse 1,707,111.40 marks

Superior court 1,779,583.97 marks

Local court 3,007,995.80 marks

Guardians' court 177,191.50 marks

Attachment court 1,030,050.30 marks

5. At the end of 1911, Hamburg bond issues were outstanding to
the amount of 769,451,838.39 marks, in addition to which there was
an old debt, not redeemable, amounting to 300,810.50 marks.

6. Yes, bonds are issued when public works of various kinds are
proposed, in order to secure funds therefor.

7. Contracts are entered into after public advertising for bids in
the State Gazette. I'his relates to public works as well as to supplies
of almost every des(rij)tion. The execution of contracts is supervised
by the competent department of the government.

8. The city operates water and gas works for its own account.
The street railways and elevated and underground railways are oper-
ated by corporations under concessions, the city deriving a substantial
income from these enterprises.

9. The port is the greatest revenue-])n)ducing pn)|)erly i)elonging
to the State of Haml)urg; however, the general interests of the state
are considered rather than the possibility of taxing commerce for the

benefit of the resident population. Not only is the income of the port
necessary for its maintenance, but the state expends enormous amounts
for its improvement and extension. The jealous care with which the
harbor and its surrounding works is administered is one of the promi-
nent causes of Hamburg's development.

In connection with the port there exist warehouse facilities enor-
mous in extent which are operated by a private corporation in which
the state holds stock. By a rather complicated method of accounting
a portion of the annual revenue from this warehouse stock is set aside
for the purpose of acquiring additional stock in the company for the
state, so that in time the state will become the whole owner of the
plant.

The state is the owner of real property which changes hands fre-
quently. As the area of Hamburg is limited, the state acquires land in
fee and disposes of it at auction from time to time under such condi-
tions that purchases for speculative purposes are impossible. Quite
lately the state condemned certain congested districts, razed all struc-
tures existing thereon, cut a broad thoroughfare through the property,
which bears the name of Moenckebergstrasse, and is now selling the
lots on each side to cover the cost of the operation. The property cost
38,289,355 marks and up to 1911 the sales of street-abutting land had
amounted to about six million marks. The expenses of carrying on this
operation were covered by a special loan. In this connection I may
remark that most European cities refuse to give their streets names' or
numbers without character, preferring to name them after celebrated
national or local personages. It is considered that even the largest
cities are not so complicated but that intelligent persons can find their
way about, without reducing public nomenclature to a series of figures.

The gas works belong to the city and produced a revenue of 12,-
975,350 marks in 1912, against a cost of operation of 8,178,870.50
marks.

10. The port warehouses, as already stated, are becoming the prop-
erty of the public. The gas works were taken over from a private cor-
poration in 1891.

11. The gas works yield the state a fair amount of revenue over the
cost of maintenance and operation. For particulars, see No. 9.

12. This question has already been answered in part. The electric
light company is a private corporation, and in the fiscal year 1909-10
paid the state 2,122,006.60 marks in taxes and dues of every sort, and
in the year 1910-11, 2,323,456.25 marks.

The street railway companies in 1909-10 paid the state 1,762,383.53
marks in taxes and concession dues. From 1866 to 1910 stockholders
of the street railway company received 33,397,965.75 marks, and the
city 23,001,703.31 marks.

The underground and elevated railroad has only been in operation a
few months, and no results can be stated.

13. Fares on the street railway amount to 10, 15 and 20 pfennigs,
according to distance. The cost of gas in Hamburg is 14 pfennigs per
cubic meter. Electricity for illuminating purposes is sold at the rate
of 6 pfennigs per kilowatt hour, and at the rate of 20 pfennigs per
100 kilowatt hours for power purposes.

14. The salaries paid to public officers in Hamburg may be judged
from the following partial list :

Building police director 14,000 marks

Building inspectors 10,000 marks

Assistants 5,000 marks

Technicians 3,500 marks

Chief of bureau 5,300 marks

Registrar 4,300 marks

Messengers 2,150 marks

In the administration of tlie port, the chief councillor receives
$2,856 per annum; the less conspicuous oihcers are paid $2,380, $1,309,
$1,094, $856, $642, $452, the lowest salary being that of office mes-
sengers. These port salaries are subject to three, four and five in-
creases every three years, so that a chief councillor who starts in at
$2,856 may terminate his career at a salary of $3,908, and upon re-
tirement from active duty receives a pension to the end of his days.

15. The income tax of Hamburg varies according to the require-
ments of the state. There is a unit tax, the imit increasing according
to the income reported, and this unit rate is multiplied a sufficient
number of times to produce the desired amount of revenue. The
average number of units collected has been seven. This question of
taxation is complicated, and for details you are referred to the report
annexed hereto, entitled "Taxation in Germany." This report, written
some years ago, is substantially correct today, except that the tax on the
increase in the value of real property, sometimes called the tax on the
unearned increment, and which was formerly merely a ITainlnirg state
tax, is now an imperial tax. This tax puts into effect the Henry
George theory of land taxation.

16. Taxes in Hamburg are payable without excejition. 'j'be rate of
the income tax increases as the income of the individual becomes
greater.

17. Hamburg is one of tbe free states of the German Empire. Its
government is imlike any other in this country, and has come down
from the Middle Ages changed only to meet modern necessities. The
commission plan of administration has been in operation in Hamburg
during many centuries. The chief executive l)ody is the senate, of
eighteen members, elected for life and com])osed of men of high per-
sonal qualifications. This commission of eighteen proposes laws to
the l)urgerschaft, which is the popular elective chamber. The various'
senators sit as members of deputations which control the different
l)ranche8 of the government. The term "oberbuergcrmeister'' is not
used in Hamburg at all. In this state each member of the senate is

the equal of every other in rank and authority. The senate elects a
president who serves, usually, not more than two years, and who is
called the burgomaster. There is also a second burgomaster, who
usually becomes burgomaster. The burgomaster, in addition to being
president of the senate, represents the state on ceremonial occasions,
and as a senator he continues to carry on the work intrusted to him
before he was chosen burgomaster.

The Hamburg system of government is complicated. It works well
here because it is hallowed by centuries of use, and because members
of the government are superior men. It works well, also, because the
city is the state and the state is the city. That being the case, there
are no delays or differences of opinion between the mimicipal govern-
ment and the national government, as is sometimes the case in the
United States. In Hamburg, when the senate and the burgerschaft
have spoken, their decision is law, and requires no higher confirma-
tion. Members of the Hamburg government must be citizens of Ham-
burg. This does not apply to specialists who are employed in the
various departments. This reply to question No. 17 is obviously not
based upon any otticial report or expression.

18. All the higher officers of the State of Hamburg are university
graduates, and all the officers of the building department and the like,
must be graduates of technical high schools. It would be inconceiv-
able in Hamburg that a public officer should not possess either the gen-
eral culture or the special training for his particular post. No one
would think for a moment of putting an untried man in a responsible
position to learn the actual business of his office at the expense of the
taxpayer. On the other hand, any man who has entered the service of
the state is assured of permanent employment, occasional increase in
compensation while performing the same work, or promotion in rank
according to merit, and, eventually, retirement with a pension for life.

Robert P. Skinner, Consul General.

Hamburg, Germany, October 28, 1912.

Further statistical information concerning the city-state of Ham-
burg is given in the following reply by the government, through its
statistician, to the inquiries which I addressed to the president of the
Hamburg senate.

Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,
board of statistics.
No. of Journal: 3171

Hamburg, October 31, 1912.
Reply to letter dated October 4th.
To Mr. Putnam, Special Commissioner of the City of Houston,
Texas, U. S. A., United States Consulate, Hanover.

I beg to answer the questions put by you as follows :

1. On November 1, 1911, Hamburg's population (city) was 953,-
079 inhabitants; on November 1, 1911, Hamburg's population (state)
was 1,038,669 inhabitants.

2. The City of Hamburg has uo special administration; all the
municipal affairs of the city are managed by the authorities of the
State of Hamburg. The city, however, forms the largest part of the
state. The state budget of 1910 shows the income (apart from loans)
to be 155,436,000 marks. This according to the state's account given.

3. This income is composed of:

Rentals, interest, etc., of state property.. 34,616,000 marks

Taxes and royalties . . 98,648,000 marks

Fees and other revenues of the authorities 23,172,000 marks

Total 155,436,000 marks

4. According to the balance-account, expenditures of the state were
as follows for the calendar year 1910 : 153,217',000 marks, so that there
was a surplus of revenues of 2,219,000 marks. In detail the state ex-
pended, for:

Overground workings 22,694,000 marks

Engineering — River and port workings. . . 7,569,000 marks

Interest for state's debts 26,663,000 marks

Amortisation 5,981,000 marks

5. In 1910 (beginning of 1911) the state's debts amounted to
715,761,000 marks.

6. The state issues bonds which bear interest, but the expenses for
public buildings, etc., are paid, in part, from the yearly revenues.

The state's bonds are assured by the state's property, which may be
appraised, approximately, by the financial department and private
financiers. The property is larger than the debts are.

7. Works and furnitures surpassing 360 marks in value must be
publicly written out for contract unless the senate (the chief mimicipal
authority) decrees dispensation therefrom. Whosoever gets the con-
tract must either bring two good citizens who guarantee the furniture
or work according to contract, or he must deposit, in ready cash, a sum,
usually 10 per cent of the amount in question. The sum is deposited
with the financial deputation.

8 and 9. The street railways (Street Railway Company in Ham-
burg and Central Railway Company of Ilaniburg-Altona), and the
running tliereof, are operated by j)rivate companies wliich have to pay
yearly taxes and other obligations. Electricity is furnished by a private
company; tliis also is done against a yearly tax. Further, a private
company operates electric fast trains (elevated and underground rail-
way) and is taxed therefor yearly. On the other hand, the gas works
(with a surplus) and the water works (with a surplus) are o])erated ])y
the city, rectius the state. As for the railway lines, the main line is
owned and ofx-ratcd by Prussia; the city and suburb lines are owned
by llaml)urg and operated by Prussia; the same with the lines on the

quay. Public works and institutions are further: The Abattoir Ad-
ministration (\nth a small surplus), the Quay and Port Administra-
tion (operated by the state), the mint, the foundries laboratory, and
the gauging offices, alternately with a surplus or an allowance.

10. None of the works owned and operated by the state at the time
being has been owned formerly by private persons or companies. The
gas works have been leased to a private person, but were taken over by
the state in 1891.

11. The yearly gross receipts of public institutions, owned and
operated by the state, were, in 1910, as given below:

Gas works' 17,124,000 marks

Water works .5,009,000 marks

Abattoir 1,548,000 marks

Quay buildings, including port rentals. . . 6,334,000 marks
Mint, including the stock capital for coins

and medals 2,523,000 marks

Foundries laboratory 82,000 marks

Gauging offices 95,000 marks

Lombard (deposit business) 203,000 marks

Former customs bureau store 321,000 marks

Should there be a surplus, it goes to the state's funds; as a rule,
prices are not lowered.

12. As for public works owned and operated by private companies,
the State of Hamburg received in 1910 :

(a) From the street railway companies, according to the contracts
made, 1,330,000 marks. Of this amount the Street Eailway Company
in Hamburg had to pay 875,000 marks taxes. The share of the state
of the dividend of the above-mentioned company was 336,000 marks.
The Hamburg-Altona Central Eailway Company had to pay 119,000
marks taxes.

(b) From the electric works, 1,973,000 marks.
The electric fast trains line was opened but this' year.

13. On the lines of the Street Eailway Company in Hamburg,
passengers pay 10, 15 and 20 pfennigs (2 to 4 cents), according to
distance; on the lines of the Hamburg-Altona Central Eailway Com-
pany, 10 pfennigs (2 cents) for each ride is paid, without taking into
consideration the distance.

The price of gas is 14 pfennigs' per cul)ic meter and is the same for
lighting, cooking and heating purposes, as well as for motors.

The electric works charge for light 60 pfennigs per kilowatt hour;
for power, 20 pfennigs.

14. Public buildings are designed, as a rule, by state's officials and
executed, nearly without exception, by private enterprises. (See an-
swer to question 7.) Wages paid to workmen occupied with public

building work are the same as those of workmen occupied with private
buildings. The majority of Hamburg workmen are paid by the hour.
Wages paid for the hour are, just now :

For masons and carpenters, 85 pfennigs per hour for a working day
of nine hours; that is, 7.65 marks per day.

For stone masons, 90 pfennigs per hour for a working day of eight
and one-half hours.

15. Xo income tax is raised from incomes under 900 marks. Every
fiscal year the senate and the burgerschaft decide how many tax units
are to be raised. In 1910, seven and one-half units were raised — the
same in 1911 and 1912. The tax unit would be :

Yearly Income — Tax Unit.

From 900 M. to 1,000 M 1.00 M.

From over 1,000 M. to 2,000 M., for each hundred 0.20 M. more

From over 2,000 M. to 3,000 M., for each himdred 0.40 M. more

From over 3,000 M. to 4,000 M., for each hundred. . . .0.55 M. more

From over 4,000 M. to 5,000 M., for each hundred 0.65 M. more

From over 5,000 M. to 6,000 M., for each hundred 0.80 M. more

From over 6,000 M. to 7,000 M., for each hundred 0.95 M. more

From over 7,000 M. to 8,000 M., for each hundred 1.00 M. more

From over 8,000 M. to 10,000 M., for each hundred 1.05 M. more

From over 10,000 M. to 15,000 M., for each hundred 1.10 M. more

From over 15,000 M. to 20,000 M., for each hundred 1.15 M. more

From over 20,000 M. to 30,000 M., for each hundred 1.20 M. more

So the unit is :

With an income of 1,000 M 1 M.

With an income of 2,000 M 3 M.

With an income of 3,000 M 7 M.

With an income of 4,000 M 12.50 M., etc.

until with an income of 30,000 M., it amounts to 300 M.=l%.

From this point it is raised, in another 20 units, in proportion of .01%,
up to 1.20%, viz: In 10 units of 2,000 M. each up to 1.10% with an
income of 50,000 M. ; in 5 units of 10,000 M. each up to 1.15% with
an income of 100,000 M.; in 5 units of 20,000 M. each up to 1.20%
with an income of 200,000 marks.

A portion of a hundred is counted for a full liundred.

If the family of a taxpayer consists of, at the least, four persons, and
the whole income of the taxpayer docs not exceed 5,000 M., he has tlie
right to demand his tax lowered by one-quarter; in case his wliole
income does not exceed 2,000 M., by one-half. If the family consists
of six persons, and the whole income of the taxpayer does not exceed
5,000 M., the taxpayer has the right to demand the tax lowered by one-
half; in ease the whole income does not exceed 2,000 M., by three-
quarters.

The income tax would be, for a familv of six heads, witli an iiu^ome
of 1,000 M., and on the base of 7>4 units: 1.88=1.90 M., that is' to
say one-fourth of tlie tax unit of 7.50 ]\r.=not quite 2%. A family

with an income of 1,000 M. and four or five heads would have to pay
3.75 M., that is to say, one-half of the tax unit of 7.50 M.=.38% of
the income. The unit is raised up to 9% in case of the income being
200,000 M. and more. So it is clear that the lower incomes are very
much favored in comparison with the higher ones.

16. The tax units refer to physical and Judicial persons, but cor-
porations and institutions founded for benevolent purposes are free
from income tax. The property is not taxed in this city; the tax on
landed property and buildings we raise is a so-called "real" tax.

17. See answer to question 2. All municipal alfairs are managed
and closed by the state government. The senate, being the head of
the administration, chooses, by secret vote, a first and a second biirger-
meister from the members of the senate, to be president for the term
of one year. No biirgermeister is allowed to rule longer than two years
at a stretch, but he may be re-elected after a short interval out of office.

The two biirgermeisters ruling just now were elected on September
13, 1912. The first biirgermeister ib' in a position comparable to that
of the president of a republic; his position is not to be compared to
that of a city's mayor.

18. As a rule, the principle is that municipal works and institu-
tions must be operated by experts with a special training for their post.
Public buildings are supervised by officials of the state who were trained
at the technical high schools. According as they are wanted in the
lower, middle or higher administrative service, officials have to get
their training at the schools of the city or the state relatively, or at a
high school. Officials wanting a position in the high administrative
service of the city or state must be students of a high school and must
have passed the examination prescripted.

Dr. Beukemann,

Director of the Bureau of Statistics.

CHAPTER XIL
The Land Increment Tax in Hamburg.

Hamburg, Germany. — In the eleventh article of this series, United
States Consul General Skinner of this city was quoted as saying that
the application of the principle of taxing the unearned increment on
land was first a policy of the City of Hamburg but has since become
also an imperial German policy, thus putting "into effect the Henry
George theory of land taxation." The precise extent to which this
theory is applied is indicated in the following excerpt from an official
report made by Mr. Skinner on this subject, and included in this letter.

Inasmuch as Houston recently attempted forward steps along this
line, creating a lively issue between large landholders and the majority
of citizens who own little or no land, it seems to me this brief recital
of Hamburg's experiment with the new tax theory should be inter-
esting to our people, and possibly give them some light on the path.
Here it is :

Law Prescribing Payment of Taxes on the Increase in Value of Real
Property. — If, in the State of Hamburg, a piece of property is sold or
transferred, it is subject to the payment of a tax if the proceeds ex-
ceed the amount realized upon its next preceding sale, or the value of
the consideration which resulted in its last transfer. The tax is
payable by the seller. The tax is not payable when property is ac-
quired by inheritance or gift. The amount to be assessed for taxation
is found by subtracting cost plus expenses incurred for construction,
sale and transfer, from the price finally realized.

The expenses incurred to the seller in the way of improvements
during the time when he owned the property, provided such improve-
ments still exist at the time of sale or transfer, may be deducted, but
under no circumstances interest on the cost of purchase.

If property passes into the hands of another, otherwise tlinn l)y sale,
but in consideration of an e(|uivak'nt, and the amount of such equiv-
alent can not 1)0 ascertained, the value of the property at the time of
transfer is ascertained by ap))raisement. If the transfer or sale only
refers to a relatively STuall share of a house or lot, the tax department
may exempt the seller from the payment of this tax, but the ])roceeds
of the sale of such small portion must be added to the proceeds of the
Bale of the remaining portion when sold or transferred later.

Over

10 to

Over

20 to

Over

30 to

Over

40 to

Over

50 to

Over

60 to

Over

70 to

Over

80 to

Over

90 to

The tax rates are as follows :

Amount of increase — Tax.

Up to 2,000 M 1 7o of increase in value

Over 2,000 M. to 4,000 M 1^ % of increase in value

Over 4,000 M. to 6,000 M 2 % of increase in value

Over 6,000 M. to 8,000 M 2>^ % of increase in value

Over 8,000 M. to 10,000 M 3 % of increase in value

Over 10,000 M. to 20,000 M 3>4% of increase in value

Over 20,000 M. to 30,000 M 4 % of increase in value

Over 30,000 M. to 40,000 M 4i^% of increase in value

Over 40,000 M 5 % of increase in value

If the increase in the value since the last transfer of the property
amounts to more than 10 per cent of the value at the time of the next
preceding transfer, the following tax rate is added to the foregoing:

20% 10% of the above tax rates

30% 20% of the above tax rates

40% 30% of the above tax rates

50% 40% of the above tax rates

60%' 50% of the above tax rates

70% 60% of the above tax rates

80% 70% of the above tax rates

90% 80% of the above tax rates

90 to 100% 90% of the above tax rates

Over 100% 100% of the above tax rates

Only three-quarters' of the above tax is charged if thirty years had
elapsed since the last previous sale or transfer. However, if this period
(between last and present sale) is less than ten years, one-quarter more
is charged.

The department of taxes is charged with the fixing and collecting
of this tax. The taxpayer receives a bill, which is payable within one
month, but not before the transfer has been effected.

Exempt from this tax are Hamburg charitable funds, associations
and institutes for benevolent purposes, or of general public utility. In
cases of doubt the senate decides.

The party by whom the tax is payable must inform the department
of taxes of the transaction, with details, and may be required to pro-
duce documentary evidence of the truth of his statements.

An appeal against the assessment must be made within a month after
receipt of the tax bill, it being the duty of the taxpayer to prove the
alleged injustice of the assessment, and to answer, verbally or in
writing (if demanded), the questions propounded to him. The depart-
ment of taxes decides. An appeal made later than four weeks after
the receipt of the bill can be considered if proper reasons prevented the
taxpayer from doing so sooner.

Incorrect statements, or failure to report the transaction, intention-
ally or in consequence of gross negligence, are punishable by a tme not
to exceed three times the amount of the tax.

In special cases, where the collection of the tax would be an act of
extraordinary hardship, the senate may reduce or waive the amount
payable.

This law went into effect on January 1, 1908, it affecting all sales
or assignments of real property where the transfer took place subse-
quent to December 31, 1907 ; and it will be applied to all such trans-
actions imtil December 31, 1911, that is to say, for a period of four
years. The act is, therefore, an experimental one and must be amended
or re-enacted prior to expiration if it is to continue to remain in force
after that date. In limiting the effectiveness of this law to such a
short period it was the intention of the legislative body to learn
whether it would produce sufficient revenue without working a hard-
ship to the real estate owners or unfavorably affecting the value of
property.

CHAPTER XIII.
LooKixG Into Houston's Future.

Bremen, Germany. — I have just been reading, in the Chronicle of
October 20, which was forwarded to me here this morning, Mayor
Rice's public statement in which he reviews the work of his eight-year
administration of the commission government of Houston. In that
statement the mayor says :

"I can not but impress upon you the importance of your waterway.
Already other seaports are being established upon the Texas coast aside
from Galveston, and it behooves every citizen of Houston to study his
own city, and strive for one of the greatest inland harbors of America.
Our people must be watchful and see that our waterway is constructed
on broad and safe lines, that the terminal facilities, wharves, etc., shall
be o\^Tied and controlled by the city. It is the greatest asset this city
possesses and it grieves me to see not only the outside speculators, but
some of our own citizens, retarding the progress of this channel by
buying land and speculating along its banks. Land that the govern-
ment needs for dredging, to make a permanent waterway, is being held
at a prohibitive price by some of our citizens. I suggest that an amend-
ment to our charter be passed by the next legislature giving the City
of Houston the right to condemn any land needed, and also police
power between Harrisburg and Morgan's Point."

Xo thoughtful man can study the great inland seaports of Germany
— and they are all inland, most of them much farther inland than
Houston — without appreciating the sober wisdom of Mayor Rice's
counsel to Houston quoted above.

Germany's world-beating advance in material wealth, and in the
development of great modern cities and harbors, during the past forty
years, was made possible through the exercise, by the cities, of just
such powers as those which Mayor Rice urges shall be conferred upon
Houston by the next Texas legislature. Here the selfish private profit,
derived from speculation in lands which were essential to the com-
munity, has been made imj)ossil)lo. Benefits arising from increases in
land values, due to demand created l)y community growth, have l)een
absorbed chiefly by the city governments for the general welfare.
Hamburg and Bremen, the great North German ports nearest the sea,
are examples illustrating this policy. So are all of the score or
more busy ]^)ort cities along the Rhine, Weser and Elbe rivers, farther
inland. Each has l)cen able, wholly or in large part, to forestall, for
the community, tlie private speculator in land values. When a tract
of land was needed for harhor iinprfjvement, the city bought it, or

condemned it at a fair valuation, with borrowed capital. The city
thereafter worked out carefully a general plan of improvements, both
public and private, and resold parcels of the land for factory and
warehouse sites, homes and otherwise, thus attracting new industries
and getting back the original investment with an added profit.

My observations over here convince me the City of Houston, or a
Houston harbor board, should own and control, for all time, enough
land along either bank of the ship channel to enable it to provide for
future widening of the channel, and to supply sites, at fair prices,
for factories, warehouses and other betterments which private capital
must establish there if Houston's ambition is to be realized.

If Houston acts on her opportunities, nothing is more certain than
that the channel now in process of creation must be widened as well
as deepened hereafter. The 150-foot bottom width which will limit
the capacity of the original channel will not long meet the demands
which will be laid upon it. Its ultimate bottom width — pretty cer-
tainly within twenty years — will be 500 to 1,000 feet, and its depth
will he sufficient to float the biggest cargo ships.

There will be, as there are today in these great German ports simi-
larly situated, numerous huge basins opening off the channel, and
affording harborage for the commercial fleets which will come up to the
rail terminals at Houston to deliver the traffic between the American
West and the outer world.

The Houston harbor authorities will be spending money on the
Houston ship channel a hundred years hence; that was fairly clear to
me when we were hustling for votes to get the district created. It is a
certainty in my mind now. I find each of the great harbors of Europe
is controlled by a separate board or commission, whose membership
includes the ablest men in the community. The Clyde Trust, con-
trolling Glasgow harborage and the river channel down to the sea, is
an illustration.

There is every reason why the Texas legislature should be glad to
grant to Houston and Harris county the fullest desired power to create,
along the channel between Galveston and Houston, the huge harborage
which the commerce of the West and Southwest demand at that point.
Because, while the burden of cost will fall upon Houston and Harris
count}' and the Federal government, the benefits will be shared,
throughout all the future, by every Texan who produces a pound of
any product for export or who consumes any product brought into
Texas by water. Houston and Harris county are building not for
themselves alone but for the whole state and the whole West.

Mayor Eice's urgent advice that the wharfage in the Houston ship
channel should be owned or controlled Ijy a public body representing
the people, and not left to be monopolized by combined private cap-
ital, is supported by the experience of the great ports of Europe, where
the wisdom of that policy has been everywhere demonstrated. This
means that further enormous sums of money must be invested by

public authority, to obtain title to lands, and to plan and in part to
make improvements upon such lands. It seems to me our port avithor-
ity should vest, as it does over here, in a separate body, since in time to
come the local investments in harborage and channel will be almost if
not quite as great as those in the purely municipal services. This port
authority should have power to issue bonds as needed — and it will need
a very wide latitude in this respect — without embarrassing the city
proper in its borrowing capacity for municipal needs.

The time has passed when there is even a remote possibility of the
creation of another seaport upon the Texas coast, or for that matter
upon the American coast of the Gulf of Mexico, which can hope to rival
the Houston-Galveston district. There will be other ports — for ports
like cities are built where men build them — but the one great interna-
tional seaport on the gulf will be where it is today, namely, in the
Galveston-Houston district. All of the available water frontage with-
ing that district will in due time be needed, and used. Yoimg men
who cast their first votes November 5, 1912, will live to see the Houston
harbor authorities doing what the port authorities of Hamburg have
had to do, and that is, glean with a fine-tooth comb for every available
foot of water frontage that can be made available, by filling, draining
or other improvement, for industrial sites and harborage.

One steamship company alone runs forty lines, with a total of 453
ships, out of Bremen. The city-state could not economically make the
Weser river navigable, at Bremen, for the huge vessels of recent times,
so it bought a site and laid out a subsidiary city — Bremerhaven —
farther down stream, where the river is wider and deeper. Here the
big ships of the Xord-Deutscher Lloyd line dock passengers and freight.
Vessels of lighter draught, but large enough to trade with the whole
of the A;vade world, come up to Bremen and discharge cargoes in half a
dozen basins made, owned and controlled by the public authority.

The ship channel is indeed Houston's biggest asset ; it is also Hous-
ton's biggest responsibility and Houston's biggest obligation. Hous-
ton's recent growth has been largely built upon it in tmticipation ;
Houston's future growth rests chiefly upon it. Houston should employ
first-cla.ss harbor engineers on her own account and, supplementing
whatever the Federal government may do, to study the harbor devel-
opment of other great seaport cities, and make sure their best ideas are
embodied in the development of the Houston harbor and chajiuel.

CHAPTER XIV.

The Appreciation of Art in German Cities.

Bremen, Germany. — This town is of especial interest to me for
several reasons. First, it handles a hmidred million dollars' worth
of cotton every year, most of it from Texas, through the Houston-
Galveston district. Second, it has a city hall dating from 1457, in
whose basement is the daddy of all the ratskellers. Third, it has
some of the handsomest public monuments in Europe, one in par-
ticular which I should certainly steal for Houston if I knew of any
way to get it across. I allude to the Teichmann fountain, which is
the most delightfully imaginative and in all ways alluring of the
public monuments which I have seen. In the group of figures we
have the ancient Norseman, standing with poised oar in his bull's-
hide boat; beneath the boat, bearing it on his broad back and draw-
ing it forward with mighty hands, the sea centaur; at the left side,
clinging to the gunwale of the boat and looking upward with siren
entreaty, the mermaid, seeking to draw the sailor down into the
deeps; below, in the water, an octopus with tentacles twining around
the limbs of the centaur; at the boat's prow, a very figure of flight,
the yoimg God Mercury, guiding the sailor toward the home port.
The whole composition is alive; the artist caught the figures in the
very stress of action. It symbolizes the history of Bremen — a sea-
port's history; and it expresses the artistic genius of the Teuton
at its best. For half an hour I studied it, saying to myself: "Good
Lord, if we only had the equivalent of that in Houston ! If we only
had the trained talent there to produce such work ! If we as a
people only cared a rap for it! If we were not so utterly engrossed
with mere getting and spending! If — but what's the use? Maybe
the future will give us grace. Meantime, our job is to lay fouuthi-
tions for the fundamental decencies of city life. Aljove all, we
must get good public highways. And before we lay down the per-
manent pavements we must complete the underground services, so
that our paving shall not need to be torn up and badly repaired
every six months. To do this we must spend money — more money
than we have ever contemplated spending. Tlie cost of not having
good pavements is larger by far than the cost of building them. But
we don't realize the cost of not having them, because wo never have
had them ; whereas we do realize the cost of building them. Every
foot of street in the City of Houston ought to be ])aved, and in the
least possible time, just as every foot of street in tliese cities of
modem Germany is paved — and most of llu; work done dining the

past thirty years. When Ave get our streets paved, our water and
sewers connected up with every house, our parks bought, and their
development on artistic lines at least begun, then maybe we'll de-
velop, or attract to us, the kind of talent that produces Teichmann
fountains, and get beautiful works of art with which to refresh our

BOllls."'

All of which is set down not with any idea that it will interest the
old fellows — the men of my own generation — but with the hope that
it may inspire some of our boys or girls to seek careers in the least
occupied of all fields of American endeavor — the field of creative
art. I haven't a shadow of doubt we have the native talent in Texas
to produce works of art as fine as any that adorn the cities of Europe ;
but we have not, as Europe has, the disposition to honor the artist,
and to encourage him.

At this point let me suggest that an opportunity is open to our local
millionaires. Houston needs an art gallery and museum — needs it as
badly as she needs more sewers and paving, although the need is not
recognized, probably, by as many citizens as perceive the need for the
foundation laying. I find that in most of these German cities, with
their scores of noble public monuments, the public administration has
received aid, in procuring such ornaments for the municipality, from
generous individuals and societies. These men delight thus to honor
the city in which they dwell. They are glad to associate their names
honorably with fine, costly gifts out of their plenty to enrich the lives
of their less fortimate neighbors. This is especially true of Bremen,
my favorite among the German cities. In this city is a savings insti-
tution (concerning which Mr. Fee, our consul, has lately sent an in-
teresting report to the American state department), which expends
its surplus earnings, above 5 per cent, in aiding the city-state to erect
needed public service institutions, such as the big public bath house,
schools, etc. The directors of this huge bank, with deposits of more
than forty-five million dollars, receive no payment for their services;
the business, under their gratuitous supervision, is conducted by sal-
aried managers, with the sole aim to encourage saving by the working
people of the city, and to provide a fund, from the surplus earnings,
with which to help the city procure benefits for the people which it
could not obtain from its own revenues.

The rule of "everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost,"
which has made America what it is — the wonder of the world and the
despair of its soberest thinkers — has not governed here. The pace is
slower than in America. The workers work longer hours, as a rule,
but less hurriedly, and they play more, more innocently than in our
big cities, with more real individual freedom. At night I find them
by thousands gathered in the restaurants and cafes — all classes, enjoy-
ing social companionship, the cup that cheers but rarely intoxicates,
and excellent music, at prices which they can afPord to pay for the
privilege of thus lightening the dull routine of life. They are happy
people — as happy as it is given mortals to be in a world of disappoint-
ments and uncertainties. The men have all done army service — from

one to three years — and show it in their erect bearing, their manly
pride of demeanor, their evident aft'ection for the Fatherland. I have
been converted to the belief that it would be a fine thing for America
to require all our physically competent young men to serve with the
flag for at least one year. Here in Germany it is agreed by those whose
testimony is best worth taking that the universal military training has
far more than made good (by prolonging the average term of life and
by stimulating the general intelligence along sanitary lines especially),
the loss of productive labor incurred through the withdrawal of the
young men from the trades and professions during the period of their
army service. We are long on theories in America, but some of those
theories wilt in the shining presence of the concrete facts of the ex-
perience of older peoples.

From the Teichmann fountain, meditating as above set forth, I
walked over to the ancient Rathouse, or city hall. It is a gem of fif-
teenth century architecture — the older portion. There is a new por-
tion, a wing added in recent years to accommodate public offices. In
the basement of the old Rathouse is the ratskeller, the first of all the
ratskellers, and the one from which the name was taken. Entering
the ratskeller do^Ti a stairway at the side of the front main entrance
to the council chamber of the Rathouse, one finds himself, in the
morning, almost alone, except for two or three white-aproned waiters,
in an apartment perhaps eighty feet long and forty feet wide. On one
side is a row of huge beer tuns, or barrels ; on the other side a row of
tiny rooms, each with its dining table and a cushioned seat for four
persons' on either side of the table. On the walls of these rooms fa-
mous Deutsch and Scandinavian artists have painted scenes from
Deutsch m3'thology, or landscapes, or harbor views in other Xorth
European cities. Fronting me, as I sat down in one of these little
doorless rooms, was a perfectly corking marine view, of Bergen in
Norway. Watching the water gushing from the Teichmann fountain
during the bright morning sunshine had made me unexpectedly thirsty,
60 I ordered a half-flask of Ingelheimer and sipped it meditatively,
wondering the while how many years must elapse before we in Houston
shall begin to manifest any appreciation of the value of mere beauty as
a municipal asset. There for the first time the charm of the old things
of Europe gripped me, and I began making mental comparisons be-
tween the real value of the old and the modern expressions of hunum
intelligence. It is doubtless true that ours is the brightest little gen-
eration that has ever inhabited the earth — and yet, and yet ?

-^I^-

CHAPTEE XV.

Facts axd Figures From Hanover's Government.

Hanover, Germany. — Here in the ancient capital of the vanished
Kingdom of Hanover, now a typical North German city, ultra modern,
of 300,000 inhabitants, I have made my headquarters for the brief
period allotted me to study municipal administration in Germany.
From Hanover I have made visits to other German cities, and through
secretaries have conducted a deal of correspondence with the officials
of these cities.

Ever}'where and from everybody, high and low, the visitor from
Texas has received generous kindness and cordial co-operation in his
efforts to learn something, out of the experience of German cities,
which might be of use to his own city and to other cities of Texas.
This is the more remarkable in view of the fact that the officials of
German cities are frequently called upon to spend time and energy
preparing replies to inquiries of this character. So far as I am able
to learn, Houston is the first American city which has at its ovm ex-
pense sent a special commissioner to Germany on a mission of this'
kind, but there have been no end of such investigations made or at-
tempted by representatives of commercial and political or semi-political
organizations unofficial in character. Several American cities luive
propounded inquiries by mail to German city officials, and the replies
to these inquiries, if their location was kno\\Ti, and their contents could
be made available for arrangement and condensation, would doubtless
afford a larger total of such information than any one investigator has
or will be able to acquire.

Houston's in(|uiry differs from all the others in this respect: that it
is an effort not only to acquire facts, but through personal study on the
ground to apply those facts, in so far as may be possible, to our home
conditions. Tbis, more than the mere collection of facts, will, I hope,
prove to be the most useful result of my tour of inquiry.

Houston's inquiry is, moreover, the first whose results have ever been
published in a series of letters prepared to reach a large population
weekly during the progress of the investigation. All other investiga-
tions made over hero, by cities through the mails or by non-oflicial
organizations through men in the field, have been re))orted ujion either
in dry documentary form, for preservation in the files of the organiza-
tions which footed the bills, or in books, which have had but liniiled
sale, and that almost solely among academic students of the sul)ject,
and have thus failed to reach any consideral)le number of the plain
people, who must finally pass judgment upon any changes which may
be proposed in our form of mimicipal government.

It is apparent, therefore, that the City of Houston has not only done
a new thing in sending its own commissioner to study the question in
the field, but has created a valuable precedent in the method of getting
its report to the people.

The facts that Houston had officially sent her own investigator, and
that Houston was publishing its findings weekly in newspapers reach-
ing a very large number of American citizens, was undoubtedly in-
fluential in inducing the officials of some German cities to give especial
attention to Houston's request for co-operation in developing the
desired information.

The old world, officially, is mighty formal. Ben Franklin, captured
the court of the French king in American homespun — but he was the
only man that ever did anything of the kind, and his fame as a phil-
osopher and scientist, to say nothing of his extraordinary personal
charm, was worldwide when he arrived in Europe. Today the foreign
emissary to Europe, however obscure his station or relatively unim-
portant his mission, must go the gait prescribed by official custom,
must be provided with credentials, the more formal the better, and
must in short be prepared to play the good old American game of bluff
to the limit. I suspect, in fact, the Americans learned that game in
old Europe. I was up against it for fair, apparently, at the start
(having no title of any kind except the one we coined on the spur of
the moment in the city hall the day the city commission decided to send
me over here), and my friends at the consulate here in a worried way
asked me if I wasn't a "doctor professor," or something. When I
told 'em I wasn't either doctor or professor or colonel or judge or even
a justice of the peace, but just a plain untitled hombre from the gulf
coast prairie, they scratched their heads and did some deep thinking.
I had no Deutsch then, and was unsuspicious, but when the consul intro-
duced me to the stadt syndicus (city secretary), as Herrn Docteur Put-
nam von Houston, Texas, U. S. A., I knew he had taken matters into
his own hands and put me in right, as he saw the right. And I noticed
that the stadt syndicus' manner thawed perceptibly when he caught
that "Herrn Docteur" stuff. We submitted to him a list of questions
concerning his city government, and he said he'd take the matter up
with his magistrat (council), and the stadt director (mayor), to see
whether or not they wished to give me answers to my questions. Then
the consul and the "Herrn Docteur" bade him good morning and went
out to begin making a first-hand study of the organization of life in
a German city.

A few days later the consul received from the city government the
following :

"We beg to give you the following information as to the questions
of Mr. Frank Putnam of Houston, Texas, U. S. A. :

"1. All services produce income. Presupposing two sorts (a) such
as show a surplus as a rule, (b) such as usually require a grant from
the town treasury ; to the first group belong the technical industries, to
the second group such as are of social and humanitarian nature. Of
the first the town of Hanover possesses two chemists' shops (drug

stores) ; one electrical works, various houses let to tenants, and real
estate premises of various kinds; a market with cold storage; a savings
bank; water works, partly well and partly river water, with various
branches; fourteen restaurants, mostly in the woods, and four brick-
yards. Of undertakings of the second kind the town of Hanover pos-
sesses : A home for the aged and infirm ; one labor exchange, one
workhouse, one refuge home for women, one information bureau, a
home for consumptive patients where medical advice is given free, with
treatment when patients are unable to pay fo,r it; four baking estab-
lishments; one chemical testing laboratory; one disinfecting estab-
lishment; seven cemeteries; sewerage works (in which the city's sewage
is prepared to be used for fertilizer) ; one museum; two infirmaries;
one pa^vnbroker's shop ; one public reading room ; one slaughter house
and cattle yard, where all animals slaughtered for human food to be
consumed in Hanover are required to be handled, with inspection before
and after killing; one public library; the town woods, and one orphan-
age.

"2. Information on this subject can not be given; this we regret.
(I had asked when and how municipal services, formerly owned pri-
vately and now owned publicly, were acquired by the city. )

"3. The net income of the services: In the year 1910-11 the sur-
plus obtained from the actual services amounted to 1,141,822 marks;
of this 222,136 was from rent of houses and restaurants.

"4. The other sources of municipal income are chiefly from taxes,
10,127,286 marks; from invested capital, 181,273 marks; money paid
by the gas company, the tramway company and Capital Insurance
Association, etc., 1,401,222 marks; dues and fines, 256,798 marks. A
large number of the administrative offices have their income at their
own disposal ; for instance, the police who look after buildings re-
ceived fees, 185,006 marks; the board of works, dues and grants,
222,385 marks; the street cleaning department, 205,422 marks; the
sewerage department, dues (rentals), 1,337,863 marks; the bathing
establishments receipts, 187,858 marks; covered market dues, 205,422
marks ; infirmaries, 652,768 marks, etc., and not the least item, fees
for schooling, 1,853,521 marks. The total income derived from the
various administrative branches, inclusive of the receipts from the
above mentioned services, amounted, 1910-11 to 20,388,093 marks,
while the total expenses absorbed 20,343,548 marks (about $5,000,000).

"5. The municipality is not, of course, able to pay any abnormally
great expenses from the current revenues, but requires for such pur-
poses abnormal sources of revenue, which, as is the case elsewhere, are
procured by means of loans subject to interest. Security is assured by
the liability of the community. Contracts are never granted to certain
interested groups, but are as a rule pul)lic so that anyone may bid.
Public opinion insures the contracts l)eing let fairly; contributory is
the right of those elected by their fellow citizens to assist in settling
the matter, and the composition of the commissions which have the
final decision, consisting of disinterested members, officials, sworn pro-
fessionals and experts. It may certainly hapjx'n that certain measures

are adopted in German municipalities which insure preponderate ad-
vantages to some interested group ( in so. far as this group may possess
a preponderant influence in the administration of the municipality),
as the result of some municipal regulation, or the privilege of voting.
Such occurrences, however, are exceptional.

"6. The privilege of voting (for members of the magistrat — the
city coimcil) is enjoyed in every German municipality, but the mode
of according this privilege varies. In Hanover it is regulated by the
rules laid down for Hanoverian municipalities: The distinguishing
feature is that the privilege is not enjoyed by all the inhabitants. It
is a privilege which is acquired in part by payment of a fee [equiv-
alent approximately to our Texas poll tax plus payment of a required
amount of property taxes], while it may also be partly obtained as a
right.

"7. The leading men in German mimicipal governments have been
educated at German universities or technical colleges. In some cases
those who are awaiting some civil appointment act as town officials,
i. e., young men who have had a practical education in various admin-
istrative branches, after being duly qualified are appointed to some
post. Hanover does not possess any special school for teaching the
theory of municipal administration, as there are in Dusseldorf, Cologne,
Franivfort-on-Main and Munich. Courses of lectures are delivered
from time to time for officials in many German towns, as also in
Hanover. In addition to this, students in Germany have opportunities
of suitable instruction in almost all universities and technical colleges.
We would recommend reference to the extensive and valuable litera-
ture on this subject and especially: (1) Statistical Yearbook of Ger-
man To^\^ls, published by Xeefe, Breslau; (2) Municipal Yearbook,
published by Lindemann & Sudekum, Jena; (3) comprehensive col-
lection of works, non-periodicals: Wuttke, The German Towns, two
volumes, Leipzig, 1904; Bucher, The Big Towns; Yearbook of the
Gehestiflung, volume 9, Dresden, 1903 ; Preuss, The Development of
the German Municipal System; Hassert, The Towns, Leipzig, 1907;
Weber, The Big To^\ti and Its Social Problems, Leipzig, 1908 ; Stengel-
Fleischmann, Dictionary of the System of German States and Admin-
istrative Regulations, volume two, Tubingen, 1911, under the article,
'Community'; Von Kaufmann, Municipal Finances, Leipzig, 1906;
writings of the Association for Social Politics, volume 127:1, The
Municipal Finances ; Most, The German Town and Its Administrative
Policy, Leipzig, 1912.

"Of comprehensive works on municipal promotion of economic and
social politics : Adukes & Bentler, The Social Problems of German
Towns, Leipzig, 1903; Damaschke, Problems of Municipal Politics,
Jena, 1904; Lindemann, The German Municipal Administration,
Stuttgart, 1906, and The Politics of Work People and Promotion of
Economics in the Administration of German Towns, Stuttgart, 1904;
writings of the Association of Social Politics, volumes 128 and 129,
on 'Municipal Services.' "

CHAPTER XVI.

Haxover"s Municipal Restaurants.

Hanover, German}-. — At the junction of six streets, in the heart of
the retail district of Hanover, the city owns a three-sided block of land,
possibly one and one-half acres in size. On the narrow end of this
block stands a cafe, one story high. Back of the cafe, on either side,
the little block is bordered with tall shade trees, which also extend
across the broad end of the block. Within the inclosure of the trees,
at the far end of the block, is a bit of green grass with winding paths
through it, and benches on which to sit. An old countrywoman (I
have bought my morning apple from her so often that we now greet
each other, "Morgen, Mutter" — "Morgen, Sohn'') has a little fruit
stand. A few yards distant from the stand, perhaps thirty feet back
from the sidewalk, is a public comfort station, for men and women,
with another old woman in charge. The middle portion of the block
is laid out as an open-air dining and drinking garden, with chairs
around small tables and on one side a pavilion for an orchestra.
During the summer this little tree and shrub inclosed garden, situated
in the commercial heart of a city of 300,000 people, is visited by hun-
dreds of townspeople, clerks, shoppers and strangers, who look through
the green walls, while they eat and drink, at the passing panorama of
city life. At this season, when the chill of autumn is giving place to
the decidedly shivery cold of approaching winter, few are sutficiently
hardy to take a place at one of the outdoor tables. They go inside
the cafe, which accommodates perhaps 200 people when filled, in real
comfort, and at very moderate prices. These prices, by the way, are
regulated by the city government through one of its bureaus, and can
not be advanced by the lessee of the cafe without official permission.

This little block of ground, with its artistic cafe and cafe garden, its
belt of tall green trees, its public comfort station and its restful bit of
green sward, is a veritable island surrounded by busy streets lined with
tall buildings. The city could readily sell it for an enormous sum, or
could lease it, to be occupied with tall commercial buildings, for an
annual rental running above a hundred thousand dollars. Instead, the
city government has preferred to maintain it as an open space, for
light and air and view, in its busiest section. It earns a good revenue —
the lessee of the cafe pays seventeen thousand dollars a year to the
city and would cheerfully pay more in dm' rntio if permitted to
increase the ground size of the cafe — but this is ])re(isely what the city
won't permit. 'J'hey have turned down pro])osition8 to that effect, as

if money were of no importance to them — and it is not when to get the
money they find themselves called upon to sacrifice municipal health,
comfort or beauty.

The little cafe is one of fourteen owned by the city, all operated under
lease by private citizens^ and all, like this one, subject to municipal
regulation of service and prices. There are any number of fashion-
able and expensive cafes and restaurants in Hanover, where the sporty
and the ennuied can get whatever they want by paying the three or
four prices for it usually demanded in such places everywhere. The
city government does not concern itself about these resorts of the
rich, except as they come under the general police regulations. It
does concern itself to provide, for the great majority who are not rich,
but who must make every penny count, cafe and restaurant service,
excellent in kind and at prices which the majority can afford to pay.
Most of these city-owned cafes are in the public parks. There, on
summer Sundays, or on a holiday, thousands of the workers with their
families go, to hear the excellent orchestral or band music, and to sit
in the shade of the trees, or walk in the woodland paths, and to share,
in family groups, by twos or threes or singly, the service of the cafe.
For two to five cents each — distance varying — they ride to one of the
parks in an excellent street car — and the money buys a seat, inva-
riably. In the park, for another ten cents, each gets a big cup of
bully good coffee, or a big glass of real beer, with crisp rolls or biscuits
or a fat slice of the black bread of the country. Meats are very high-
priced in Germany. One of the bachelors at the consulate, inviting
two or three of us in to supper, bade me bring a pound of pork chops.
I paid 39 cents for that pound of pig, which in Houston, as nearly as
I can remember, would have cost me not over 20 cents, perhaps 25,
Yet the workingman visiting the city restaurant in the park can get
a slice of meat with his black bread, a substantial slice, too, for another
ten or fifteen cents. Just what kind of animal the meat — some of it —
was when alive, I wouldn't like to say offhand. I have never tried the
experiment of shouting "Whoa" to a platterful of it, but the thought
has occurred to me once or twice. One thing I am sure of, and that is,
the animal which supplied the meat was a healthy animal when
slaughtered for food purposes, or the rigid expert inspection of the
city's slaughtering bureau would have forbidden its use for human
food. It is a fact that scores of thousands of horses, no longer useful
for labor, are each year slaughtered for human food in Germany and
in other European coimtries, too.

This brings in the subject of customs tariffs in Germany. The im-
perial government is really controlled by some 15,000 of the old lords
of the land — titled owners of big estates in Prussia, politically classified
as agrarians. The manufacturing interests of Germany have during
the past thirty years grown to be far more important, in respect to
capital invested and hands employed, than the farming interests of the
country; but the agrarians, preventing a readjustment of electoral
districts, are still able to make a few thousand votes in each of the
districts which they control count for more than 200,000 or 300,000

votes of city working men in the manufacturing districts. So they
manage still to hold the whip hand in the imperial parliament. They
have been strong for the policy of protective tariffs, but they have
taken the lion's share of the protection for themselves. The manu-
facturers of Germany have not been able, like the manufacturers of
America, to shuffle the tariff cards to suit themselves. They have
had some protection, but the major part has been taken by the landed
proprietors, producers, by wage and tenant labor, of the country's food
supply.

These great landlords have had the ear of the imperial government,
that is to say, of the kaiser. Wilhelm appoints his ministers and they
run the government pretty much subject to his ^nll. The parliament
cuts in now and again with a kind of negative protest against one
policy or another, but the theory of the kaiser is that whatever of
representative government the people of Prussia or of the empire enjoy,
within the limits of their written constitutions, is a free-will grant from
the divine-right ruler. And not enough power has been granted the
parliament to enable it to make and enforce any national policy.
Wilhelm is determined German farms shall produce the German food
supply, and joins with the agrarian element which would shut foreign
meats out of Germany as much as possible. This policy enables the
landlords to get top prices for meat, but it is tough on the industrial
element which wants meat to eat and has to pay high prices for it out
of wages which average very low as compared with wage scales in
America, or even, in a good many trades, with the wages paid in
England.

Municipal restaurant undertakings, then, like those which I have
briefly described in Hanover, are local governmental efforts to take a
part of the curse of dear meat and bread off the city's industrial work-
ers. Collectively, the city restaurants produce a considerable yearly net
revenue, but more important than that they bring food within reach
of a multitude at low prices and of guaranteed good quality, even
though it be not always of known conventional origin, I have eaten
meats of four or five different colors, cooked and cold, from a big
platter on a long table in the open at Hanover's beautiful Tiergarten
park, and have washed it — and the l)lack bread spread witli real
butter — down with foaming beer made from real sure-enough hops
and malt — and been content to ask no questions, the answers to which
might have affected my American peace of mind. What a man doesn't
know very often doesn't trouble him.

If I were jilanning a new city, to stand where Houston now stands,
and to become Die kind of city Houston now is, I sliould locate half a
dozen cafe and restaurant sites aiouiid within the chief centers of
commercial and industrial activity, and urge tiiat the city government
lease them to energetic citizens, sulg'ect to regulation and supervision,
as to quality of food and prices, by a city bureau charged with llic duty
of safeguarding the people's food supply. There seems to be no ques-

tion but that a man with a special knack for it can manage a restaur-
ant better than a man with no talent for the task, but who might be
assigned to it perfunctorily by a city administration. And there seems
to be no doubt but that the man with the knack for the job ^\ill make
a better success of it if he has the incentive of o'WTiership and prospec-
tive profits to stimulate his energw But there seems also to be good
Avarrant for believing that when the city, through ownership of the res-
taurant land and building, and through expert regulation of food
quality and prices, holds a check on the profit ambition of the lessee,
the best results all around are obtained for everybody. The lessee
gradually accumulates a comfortable fortune; the city gets a satisfac-
tory rental income from its property, and the rank and file of the
citizens get good service and good food at fair prices.

100

CHAPTEK XVII.

Munich's Model Municipal Eepokts.

Munich, German}^ — With this article I transmit (for filing in the
Houston Public Library) bound copies of the latest municipal reports
of the City of Munich. These reports, differing only in detail from
similar annual reports published by all German cities, form a model
of municipal accounting. I know of nothing at once so complete, so
informing, so readily understood by the average citizen, published by
any American city. They are of course printed in the German lan-
guage, yet anyone with even a little knowledge of Deutsch can quickly
get the sense of them, and appreciate the thoroughness with which the
business affairs of the city are made known to its citizen stockliolders.

The value of this article consists chiefly in its demonstration of the
means by which German cities get skilled labor in all their depart-
ments. I submitted to the magistral of Munich a list of questions,
covering chiefly (as instructed by my ov^n city government) the
finances. The mayor of Munich sent me the following reply :

Munich, 2oth October, 1912. — Mr. Frank Putnam, Special Com-
missioner of the City of Houston, Texas, U. S. A.

Re the conditions of the Municipality of Munich :

The questions put are answered, as follows:

1. According to the last census in 1910 the Municipality of Munich
had 595,053 inhabitants.

2. The gross revenues of the Town of ^lunicli amounted in 1911
to 218,844,431.70 marks. (See page 1004 of the inclosed report on the
condition of the nmnicipal affairs; 2nd Part, Financial Results.)

3 and 4. The various revenues and their amounts, as also the ap-
plication of tbem (expenses) may be seen from tlie accompanying
flnancial report (incJosure 1). Compare the statements, p. 2, with
45, as also special references thereto, pp. 47-525, a com])ilation, pp.
712-713, and special references thereto, pp. 557-711 ; further, a synop-
sis, pp. 715-793, and special references thereto, pp. 794-895; and lastly,
a compilation, pp. 954-955, and special references thereto, pp. 897-951.

5. The bonds j)ayab]e to bearer at the end of the year 1911 for the
Town of Munich amounted to 2G7,909,r;00 marks. (Page 972 of the
report.) The Municipality of Munich has been in the habit of issuing
for some years bonds, bearing interest, for defraying the expenses of

101

such objects only as are a source of profit; other public works and
ornamental spaces bringing in no revenues are, as a rule, paid for not
by means of loans but out of the funds received from various services.

6. The Municipality of Munich is liable for the redemption of the
bonds it issues, and for the interest on them, with their whole property
and the money which it can raise by taxes. The municipal authorities
have to. render an account to the supervisory board, i. e., the represen-
tatives of the government of Upper Bavaria.

7. The public works are as a rule supplied by contractors, tenders
having been invited; these contractors are required when undertaking
to do the work assigned or when delivering supplies, to furnish ade-
quate security to the city treasurer, consisting of hard cash or value
certificates; the amoimt of security to be rendered is determined in
each instance and depends on the extent of the work undertaken or the
amount of the supplies to be purchased.

8. The municipality is entitled to start and operate public institu-
tions and industrial undertakings intended for the public good, so far
as the regulations of the Bavarian communal standing order, in ac-
cordance with the legal statute, dated the 20th April, 1869; 19th Jan-
uary, 1872 (Arts. 1, 38 and 84), are not violated. Paragraphs 1 and
159 of the imperial trade regulations also affect this point as regards
the industrial undertakings started and managed by the Municipality
of Munich. (See the answer under Xo. 9.)

9. With a view to extending and supplementing the tramway serv-
ice, the municipal authorities determined in the course of this year to
give a concession to a joint stock company to organize a service of
motor omnibuses for a period of fifteen years for a certain payment on
certain routes. In addition to this, the municipalty has in the past
year contributed 51 per cent of the capital for founding a company for
the establishment of electrical works outside ]\Iunich, so as to have
more electricity at their disposal without the expense of enlarging their
own works.

10. The following public services are in the possession of the City
of Munich, and are managed by it: (a) The municipal wine vaults,
(b) the electrical works, (c) the gas works, (d) the tramways, (e) the
water.

For the financial results of these undertakings, see pp. 10, 100, 110,
124 and 292 of the report.

The gas works and the tramways of Mimich were formerly in the
hands of a joint stock company. The gas works were taken over by
the municipality on November 1, 1899, a sum of 7,720,000 marks-
having been paid over by way of commutation. The service of the
tramways passed into the hands of the city on July 1, 1907, a sum of
535,000 marks having been paid by way of commutation. In return
for the payment of the above sum for the gas works, all the buildings,
machinery, plant and equipment passed into the hands of the City of

102

Munich. In the case of the tramways the commutation sum was paid
over to the former company for the houses only, which belonged to it;
for according to the terms of agreement as to this service between the
former company and the municipality the latter had already been
gradually electrifying the tramways at the expense of the community.

.11. As to the annual receipts from these services, see the financial
report. The synopsis of contents which precedes the report, p. 3,
renders it easy to find any particular service. The net receipts are
applied for (a) the interest and the amortisation of the costs of plant;
(b) the depreciation to be based on commercial calculations, as a
reserve for a renewal fund for the works.

After deducting the expenditure for interest and amortisation of the
costs of plant and for depreciation, the municipal services showed, in
1911, the following clear surplus profits:

The wine vaults 116,262.26 marks. (Seep. 99 of the report.)

The electrical works. . . 1,650,964.64 marks. (See p. 109 of the report.)

The gas works 1,527,184.11 marks. (See p. 123 of the report.)

The tramways 1,331,147.44 marks. (See p. 145 of the report.)

Waterworks 153,810.00 marks. (See p. 305 of the report.)

These net profits are placed to the account of the municipal treasurer
for defraying the expenses for the general requirements of the adminis-
trative departments of the municipality. (Group 8, "Public Ar-
rangements and Institutions" — see pp. 218-459 of the report.) The
rates and charges fixed by the municipal statutes are not affected by the
amount of the profits cleared from these services, but in the event of
any being worked at a loss they are, of course, liable to be raised

12. This does not apply to Munich.

13. Regarding the fares charged on the municipal tramways, the
prices for gas and cokes from the gas works, for electric current from
the municipal electrical works, and for the supply of water from the
municipal water works, refer to the inclosures, 2-6.

14. The wages paid to the employes on the pul)lic works may be
seen on reference to inclosure 7.

15. The communal taxes in Bavaria form a certain additional per-
centage to the government taxes. The communal income tax for the
year 1912 is, in Munich, 62 per cent of the government income tax.
The amount of the assessment is fixed from year to year and varies
according to the deficit of the communal budget for that year.

16. This percentage of 62 per cent applies to all inhabitants alike.
Besides the income tax the government levied a tax on the income de-
rived from capital of each year, a house and land property tax and a
tax on trade licenses. The municipality levies an additional tax on
these various kinds amounting to 186 j)er cent for the tax on the in-
come from cafiital ; 310 j)er cent for the house and land tax; 310 per
cent for tax on trade licenses.

103

Tlio mayor and the councillors, who have legal training, are chosen
for three years, at the expiration of which time they are appointed for
life or take their conge. The mimicipal secretaries and other officials,
after serving ten years, are also appointed for life. No one can serve in
municipal office unless he is a subject of the German Empire and has
his domicile in Munich.

18. The municipal services in Munich are under the management
of such officials only as have a special experience in each case. Para-
graphs l-i and 15 of the statutes in force for Munich apply to a can-
didate for any mmiicipal appointment, which are as follows :

PARAGRAPH XIV.

First — A candidate for an appointment in the administrative or
treasury posts must possess the following qualifications, as a rule :

(a) Certificate of having passed the state examination in the special
subject with a mark of distinction for which they will be employed for
officials of classes 1 and 2.

(b) The same certificate for officials in classes 3, 4 and 5, so far
as this may be required by the importance of the office held, or other-
wise a certificate of having passed the examination held at the end in
the special subject of their employment, at any rate a certificate of
having passed the examination for intermediate posts in the govern-
ment, or a municipality with distinction and in addition to this the
final examnation of a middle school with nine classes. The examina-
tion for the intermediate treasury posts, class 1, is regarded as identi-
cal wath that for the intermediate administrative posts in the govern-
ment or municipal services.

(c) For officials in classes 6 and 7 a certificate of having passed
the examination for the intermediate administrative posts in the gov-
ernment or municipal service, or proof of the scientific knowledge
required for the one-year service in the army, or certificate of having
passed the examination for the intermediate treasury posts, class 2,
with a mark of distinction.

(d) Officials of classes 8, 9, 10 and 11 must have attended several
classes of an intermediate school, or hold the leaving certificate of some
continuation school in lieu of the Sunday school, and in addition for
class 8, a certificate of having passed the examination for the inter-
mediate administrative posts either in the government or municipal
service. For the other classes they must have passed the examination
successfully which the municipality prescribes as necessary for the
appointment of any official.

(e) A woman to be appointed in class 12 must have passed the
final examination in a high school for girls, or of the Eiemerschmid
Commercial School, or of some institution of the same standing; at
any rate she must possess the leaving certificate of a commercial con-
tinuation school and must have passed the examination for clerkships
as is prescribed for classes 9 and 10.

104

Second — Officials of the 9, 10, 11 and 12th classes must, before the
expiration of the probationary period (paragraph 39, No. 5), submit
themselves for an examination defined for that purpose by the munici-
pal coimcil, and if they fail to pass this a second time, must quit the
service of the city altogether. The arrangements for carrying out
these regulations are made by the to\vn council.

Third — Officials who are desirous of qualifying for a municipal ap-
pointment from class 7 upwards, but do not possess the certificate for
the one year's military service, must submit to an examination of the
same standard defined by the town council for this purpose.

Fourth — All officials seeking admission to the intermediate posts
in the government or municipal administrative service must take part
in the preparatory courses as arranged by the to^^Ti council. Only those
who have passed these preparatory courses with distinction may receive
a certificate for admission to the above mentioned examination.

PARAGRAPH XV,

First — Officials with technical knowledge in classes 1 and 2 (gov-
ernment architects and those engaged at the board of works) must
have passed the government examination, so far as there is any such
provided for their profession, with distinction, while electrical engi-
neers, mechanical engineers and chemists, for whom there is no govern-
ment examination provided, and further engineers, former pupils of
industrial schools, to whom the admission to the government exam-
inations was formerly allowed but refused later, must have obtained a
diploma of a German technical university in their special subject, with
distinction. All competitors for posts in classes 1 and 2 must have
had experience for several years in some responsible position and pro-
duce proof of efficiency in their special line.

Second — Classes 3, 4 and 5 are open to engineers only who possess
a diploma. Proofs can be demanded as to the success with whicli they
have passed the government examination in proportion to the impor-
tance of the post to which tliey are to be transferred. (Surveying engi-
neers, district engineers for local board of works committee.)

Tiiird — Class 6 includes the preliminary post for engineers with
diplomas.

Fourth — For ol)taining a post in class 7 or 8 a certificate of having
passed through the school for building-workmen is generally required.
They are, however, open to especially clever technicists whose training
has been confined to practical work only.

Fifth — A certificate of attendance at a school for building-workmen
or a certificate of having passed the final examination of an industrial
continuation school or a school for some special craft suffices for ad-
mission to classes 9 and 10. Tlic applicant for a future post with
whicli an unusual degree of responsibility is connected, must furnish
proof of his possessing tlie necessary cajjabilities and kTiowledge re-
quired by giving probationary service, the duration of which is de-
termined by special regulations referring to this service.

105

The preceding contains the answer, also, as to the preparation neces-
sary for the appointment of an applicant for municipal service.

It will be observed, from brief study of these reports on file in our
public library, that salaries of municipal officials in Munich are not
high, as compared with salaries of similar officials in large American
cities. For instance, department chiefs, in charge of waterworks,
streets, etc., get from 9,000 marks (about $2,250) a year, down to as
little as 3,000 marks, or about $750. It should be borne in mind,
however, that the mark is in Germany what the dollar is in America —
the unit of the currency. While it will not buy as much here as a
dollar buys at home — indeed, the traveler finds little difference in the
cost of living here and at home — yet the native, who knows better how
and when and where to buy, does in many respects make the mark do
the work of a dollar in the United States. Further, the German cities
are over-officered — or we would so regard them in our country. There
are more than enough men to do the work, if it were done at the rapid
pace we Americans have adopted. But our German friends are not in
a hurry. They have time to eat four or five meals a day, and to take a
late supper with beer or wine (according to the length of their purses),
in the cafes at night. The building occupied by the police department
of Hanover, with 300,000 inhabitants, is big enough to house a regi-
ment— and pretty nearly does, a regiment of clerical officials and
functionaries'.

I transmit also, with the Munich reports, reports received from the
city government of Frankfort-on-Main, which contain some special
features of interest to students of municipal government.

106

CHAPTER XYIII.

German Management of a Difficult Problem.

Leipzig, German}'. — As Elbert Hubbard observes in his little sawed-
off and jammed-down magazinelet, "Those who don't know how to take
the Philistine had better not.'' So, those who don't know how to take
this brief article had better not.

Leipzig is' famous as the chief publishing center of Germany, and
has won celebrity during the past two years as the site of the largest
and most magnificent railroad station in Europe. This station will
cost when completed over $35,000,000, Here as elsewhere in Germany,
where all but a trifle over 1 per cent of all the railways are owned and
operated by the government, city railroad stations, like the roadbed,
are built as well as money and the best skill can build them, regardless
of cost, because it is figured to be economical to build for permanency
from the start. The state railway system, and other state-owned serv-
ices, produce over one-half of all the Prussian kingdom's public
revenue, and net about $75,000,000 a year in clear gain. The service,
by the way, compared with our American railroads, class for class, is
distinctly better than our own, to say nothing of being a lot safer. It
takes time for an American to get used to the side aisle and the little
separate compartments, but when the first shock of prejudice subsides,
and one gets the hang of the system, the average American in Europe
will confeses to you that he prefers the German way of transporting
the public. On the theory that a man ought to be willing to try every-
thing once, I have ridden in all four classes of German railway com-
partments— from the exceedingly clean, comfortable, elegant first-
class down through the very nice second, the severely plain and often
crowded third to the bare wooden compartment with seats for only
about one-third of the passengers — as a rule — in the fourth. I have
stood on my one good leg, in a mixed crowd of private soldiers and
farm laborers, during a run of one hundred miles and been glad of
the experience. The only way to get acquainted with a foreign people,
so far as I can figure out, is to meet 'em. And T found them very jolly
folks indeed, either too poor to pay for scats or sensil)le and sturdy
enough to lake that means of saving a few marks. They rode for less
than one cent a niik', and they rode just as rapidly as the folks who paid
something over four cents a mile in the first-class compartments.

But this is not what I set out to discuss in this chapter. My subject
is the German police method of controlling the underworld in the
cities. This is the subject of no end of diniciilly for the authorities of
all cities, although it is a subject seldom discussed in ])rint and thus is
probaldy not often taken under consideration by citizens. During
twenty-seven years of newspaper work in many American cities, sev-

107

eral years of that time serving as a police reporter and thus in daily
contact with the seamy side of city life, I have often wondered if there
were any other phase of our American life so cruel, so hrutally heart-
less, as the treatment usually meted out to fallen women. And I have
often wondered if there were not, somewhere in the world, a people
sufhciently civilized to have worked out a juster method of dealing with
them than that which disgraces the average American city.

The policy of segregation has been pursued by most American cities
during my period of observation. Herded like beasts within narrow
limits, and there denied the most elementary liberties of human beings,
these unfortunates (the victims, most of them, of society's uncon-
fessed savagery), have too often been made the fruitful source of
blackmail by conscienceless police departments, and sometimes have
even been made a source of revenue for public use. In one Western
city, twenty years ago, a substantial part of the public school fund
was drawTi each month from fines levied by the police justice upon
these women. Voluntary societies, usually composed of benevolent
women, have in several American cities done the little they could,
without much official encouragement and with inadequate funds, to
help a few of the unfortunate redeem themselves. But as a rule the
American police system has refused to recognize the possibility that a
woman in hell, and fully aware of it, might possibly, in all sincerity,
wish to escape therefrom. I have Icnown such women, in American
cities, to be hounded by the police back into the pit from which they
were trying desperately to climb up to the lost level of obscure re-
spectability.

German police officials assure me that nowhere, in that country, are
these women segregated into special districts, nor denied the usual
liberty of action accorded to other human beings. Every resident of a
German city is registered by the police department. If a traveler stays
over a month in any city his name, his local address, his business or
profession or trade and his home address are all required to be filed
with the police department. Thus it is possible for the police to ke6p a
check on every man, woman or child within their jurisdiction. Even
the traveler stopping over night in a German hotel is required to give
his name, occupation and home address. In the Leipzig police depart-
ment— as in all others — these addresses, of permanent residents and of
visitors who stay longer than one month, are filed away, listed by
streets, and subjected to constant revision.

There is a special registry for fallen women in each German city
police department. The police are presumed to know every woman who
lives with a man or with men out of wedlock. In Berlin this list runs
into the thousands, in Leipzig over 800, in Hanover to an even 300.
These names, of course, are not open to press or public. The women
are graded into four classes. In the first class are those who, known
to the police as housekeepers, live with one man out of wedlock. These
women are not required to report at police headquarters, but are re-
quired to send to police headquarters, every two weeks, a physician's
certificate of sound health. The second, third and fourth classes in-

108

elude, respectively, women of divers grades who do not live with one
but with more than one out of wedlock. These are all required to re-
port in person at police headquarters, for medical inspection, twice
each week, and the city pays the bills.

The German police system recognizes the fact that many of these
women, being betrayed into indiscretion by reason of their youth and
their credulous faith in man, wish to escape from the dowTiward path
which they see opening before them. Therefore, at each German police
headquarters, there is employed one or more women, whose duty it is
to hear and investigate all such applications for help in the effort to
return to a respectable life. A girl who has made the first misstep, and,
fearing to return to her home, has .gone forward for a month or several
montlis, comes to the matron, imploring her aid to get back on the
right road. The matron communicates with or visits the girl's parents.
She explains to them, out of her wider knowledge of the pitfalls of
life (if the parents or either of them proves obdurate), their duty to
forgive and take back their daughter and to give her their support in
her attempt to make amends. I am told by police officials that hun-
dreds of young girls are thus redeemed from lives of shame and ig-
nominy every year, through the help of the police departments.

In other cases, as where a girl who has erred determines to live by
labor, and gets work, she is required by the police department to report
at regular intervals during the three months following, in order to
make sure her reformation is lasting. During these three months she
receives the aid and encouragement not only of the police department
but of a society, whicli under different names does about the same
service in all German cities. At the end of the three months probation
she ceases to be under observation and need no longer report at head-
quarters.

Again, a woman of the underworld in a German city is asked by a
man to become his wife — this happens often over here. The police
department investigates the circumstances, both of the woman and of
the man. If it appears that the man is able to support the woman,
the marriage is sanctioned and takes place, and the woman passes
from under poh'ce observation. If, however, it appears that the man
is not able to support the woman, or if it appears that he purposes to
make her support him by continuing in a life of prostitution, the
marriage is forbidden.

IFcre, as elsewhere in the world (or sucli at least is the deliberate
judgment of police officials and police nuitrons; who should know if
anybody can know), most of the women of the underworld, and of the
half-world especially, are driven by poverty to accej)t the aid of a num
or of men. Recognizing this as a fact, the German police departments
in no way molest a woman who accepts such aid, requiring only that
she shall report at intervals for medical inspection. She is free to
rent a room and receive friends there, unobtrusively, without police
interference of any kind. Rut she must not engage in sex traffic in
her room ; for that she must go to a hotel. No quarter of any German
city is set apart for, or exempted from, occupancy by such women.

109

The German police do not aim to limit their liberty, but only to pre-
vent them, so far as possible, from becoming mediums for the trans-
mission of the hideous diseases which attend the sex traffic. They
recognize, as did Frances ^Yillard in the last year of her life, that the
traffic is chiefly economic in its origin, like drxmkenness, due mainly to
poverty and poverty's legitimate child, ignorance, and they say there-
fore that society, tolerating economic conditions which condemn thou-
sands of the daughters of the poor to sell their bodies for bread and
shelter, has already punished them sufficiently, without laying further
unnecessary burdens upon them.

WTien I asked a prominent German police official if German cities
ever laid a tax on prostitution, or derived any public revenue from it,
he was as plainly insulted — and showed it in his manner — as if I had
asked him whether he as an official had ever derived any such revenue
illegally. Then I told him of the Western city which in my youth had
levied such a tax, by the device of imposing fines upon the women at
stated intervals, and I know he didn't believe me. The thing was
monstrous and incredible from his viewpoint.

I have no suggestion to offer for the guidance of our ovm city on
this subject. It has been handled there in the usual American fashion.
I remember that the anti-prohibitionist leaders, in the last session of
the Texas legislature, enacted a law, which Governor Colquitt gladly
approved, forbidding the sale or gift of intoxicants in houses devoted to
prostitution. The idea was to minimize the attractiveness of such
places for the young and thoughtless citizens of the male sex, and thus'
to reduce the patronage of such places. The effect of that law upon
the unfortunate inhabitants of the proscribed quarter, the women, is
of course to withhold from them their only means of procuring even
temporary forgetfulness of the horrors of the hell into which youthful
folly, blind trust in man's honor, or poverty has plunged them. It is a
good law so far as it goes, but it is distinctly a man's law — drawn to
protect men, with no thought for its effect upon men's victims.

This is one of the saddest, most perplexing problems with which
municipal administrators have to contend. Good people generally,
having no official responsibility, can comfortably forget it or ignore it
— and usually do so. But it is neglected only at society's peril. One
of the cleanest, ablest, most vigorous thinkers in Houston, a lawyer
of high standing, said to me, a day before I set out on this Journey:
"The segregation of fallen women in a special district, where they are
cut off absolutely from any possible contact with decent people, from
any refining or reforming influence, is a damnable outrage against the
laws of man and God. I want you, when you reach Europe, to learn
how the older coimtries, which have studied this problem centuries
longer than we, have solved it, and I want you to lay the cold facts
before our people. I am sure our Houston people want to do what
is just and right, but I am equally sure our existing policy with regard
to this problem is all wrong, and if you find the experience of the old
countries proves it wrong, I want you to say so."

I report the facts as I find them.

110

CHAPTER XIX.

DUSSELDOEF, '"ThE SHEFFIELD OF GERMANY."

Dusseldorf, Germany. — Xothing that I saw more forcibly illustrates
the wide gap between the highly socialized industrial life of Germany
and the laxly socialized industrial life of the British cities, than the
contrast between Sheffield, which is often alluded to as "the Dusseldorf
of England,'' and Dusseldorf, which is sometimes called "the Shef-
field of Germany." The cities are likened to each other solely because
each is the chief seat of the iron and steel industry of its country.

The German city system, looking closely and carefully after the
welfare of the humblest citizen; ministering to his need not only of
decent and economical housing, cheap food and ample cheap trans-
portation and the other necessaries of life, but also providing him with
an abundance of excellent and free or low-priced entertainments and
recreation places, affords a vivid contrast in municipal house keeping
with the English system as exemplified in Sheffield. Dusseldorf is
throughout planned and governed hj its ablest men with the primary
purpose to procure for all its people the maximum of health, comfort,
pleasure and civic beauty, whereas in Sheffield the want of civic pride,
and of a civic attempt to introduce the element of esthetic beauty into
the lives of the people is conspicuously wanting. Dusseldorf exhibits,
as do in degree all the other great modern cities of Germany, the
singular and striking fact that the Germans are the foremost people on
earth in solving to an appreciable degree the new problem of feeding,
housing, educating, amusing and intelligently governing the vast army
of farm and village folk who, during the past half century, have
swarmed into the cities to serve the complex machinery of modern
industry.

Yet Sheffield, unspeakably ugly as it is for the most part, and
especially in those quarters inhabited by the army of its working
people (and here is exhibited, grim and stark, that English genius
for efficiency in the conquest of material wealth), has the best and
cheapest street railway service in Europe — the fare to nearly all points
witbin the city is, under the zone system, a single penny American —
and the cheapest gas, municipally supplied at 35 cents per thousand
cubic; feet. The city of Sheffield lias made good in operation of these
j)ul)lic works; it has failed misera])ly, contrasted with Dusseldorf, in
providing for its workers clean, healthful, attractive housing and low-
priced entertainments and diversions. How much of tbis failure is
racial and temperamental, due to sf)il and climatic environment, and

111

how nmoli may be due to the Puritanical traditions of the country, I
do not undertake to say. Probably it is chiefly due to the fact that,
whereas in German cities private profit is subordinated to the social
welfare, in Sheffield as in American cities private profit is paramount.
The merits of the two systems are exhibited in their fruits.

My inquiries addressed to the city government brought to me the
following reply :

The Oberbiirgermeister. IV C. No. 626. Dusseldorf, November
14, 1912. Mr. Frank Putnam, Special Commissioner of the City of
Houston, U. S. A., to the Cities of Europe.

Sir : In reply to your favor of October 4th, I beg to hand you here-
with municipal report for 1911, as well as the "Pocketbook of the
Bureau for Statistics of the City of Dusseldorf," which has been just
issued. These booklets will be a good help for you in your studies.

Below please find your questions answered in detail as follows :

1. Present population, 390,000 inhabitants.

2. The municipal budget for 1912 balances -wdth 50,775 marks in
revenues and expenditures.

3. As for sources of municipal revenues, see pocketbook, pp. 82-90.

4. In regard to expenditures made from the revenues, see under
"Expenses," pp. 82-91.

5. Debts amount to 167,399,087 marks. See p. 81 of pocketbook.

6. Bonds bearing interest are issued ; security thereof is guaranteed
by municipal property and taxes paid. The municipal administration
has to render an account for public loans to the town council and the
royal government. We think that, in this connection, the book writ-
ten by Dr. Most, "Administration of Debts of German Cities," would
be of great interest to you. This book was issued in Jena, 1909.

7. Public works are intrusted to contractors bidding for them;
small public works are let without competitive bidding. In case of the
work being important, the contractor has to deposit a guarantee.

8. The tramways are not owoied by the municipality. A street car
company pays yearly a "recognization fee" to the municipality, like-
wise a fee for the right of using the streets.

9. With the exception of the tramway line mentioned above, all
public institutions are owned and operated by the municipality. You
will find them enumerated on page 82 under "Etat for independent
revenue-giving institutions" ; and, with the exception of the port, the
concert hall and the Zoo, all of them are sources of income and work
with a surplus.

10. The Statistical Pocketbook gives you every detail regarding
each public institution ; above all. Dr. Most's book, "Municipal Insti-
tutions of the City of Dusseldorf," issued among the books of the
"Corporation for Social Politics," Vol. 129, 2nd part, Leipzig, 1909,
will be of use to you.

112

11. The revenues of the city from its public institutions are to be
seen under XI, p. 85, "Eevenues and Additional Supplies of the In-
dependent Institutions and Administrative Otfices." In case the in-
stitutions work with a surplus, prices are sometimes lowered; this has
been done lately at the electric works and the tramway.

12. Eegarding the only one public institution not owned by the
municipality, viz : the tramway line, the city participates with 61 per
cent of the share capital; for this reason the city participates greatly
in the net gain of this tram.

13. As a rule, the tariff on tramway is 10 pfennigs, that is to say,
one rides four kilometers for 10 pfennigs. The price of gas for light-
ing, heating and cooking purposes is 13 pfennigs, for power purposes,
8 pfennigs per cubic meter. Electric current costs 40 pfennigs per
hour for lighting purposes per kilowatt hour; for power, 14 pfennigs
per kilowatt hour. Special contracts are made with persons wanting
big quantities.

14. Public buildings are erected by private contractors; the wages
they pay vary. Regarding tax units, see p. 93 of pocketbook.

16. Everything concerning the tax system as a whole is laid down
in the book of Matthias, "Municipal Self-Administration in Prus-
sia," Berlin, 1912, edited by Franz Vahlen.

17. The book mentioned above would give j^ou essential enlighten-
ment as to Xo. 17 of your questions. The oljerbiirgermGister is ap-
pointed for a term of twelve years, the assistants also ; municipal
office clerks and cashiers for life. The period of service of the present
officials varies very much. Most of them were not born in Dusseldorf.

18. The book of Matthias will enlighten you regarding this ques-
tion.

Hoping that these communications and the books recommended will
be of use to you in your studies, Dr. Most,

Representative of the Oherhurgermcistcr.

The Dusseldorf Statistical Pocketbook for 1912, and the city's Year-
book for 1911, containing much additional historical and statistical
information, with a map of the city showing its ])lan of development
for industrial and residential sections, parks, boulevards, playgrounds,
etc., have been sent to the Houston Public Library. The volume re-
porting, with numerous maps, etc., the city-planning section of the
international municipal congress held in Dusseldorf in Se])tember,
1912, where Houston was the only American city officially repre-
sented, lias also been placed on file in the Houston Public Tiibrary, and
the full re[)ort of the proceedings (if that congress will soon he re-
ceived by the library.

113

CHAPTER XX.

Berlin', the City Magxificext.

Berlin, German}'. — Kaiser Wilhelm, coming to the German throne,
is said to have declared his purpose to make his capital, Berlin, the
most beautiful city in Europe. Wanting the help of nature, he has
not succeeded in doing that, because it was impossible to make a city
standing where Berlin stands equal in beauty to some other European
cities more favorably located ; but Berlin, in the opinion of some trav-
elers, is by far the most attractive of all the large cities of Europe.

Its wide, perfectly paved and perfectly kept streets, its spacious and
charming public parks, its freedom from overshadowing skyscrapers
that mar the skyline and shut out the sunlight in American cities, and
its nobly beautiful churches, public buildings and monuments, make
Berlin the !Mecca each year of a larger number of students and pleasure
seekers. It is predicted that within a few years Berlin will have taken
Paris' place, so long held, as the "capital of Europe.'"

I found the asphalt streets of Paris marred by many ruts and gaps,
badly repaired and dirty. In one Paris street I saw city workmen
repairing a wooden pavement with uncreosoted blocks. In Berlin the
streets are kept as clean as a parlor floor. I saw Berlin, Paris, London
and Xew York, the four great cities of the Western world, all within
twenty days. In each city my attention was directed by chance to work
done by city employes in laying or repairing paving. In the Strand,
London, I found city workmen j)atching the wood block pavement.
They told me the wood block in the Strand had been in service over a
dozen years. It is still in excellent condition, although one of the
most traveled streets in the world. The foreman of the gang told me
that in the early wood block construction it was the custom to lay the
blocks down with a slight space between them, to allow for expansion
during wet weather. lie said experience had proved this system
faulty, since the blocks when so laid tend to wear round at the surface
and become col)l)ly. In the new construction, he said — and I found the
same principle oljserved in laying wood block paving in Monroe street,
Chicago, three or four years ago — the rule is to lay the blocks snugly
against each other, give them a tbin coating of liquid asphaltum, then
sprinkle with sharp sand. The London highway authorities esteem a
pavement of this kind the best that human ingenuity can produce, but
they tell me it costs more, when properly made, than any other. The
Lonflon municipalities, or most of them, operate their own creosoting
plants and prepare the blocks. The blocks I saw laid down were five

115

inches high, and wore placed on a foundation of concrete eight inches
thick at the curb and twelve inches thick at the crown of the street.
An inch of space was allowed at the curb for expansion. In New York
I saw city workmen taking up asphalt, which had been laid down years
ago without any concrete foundation, and replacing it with creosoted
wood blocks. The foreman of the work told me the city had recently
laid down a great many miles of wood block paving; that, notwithstand-
ing its larger cost, it was believed to give most for the money in the
long run, when built right. He said the city was "experimenting"
with a short street paved with uncreosoted wood block, which sug-
gested the possibility that New York may yet "experiment" with
thatched roofs to reduce the fire hazard. Incomparably the best built,
smoothest, best kept and cleanest streets in the four great cities are the
streets of Berlin. London and New York still retain — and even from
time to time lay do^vn anew — considerable stretches of the vehicle, hoof
and human nerve destroying cobble stone pavement. Berlin's streets
were laid down by men who were aware that motor-driven vehicles are
to predominate in street traffic of paved cities now and hereafter.

Transportation in Berlin is plentiful, cheap and excellent in kind.
Street cars and underground electric cars are swift and clean and fares
are lower than in any American city, not even excepting "three-cent
Cleveland." Y^our taxicab, equipped with all the latest devices for
personal comfort, costs you 15 cents for the first mile, 10 cents each
subsequent mile ; if taken by the hour, it can be used all afternoon for
approximately $3. Compare this with the outrageous charges ex-
acted by taxi companies in New York and Chicago, and with the $3
per hour charge made for the use of old and untidy rent motors in
Houston, and you'll understand why the noiseless, manureless, flyless
and runawayless taxicab has virtually put horse-drawn vehicles out of
business in Berlin. Even a man who loves horses — and it is my private
opinion the Almighty never made anything handsomer than a high-
spirited thoroughbred — has to admit that in our motor-driven age the
continuance of any kind of domestic animals in crowded cities is a sur-
vival of ancient habit, a source of uncleanliness and a menace to
human health.

The average tax borne by each man, woman and child in Berlin is
about $25 a year, which is more than the average of direct taxes paid
per capita in Houston. Considering that per capita income is easily
twice as large in Houston as in Berlin, it can be understood that the
German citizen, and especially the German workingman, speaks truth
when he complains that he is heavily taxed. He is indeed taxed almost
if not quite twice as heavily as his American cousin.

The principal difference between the American and German tax sys-
tems, says Consul General Thacher, is that in the United States an
estimate is made of the necessary municipal expenditures for the en-
suing year, and the tax rate on taxable property both real and personal
is fixed accordingly. In Germany, an estimate for this purpose is not
made in advance, but the rates of the various taxes from which mu-
nicipalities derive their income are fixed by law.

116

The state income tax is based upon the taxable capacity of the in-
dividual according to his income out of real and personal property.
The municipal income tax is a certain percentage of the above tax,
ranging from 90 to 250 per cent. In Frankfort-on-Main, for instance,
the percentage is 90, in Berlin it is 100 per cent, while in some of the
smaller cities which are under unusual expense owing to the large im-
provements which have been made to keep pace with their rapid de-
velopment, the percentage is 250, which is the case in Spandau.

It should be borne in mind that when the German cities have paid
off their bonded indebtedness incurred to buy or build revenue-
producing public utilities, the surplus earnings from these utilities
will not, as now, be used in large part to pay interest and principal on
this bonded debt, but will become so much clear profit for the munici-
pality. In that day, which is not more than forty or fifty years dis-
tant, the cities can either absorb these surplus earnings in extensions
and improvements of the public services, or by reducing charges for
these services, or can employ the surplus in acquiring or creating addi-
tional public services. It seems to me likely the last suggested course
is most likely to be adopted, since the march of invention and the con-
stant multiplication of human needs in cities creates ever new demands
upon municipal revenue.

To become the mayor of a city like Berlin, says our consul general,
the applicant must have established his reputation for efficiency by
successfully governing another or other German cities. His career is
carefully scrutinized by the members of the town council who select
him, for not only must he be competent but must be still so young as
likely to remain competent for many years, for a mayor in Prussia is
elected for a term of twelve years, and if not re-elected is entitled to a
life pension of half the amount of his salary. After a service of six
years his pension is one-fourth of his salary, and after serving twenty
years, two-thirds. He may not necessarily be a resident of Berlin at
the time of his appointment ; in fact, the mayor is usually chosen from
another city. He is elected by the town council, subject to confirmation
by the king of Prussia. When it becomes known that the office of
mayor is to become vacant, applications for the position are considered
by a committee of the town council, and if municipal officers have made
especially good records in other cities, they are requested to apply, if
they have not already done so. After a thorough discussion of the
merits of the applicants, a selection is made. In the administration of
the City of Berlin tliere are two mayors, the oberbiirgermeister or chief
mayor, and tlie Ijiirgermeister or mayor. The method of election is the
same for l)otli. Tlic town council also elects the other members of the
administration (iiiagistrat), which with the two mayors includes thirty-
six members, sixteen of whom are paid and twenty are honorary offi-
cials. The election of all the members except the two mayors must
be confirmcfl by the governor of the Province of Brandenburg.

The members of the town councils are elected by the taxpayers. The
latter are divided into three classes, according to the amount of taxes
each pays. Each class selects one-third of the town councillors; thus

117

the small number of large taxpayers select as many councillors as the
much larger group of medium taxpayers and as many as the very
much larger group of small taxpayers. It is esteemed a high honor to
be chosen a councillor, and no salary is paid members of the council.
If a citizen being elected to the council, fails to qualify, he is subject
to a fine.

In addition to the town council of Berlin there are about ninety
"citizen deputies" chosen by the council from among the most distin-
guished citizens to serve as advisory members of council committees
charged wdth supervision of various municipal interests, such as parks,
schools, the care of the poor, etc.

The heads of the city departments are appointed by the chief mayor.

There is not much political democracy in the system as above out-
lined. It is government by highly trained specialists in government,
the few, and is tolerable only because it produces better results, for
the general welfare, than our democratic system has yet produced in
any American city. The "sovereign citizen" of America pays for his
pofitical sovereignty by holding administrative efficiency down to the
level of the mass intelligence — or more often the mass indifference.

The German masses strive continually for larger political privileges,
believing they can use these privileges to obtain higher wages and
larger social insurance guaranties — against sickness, unemployment,
accidental injury or death and old age. They may err in believing the
democratic rule of the masses would procure these benefits, but it is a
fact that their pressure for such rule brings them constantly larger
measures of these benefits granted by the ruling minority.

118

CHAPTEK XXI.

Latest Official Data ox Berlin.

Latest official data on the City of Berlin is given in the following
letter from the city government :

Berlin, December 19, 1913.
Mr. Frank Putnam, Special Commissioner of the City of Houston,

Texas, U. S. A.

Dear Sir : The propounded questions we answer as follows :

No. 1. The population of Berlin, November 1, 1912, was 2,090,715 ;
at the last official census, on December 1, 1910, Berlin had 2,051,297
inhabitants.

Xo. 2. The gross revenue of the city for 1911 was 363,120,789
marks (over $90,000,000).

Xos. 3 and 4. The enclosed general report of the city's budget for
1911 gives full information on this question. The city derives its
greatest income from taxes, to the amount of 95,308,169.83 marks
(about $22,700,000). The very exhaustive reports dealing with all
funds received and disbursed by the city exchequer shows that all reve-
nues of the different city departments exceeded all disbursements to
the amount of 7,705,272.91 marks during the fiscal year 1911.

Xo. 5. The bonded del)t of the City of Berlin at the close of the fiscal
year 1911 was 481,393,455 marks ($114,617,549).

Xo. 6. From the enclosed report of the loans made by the City of
Berlin the purpose and amount of each loan can be seen. The entire
assets of the city and its taxing power serve as security for these loans.
Each loan is authorized by the secretaries of the interior and the treas-
ury, after having received royal sanction.

Each loan contains a sinking fund chiuse, stipulating the amount
that must be paid off annually. A full report of these transactions'
has to be submitted to the City Council annually.

No. 7. The street and bridge commission is authorized to make
contract and purchase material to the amount of 3000 marks ($715),
freehanded, under the general condition established for this purpose.
It is loft to the discretion of this commission to call for bids from
several contractors, or not, and to accept any of the submitted bids,
according to its own judgment.

All other contracts and purchases, exceeding 30()() marks, must be
made by public bids under the specified ordinances issued for this' pur-
pose. We enclose the conditions for making bids (beitungs bedingun-
gen) ; the general contract conditions (allgemeine vertragsbedingun),

119

and special regulations (besondere bedingungen). Before a con-
tract is awarded to any firm, the ability, capacity and general worth
of that lirm is carefully examined, and the successful bidder must
guarantee his work by depositing a valid bond of sufficient amount to
indemnify the city against any loss from non-fulfillment of the con-
tract conditions. It will suffice to state that the conditions and regula-
tions are prepared with the utmost care and protect the city's interest
in every respect.

No. 8. The occupying and the use of streets, bridges and public
squares is granted to the postal department of the German Empire to
a certain extent by the telegraph road law. Besides this the use of
public streets is granted to the tramways, electric cars and underground
railway by the railroad law of July 28, 1892. In every instance the
use of public streets and thoroughfares by private corporations is regu-
lated by special contract, that binds the corporation to pay a certain
annual sum to the city, besides the keeping in full repair of that part
of the streets used by said corporation.

Regarding the granting of the use of streets, bridges and public
squares to gas companies, we refer to the enclosed pamphlet No. 34.
This pamphlet contains a contract entered into by the municipality of
Berlin and the Imperial Continental Gas Company in 1901, for a
term of twenty-four years, in which the territory of Berlin was di-
vided for the supply of gas for public, private and commercial use be-
tween the municipal gas works and the Imperial Continental Gas
Company. The latter agreed to pay the City of Berlin an annual rental
for the use of the streets that amounted for the first year of the con-
tract to 477,541.37 marks, or approximately $100,000. Every three
years during the life of the contract this rent is readjusted to conform
with the increased volume of gas supplied by the Imperial Continental
Gas Company.

No. 9. Municipal works :

Establishment — Receipts. Expenditures.

Gas works 87,563,399.59 M. 78,954,834.98 M.

Water works 18,414,913.76 M. 15,316,930.60 M.

Canalization and farms 24,712,257.60 M. 26,248,826.20 M.

Cattle market 3,855,184.39 M. 3,160,441.59 M.

Abattoirs 2,961,958.25 M. 2,558,421.60 M.

Meat inspection 8,845,973.94 M. 7,343,441.16 M.

Market halls 4,357,561.26 M. 3,872,166.42 M.

Street railroads 2,629,961.80 M. 1,987,146.49 M.

Public warehouse 134,694.61 M. 86,629.56 M.

Construction of East harbor. . . . 2,361,426.10 M. 3,159,579.71 M.

Total 156,067,326.37 M. 142,685,418.19 M.

This shows that the City of Berlin derived annual net revenue of
13,500,000 marks, or more than $3,000,000, from the different public
works or utilities which it o^\Tied and operated in 1912.

120

No. 10. The municipal water works were bought on July 1, 1873,
for 25,125,000 marks ($6,000,000), from an English association. The
loan floated for the purchase has been repaid several years ago from
the profits derived from the operation of the works.

The street railroads were owned and operated exclusively by private
concerns to the year 1908. Since July 1, 1908, the municipality con-
ducts street car lines built by the city. (These, of course, are in addi-
tion to the main service, wliich is still in the hands of a private com-
pany.)

No. 11. The yearly gross receipts obtained from the different
branches of public service are shown in Chapter II of the enclosed
report (enumerated above). The profits are almost entirely used for
the general welfare of the community. A reduction in charges does not
take place.

No. 12. The Berlin electric works (privately owned), have to pay to
the city 10 per cent of their annual gross receipts and 50 per cent of
their net profit, for the franchise of laying cables under the streets.
From this source the municipality received 6,369,807.25 marks ($1,-
516,621), in 1911. The street railway company is also required to pay
the city for permission to lay tracks along the streets. The street rail-
way companies paid into the city treasury 4,296,996.72 marks ($1,025,-
416), in 1911.

No. 13. For each uninterrupted ride on the street cars 10 pfennigs
(2^/^ cents) is charged. The street railway companies also sell: (a)
monthly cards, at 6.70 marks ($1.30) per month; (b) pupils' cards,
at 3 marks (72 cents), per month; (c) weekly cards, for mechanics and
laborers, at 50 pfennigs (12 cents), and 1 mark (24 cents), good for
one or two trips daily during the week; (d) police cards, at 2.05 marks
(50 cents), and 3.10 marks (75 cents), per month to policemen in
uniform, and detectives. For taking a dog in cars the passenger must
pay full fare, 25/2 cents.

The price of gas at present is .13 mark (3 cents) for one cubic meter,
on which price a rebate of 5 per cent is granted. For gas used for
business purposes other than for illuminating, the following rebates
are granted: Gas used in industrial establishments, 50,000 to 100,000
cubic meters yearly, 10 per cent; 100,000 to 150,000 cubic meters yearly,
12 per cent; 150,000 to 200,000 cubic meters yearly, 14 per cent;
200,000 to 250,000 cubic meters yearly, 16 per cent; 25(),000 to 300,000
cubic meters yearly, 18 per cent; 300,000 cubic meters yearly and up-
ward, 20 per cent. Kebates are not granted for a shorter ])erio(l than
one year. On gas used for gas motors and central heating eslablisli-
ments in dwelling houses a rebate of 20 per cent is granted, irrespective
of the amount used.

The price for electricity varies, according to whether the current is
used for ilhiminating or power purposes. Electric current is charged
for by the kilowatt hour, i. e., the use of 1000 volt-amperes jier hour.
The l)asic price; for electric power for ilhiminaling piirjjoses at present
is 40 ])f('nnigH (10 cents) per kilowatt hour. Cliangcs of price are
niad(; with the consent of the City Council and become elTective one

121

month after having been published in at least six newspapers of Berlin.
Customers who use annually electricity in excess of 10,000 marks
($2,500) are entitled to the following rebates: With a yearly use of
10,000 marks, 5 per cent; 20,000 marks, 73/^ per cent; 30,000 marks,
10 per cent; 40,000 marks, 12>4 per cent; 50,000 marks, 15 per cent;
75,000 marks, 17>^ per cent; 100,000 marks, 20 per cent. With each
25,000 marks above 100,000, the rebate increases 2^ per cent until
the highest rebate of 50 per cent is reached. Persons or firms that take
electricity for at least 500 marks ($120) yearly during the hours of
10 p. m. to 7 a. m., pay only 18 pfennigs (4 cents) per kilowatt hour.
Special prices are also given for the use of electricity for advertising,
the lighting of house numbers, stairs, cellars and accumulators.

For industrial purposes the price of electricity at present is 6 pfen-
nigs per kilowatt hour. The Berlin electric works decide whether the
power is used for industrial or illuminating purposes. With the use of
electricity for 2000 hours per annum the price is 15 pfennigs per kilo-
watt hour; between 2000 and 2200 hours, 13.5 pfennigs; 2250 to 2500
hours, 12.75 pfennigs; 2500 to 3000 hours, 12 pfennigs; 3000 to 3500
hours, 11.25 pfennigs; 3500 to 4000 hours, 10.75 pfennigs; 3500 to
4000 hours, 10 pfennigs. These prices are subject to a rebate of 25
per cent.

No. 14. As the public buildings of Berlin are not erected by the
municipality, no workmen or mechanics are employed in this branch
by the city. For the planning and drafting, technical and financial
supervision of public buildings, officials are employed either for life, or,
in the lower grades, from month to month.

The higher officials receive a salary varying between 5400 and 9000
marks ($1300 to $2200) ; the lower officials, 2800 to 6200 marks ($800
to $1500). The assistant technical officials, engaged from month to
month, receive a monthly salary of 160 to 400 marks ($40 to $100).

Xo. 15. A mimicipal income tax is levied in addition to the normal
state income tax, in accordance with the communal tax law (kommun-
alal)gabengesetz) of July 4, 1893. The percentage of the tax levy to
the state income tax is fixed annually by the City Council. We enclose
copy of the income tax tariff. We quote the following items from this
tariff, that give in detail the tax levied on incomes' from 900 to 255,000
marks yearly :

Income — State Income Tax. Municipal Inc. Tax. Per Ct.

900 to 1,050 M 6M.

1,050 to 1,200 M 9M.

1,200 to 1,350 M 12 M. .60 M. 5

1,350 to 1,500 M 16 M. .80 M. 5

1,500 to 1,650 M 21 M. LOOM. 5

3,000 to 3,300 M 60 M. 6.00 M. 10

10,500 to 11,500 M 330 M. 49.40 M. 15

20,500 to 21,500 M 630 M. 126.00 M. 20

100,000 to 105,000 M 4,000 M. 1,000.00 M. 25

200,000 to 205,000 :M 8,000 M. 2,000.00 M. 25

250,000 to 255,000 M 10,000 M. 2,500.00 M. 25

122

Each additional 5000 marks of income paj'S an additional state tax of
200 marks ($50), and an additional municipal tax of 50 marks
($12.50).

No. 16. The rates of the income tax tariff apply to individuals and
corporations alike and treat equally the rich and the poor. On all
personal estates the state collects a special tax, while the municipality
levies a tax on estates equal to 25 per cent of the state tax. Thus:

Estate— State Tax. Municipal Tax.

5,000 to 8,000 M 3.20 M. .80 M.

100,000 to 1,000,000 M 526.00 M. 131.40 M.

For each additional 2000 marks of the estate the state tax is raised
10.60 marks and the municipal tax 2.60 marks.

Real estate in the city pays a land tax based on its actual value. The
tax rate for the year 1912 is 3.10 marks for each 1000 marks of property
value — approximately 78 cents on $238.

Besides this, the new acquisition of real estate is taxed at 1 per cent
for improved property and 3 per cent for unimproved property, as a
sales tax (umsatzsteuer). Finally, from every sale of real estate a tax
on the unearned increment, according to the law of February 2-1, 1911,
is levied. From this tax the City of Berlin receives 45 per cent, the
remaining 55 per cent going to the State of Prussia and the national
treasury of the German Empire.

No. 17. The chief mayor (oberbuergermeister) is elected for a
term of twelve years. The present chief mayor. His Excellency Wer-
muth, comes from Hanover, and holds his office since September 1,
1912.

The office of city secretary, as an assistant to the mayor, does not
exist in Berlin or any other Prussian city. There are several hundred
city secretaries employed by the municipality, who belong to the offi-
cials of the medium class and act as clerks or bookkeepers in the differ-
ent departments of the city administration.

The chief ma3'or with several salaried (unbesoldete) councilmen
(stadraethe), including some technical advisors, compose the magis-
trat, or executive council, of the city government.

Xo. 18. All technical departments are controlled exclusively by
expert officials, the higher officers in the building and administrative
departments must have a university education, while a college (gym-
nasium) education is sufficient for the medium officers. No other
special training is required for entering the municipal administrative
service, but documentary proof must be furnished that the candidates
have successfully finished the course of studies of a college (gymnasium
or realschule), or are university graduates of jurisprudence and have
passed the two state examinations of "referendar'' and "assessor."

(Signed) Rkidlkh.

123

CHAPTER XXII.

Humanity Moving to Town.

The foregoing considerations bring us back once inore to the chief
lesson that is to be learned from even a brief study of human experi-
ence in city-building and city-dwelling, namely, a low tax rate means
a low standard of civilization; a high tax rate, a high standard of
civilization. The advantages which modern cities give their citizens
over the inhabitants of our old-fashioned villages, are speedier trans-
portation; a wider range of entertainment; far more numerous con-
tacts with the life of the outer world and a consequent quickening of
intellect; a more diversified food supply; more numerous relations of
the beauty which genius calls forth from marble, color on canvas,
landscape and water vista, and the spirit-stirring strains of noble
music. The shallow observer of modern life errs when he says youth
leaves the farm for the city solely in order to get more and better and
easier bread and raiment at lower cost in labor; the deeper lure of the
cities is their appeal to the young to come and be entertained, amused,
diverted, educated ; and the young go thence, subconsciously aware that
their hunger for increasing mental and spiritual sensibility, which the
cities alone can satisfy, somehow involves the forward, upward move-
ment of humanity, which it undoubtedly does.

For perfectly valid reasons, mankind is moving to town. Lest worse
befall, our towns must as speedily as possible be made clean, healthful,
beautiful, in order to fulfill their function. Their citizens must have
the maximum of all social services at minimum cost. Old-world ex-
perience proves this can be obtained only by eliminating private profit
from all social services.

Since the fortunes of city and country dwellers are linked together,
it may not be out of place here to set down a conclusion concerning the
latter. I am convinced that precisely as all city wealth-producing
occupations have been organized on large scale, corporate ownership
superseding small individual ownership, so in the country corporate
production of food and of the raw materials of manufacture will super-
sede production by small individual landholders. The rising demand of
a rapidly increasing population requires the change, and it will there-
fore be made. Fifty years ago a white tenant farmer in Texas, or Iowa,
was almost unknown. Today almost if not quite one-half of the white
farm families of Texas — nearly a (|nartor-million of them — arc home-
less and landless tenants, and only ^2 per cent of the farms of Texas
are operated by their owners. Approximately the same conditions exist

125

in Iowa. It is probably idle to advance any scheme to restore these
dispossessed farmers to land ownership ; most of them would fail agaia,
as they have already failed, if given opportunity to compete once more.
Since they could not compete in in era of small tools, used by their
owTiers, how shall they compete in the new era of huge labor-saving
and product-multiplying farm machines, in cost quite beyond their
reach? Is it not inevitable that this vast army of farm tenants must
become the wage employes of farm companies, using the new machines
on large areas, employing trained soil and crop experts to direct opera-
tions, and using the quarter-million of unskilled farm laborers to
produce a far larger food supply, at much less cost, than these laborers
in their present role of wandering tenants are now able to produce ?

The thoughtful student of modern city life, if he be also acquainted
with conditions and tendencies in the rural regions, is forced to the
conclusion that humanity, each year in larger numbers harnessed to
labor-saving and product-multiplying machinery, is moving en masse
out of the old isolation into community life. The machine cotton
picker and the machine corn husker and the motor-driven machine
which plows thirty or forty furrows abreast, at the same time harrow-
ing and leveling the soil — these and other huge new machines applica-
ble to farm labor, and economically usable only on large areas, indicate
unerringly the way the race is going. The masses of tenant farmers,
who now wander from place to place, with their families, will become
fixed residents', decently housed and provided with the sanitary, educa-
tional and entertainment resources of modern community life, on
great farms owned and operated, for a time at least, by incorporated
companies of capitalists. Eising general intelligence may in time
evolve co-operative communities of farm workers. This has been ac-
complished, with, marked success, in portions of Italy, on leased lands.

Man's ineradicable himger for land and home ownership will per-
haps be satisfied under the new order by making it possible for each
family to acquire title to the home it occupies and an acre or more of
ground upon which the home stands. He will be compensated for
hia lost vision of estate ownership by the advantages of community
life organized in conformity with the modern spirit.

Xothiag, in my opinion, short of this method of carrying the decen-
cies, the conveniences, the social and educational advantages of the city
to the country, will avail to check the too rapid rush of farm and small
village people to the already overcrowded cities. City dwellers who
may think a discussion of farm conditions out of place in a report on
city conditions are reminded that their own welfare, and especially the
welfare of the laboring masses, is constantly jeopardized by this inflow
of competitors seeking city employment and access to city pleasures and
educational opportunities.

The charms of the beautiful modern cities of Germany, so attractive
to visitors from other parts of the w'orld, are equally attractive to
German country folk. Thus it comes to pass that wages in German
city employments are very low, and labor on German farms inadequate

126

for farm tasks at crop gathering time. Several hundred thousand girls
are each year brought in from Poland to help gather the German
potato crop, and even in Germany, with its 66,000,000 people on an
area three-quarters as large as Texas (and one-fourth of this area
wooded), there are large tracts of farm land which for want of labor
are not producing food up to their capacity. And this, mind you, in a
country where the people's most constant and painful outcry is against
the ever-rising cost of food.

The brains of Germany have met the demand for decent living con-
ditions in their vast new cities better than the managers of cities
anywhere else in the world; but they now realize that they must carry
city advantages into the country places, and today the chief ambition
of the imperial government is to restore the lost equilibrium between
city and country by modernizing — that is to say, citifying as far as'
possible — the conditions of country life.

127

CHAPTEK XXIII.
Houston's Inland Harbor.

I am asked by the Manufacturers Eecord to tell its readers what I
think of Houston's inland harbor, after having seen the gi-eat inland
harbors of Northern Europe.

I am now more strongly than ever convinced that Houston will in
due time become the sea-and-rail meeting point for the seaborne com-
merce of the Southwest and a large part of the American Northwest,
between the Rocky Mountains and the Missouri river.

For all of this vast area Houston brings tidewater 500 miles nearer
than any port on either Atlantic or Pacific, and 300 miles nearer than
New Orleans, the nearest rival port on the Gulf of Mexico. Today the
only deep water wharves in the Houston-Galveston district are on Gal-
veston Island, and on the mainland across the bay at Texas City and
Bolivar Point, and the exports and imports through the Houston-
Galveston sea-and-rail shipping district already, in the comparative
infancy of Southwestern and Northwestern commercial development,
make Galveston the second port of the United States in volume of
business — led only by New York.

Houston's proposition is that the deep water haul of unbroken cargoes
now terminating at Galveston sliall be, in large part, extended forty-five
miles farther inland. The cost of water transportation, approximately,
is only one-sixth as large as the cost of rail transportation. If the
huge volume of traffic which now passes in and out of Galveston's
harbor at the mouth of Galveston bay can be given forty-five miles more
water haul, and forty-five miles less rail haul, the saving in transpor-
tation cost to shippers and consumers will rapidly mount into the
millions and ultimatolv into hundreds of millions of dollars.

It is this fact precisely which has caused all the world's great harbors
which men have created or improved, to be located as far inland as
possible. The saving in cost of transportation in a few years pays the
cost of harbor construction, and thereafter permanently sustains a great
city, manufacturing and trading in commodities, around the harbor.

The two principal harbors of Northern Germany are those of Ham-
burg and Bremen. In each instance the harbor is situated farther
inland than Houston's harbor, and in each case the inland harbor has
been almost wholly man-made. In each case the harbor-builders had
as a basis for their work a cily with rail terminals already established,
with a river flowing tlirough it. Ilonstoii li;is exactly these advan-
tages. Houston has not yet so largo a po[)iilal ion back of if as have

129

Hamburg and Bremen, but the American Southwest and the American
Northwest, regions which by virtue of the short haul must inevitably
and forever patronize the Houston-Galveston sea gateway, for their
seaborne commerce, are enormously larger than the region whose popu-
lation supports the commerce which sustains Hamburg and Bremen.
Moreover, these American regions tributary to the Houston-Galveston
sea outlet are much richer, potentially, and therefore are certain in due
time to sustain a much larger population, than the region tributary to
Hamburg and Bremen ever can sustain.

Hamburg has over a million inhabitants, Bremen about a quarter-
million. Both are growing larger each year, and richer, through their
commerce chiefly. Both, being city-states, with ability therefore to
borrow money by bond issues far in excess of the like authority pos-
sessed by a small city like Houston, have expended enormous amounts
of money so procured in extending their harbors and harbor equip-
ment. Hamburg during the past thirty years has invested $130,000,000
in harbor extensions and betterments. The warehouses are owned and
operated by a company, in which the city-state of Hamburg owns a
stock control, with the privilege — which it is exercising — to absorb the
stock privately owned out of its share of the profits of the enterprise.
I neglected while there to learn exactly how many millions the city-
state of Bremen has invested in its harbors in the City of Bremen and
at Bremerhaven a few miles do^n the Weser river ; but it is significant
of the size of these investments that for one detail alone — an enlarge-
ment of the harbor system of Bremerhaven — the city-state issued
bonds amounting to $132 per capita for its whole population.

Houston, in the Buffalo bayou arm of Galveston bay, has a big
natural waterway. Its size and natural depth are indicated by this
fact: that government engineers and responsible private contractors
have engaged to give it a 25-foot channel, with a minimum bottom
width of 150 feet throughout its more than fifty miles length from
Houston's ship-turning basin down to the Galveston jetties, for only
$2,500,000, and have engaged to complete the work within three years
from the date of beginning in 1912. Compare this with the $87,-
000,000 which Manchester, England, spent on its short 29-foot canal
cut inland from Liverpool's sea-front harbor, in order to save the cost
of rail transportation on the product of Manchester's mills, and you
will better imderstand how little nature left for men to do in giving
Houston a broad, deep water highway direct from her great rail ter-
minals down to the open sea.

Houston's inland harbor, at the head of the channel, is as yet an
unsolved problem — as to cost. The Federal government has widened
the banks of Buffalo bayou, at a point five or six miles below Houston's
city center, to make what we call a ship-turning basin. This basin is,
approximately, a quarter-mile long and seven or eight hundred feet
wide, with a depth of twenty feet. It is big enough to afford anchor-
age for a small fleet of small vessels engaged in the coasting trade, but
it would be a flight of pure fancy, or the assumption of pure ignor-

130

ance, to denominate it a harbor for seagoing ships. Viewed in that
light, it is a mere scratch in the ground, a tentative beginning,
certain, I believe, to be abandoned in favor of a site farther
down the bayou where the gigantic task of cutting out a real inland
harbor will be easier and cheaper. The present turning basin will
fulfill its proper function, and repa}' its cost, when, the harbor for
seagoing ships having been constructed lower down, this small basin
becomes a harborage for a mosquito fleet of coasters, trafficking up and
down the Texas rivers and along the Texas Intercoastal Canal.

It took me nearly four hours, in a fast motor boat, to circumnavi-
gate Hamburg's inland harbor, which has been cut out of a meadow
along the mighty Elbe river. Houston's inland harbor, if it is to
effect for the seaborne commerce of the American Southwest and the
Xorthwest a cost saving such as Hamburg's inland harbor — twenty
miles farther inland than Houston's, by the way — eft'ects for the com-
merce of a portion of Xorthern Europe, must and undoubtedly will in
due time be worked out on a similar scale.

Houston's participation in the task of procuring an inland harbor
has been small down to date. I mean participation by the city gov-
ernment, in cash. Under Mayor H. B. Rice's far-seeing guidance
during the past eight years, the City of Houston has borne most of the
cost of promoting Houston's harbor pretensions in congress, and the
cit}-- has voted, and expended, a bond issue of $250,000 to build mu-
nicipal wharves in the tiny turning basin above alluded to, just below
the city limits. There has been some short-sighted local criticism of
the administration for failure to make this $250,000 drop-in-the-bueket
procure and pay for big municipal wharves. Anybody possessing a
nickel's worth of practical information on the subject of wharves of
the size proposed to be built here, would readily understand that this
$250,000 was intended only to make a beginning, and not to complete,
a work of such magnitude. If the excavations made for municipal
wharves in the turning basin are later used, in providing dockage
for coasting vessels, as they probably will be, then the city will get
full value for its money. If not, then the $250,000 will have to be
charged off to profit and loss, under the heading, "Experience Paid
For" — and with the reflection that we are not the first city builders
who have made small mistakes in working out big projects.

The task of making a great harbor forty or fifty miles inland on
Buffalo bayou is not a task which the City of Houston, or the County
of Harris, in which the City of Houston is situated, can or should
assume. It is a task for the nation, because the whole nation will be
a gainer by the construction of such a harbor. The city-states of
Hamburg and Bremen paid most of the cost of building their great
harbors, because they are states, free sovereignties like our own states,
subject to the imperial government only in respect to customs and
military armaments, as our states are to our Federal government.
The imperial government has contributed over $10,000,000 to Ham-
burg's harl)or development, in payment for concession of customs
authority there.

131

Houston the city is an incident in the vast natural scheme of things,
which demands, and insures, the creation of the big inland harbor of
the near future on Buffalo bayou. This harbor, as Galveston's rapid
rise to second place among American seaports proves, will command a
yearly increasing share of the seaborne traffic of the United States.
Saving for a large portion of that traffic five-sixths of the cost of its
transportation for forty to fifty miles, this inland harbor, like all of the
other great inland harbors of the world, will quickly pay for itself out
of that saving, and will thereafter be a national asset for economy in
exporting and importing commodities exchanged with the other coun-
tries of the globe.

In order to induce prompt and decisive action by the Federal gov-
ernment, in creating such an inland harbor, the Harris County navi-
gation district, including the City of Houston, two years ago voted a
bond issue of $1,250,000 and put it up with an equal amount appro-
priated by the American congress, to make the $2,500,000 needed to
complete the 25-foot channel from Houston down to the gulf.

That was an exhibition of energy and of ambition by Houston never,
I believe, matched by any other American city of its size, if indeed it
was ever matched by any American city of any size. It is the plain
duty of the Federal government not only to put through the whole big
plan at its own cost, and promptly, but to return to the Harris county
navigation district its voluntary gift of $1,250,000 towards paying for a
strictly Federal enterprise, so that this money may be used by the
local interests in procuring frontage on the channel and in equipping
municipal wharves as a safeguard against monopolization of the
wharfage.

Here is where the City of Houston will be called upon to make a
very large investment of borrowed money in the years to come. The
city will be obliged, if it follows the wise example of the German city-
states cited above, to acquire o^\'Tlership of land on either side of the
inland harbor, and on either side of the channel below the basiii, in
order to prevent monopoly, and in order through rentals to derive a
revenue with which to take up its bonds and defray its share of the
cost of operation.

Immediately, since no provision has been made for terminals on the
25-foot channel that will be ready for use in June, 1914, the City of
Houston, or a Houston harbor district to be created by legislative
action, must make haste to provide at its own cost a small preliminary
inland harbor with docks and a belt line railway linking its wharves
with the Houston rail terminals. Failure to make such provision,
within the next fifteen months, will imperil the $2,500,000 invested in
the 25-foot channel and seriously discredit Houston's deep water pro-
gram in the eyes of the nation.

The Houston city government having met the present emergency, as
suggested, will thereafter be called upon to invest several million dol-
lars in extending its harbor equipment, and the Federal government

132

will be urged to do its duty in the premises by enlarging the small
emergency harbor to a basin several hundred acres in extent. The
Houston harbor district will probably have to donate to the Federal
government the site of this harbor, which will have to be cut out of
the meadow along the waterway just as Hamburg made most of her
mighty harbor on the Elbe.

I look for this development to take place naturally, over a long term
of years, in response to demands made by seaborne commerce for ac-
commodation in the Houston-Galveston district. Already this com-
merce has overflowed Galveston's island equipment and has come across
to the mainland in two places — Texas City and Bolivar Point. The
steadily rising volume of this traffic ^\'ill progressively utilize Galveston,
Texas City, Bolivar Point and the Houston ship channel and inland
harbor. The interests of the whole of the tiny district are identical, in
any large view of the situation, just as are those of New York,
Brooklj-n, Jersey City and the other portions of the vast shipping dis-
trict at the mouth of the Hudson river. The development of one
means added prosperity for all. And let it not be forgotten that the
region inevitably tributary to this sea outlet is vastly larger, and in the
years to come will be even more populous and more productive of sea-
borne commerce than the region now tributary to New York.

I shall not be here to say "I told you so," but nothing is more
certain in my mind than that within three or four generations the
city which will have grown up within the Houston-Galveston district
will rival in size and wealth the city at the mouth of the Hudson.

133

CHAPTEE XXIV.
An Appreciation of the Theme.
(Editorial, Dallas-Galveston News.)

The series of articles written by Mr. Fi'ank Putnam of Houston on
the organization and management of public works and governments of
European cities constitutes, in the opinion of the News, one of the
most valuable contributions that has been made in many years to the
literature of mimicipal government. There is not a city or to^vn in the
state that is not indebted both to Mr. Putnam and to Houston, which
city bore the expenses of the investigation ; for although Mr. Putnam's
study was made with particular reference to the peculiar needs and
conditions of Houston, necessarily the greater part of the information
contained in them is pertinent to the problems of all municipalities,
and this information has generously been given to all. It was a splen-
did benefaction on the part of Houston.

Certainly there is no subject on which we are more in need of in-
formation and the inspiration that may be expected of the knowledge
of what other people have accomplished. In the general art of govern-
ment we indulge ourselves in the belief that we have excelled all
peoples, and that we have brought about the best government on earth
— a self-satisfaction which may be allowed, subject to some particular
exceptions. But if we are allowed to indulge in that self-satisfaction,
it only makes more incongruous another fact, equally admitted, that in
municipal management or government we are the most backward.
There is none so filled with pride and the spirit of self-sutficiency as
to extol our municipal governments. It is admitted, on the contrary,
that at that point our efforts have been rewarded ^vith but a small
measure of success. It may be that we have little to learn from the
Europeans as to tbc manner of conducting national and state govern-
ment«, altliougli even in those respects they can proljahly teach us more
than we suspect; but it is certain that in the matter of municipal man-
agement they are decades ahead of us. We have made noteworthy
progress in the last eight or ten years; the standard of efficiency has
been raised, and particularly in Texa.s cities. But there is always a
dang<'r of being betrayed into contentment by small achievements and
of resting satisfied with (■f)n(litions tliat are good only in comparison
with older conditions, and that are bad if they be considered relatively
to what is possible and f('a><il>le. Tlu; cireumstances give a peculiar
tinirliness to the articles Mr. Putnam has written, for they who have
read them carefully must have been fired with that discontent which
leads to better things.

135

If there had been no previous evidence of the fact for us, Mr. Put-
nam's articles would have made it too clear for denial that the Germans
are pre-eminent in the matter of municipal management, or perform-
ing public service. It would be no tribute to their achievements what-
ever to say that they have far surpassed us; one must make the com-
parison with the accomplishments of people who are incomparably
superior to us in this respect if he would give full tribute to the skill
and art of the Germans in municipal management. Doubtless their
superiority is due primarily to racial traits. In them the social sense
is probably more highly developed than in any other people. The
rights of society as opposed to those of individuals have been made
more paramount among them. Mr. Putnam has made it clear that
another reason of their success in municipal management is their free-
dom from political theories and formulas. With us, one often has
occasion to suspect, municipal governments were instituted largely
for the purpose of celebrating and demonstrating abstract theories,
and that we regard it as of more importance to vindicate a political
doctrine than to do a particular thing efficiently.

^Ye are the most practical people in our management of business and
industry. No amoimt of theory would prevent our millers from dis-
carding millstones and introducing steel rollers. But we stick tena-
ciously to plausible political theories whether they work or not in
practice.

German philosophy with respect to municipal management, so far
as the Germans seem to have any philosophy, is decidedly pragmatic.
The results must justify the act, and if they do, no one seems to care
whether the act is consistent with some theory or not. Political con-
siderations, or party considerations, seem to enter little if at all into
municipal management in Germany. It is with them strictly a bus-
iness matter; and just as with us a business man employs and retains
men solely because of their efficiency without inquiring or caring as to
his political or religious preference, so the Germans give municipal
business over to men who have aptitude and training for it. With us
no man is eligible for municipal service unless he is a legal resident of
the city, and if one should propose to elect as mayor some one who was
not a resident of the city, but who in some other citv had demonstrated
pre-eminent fitness for the service, the patriotism of the man making
that proposal would be immediately impeached, and he would prob-
ably not live long enough to get another hearing from his fellow
citizens. How little the Germans are in the hal)it of thus subordinating
essentials to non-essentials is shown by Mr. Putnam's statement that
German cities frequently compete for the mayoral services of men who
have demonstrated superior fitness.

One of the recommendations which Mr. Putnam makes with particu-
lar emphasis, as a result of his study of European cities, is that Hous-
ton "create a city planning commission to outline for adoption by the
city government a general plan, providing for Houston's future growth,
as the German cities have done." He declares that he regards this

136

"as 1)}' long odds the most vital of all my recommendations," and he
adds the very just observation that ''it would be nothing less than pur-
blind folly for the generation now in control of Houston's destiny to
neglect to make provision for a sane, beautiful, healthful, economical
plan for future city growth — now, while the first foundations for the
future great city are being laid." In one sense that observation is
superfluous, for even in Texas where our largest cities have only just
begun to grow we have had the folly of allo\\dng them to develop with-
out plan or premeditation impressed on us by mournful and costly
experience. Xothing can be more certain than that if the forces of
individual selfishness are allowed to govern the growth of cities un-
restrained they will come to be ugly, inconvenient and unhealthful, un-
healthful physically and morally. Environment exercises a tremen-
dous influence on individual lives ; there are some indeed who assert
that it is a more potent force than heredity, and yet we have done next
to nothing to utilize that tremendous force as a means of bettering the
moral life of our cities.

137

PRESS O F
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MOUSTON, TEXAS
1913

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Full text of "City government in Europe. Houston's inquiry into municipal organization and administration in the principal cities of Great Britain and Germany; with a report of findings and recommendations for Houston's guidance in developing a great seaport city on the Gulf of Mexico"

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