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The Jungfernstieg wears an air of leisurely elegance and pleasure-seeking prosperity.-Page 446.

T

HAMBURG AND ITS HARBOR

By Ralph D. Paine

HE rise of Germany as a naval power of the foremost rank has been flamboyant and startling. Her battleships, afloat and building, recently afflicted England with acute nightmares and have even influenced the United States to share in the ruinous scramble for bigger dreadnoughts, heavier guns, and more of them. With far less noise and alarm, however, the modern Germany has suffered a sea change of another and more formidable kind. Her armed fleet is as yet untried, its prestige is a matter for the experts to calculate on paper, but the merchant marine has challenged the supremacy of British ships and sailors and is waging a pacific war for the commerce of the world, from the Baltic to Zanzibar, and from China to Peru. The industrial empire of the Fatherland, militant, intelligent, and highly organized, has already demolished the ancient doctrine that Britannia rules the waves.

So small is the strip of coast and so few the harbors facing the cold, tempestuous

VOL. L.-41

North Sea that the German people have hammered out a maritime destiny for themselves rather by stress of circumstances than by natural inclination and environment. They were compelled to turn seaward because the land was overcrowded and they must find new markets for their wares. As a result of this economic pressure, the chief seaport, Hamburg, was marvellously quickened by the spirit of the new nation with its slogan "Made-in-Germany," and became the great gateway of traffic in manufactured products outward bound and of raw materials brought home from the ends of the earth. In its tonnage of shipping and merchandise, Hamburg has wrested second place from London, a fact to wonder at.

It is to be regretted that so many Americans hastily scan such statements as these, fight shy of the statistics usually accompanying them, and contemplate Hamburg merely as a port of entry and departure for transatlantic steamers filled with persons bent on going somewhere else with all possible despatch. True, the city has almost

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no ruins and somewhat lacks the atmosphere of oderiferous dilapidation so ardently sought and gloated over by those pilgrims who would get their money's worth during a summer abroad. The people are clean, busy, and self-respecting, and they have made a beautiful metropolis of this capital of the Free State of Hamburg, and ancient Hansa town.

In that dimly remote age when Charlemagne wielded the mailed fist, a castle was built on a hill between the Elbe and a confluent little river called the Alster as an outpost of defence against the Slavs. Through the succeeding centuries the shipping sought the deeper water of the Elbe and the road to the sea, and, as elsewhere, the old town huddled close to the wharves and warehouses. In times more modern the city spread around the pleasant, wooded Alster. Instead of dredging this stream and defiling its banks with sheds and docks and bulkheads, a sense of beauty moved the Teutonic mind to transform it into a lake, preserved inviolate for the enjoyment of all good Hamburgers now and hereafter. And so, like a great jewel, the Alster shines in the very midst of the city which looks out upon a sort of fairy-land from its boulevards, hotels, offices, and stores.

There are really two lakes, separated by a bridge of noble architecture, the smaller in the business quarter of Hamburg, the larger extending spaciously in a region of villas, parks, gardens, and promenades where dwell the wealthy merchants and others on whom fortune has smiled. Small steamers ply between the Binnen-Alster and the Aussen-Alster, and instead of being shot home through jammed and stifling subways, these favored commuters are wafted over the pleasant water while the bands are playing in the pavilions on shore and the sailing yachts skim to and fro.

Like other North Sea ports, Antwerp and Amsterdam, for instance, Hamburg has a net-work of ancient canals and basins and is a city which seems more or less afloat; but this bright expanse of the Alster, so lovingly conserved and beautified, is unique among the world's great centres of trade. Commerce may be sordid and money-getting a soulless business, but your German, who is eminently successful at both, is in his heart the most sentimental of beings. In proof of which seeming paradox, please

to tarry in Hamburg long enough to descry the Alster. There are great cities, no names need be mentioned, in which this lovely sheet of water would have been regarded as so much waste area to be filled in by the dump-cart of the contractor, plotted and staked by the real estate operator, and blighted with brick and mortar by the building speculator.

As one passes along the Jungfernstieg or the Alsterdamm, handsome thoroughfares which border the smaller lake, it is not easy to realize that the clamorous, grimy business of a vast harbor is surging no more than a few minutes' walk distant. The Jungfernstieg wears an air of leisurely elegance and pleasure-seeking prosperity. The restaurants are crowded, there is much excellent music and hearty eating and drinking, a great display of automobiles and smartly turned-out carriages suggesting Fifth Avenue, Unter den Linden, or Piccadilly. At home or abroad, people with money to spend for luxuries buy things pretty much alike and travel the same merry-go-round of fashions and diversions.

These first impressions veer to another tack as one becomes better acquainted with the life of Hamburg. Its leisure class is much smaller than appears, the glitter is mostly on the surface, and nobody thinks less of his neighbor because he harkens diligently to the gospel of hard work. A hundred years ago our own ports of Boston and Salem, then filled with deep-water ships, were notable for a merchant aristocracy engaged in commerce over seas. The sons of these families went from the solid, squaresided brick mansions to the counting-rooms on the wharves, and thence to forecastle and cabin, earning promotion step by step until they gained command of East Indiamen and China tea packets, quitting the sea thereafter to become merchants ashore and owners of square-rigged fleets. Before this era had vanished Harriet Martineau, visiting Salem, remarked of its society:

"These enterprising merchants speak of Fayal and the Azores as if they were close at hand. They have a large acquaintance

at Cairo. They know the grave of Napoleon at St. Helena and have wild tales to tell of Mozambique and Madagascar and stores of ivory to show from there. They speak of the power of the king of Muscat and are sensible of the riches of Arabia.

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Main Entrance of the Emigrant Station or "model town.'

Anybody will give you anecdotes from Canton and descriptions of the Society and Sandwich Islands."

On a far larger scale, for its population falls just short of a million, these social conditions are very typical of the Hamburg of to-day. The manufacturing interests are large and varied but her absorbing af fairs are those of the sea and her most powerful citizens are the lords of commerce. New York is the new Babel, so the census tells us, and London houses all races under Heaven, but unless one takes pains to seek out the foreign quarters, the one city appears thoroughly American, the other as completely British. Hamburg is German

to the backbone, but there is a sensible difference. Its spirit is more genuinely cosmopolitan. It is the meeting place of the long trails from everywhere to anywhere. Whether it be in a dingy Rathskeller of the harbor front or in the most pretentious dining hall of the Jungfernstieg, there is talk in other languages than German, there are faces from other climes to pique the curiosity, and there is the tang of romance and mystery inspired by these glimpses beyond the horizon.

The ear becomes accustomed to hearing Spanish spoken wherever people congregate for business or pleasure. A great part of the trade of South and Central America flows through Hamburg, whose steamers are to be found in every port of both coasts. Hither come the cattle kings of the Argentine, the rich merchants of Lima and Valparaiso, the dictators of explosive little republics, the coffee magnates of Brazil, who will talk to you in Portuguese

as well as French and Spanish. Pervasive, too, is the German travelling salesman, as great a rover as the Hamburg sailor, who swings around the globe in a most enchanting orbit and spices the chat of the restaurants with tales of Capetown, Batavia, or Nagasaki. He it is who has caused England much disquietude and gloom, for this ubiquitous person, linguist, diplomat, and trading expert, fills the holds of Hamburg ships with cargoes for the markets of every ocean.

In divers other ways, the people and the interests of distant countries weave themselves into the fabric of one's impressions of Hamburg. New York is the greatest of

seaports, but its maritime atmosphere is bounded by the water front, and small interest is taken in seafaring. Its old men own no ships and its young men have no desire to seek blue water, which has been given over to the foreigner. A hundred of the finest ocean steamers that pass in by Sandy Hook might go to the bottom and if there were no American passengers on board, the only mourners in New York would be the underwriters' agents. The socalled steamship trust or "combine," organized in this country with a great fanfare of trumpets, has passed into English control and recalls unhappy memories cf misdirected financial and commercial endeavor.

Hamburg owns great fleets of its own ships and her sons are in them. Ties stronger than those of trade link the homes of this port with isles and roadsteads scattered and remote, east of Suez and under the Southern Cross. All this inti

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mate interest in the affairs of the sea is bound to make itself felt, to take hold of the imagination, before ever you have a glimpse of the shipping itself. That one does not have to go first to the harbor to know he is in an immensely active and prosperous seaport is curious in a way. It could hardly be said of Herald Square or Central Park West.

On the Alsterdamm, facing the inner lake, is a building, vast and dignified, which many a monarch of sorts would deem worthy to be added to his collection of palaces. This is the home of the Hamburg-Americkanische Packetfahrt Actien-Gesellschaft, a few of whose ships comprise what New

York knows as the Hamburg-American Line. It may surprise sundry of our tourists to know that this is only one of fifty routes travelled by the vessels of this, the greatest of shipping corporations, whose house-flag flies above the decks of four hundred steamers manned by twenty-three thousand officers and seamen who visit three hundred and fifty ports during the year. When statistics are as large and eloquent as these, it is difficult to pass them by on the other side. It would be something to remember if the four hundred captains of the Hamburg-American ships could be assembled in this building whence they receive their sailing orders that take them

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