To  the  President  of  the  Board  of  Trade.
Sir,
The  volume  which  I  have  the  honour  to  submit  herewith  embodies  the
results  of  the  second  part  of  the  enquiry  now  being  conducted  by  the  Board  of
Trade,  in  accordance  with  your  directions,  with  regard  to  the  cost  of  living  and
the  well-being  of  the  working  classes  in  industrial  towns  in  some  of  the  principal
commercial  countries.  The  first  volume,  relating  to  towns  in  the  United
Kingdom,  has  already  been  published  (Cd.  3864).
The  present  Report  refers  to  the  German  Empire,  in  which  33  representative
towns  have  been  investigated  containing  an  aggregate  population  of  some  nine
millions.  As  in  the  case  of  the  United  Kingdom,  the  enquiry  related  to  rents
and  housing,  prices  of  commodities  and  cost  of  living  of  the  working  classes,
together  with  the  rates  of  wages  and  hours  of  labour  prevailing  in  certain
trades.  The  particulars  obtained,  together  with  a  good  deal  of  supplementary
information  on  matters  relating  to  local  industrial  conditions,  are  given  in  detail
under  the  various  towns,  and  the  most  important  results  of  the  enquiry  are
summarised  in  the  preliminary  Memorandum,  which  also  contains  a  section
comparing  these  results  so  far  as  possible  with  the  corresponding  information
for  English  towns  contained  in  the  recently  published  Report.
Any  precise  statistical  comparison  of  cost  of  living  in  Germany  and
England  is  by  no  means  a  simple  matter.  Even  when  all  the  difficulties  of
maintaining  the  same  standard  of  investigation  throughout  have  been  successfully ­
  overcome,  there  remains  a  difficulty  inherent  in  the  nature  of  things
arising  from  the  different  habits  and  modes  of  living  in  the  two  countries.  The
point  is  well  illustrated  by  the  interesting  result  obtained  from  the  present
investigation,  that  an  English  workman  migrating  to  Germany,  and  maintaining, ­
  so  far  as  possible,  his  own  standard  of  living,  would  find  the  cost  of
rent,  food,  and  fuel  raised  by  about  one-fifth,  while  the  German  workman  who
migrated  to  England,  but  retained  his  own  habits  of  living,  would  find  his
expenditure  on  the  same  items  reduced  by  less  than  one  half  that  amount.
While  attention  is  called  in  the  report  to  this  essential  ambiguity  in  international ­
  comparisons,  the  subject  is  naturally  treated  for  the  most  part  in  the
present  Report  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  English  workman.
The  comparison  of  the  rates  of  wages  has  been  confined  to  certain  standard
trades,  as  in  the  United  Kindom  Report,  for  the  reasons  stated  in  full  in  that
volume.  The  general  result  of  the  comparison  is  to  show  that  in  German
towns,  the  workmen  engaged  in  these  trades  receive  about  1  7  per  cent,  less  in
money  wages  in  return  for  a  week’s  work  of  about  10  per  cent,  longer  duration
than  the  corresponding  English  workmen.  In  other  words,  their  hourly  rate  of
money  remuneration  is  about  three-quarters  of  the  corresponding  English  rate,
while  the  cost  of  food,  rent,  and  fuel  (measured  by  the  English  standard)  is
about  one-fifth  higher.
2000  Wt  8738  6/08  D  &  8  1  29088