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Brought forward

gular receipts or disbursements such as presents of fuel, clothing, money for special objects

An accountant, receiving also some remuneration from the boxes of the institutions he keeps the accounts of

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Cash keeper and a comptroller, 2; receiving in all

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[These are messengers between the different members and branches of the poor direction. One also is the housekeeper, and one files the vouchers and documents.]

A revising commissioner

A paid poor commissioner-assistant for two sub-
urbs of the city inhabited almost wholly by
paupers, and whom, on account of their num-
bers, the ordinary poor commissioners could
not attend to without assistance
Town sergeants, 12 persons
District messengers, 6 persons

[These are messengers between the poor commissioners in the different districts, and the individual paupers, and are paid days' wages. They are not exactly poor officers on salaries, but are persons taken from among the poor, who, at any rate, would require aid for their families.]

A master poor-watchman or poor-ward
Poor-wards under him, 12 persons

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[These belong properly to the police, as much as to the poor establishment. They have a uniform, and their duty is to arrest beggars, and bring them, as distressed persons, to the poor commission of the district, the poor director's room, or to the workhouse.]

The total administration cost yearly, in 1828

14,221 = 2,112

The poor directors keep an application-room open to the public, at which the assistant secretary attends, and in which a day-book is kept of all applications of the poor for relief, and of appeals from the decisions of any of the district poor commissions, if the pauper thinks he ought to get relief and has been refused; and at

which any petitions or claims they may have to make are drawn out, and any advice they require given without expense; and it is also a kind of house of call for work and workmen, if any labourers are wanted for such work as the poor can do. The poor commissioners find here the information they require respecting applicants for relief in their districts; and the benevolent can learn if the objects they are relieving are really necessitous, and to what extent their charity is required.* Among the charitable establishments under charge of the poor directors one seems very interesting the school for neglected and morally depraved children. These children are first placed in a lazarette for fourteen days, in one wing of the hospital, to be sure that they are free from infectious disease; the sick are on the other side, and the children are only admitted to mix with the others when perfectly clean and well; and their moral defects also in some degree ascertained. Useful trades and women's work are taught the boys and girls in these institutions.

It is generally complained of in the Prussian towns, that the abolition of the old corporation system by which liberty to set up in any trade or handicraft was restricted by apprenticeships, journeymanships, and freedom of the corporated body of each trade, has filled them with pauperism. The freedom of the city or town as burgess, which in Berlin costs thirty thalers, is all that is now required to entitle any one to carry on any trade or handicraft in it; and young men, as soon as they have completed their three years of military service, set up as masters in the trade they were bred to, marry, and in a few years their families come upon the public for support. It is evidently not the freedom of trade that

*The following reports of the poor directors are interesting on this subject. Die oeffentliche Armenpflege in Berlin dargestellt von der Armen Direction, Berlin, 1828; also, Uebersicht der bei den Armen-Commissionen der Residenz Berlin bestehenden Geschaefts Fuehrung, Berlin, 1836; and Jahres Bericht ueber die ArmenVerwaltung in Berlin pro 1838.

produces this evil, but the attempt to unite freedom of trade with the Prussian military system. The young men have lost, if they had ever acquired, the expertness and readiness at their work, and the habits of steadiness and industry necessary in every handicraft, by their military service; and are arrived at the age, after three years' service in the army, when they must settle in life. The two systems cannot work together in society. The Prussian military system also gives no such outlet as our army does to the unsteady class of half-bred tradesmen who want prudence, forethought, or skill, to thrive in their handicrafts. Our land and sea service, colonies, and emigration, relieve the country of a considerable proportion of this class who in Prussia marry, and become, in effect, an increasing fund of pauperism in the community. The Prussian military system is thus working out pauperism in two ways-by impoverishing, and preparing for pauperism, the working class and by not absorbing those whose habits, temperament, and conduct tend to bring them to pauperism, and who with us, but for the military service, would be paupers, or engendering pauperism. If England, notwithstanding all her employments and outlets for pauperism, is overwhelmed with it, what will Germany become as a manufacturing country, breeding paupers in the same ratio as England, yet without any outlets for them in colonies, standing armies, fleets, or commercial shipping? The manufacture of pauperism must increase faster than all her other manufactures.

CHARACTER

CHAP. XI.

LEIPSIC.- BOOK-TRADE-ITS EFFECTS ON THE LITERATURE
ON THE
ON THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF THE
GERMANS. THE GERMAN THEATRE-ITS INFLUENCE.-THE
EDUCATIONAL INFLUENCES IN SOCIETY. THE SCOTCH AND
THE GERMANS COMPARED.

of

LEIPSIC, remarkably in contrast with Berlin, is a city of the middle ages-balconies projecting into the streets, old forms and fashions about the people and their dwellings, nothing of the Parisian air, nothing of the Frenchified German air about them. Every thing is downright German, and plain unsophisticated German burgess style. This is the capital of the middle class of Germany-of the class which has nothing to do with nobility, or with military, or civil service as a way living, which has not its great money merchants, bankers, contractors of loans, millionaires, like Frankfort; but has its very substantial, and some very wealthy, quietliving burgesses. The traveller who could get into the domestic society of this town-which even native Germans cannot easily do would see, it is said, more of old Germany, more of the houses, habits, and modes of living of two centuries ago, than in any other place. A very respectable people these Leipsicers are, and precisely because they affect to be nothing more. Their book trade is of such importance, that the booksellers, of whom there are reckoned at the fairs about 560, and many of them settled in Leipsic, have a large exchange of their own to transact their business in. It is not, however, the printing and publishing in Leipsic itself, that is the basis of these book fairs, but the barter of publications between booksellers meeting there from different points. The bookseller, perhaps, from Kiel on the Baltic, meets and exchanges publications with the

bookseller, perhaps, from Zurich, gives so many copies of his publication- a dull sermon possibly-for so many of the other's-an entertaining novel. Each gets an assortment of goods by this traffic, such as he knows will suit his customers, out of a publication of which he could not, perhaps, sell a score of copies within his own circle; but a score sold in every bookselling circle in Germany gets rid of an edition. Suppose the work out and out stupid and unsaleable, still it has its value; it is exchangeable, should it be only at the value of wrapping-paper, for works less unsaleable, and puts the publisher in possession of a saleable stock and of a variety of works. His profit also not depending altogether upon the merit of the one work he publishes, but upon the assortment for sale he can make out of it by barter, he can afford to publish works of a much lower class as to merit, or saleable properties, than English publishers. The risk is divided, and also the loss, and not merely divided among all the booksellers who take a part of an edition in exchange for part of their own publications; but in effect is divided among the publications. The standard work, or the new publication of an author of celebrity, pays the risk or loss of the publisher of the bad, unsaleable work, as by it he is put in possession of the former, of the more saleable goods. The loss, also, compared to that of an English publisher, is trifling, because, although the German press can deliver magnificent books, yet the general taste of the public for neat, fine, well-finished productions in printing as in all the useful arts, is not by any means so fully developed as with us, and is satisfied with very inferior paper made of much cheaper materials. The publisher also is saved the very important expense of stitching, boarding, or binding all he publishes, by his own capital, the private buyer generally taking his books in sheets. The bound or made-up books in booksellers' shops are but few, and generally only those of periodical or light literature. The advantage to literature of this system into which the book trade has settled is,

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