What You Weren't Taught In College

James W. Gerard wrote of the Germans in 1914:
"The workingmen in the cities are hard workers and probably work longer and get less out of life than any workingmen in the world. The laws so much admired and made ostensibly for their protection, such as insurance against unemployment, sickness, injury, old age etc., are in reality skillful measures which bind them to the soil as effectively as the serfs of the Middle Ages.
I have had letters from workingmen who have worked in America begging me for a steerage fare to America, saying that their insurance payments were so large that they could not save money out of their wages."
P. 124 from the book "My Four Years In Germany"