GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION. In the ad ministrative system of Berlin, the municipal council, composed of 126 members, is elected for a term of six years; to insure continuity and sta bility in the council, one-third of its seats are vacated and filled every two years. The coun cil elects the mayor (burgomaster) and his imme diate advisers, and is in general the source of govenunental authority for the municipality ex cept in those branches of administration which are under the direct control of the National Gov ernment. (For further details see PaussiA, Local (7orernntrnt.) The police organization is under the control of the Minister of the Interior, and is subdivided into six departments. as fol lows: General police; factory inspection; build ing inspection; criminal police; passport and labor bureau; market and mounted police. The total force amounts to 4200 men. or about 25 men to each 10,000 inhabitants, which consti tutes a favorable comparison with 28 in Paris, 24 in London. and 20 in New York, to the same number of inhabitants.
The steady growth of the city and the increas ing number of functions performed by the munici pality have led to an increased city budget, which amounted to more than $20,000,000 in 1393-94, and to over $25,000,000 in 1900, not including the income and expenditure of various city works, amounting to over $12,000,000. The department requiring the largest expenditure is the building department. over $4,500,000: the board of educa tion spends about $3,500,000, whereas the police department requires about $1,500,000, and the board of health about $1,250,000. The total debt of the city amounted to 256,000,000 marks in 1893, and exceeded 237,000,000 in 1900. The numerous city improvements offset these items of expense and indebtedness. There is an ex tensive system of asphalt pavements, which have been continually increasing for the last 20 years. Two abattoirs erected in Berlin in 1S83 at a cost of 85,000,000 have supplanted about a thousand private slaughter-houses, and make it possible to enforce every regulation for health under a very efficient and cheap service. The civic water works yield a net income of 2,500,000 marks per year (in addition to supplying what is used for public needs), after defraying all the costs of operation and providing for the extinction of the debt incurred in erecting the plant. The sewerage system is on the most modern hygienic plan, all the city sewage being conducted, by means of a comprehensive system of sewers, to a sewage farm of about 30 square miles in extent, a few miles away. it required an outlay of $30,000,000
to perfect the system and buy the necessary land; but the city is already utilizing the farm to great advantage by raising thereon all kinds of vege tables, fruits, and cereals, and the accruing pro ceeds in -time will not only cover the entire cost of maintenance, but also pay off the original out lay. Berlin has a perfect system of street-clean ing. It is thoroughly organized tinder municipal control, and costs the city less than half a million dollars a year. Berlin owns its gas plant. Though not owning its street-car sys tem, which will become the property of the city at the expiration of the charter of the com pany in 1911, Berlin receives an annual sum from the company exceeding 1,000,000 marks. lts system of municipal market-halls recently intro duced is a worthy supplement to the other mu nicipal institutions which enable the city to enforce strictly all the sanitary measures and protect the poor against impure food and ex tortionate prices. A comprehensive system of parks and squares, some eighty in number, pro vides breathing-space for the most crowded por tions of the city.
The rapid growth of the city's population, re sulting in a great rise of real-estate led to great overcrowding of the poorer classes of the population in large tenements. Many of them were forced to live in cellars, which previous to the reforms mentioned below were damp and shut off from light. As a result there was an extremely high death-rate, varying in different parts of the city with the nature of the dwell ings. In 1873 the rate was 28 per 1000, and it continued to grow. In 1885 an exhaustive statis tical investigation was made, with a view to establishing the connection between the death rate and the number of rooms occupied by a fam ily. The results were Startling, showing an extra ordinary increase of the death-rate with the crowding into inhumanly narrow quarters. This caused the municipality to adopt a new stringent code of building regulations in 1SSS, which has been instrumental in greatly improving the con dition of the Berlin tenements, and diminishing the death-rate, as seen from the following sta tistics of mortality: 1885, 29.9S per 1000; 1890, 27.55; 1892, 26.06; 1897, 18.61; 1898, 18.16.