Page:Buddenbrooks vol 1 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0001mann).pdf/369

RV 357 (BUDDENBROOKS) grow under our feet. I am saying nothing against Överdieck, but he is getting on. If I were Burgomaster I’d make things move a little faster. I can’t tell you how pleased I am that they are installing gas for the street-lighting, and the miserable old oil-lamps are disappearing&mdash;I admit I had a little something to do with that change. Oh, how much there is to do! Times are changing, Wenzel, and we have many responsibilities toward the new age. When I think back to my boyhood&mdash;you know better than I do what the town looked like then: the streets without sidewalks, grass growing a foot high between the paving-stones, and the houses with porticos and benches sticking out into the streets&mdash;and our buildings from the time of the Middle Ages spoilt with clumsy additions, and all tumbling down because, while individuals had money and nobody went hungry, the town had none at all and just muddled along, as my brother-in-law calls it, without ever thinking of repairs. That was a happy and comfortable generation, when my grandfather’s crony, the good Jean Jacques Hofstede, strolled about the town and translated improper little French poems. They had to end, those good old times; they have changed, and they will have to change still more. Then the population was thirty-seven thousand: now it is fifty, you know, and the whole character of the place is altering. There is so much building, and the suburbs are spreading out, and we are able to have good streets and restore the old monuments out of our great period. Yet even all that is merely superficial. The most important matter is still outstanding, my dear Wenzel. I mean, of course, the ceterum censeo of my dear Father: the customs union. We must join, Wenzel; there should be no longer any question about it, and you must all help me fight for it. As a business man, believe me, I am better informed than the diplomats, and the fear that we should lose independence and freedom of action is simply laughable in this case. The Mecklenburg and Schleswig-Holstein Inland would take us in, which is the more desirable for the reason that we do not control the northern trade quite

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