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 success 
fully 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 main 
taining, 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 inter 
national 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