Professor Zorn writes: “The possibility that while our Emperor was seeking rest and refreshment in Norwegian waters and enjoying the beauties of the Norwegian landscape, English ships were lying in readiness to annihilate German ships.” It is hard to believe that such lunatic lies can come from the pen of a professor in good standing.
“Ohne zu übertreiben kann man sagen dass heute nur der allerkleinste Teil der deutschen Presse geneigt ist, den Engländern Gerechtigkeit widerfahren zu lassen, bei Behandlung allgemeiner Fragen sich auch einmal auf den englischen Standpunkt der Betrachtung wenigstens zeitweise zu versetzen. England ist fur viele ‘der’ Feind an sich, und em Feind dem man keine Rücksichten schuldet.”
(“It is no exaggeration to say that nowadays only the tiniest minority of the German press is inclined to do justice to the English by at least occasionally looking at questions from the British point of view. England is for many the enemy of enemies and an enemy to whom no consideration is due.”) Thus writes one of the cooler heads in theKölnische Zeitung.
Doctor Herbert von Dirksen, of Bonn, writing of the Monroe Doctrine, says: “By what right does America attempt to check the strongest expansion policy of all other nations of the earth?” During the Boer war Germany was showered with post-cards and caricatures of the English. British soldiers with donkey heads marched past Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales; the venerable Queen Victoria is pictured plucking the tail feathers from an ostrich which she holds across her knees; the three generals, Methuen, Buller, and Gatacre, take off their faces to discover the heads of an ass, a sheep, and a cow; Chamberlain is depicted as the instigator of the war, with his pockets and hands full of African shares; a parade of the stock-exchange volunteers depicts them as all Jews, with the Prince of Wales as a Jew reviewing them; the Prince of Wales is pictured surrounded by vulgar women, who ask, “Say, Fatty, you are not going to South Africa?” to which the Prince replies, “No, I must stay here to take care of the widows and orphans!” English soldiers are depicted in the act of hitting and kicking women and children.
In the war with Denmark in 1864 the Austrian navy met with a disaster at sea. A German publicist even then wrote: “I was grieved at the demonstrations of joy about this in the English Parliament. It was not sympathy with the Danes but petty spite and malice at the defeat of a foreign fleet. But at the same time it is a consolatory proof that the English are afraid of the future German navy.” This quotation is interesting as showing how far back the quarrel dates.
It would be merely a question of how much time one cares to devote to scissors and paste to multiply these examples of Germany’s journalistic and professorial state of mind. It is unfortunate that some of this writing in the press is done by those who are often in consultation with the Emperor, and on some political subjects his advisers. I have suggested in another chapter that Germany suffers far more from the theoretical and book-learned gentlemen who surround the Emperor than from his indiscretions. In more than one instance his indiscretions were due to their blundering. Their knowledge of books far surpasses their knowledge of men, and nothing can be more dangerous to any nation than to be counselled and guided by pedants rather than by men of the world. This projecting a world from the gaseous elements of one’s own cranium and dealing with that world, instead of the world that exists, is a danger to everybody concerned.
“Bedauernswert sei es allerdings, dass wir in unserem politischen Leben nicht mit gentlemen zu thun haben, dies sei aber em Begriff der uns überhaupt abgehe,” writes Prince Hohenlohe in his memoirs. (“It is of all things most to be regretted that in our political life we do not have gentlemen to deal with, but this is a conception of which we are totally deficient.”)
A daring colonial secretary, speaking in the Reichstag of certain scandals in the German colonies, said bluntly: “A reprehensible caste feeling has grown up in our colonies, the conception of a gentleman being in England different from that in Germany.”
When Lord Haldane came to Berlin, on his mission to discover if possible a working basis for more friendly relations between the two countries, his eyes were greeted in the windows of every book-shop with books and pamphlets with such titles as “Krieg oder Frieden mit England,” “Das Perfide Albion,” “Deutschland und der Islam,” “Ist England kriegslustig,” “Deutschland sei Wach,” “England’s Weltherrschaft und die deutsche Luxusflotte,” “John Bull und wir,” and a long list of others, all written and advertised to keep alive in the German people a sense of their natural antagonism to England.
During the last year the “Letters of Bergmann” brought up again the controversy, that should have been left to die, over the treatment of the Emperor Friedrich by an English surgeon.
In discussing Senator Lodge’s resolution before the United States Senate, on the Monroe Doctrine, the German press spoke of us as “hirnverbrannte Yankees,” “bornierte Yankeegehirne” (“crazy Yankees,” “provincial Yankee intellects”); and the words “Dollarika,” “Dollarei,” and “Dollarman” are further malicious expressions of their envy, frequently used. The Germans are persistently taught that there are neither scholars nor students in America or in England. One worthy writes: “Die Engländer lernen nichts. Der Sport lässt ihnen keine Zeit dazu. Man ist hinterher auch zu müde.”
I am always very glad, when I happen to be in Europe, that I belong to a nation that can afford to take these flings with the greatest good-humor. As the burly soldier replied when questioned in court as to why he allowed his small wife to beat him: “It pleases her and it don’t hurt I.”
This struggle for recognition as a great nation, to be received on equal terms by the rest of us, has upset the nerves of certain classes in Germany, and among them the untravelled and small-town-dwelling professor.
I am a craftsman in letters myself, in a small way, but I am no believer that books are the only key to life, or the only way to find a solution for its riddles and problems. Life is language, and books only the dictionaries; men are the text, books only the commentaries. Books are only good as a filter for actual experiences. A man must have a rich and varied experience of men and women before he can use books to advantage. Life is varied, men and women many, while the individual life is short; wise men read books, therefore, to enrich their experience, not merely as the pedant does, to garner facts. “J’étudie les livres en attendant que J’étudie les hommes,” writes Voltaire. “Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life,” writes Stevenson.
Montgolfier sees a woman’s skirt drying and notices that the hot air fills it and lifts it, and this gives him the idea for a balloon.
Denis Papin sees the cover lifted from a pot by the steam, and there follow the myriad inventions in which steam is the driving power.
Newton, dozing under an apple-tree, is hit on the head by a falling apple, and there follows the law of gravitation.
Franklin flies a kite, and a shock of electricity starts him upon the road to his discoveries.
Archimedes in his bath notices that his body seems to grow lighter, and there follows the great law which bears his name.
These are the foundation-stones upon which the whole house of science is built, and no one of them was dug out of a book. Charlemagne could not read, and Napoleon, when he left school for Paris, carried the recommendation from his master that he might possibly become a fair officer of marines, but nothing more! A capital example of the ability of the man of books to measure the abilities of the man of the world.
Reading and writing are modern accomplishments, and we grossly exaggerate their importance as man-makers. That, it has always been my contention, is the fatal fallacy of modern education, and you may see it carried to its extreme in Germany, for men who have not lived broadly are merely hampered by books. It is as though one studied a primer with an etymological dictionary at his side. Germans are renowned writers of commentaries, but you cannot deal with men and with life by the aid of commentaries. Exegesis solves no international quarrels, and the mastery of men is not gained with dictionaries and grammars.
We are all prone to forget the end in the means, for the end is far away and the means right under our noses. We all recognize, when we are pulled up short and made to think, that, after all, the arts and letters, religion and philosophy and statecraft, are for one ultimate purpose, which is to develop the complete man. Everything must be measured by its man-making power. Ideas that do not grow men are sterile seed. Men who do not move other men to action and to growth are not to be excused because they stir men to the merely pleasant tickling of thinking lazily and feeling softly. Thus Lincoln was a greater man than Emerson; Bismarck a greater than Lessing; Cromwell a greater than Bunyan; Napoleon a greater than Corneille and Racine; Pericles greater than Plato; and Caesar greater than Virgil.
The man who only makes maps for the mind is only half a man, until his thinking, his influence, his dreams and enthusiasms take on the potency of a man and come into action. Even if men of action do evil, as some of those I mention have done, they have translated theories into palpable things that permit men to judge whether they be good or bad; and the really great artists, thinkers, and saints are as fertile as though they were female, and gave birth, to living things. Their thinking is a form of action. The real test of successful organization is the thoroughness of the thinking behind it; on the other hand, the only test of thinking is the success of the thought in actual execution, and the Germans often take this too much for granted. We really know and hold as an inalienable intellectual possession only what we have gained by our own effort, and with a certain degree of actual exertion. People who have never worked out their own salvation always join, at last, that large class in the body politic who don’t know what they want, and who will never be happy till they get it.
When it comes to dealing with inanimate things, books of rules are invaluable. Hence, in chemistry, physics, archaeology, philology, exegesis, the Germans have forged ahead; their intellectual street-cleaning is unsurpassed; but the ship of state needs not only men to take observations and to read charts, but men to trim the sails to the fitful breezes, the blustering winds, the tempests and the changing currents of life. They must know, too, the methods, the manners, the habits of other men who sail the seas of life. It is just here that the German fails; he lacks the confidence of experience, and bursts into bluster and bravado. He is a believer in vicarious experience, and is as little likely to be saved by it, in this world at least, as he is by vicarious sacrifice.
His imagination does not make allowances for either England or America. He does not see, for example, that the Monroe Doctrine is not open for discussion for the simple reason that America has announced it as American policy; just as Prussia took part three times in the dismemberment of Poland; just as Prussia pounced upon Silesia; just as Germany took Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig-Holstein and Frankfort, and held the ring while Austria-Hungary bagged Bosnia and Herzegovina, and by the word of her Emperor, promised to do the same thing for Russia, when Japan declared war against her. We have decided that we will have no European sovereignty in South America, and this side war, that is the end of the matter, call it the Monroe Doctrine or what you will. It only makes for uneasiness and bad temper to discuss it. It is the national American policy. It may be right or wrong theoretically, but international law has nothing to do with it. The German professors who discuss it from that stand-point, are beating the air and raising a dust in the world’s international drawing-room.
This German mania for translating facts back into philosophy and then dancing through a discussion of theories is not understood, much less appreciated, by the rest of the world. We can never get on if we are to introduce the discussion of the lines of every new battle-ship by arguments as to the sea-worthiness of the ark. Those of us who control a quarter of the habitable globe, and the inhabitants thereof, are much too busy to discuss the legal aspects of the land-grabbing of the Pharaohs. Geography is not metaphysics, but it is wofully hard for the professorial mind to grasp this.
“Given a mouse’s tail, and he will guessWith metaphysic quickness at the mouse.”
In much the same way German statesmen and the German press do not understand, or do not care to understand, that British statesmen when they speak in the House of Commons, or when they go to the country asking increased appropriations for the navy, must give some reason for their request. There is only one reason, and that is that there is a growing navy across the North Sea, which, whether now it is or is not a menace, may be a menace to their ship-fed island, and they must have ships and men and guns enough to guard the sea-lanes which their food-laden ships must sail through.
They may be awkward sometimes in their expression of this self-evident fact, they may call their own fleet a necessity and the other fleet a luxury, but that is a negligible question of verbal manners; the fact remains that their fleet is, and all the world knows it is, and it is laughable to discuss it, the prime necessity of their existence.
As long as we Christians have given up any shred of belief in Christian ethics, as applicable to international disputes, we must live by the law of the strongest. We do not bless the poor in spirit, but the self-confident; we do not bless the meek, but the proud; we do not bless the peace-makers, but those who urge us to prepare for war; we do not bless the reviled and the persecuted and the slandered, but those who revolt against injustice and tyranny; we do not approve the cutting off of the right hand, but admire the mailed fist; and it is only adding to the confusion to raise millions for war ourselves, and then to present a handsomely bound copy of the Beatitudes to our rivals.
I shall be wantonly misunderstood if these reflections be taken as a criticism of Germany. This situation involves Germany in censure no more than other nations. It is only that Germany shows herself to be somewhat childish and peevishly provincial, in girding at an unchangeable situation, either in South America or in the North Sea.
This is not altogether Germany’s fault. She is suffering from growing pains, and from grave internal unrest. She is only just of age as a nation, and her constitution is so inflexible that it is a constant source of irritation. She is governed by an autocracy, and the two strongest parties numerically in her Reichstag are the party of the Catholics and the party of the Socialists. She has built up a tremendous trade on borrowed capital, and every gust of wind in the money market makes her fidgety. Her population increases at the rate of some 800,000 a year, but her educational system produces such a surplus of laborers who wish to work in uniforms, or in black coats and stiff collars, that there is a dearth of agricultural laborers, and she imports 700,000 Hungarians, Poles, Slays, and Italians every year to harvest her crops.
This same system of education has taught youths to think for themselves before either the mental or moral muscles are tough enough, with the result that she is the agnostic and materialistic nation of Europe, and her capital the most licentious and immoral in Europe.
This is the result of secular education everywhere. Freedom of thought, yes, but not freedom of thought any more than freedom of morals, or freedom of manners, or political freedom, in extreme youth; that only makes for anarchy political, mental, and moral.
There is much undigested, not to say indigestible, republicanism about just now in China and in Portugal, for example; just as there are materialism and agnosticism in Germany and in France, not due to super-intellectualism but to juvenile thinking. The Chinese are just as fit for a republic - an actual republic is still a long way off - as are callow German youths, and notoriety-loving French students, for freedom to disbelieve and to destroy. No country can long survive a majority of women teachers in the public schools, together with no Bible and no religious teaching there. I have no prejudices favoring orthodoxy, but I have a fairly wide experience which has given me one article of a creed that I would go to the stake for, and that is that it is of all crimes the worst to give freedom political, moral, or religious to those who are unprepared for it.
Germany’s taste in literature, once so natural and healthy, has become morbid, and Sudermann and Gorky and Oscar Wilde, and the rest of the unhealthy crew who swarm about the morgues, the dissecting-rooms, and the houses of assignation of life, theinternuntiata libidinum, the leeringconciliatricesof the dark streets, are her favorites now. There is no surer sign of mental ill-health than a taste for lowering literature, an appetite for this self-dissecting, this complacent, self-contemplating form of intellectual exercise.
This is no heated assault on German culture. It is a natural phase of development. Youthful candidates for worldliness all go through this pornocratic stage. “The impudence of the bawd is modesty, compared with that of the convert,” writes the Marquis of Halifax. The German professor and the German bourgeois in their Rake’s Progress are only a little more awkward, a little more heavy-handed, a little coarser in speech, than others, that is all. The period of twenty-five years during which I have known Germany has developed before my eyes the concomitants of vast and rapid industrial and commercial progress, and they are: a love of luxury, a great increase in gambling, a materialistic tone of mind, a wide-spread increase of immorality, and a tendency to send culture to the mint, and to the market-place to be stamped, so that it may be readily exchanged for the means of soft living. These internal changes account to some extent for her restless external policy. A man’s digestion has a good deal to do with the color of the world when he looks at it. There is more yellow in life from biliousness, than from the state of the atmosphere.
Aside from these domestic causes there is no reason why Germany should take a sentimental or pious view of these questions of international amity. Her own history is development by war. “Any war is a good war when it is undertaken to increase the power of the state,” said Frederick the Great. “Nur das Volk wird eine gesicherte Stellung in der Welt haben, das von kriegerischen Geiste erfüllt ist” (“Only that nation will hold a safe place in the world which is imbued with a warlike spirit”) writes Germany’s great military philosopher Clausewitz.
We took Cuba and the Philippines; England took India, Hong Kong, and Egypt; Japan took Korea and southern Manchuria; Italy took Tripoli; France took Fez; Russia took Finland and northern Manchuria; Austria-Hungary took Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Prussia and Germany have a long list, including Silesia, Poland, Hanover, and Alsace-Lorraine. Austria-Hungary tears up the Berlin treaty; France, Germany, and Spain tear up the Algeciras treaty; Italy tears up the treaty of Paris; and it is part of the game that we should all hold up our hands, avert our faces, and thank God that we are not as other men are, when these things are done. The justifications of these actions are all of the most pious and penitent description. We were forced to do so, we say, in order to hasten the bringing in of our own specially patented and exclusive style of the kingdom of heaven, but outside of perhaps India and Egypt, and the Philippines, it would be hard to find to-day any trace of the promised kingdom. Germany, for example, had nine per cent. of Moroccan trade, the total of Moroccan trade with all countries only amounted to $27,500,000 a year, and she was compelled to interfere for the protection of her traders, forsooth! The outcome of the business, after an exciting situation lasting for months, was that Germany got a slice of territory from France, mostly swamps, which reaches from the Congo to the Atlantic Ocean, and reported to be, by her own engineers, uninhabitable.
It is the pleasant formula of polite statesmen and politicians to say, that it is a pity that Germany came into the world competition a hundred years too late, when the best colonies had been parcelled out among the other powers. This is a superficial view of the case, and misses the real point of the present envy, hatred, malice, and uncharitableness. Germany does not want colonies, and has no ability of the proper kind, and no willing and adventurous population to settle them, if she had. Prussia’s dealing with aborigines is a subject for comic opera.
Germany came into the modern world as a dreamer, as a maker of melodies, as a singer of songs, as a sort of post-graduate student in philosophy and in theoretical, and later applied science. She introduced us to classical philology, to modern methods of historical research, to the comparative study of ethnic religions, to daring and scholarly exegesis, to the study of the science of language. She discovered Shakespeare to the English; Eduard Mätzner and Eduard Müller, and German scholars in the study of phonetics, have written our English grammars and etymological dictionaries for us, and helped to lay the foundations for knowledge of our own language. Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, one need not mention more, attempted to pass beyond the bounds of human experience and to formulate laws for the process; Schleiermacher, maintaining that Christian faith is a condition of devout feeling, a fact of inward experience, an object which may be observed and described, had an unbounded influence in America, and many are the ethical discourses I have listened to which owed more to Schleiermacher than to their authors. Humboldt, Liebig, Bunsen, Helmholtz, Johannes Müller, Von Baer, Virchow, Koch, Diesel, even the British and American man in the street, with little interest in such matters, knows some of these names; while Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are symbols of revolt, whose names are flung into an argument by many who only know their names, but who fondly suppose that the one stands for despair and suicide, and the other for the joy and unbridled license of the strong man.
Reckoning by epochs, it was only yesterday that Germany said to the world: “No more of this!”
“Hang up philosophy!Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,Displant a town, reverse a prince’s doom,It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more!”
Of a sudden our scholar threw off his gown and cap, and said: “I propose to play base-ball and foot-ball with you, I propose to have a hand in the material spoils of life, I propose to have a seat at the banquet and to propose toasts and to be toasted!” Faust of a sudden left his gloomy, cobwebby laboratory, flung a fine cloak over his shoulders, stuck a dandy feather in his cap, buckled on a rapier, and began roistering with the best of us. We sneered and smiled at first, let us be frank and admit it. We did not think much of this new buck. We had little fear that the professor, even if he took off his spectacles and slippers and dressing-gown, and exchanged his pipe for a cigarette, would cut much of a figure as a lover. He was new to the game, we were old hands at it, but the first thing we knew he had given the world’s mistress, France, a scolding, and flung her into a corner, a cowering heap of outraged finery; and she has only been safe ever since in the rôle of a sort of mistress of England on board- wages.
A new cock in the barn-yard is never received with great cordiality. He must win his place and his power with his beak and his spurs. We all of us had enough to do before this fellow came along. We are a little jealous of him, we are all uneasier because he is about, and he has done so well at our games, now that he has indeed hung up philosophy, that we are not even sure that it is safe to take him on in a serious match. We have endeavored, therefore, to keep him occupied with his own neighbors, to whom we have extended our best wishes and our moral backing, which is known as keeping the balance of power in Europe.
But a new Germany has come into the world. Germany nowadays has a large class, as have the rest of us, who belong to that increasing number of extraordinary people who want money without even knowing how to get on without it. The only satisfactory test of the right to wealth is the ability to get on without it. One of modern civilization’s most dangerous pitfalls is the subversive doctrine that all men shall have wealth, even before they have proved their ability to do without it. Germany is gradually arriving at this puny stage of culture, whose beginnings may be said to date from that ominous year for culture, 1492, when Lorenzo di Medici died and Columbus discovered America!
During all this time statesmen have insisted that there is no good reason why Germany and England should not be on good terms; gentlemen of various trades and professions from both countries, speaking halting English or embarrassed German, as the case may be, cross each other’s boundaries, comment upon the beauties of the respective countries, and overeat themselves in ponderous endeavors to appear cordial and appreciative. Mayors and aldermen swap stories and compliments over turtle and sherry, or over sauerkraut and Johannisberger; bands of students visit Oxford or Heidelberg, and there is a chorus of praise of Goethe from one side, of Shakespeare from the other; and all the while there is an unceasing antiphonal of grimaces and abuse in the press. Not even when Germany exports her latest stage novelties to London, and pantomimic platitudes are dandled under colored lights, does the turmoil of martial talk cease. Not even Teutonic lechery, in the guise of Reinhartian art, dressed in nothing but silence, and making faces at the British censor on the boards of the music-halls, avails anything.
Of course all this is nuts to the irresponsible journalists, to the manufacturers of powder, guns, and ships, and to politicians and diplomats out of employment; but it is hard on the taxpayer, who has no dividends from manufacturers of lethal weapons and ships, nor from newspapers, and no notoriety from the self-imposed jobs of the unofficial diplomats.
Perhaps of all these factors the press, in its wild gamble to make money out of sensationalism, is most to blame. The press, for the sake of gain, has soiled and soured the milk of human kindness by exposing it, carelessly and unceasingly, to the pathogenic dangers of the dust of the street and the gutter. It is wholly unfitting and always demoralizing when the priest, the politician, and the journalist turn their attention to private gain. Any one of these three who makes a great fortune out of his profession is damned by that fact alone. The only payment, beyond a living, that these three should look to is, respect, consideration, and the honor of serving the state unselfishly and wisely. The world will be all the happier when there are no more Shylocks permitted in any of these professions.
Germany is autocratic, philosophical, and continental; England is democratic, political, and insular. It is hopeless to suppose that the great mass of the people of one country will understand the other, and, for this is the important point, it is wholly unnecessary.
We get on best and with least friction with people whom we do not understand in the least. A man may have known and liked people with whose aims, opinions, employment, creeds he has the smallest sympathy. One may mention such diverse personalities as John L. Sullivan, the prize-fighter, Cardinal Rampolla, Mr. Roosevelt, Doctor Jameson, the Kaiser, President Diaz of Mexico, numerous Jew financiers, Lord Haldane the scholar-statesman, and a long list of professors, pious priests, sportsmen, and idlers, not to speak of Hindus and Mohammedans, Japanese and Chinese, and half a dozen Sioux chiefs. With these gentlemen, a few of many with whom one may have been upon such pleasant terms that they have even confided in him and trusted him with their secrets, one may have passed many pleasant hours. It probably never entered such a man’s head to wonder whether they liked him, and he never discussed with them the question of his liking for them. We get on by keeping our own personalities, prejudices, and creeds intact. There is no other way.
Other men will give even a more diverse list of friends and acquaintances, and never for a moment dream that there is any mystery in being friends with all. Nothing is ever gained by flattery. To the serious man flattery in the form of sincere praise makes him more responsible and only sadder, because he knows how much he falls below what is expected of him, and what he expects of himself. Lip-flattery makes a real man feel as though his sex had been mistaken, he feels as though he had been given curling-tongs instead of a razor for his morning toilet. These pompous flatteries that pass between Germany and England to-day, make both sides self-conscious and a little ashamed to write and to speak them, and to hear and applaud them.
America and England are shortly to celebrate the signing of the treaty of Ghent, which marks a hundred years of peace between the two nations. We have not been without opportunities to quarrel. We have whole classes of people in America who detest England, and in England there are not a few who do not conceal successfully their contempt for America, but we have had peace, and since England, at the time of our war with Spain, said “Hands off!” to the powers that wished to interfere, there has been a great increase of friendly feeling. But there has been little or no flattery passing back and forth. We have sent ambassador after ambassador to England who were almost more American than the Americans. Phelps and Lowell and Hay and Choate and Reid were all American in name, in tradition, in their successes, and in their way of looking at life. By their learning, their wit, and their criticisms, by their writing and speaking, by their presentation of the claims to greatness of our great men, by their unhesitating avowal in public and in private of their allegiance to the ideals of the republic they served, they have made clear the American point of view. Above all, they have shown their pride in their own country by acknowledging and praising the great qualities of England and the English. There has been no fulsome flattery, no bowing the knee to foreign idols, and what has been the result? The American ambassador for years has been the most popular diplomatic figure in Great Britain. An increasing number of Englishmen even, nowadays, know who Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln were, and our understanding of one another has grown rapidly out of this frank and manly attitude. We were jealous and suspicious a hundred years ago, as are England and Germany to-day, but we have changed all that by our attitude of good-humored independence, and by eliminating altogether from our intercourse the tainted delicacy of compliment, and the canting endearments of the diplomatic cocotte. We have emphasized our differences to the great benefit of the fine qualities that we have and cherish in common.
The individual Protestant does not dislike the individual Papist, half so much as he dislikes his neighbor in the next pew, who refuses Sunday after Sunday to repeat the service and the creed at the same pace as the others, and hence to “descend into Hell” with the rest of the congregation. The Sioux chief was far more annoyed by his neighbor of the same tribe in the next-door reservation than he was by me. The pugilist scorned “Tug” Wilson, a brother fisticuffs sovereign, but had no feeling against his parish priest. Theological protagonists are notoriously bitter against one another, but we have all found many of them amiable companions ourselves. It is the fellow next door, who wears purple socks, or who parts his hair in the middle, or who wears his coat-sleeves longer than our tailor cuts ours, or who eats his soup with a noise, or who has damp hands, or talks through his nose, who irritates us and makes us wish occasionally for the unlimited club-using freedom of the stone age. It is your first cousin with incurable catarrh, and a slender income who is too much with you, and who spoils your temper, not the anarchist orator who threatens your property and almost your life.
“What do these Germans want?” asked a distinguished cabinet minister of me. “They want consideration,” I replied, “which is the most difficult thing in the world for the Englishman to offer anybody.” “But, you don’t mean to say,” he continued, “that they really want to cut our throats on account of our bad manners?” I cannot phrase it better, nor can I give a more illuminating illustration of the misunderstanding. That is exactly the reason, and the paramount reason, why nations and why individuals attempt to cut one another’s throats. Whatever the fundamental differences may have been that have led to war between nations, the tiny spark that started the explosion has always been some phase of rudeness or bad manners.
Counting my school-days, I can remember about a dozen personal conflicts in which I have engaged, with pardonable pleasure. Not one of them was a question of territory, or religious difference, or of racial hatred; indeed, the last one was due to being shouldered in the street when my equanimity was already disturbed by a lingering recovery from a feverish cold.
It is, after all, the little differences that count. If politically and socially Germany were a little more sure of herself, if she were not everomnia tuta timens Dido; and if England were not as ever quite so sure of herself, I believe intercourse between them would be less strained.
“The little gnat-like buzzings shrill,The hurdy-gurdies of the street.The common curses of the will-These wrap the cerements round our feet.”
The smothered voice, the tepid manner, the affected and hesitating under-statement, of a certain middlish class of English men and women, and, alas, their American imitators, who are striving toward their comical interpretation of the Vere de Vere manner, are the promoters of guffaws in private, and uneasiness in public, between nations, to a far greater extent than the bold individualist, whose voice and manners, good or bad, are all his own. It is these small attritions that wear us down, and produce a sub-acid dislike between nations as between individuals. It is these that prepare the ground for a fine crop of misunderstandings.
But are we not to know our neighbors the English, the Germans, the French? I for one consider that not to know German and Germany, for example, is nowadays not to be fully educated. Most of us, however, have had our nerves unstrung by the speeding-up process that has gone on all over the world of late. We have lost somewhat the power to know people and to let them alone at the same time. Goethe, one of the coolest and wisest of men, maintains: “Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality. One would not be pleased if old friends were to lay aside certain peculiarities.”
We should at least give every man as fair a chance to receive our good opinion as we give a picture. We should put him in a good light before we criticise him. We should take time enough to do that to other nations, as well as to individuals. I have always had much sympathy for a certain Roman general. He was blind, and a painter who painted him with two large eyes, he rebuked; another painter, who painted him in profile, he rewarded.
It is, after all, something of an art to know people, so that the knowledge is serviceable, so that you can depict them to yourself and to others, not as they are as opposed to you, but as they are as a complement and help to you.
“No human quality is so well woveIn warp and woof, but there’s some flaw in it;I’ve known a brave man fly a shepherd’s cur,A wise man so demean himself, drivelling idiocyHad wellnigh been ashamed on’t. For your crafty,Your worldly-wise man, he, above the rest,Weaves his own snares so fine, he’s often caught in them.”
He who does not make allowances for weaknesses and differences in his study of human affairs is still in the infant class. It is a grave danger to every state that critics, smart or shallow, with their tu quoque weapons, their silly ridicule, their emphasis upon differences as though they were disasters, their constant failure to recognize the value of certain weaknesses, their stupidity in not painting great men who happen to be blind, in profile, and their harping upon the flaws, and their neglect of the fine texture of human qualities that are strange to them, that these critics are not muzzled, or, if that is impossible, disregarded.
They make it appear that amicable relations between nations are next to impossible. If you escape one danger of offending, you are sure to give offence in some other way, they seem to say. They are hysterical in their self-consciousness, “as if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him, or went in the house and leaned his hand on the wall and a serpent bit him.” Sir Edward Grey writes on this subject: “I sometimes think that half the difficulties of foreign policy arise from the exceeding ingenuity of different countries in attributing motives and intentions to the governments of each other. As far as I can observe, the press of various countries is much more fertile in inventing motives and intentions for the governments of the different countries than the foreign ministers of these countries are themselves. Foreign governments and our own government live from hand to mouth and have fewer deep plans than people might suppose. There is an old warning that you should not spend too much time in looking at the dark cupboard for the black cat that is not there, and I think if sometimes we were a little less suspicious of deep design or motive that the affairs of the world would progress more smoothly.”
The trouble lies in our undertaking the impossible, to the neglect of the obvious and the possible. The basic fact of nationality is a preference for our own ways, customs, and habits over those of other people. If the Chinese and Japanese, the Servians and Albanians, the English and the Germans liked one another as well as they like their own, there would be no nationalism to protect or to preserve. Such racial and traditional liking of nation for nation is impossible of achievement. No journeyings, speechifyings, banquets, or compliments will bring it about. On the contrary, I am not sure that it is not these very differences which cheer us and give us a new flavor in our pleasure in living, when we cross the Atlantic, the Channel, or the Rhine. What we should strive for is not social and racial absorption, but social and racial difference and distinction, with that pride in our own which makes for patience in the understanding of others.
It is the petty, self-conscious American who hates the English, the provincial Englishman who hates the German, the socially insecure German who hates the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the American. Those of us who are poised, secure, satisfied, and at bottom proud of our race, our breeding, and our country, are neither irritable nor irritating in the matter of international relations. We have enough to do, and let others alone. Let us dine one another, criticise one another in the effort to improve ourselves, praise one another where the praise serves to establish our own ideals; but let us give up this forced and awkward courting by banquets, deputations, and conferences. Let us study the great art of leaving one another alone. This is a time-hallowed doctrine. The greatest of all satirists and critics of manners knew this secret of successful intercourse with one another. One of the characters in the “Frogs” of Aristophanes is made to say: “Don’t come trespassing upon my mind; you have a house of your own.” Propinquity does not necessarily entail intimacy; as the world grows smaller, more and more people think so, perhaps often enough only to escape from themselves, a favorite form of elopement these days. Some men are fed by solitude and starved by too much companionship, and the same is true of nations. You cannot control others till you have learned to control yourself, or save another till you yourself are saved, and most of us had better be about that business.
It is England’s business to know just now, and to some extent ours, how many ships Germany is building and how many men she has in training to man them; but it is not in the least anybody’s business to question her motives or to attempt to dictate her policy. It is our business to shut up, and to build ships and to train men according to our notions of what is necessary for safety in case of an explosion. We should be about our father’s business, not about our brother’s business.
It is shallow thinking and lack of knowledge of the men and women of stranger countries, and above all that terrible itching to be doing something, which lead to these futile excursions and this silly talk.
Can anything be more maudlin than to suppose that international sensitiveness, that commercial rivalries, that tariff discriminations, that territorial misunderstandings, are to be soothed and smoothed away, by dissertations upon how much we owe to one another in matters of culture? Think what we owe to Goethe and Lessing, to Spinoza and Kant, to Heine and Mozart and Wagner and Beethoven, reiterates the Englishman; think what we owe to Shakespeare and Milton, to Byron and Shelley and Scott, to Lister and Newton, answers the German! Who can go to war with the countrymen of Racine and Molière and Pascal and Montesquieu and Descartes? repeats the friend of France; and by others are trumpeted the fraternal relations that we ought to cultivate with the countrymen of Dante, or of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. This is phantom friendship, and we all know in our heart of hearts, that we would fight any or all of them at the drop of a handkerchief, if they hurt our feelings, ruffled our national pride, or maltreated in a foreign land the meanest of our racial brothers. Straining after such artificial bonds of union is as irritating as it is unreal.
Germany has few heartier admirers of Bismarck than am I; England has few franker friends of her great gentlemen in peace and war than am I; I have read and profited by French literature far more than from anything America has produced; if I can write so that here and there a brother has profited therefrom, I owe it to the Frenchmen I have studied; but these are all nothing as compared with my heart’s real allegiances. There is a gulp in my throat when I dream of that weary, misunderstood, but patient and humble peace-maker, who held the scales between the millions of my own countrymen, shooting and stabbing one another to death fifty years ago. No other man can be quite like him to me; he remains my master of men, as is Lee my ideal of the Happy Warrior. I understand the grim humor in his sad eyes, I love that lined face, cut from the granite of self-control, that tamed volcano face, seamed and scarred by the lava of his trials and his tears; I can see how the illuminating and conciliatory anecdotes were his relief from the pain of an aching heart; my muscles harden and my nerves tingle as I recall the puppet politicians and fancy self-advertising warriors who crucified him slowly. The country and the people that Lincoln believed in, I must believe in and fight for too. Washington was an Englishman and baptized us, but Lincoln was an American who officiated at our first communion as a united people.
I ask no Englishman, no German, no Frenchman to agree with me, but I ask them to leave me alone with my dead, to leave me in peace with my living problems, to force no artificial friendships upon me, and thus to let our respect for one another increase naturally.
Has the Englishman, has the German, no sanctuaries to be left undisturbed; no heart-strings that are not to be fumbled at by busy fingers; no personal dignities to be shrouded from investigations; no sweet silences of sorrow that are barred to foreign mourners? If he have not, then all this clamor at the doors of national privacy is well enough; but let them remember that when nations lose their dignity and their racial pride, there is sure to follow the squabbling and the jealousy, the rough speech and vulgar manners, of the domestic circle, in the same plight of spiritual shamelessness. The best that any of us learn is to be a little more patient, a little more charitable, a little more careful of the dignity of others in our own homes, or abroad, and then the light goes out!
Criticism is temptingly easy when it consists, as it so often does, in merely noting what is different, or what is not there. Helpful criticism I take to be the discovery of what is there, and its revelation, with an examination of its history, its truth, and its value. That kind of criticism is close to creation itself, and few there are sufficiently self-sacrificing to endow and to train themselves to undertake it.
It makes life very complicated to think too much about it, but to take a step further, and to attempt to apply logic to life, that way madness lies. It is of the very essence of life that things are never as they ought to be, but only as they can be for the time being. We may be optimistic enough to believe that this is a good world, but it is none the less true that unbending virtue seldom receives the temporal rewards for which most of us are striving, and with which alone most of us are content. We are forced to doubt, therefore, the goodness which finds life easy and comfortable, and since we must still at all hazards be charitable in our judgments of one another, we become, most of us, opportunists in morals.
In dealing with the men, manners, affairs, and the soul of a stranger people, therefore, one must use what experience, knowledge, good-humor, and impartiality one has, without assumption of superiority, without making high demands, and without ceasing to be at least as opportunist as we are at home. Because things are different, they are not necessarily better or worse, and if certain things are not there, it is perhaps because they do not belong there. Above all, we should refrain from applying a stern logic to the life of another country which we never use in measuring our own.
The whole north of Germany is a flat, barren plain, with the Elbe, the Oder, the Weser flowing west and north. The north of Germany on a raised map looks like a vast sea-shore, and so it is. To the south a great river, the Rhine, pierces its way from Frankfort through a beautiful gorge in the mountains, and has its source near that of the Danube. Barbarossa called this river, “that royal street.” This sea-shore is cultivated and populous; this river has been made a great commercial highway. Cologne, one hundred and fifty miles from the sea, is now a seaport; Strasburg, three hundred miles inland, can receive boats of six hundred tons; and the tributary river, the Main, has been deepened so that now Frankfort receives steamers from the Rhine. Three quarters of the through trade of Holland is German water-borne trade. Now the Dortmund-Ems canal, which is one hundred and sixty-eight miles long, and can be used by ships of a thousand tons, gives an outlet, via the Rhine, at Emden. All this is the work of a patient, persistent, and economical people working under great natural disadvantages.
As compared with America this is an unfruitful land, and, as I have noted, surrounded on all sides by powerful enemies. In 1902 Traugott Müller estimated the value of Germany’s production of wheat, potatoes, vegetables-the products of the gardens and the fields, in short-at $605,000,000; the production of beef, mutton, pork at $669,500,000; of the dairies at $406,000,000; of cotton, sugar, alcohol, wine, and wood at $322,000,000; or a total of $2,002,000,000. The United States is seventeen times as large, but by no means seventeen times as productive.
Germany, again, is divided into a number of states, all, with the exception of Prussia, with its population of 40,000,000 out of the total of 65,000,000, comparatively small. These states are not merely divided by legal and geographical lines, but by traditions, different ruling families, religion, tastes, habits, and manners, and even geologically. Bernhard Cotta, writing of Germany, says: “Geologically there is a Spain, an England, a Sweden, a Russia, a France, but no Germany.” They are different individuals, not different members of the same family. They have been cemented together by coercion.
Over this whole country for three hundred years have swept all the fighting men of Europe. Until 1870 it was a tournament ground for the Swedes, Russians, French, Dutch, Belgians, Italians, Hungarians, English, and the various German states. It was shot over, till it is a wonder that there are any young birds, not to speak of old cocks and hens left, to begin with over again.
A feature of the political situation, which scarcely enters into political calculations in America, is the sharp division between Protestants and Catholics, with a political party of Catholics numbering one fourth of the total members, in the Reichstag. In 1905 there were 37,646,852 Protestants and 22,109,644 Catholics in Germany, the Roman Catholics being in a majority in Baden, Bavaria, and Alsace-Lorraine. In the past these religious differences have entailed all the most repulsive features of war, waged to the point of extermination. “Lieber Rom als Liberal,” is still a punning war-cry marking the dislike of Rome and the fear of Socialism.
With us religion has become largely an organized attempt, using charity as patronage, to reconcile piety and plenty, with the result that with the exception of the Catholic Church dealing with the lately arrived immigrants, and the Methodists and Baptists dealing with the ignorant masses, black and white, in the South, religion in the sense of an organized church has little hold upon the people, especially in the large cities.
In America the indifference to religion is the result of suspicion. The congregations are too largely black-coated and white-collared, and the lay officers of the churches much too solemnly sleek and serenely solvent to attract the weak, the unfortunate, the sorrowing, and the sinner. The mere appearance of the congregation in a prosperous Protestant church in an American city is a mockery of Christianity. Any man who preaches to men who can own a seat in God’s house is a craven opportunist. Until the doors of the churches are open all the week, and the seats in the churches free, to claim that the Christ is there is little short of blasphemy. It is no wonder that those who need Him most, never dream of seeking for Him in these ecclesiastical clubs.
In Germany half-baked thinking, following upon, and as the result of, the barracks and corporal methods of education, have turned the Protestant population from the churches. The slovenly and patchy omniscience of the partly educated, leads them to believe that they know enough not to believe. Renan, though a doubter himself, saw the weakness of this form of disbelief when he wrote: “There are in reality but few people who have a right not to believe in Christianity.”
The people living upon this ethnographical chess-board have been for centuries rather tribal than national, and are still rather philosophical than political, rather idealistic than practical, rather dreamy than adventurous. To organize this population for self-support and self-defence, to ignore differences, racial and religious, to stamp out the jealousies of small rulers, required severe measures, and we are all learning to-day that democracies are seldom severe with themselves. A tyrannical autocracy, led by the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck, produced from this welter of discord the astonishing results of to-day.
We have to-day, in an area of 208,780 square miles, 5,604 square miles representing the lately conquered territory of Alsace-Lorraine, a population of 64,903,423, of whom 1,028,560 are subjects of foreign powers. To defend this area there are to be, according to figures estimated even as this volume goes to press, a million men under arms in the army and navy. Their enormous progress in trade, in industry, in shipbuilding, is set out in full in every year-book, for the curious to ponder. In so short a time, on so poor a soil, in such a restricted space, with such a past of distress and disaster, and dealing with such conflicting interests, a like success in nation-building is unparalleled.
Industrial and martial beehive though it would seem to be, there are provided for the native and the foreigner feasts of music, of art, and of study that cost little. There are quiet streams, lovely, lonely walks, and quaint towns that are nests of archaeological interest. In Weimar, in Stuttgart, in Schwerin, in Düsseldorf, in Karlsruhe, not to mention Munich, Leipsic, Dresden, Berlin, Frankfort, Hamburg, there are centres of culture. The best that the mind of man creates is still spread out there as of yore for whomsoever will to partake, but ever in less abundance and with less enthusiasm. And these names are a mere fraction of the number of such places.
The rivalries between the states is now to a large extent an elevating rivalry of culture, dotting the map of Germany with resting-places for the curious, the scholarly, or the sentimental traveller. You may have plain living and high thinking in scores of the cities and towns of Germany, and you will be considered neither an outcast nor an eccentric; indeed, you will find no small part of the population your companions.
You may stroll for miles on the banks of that tiny stream the Zschopau, and expect to see sprites and nymphs, so hidden are its windings; and where in all the world will a handkerchief cover an Ulm, an Augsburg, a Rothenburg, Ansbach, Nuremberg, Würzburg, with their wealth of associations?
The Fugger family, of Augsburg, tell us again that there is nothing new in the world. Five hundred years ago they were millionaires. One of these Fuggers had a voice even in the election of Charles V, and we are still hard at it trying to keep our Fuggers from meddling in politics. Another Fugger, Marcus by name, wrote a capital book on the horse in the sixteenth century, and at the last horse-show at Olympia, in 1912, a Fugger came over from Germany and took away the first prize for officers’ chargers. So far flung was their fame as money-lenders that usury was called “Fuggerei”!
Heirs of great houses got out of hand then as now, and Duke Albert III of Bavaria married Agnes Bernauer, the barber’s daughter, and even the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria ran off with Fräulein Welser. One citizen of Augsburg fitted out a squadron to take possession of Venezuela, which had been given him by the Emperor Charles V. For some reason the squadron did not sail; Lord Salisbury and President Cleveland could have told this adventurous Augsburger that he was better off at home!
Bishop Boniface, of Würzburg, was an Englishman, and his father was a wheelwright. He put cart-wheels in his coat-of-arms, and they have remained to this day in the arms of the town, a fine reminder to snobbery that ancestry only explains, it cannot exalt.
“Pigmies are pigmies still, though perch’d on Alps,And pyramids are pyramids in vales.”
The atmosphere in these towns is one of repose. They are still wise enough to know that the miraculous improvements in speed brought about by steam and electricity have not shortened the journey of the soul to heaven by one second. They know that Socrates on a donkey really goes faster than Solly Goldberg in his sixty-horse-power motor-car. They are suspicious of the new cosmopolitan creed, that successful advertising endows a man with eternal life. Countless political quacks have been caricatured, advertised, and cinematographed into familiarity, but wise men still read Plato and Aristotle. The penny press has not convinced them that popularity is immortality; they recognize popularity as merely glory paid in pennies. They partake to some extent of the patience of the Oriental. They suspect, as most men of wide intellectual experience do, that the man who cannot wait must be a coward at bottom, afraid of himself, or of the world, or of God.
This is wholly true of many Germans, despite the clang of arms, the noise of steam-hammers, the shrieking locomotives, the puffing steamers, the clinking of their gold, and the shouting of their pedlers, now scattered all over the world. It is this combination, in the same small area, of noise and repose; of political subserviency at home and sabre-rattling abroad; of close organization at home and colonizing inefficiency abroad; of moral and intellectual freedom, one might almost call it moral and intellectual anarchy these days, and at the same time submission to a domestic and social tyranny unknown to us, that makes even a timid author feel that he is discovering the Germans to his countrymen, so little do they know of this side of German life.
They are not at all what the Americans and the English think they are. They want peace, and we think they want war. The huge armaments are intended to frighten us, just as were the grotesquely ugly masks of the Chinese warriors. They intend to frighten us all with their 850,000 soldiers, their great fleet, their air-ships and aeroplanes, and when they go to Agadir again they hope to be able to stay there till their demands are granted. They are the last comers into the society of nations and they mean to insist upon recognition. But this demand is an artificial one so far as the great mass of Germans is concerned. It is the Prussian conqueror, and the small class, officer, official and royal, representing that conqueror, who are determined upon this course. They have unified Germany, they have made the laws and forced obedience to them; and the heavily taxed, hard-driven, politically powerless people are helpless.
Nowhere has socialistic legislation been so cunningly and skilfully used for the enslavement of the people. No small part of every man’s wages is paid to him in insurance; insurance for unemployment, for accident, sickness, and old age. There is but faint hope of saving enough to buy one’s freedom, and if the slave runs away he leaves, of course, all the premiums he has paid in the hands of his master. A general uprising is guarded against by a redoubtable force of officials, officers, and soldiers, whose very existence depends upon their defence of and upholding of the state under its present laws and rulers.
Our grandfathers and fathers, some of them, talked and read of Saint-Simon, of Fourier, Robert Owen, Maurice Kingsley, and the Brook Farm experiment, and believed, no doubt, that the dawn of the twentieth century would have extracted at least some balm from these theories for the healing of our social woes. They would rub their eyes in amazement were they to awake in 1912 to find more armed men, more ships of war, more fighting, more strikes and trade disputes, than ever before. Above all, they would be puzzled to find the nation which is most advanced in the application of the theory of state socialism with the largest army, the heaviest taxation, and the second most formidable fleet.
The library in which, as a small boy, I was permitted to browse, where I read those wonderfulBlack Forest Storiesand my first serious novel,On the Heights, contained a bust of Goethe, and on the shelves were Fichte, Freytag, Spielhagen, Strauss, and a miscellaneous collection of German authors grave and gay, or perhaps melancholy were a better word, for even now I should find it hard to point to a German author who is distinctively gay. No visitor to that library, and they numbered many distinguished visitors, American and foreign, from Emerson and Alcott and George Macdonald to others less well known, dreamed that the serene marble features of Goethe would be replaced by the granite fissures of the face of Bismarck; and that Auerbach’sBlack Forest Storieswould be less known than Albert Ballin’s fleet of mercantile ships. As I dream myself back to that big chair wherein I could curl up my whole person, and still leave room for at least two fair-sized dogs, I see as in no other way the almost unbelievable change that has come over Germany. TheBlack Forest Stories,Hammer and Anvil,The Lost Manuscript, Werther, Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Strauss, Heine were Germany then; Bismarck, Ballin, and Krupp are Germany now. Germany was Hamlet then; Germany is Shylock, Shylock armed to the teeth, now.
No nation can change in one generation, as has Germany, by the natural development of its innate characteristics; such a change must be forced and artificial to take place in so short a time. This is not only the internal danger to Germany itself, but the danger to all those superficial observers who point to Germany as having solved certain social and economic problems. She has not solved them by healthy growth into better ways; she has suppressed them, strangled them, suffocated them.
The heroes and heroines of myBlack Forest Storieshave been rudely stuffed into the uniforms of officials, soldiers, factory hands, and Red Cross nurses. The toy-shops have been developed, on borrowed capital, into ship-building yards and factories for guns and ammunition. The dreamer in dressing-gown and slippers has been forced into the cap and apron of the workman. The small sovereigns have been frightened into allegiance to the war lord, whose shadow falls upon every corner of Germany.
In this new scheme of things it soon became evident, that the individual was incompetent to take care of himself along lines best suited to the plans of his new conqueror, therefore part of his earnings were taken from all alike to provide against accident, sickness, unemployment, and old age, and thus bind him fast to the chariot of his warrior lord. Germany, having given up the belief that the salvation of her own soul was of prime importance, became suspiciously concerned about the souls and bodies of the people. We are all to some extent following her example. The wise among us are sad, the capitalist and his ally the demagogue are seen everywhere all smiles, rubbing their hands, for the more people are made to believe that they can be, and ought to be, taken care of, the more the machinery is put into their hands, the more plunder comes their way, the more indispensable they are.
The great majority of people who write or speak of Germany applaud this situation; let me frankly say, what everybody will be saying in twenty-five years, I deplore it. It is a purely artificial, incompetent, and dreary solution. Even Hamlet were better than Shylock.
Fortunately there is also a large and increasing class in Germany who distrust the situation. They point to the fact that technical education is producing an army of dingy artisans, who turn out the cheap and nasty by the million, an education which chokes idealism and increases the growing flippancy in matters of faith and morals; they sneer, and well they may, at the manufactured art, the carpenter’s Gothic architecture, the sickly literature, the decaying interest in scholarship; they find fewer and fewer candidates for exploration and colonization; they rankle under the series of diplomatic ineptitudes since Bismarck; they see France, Russia, and England antagonized and leagued against them, and their own allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy, in a confused state of squabble with their neighbors; they are nervous and disquieted by the financial and industrial conditions; they condemn whole-heartedly the political caste system by which much of the best material in Germany is barred from the councils and the diplomatic and executive activities of the nation; there are not a few who would welcome an inconclusive war that would, they think, put an end to this system, and make the ruler and the officials responsible to the people; they wish to open the doors of this governmental, legislative, educational, industrial hot-house, and give the nation a chance to grow naturally in the open air.
The policy of making other people afraid of you must have an end, the policy of making others respect and like you can have no end. There is no question which is the natural law of national development. Neither for the individual nor for a nation is it wholesome to increase antagonisms and to lessen the conciliatory points of contact with the world.
Many of the weaknesses, much of the strength of Germany are artificial. They have not grown, they have been forced. The very barrenness of the soil, the ring of enemies, the soft moral and social texture of the population, have, so their little knot of rulers think, made necessary these harsh, artificial forcing methods.
The outstanding proof of the artificiality of this civilization is its powerlessness to propagate. Germans transplanted from their hothouse civilization to other countries cease to be Germans; and nowhere in the world outside Germany is German civilization imitated, liked, or adopted. The German is nonplussed to find the Pole in the East, the Frenchman in the West, the Dane in the North, scoffing at hisalte Kultur, as he calls it, and he is irritated beyond measure by the German from America, who returns to theVaterlandto criticise, to sneer, and to thank God that he is an American, not a German citizen. Germans become English citizens, no Englishmen become Germans; millions of Germans have become Americans, no Americans become Germans. No other population would be amenable to the Prussian methods that have made Germany, nor is there anywhere in the world a people demanding Prussian methods, while there are millions under the Prussian yoke who hate it.
The German rhetoric to the effect that Germany is to save the world by Teutonizing the world, is laughable. Prussia is the ventriloquist behind this half-hearted boast.
Werther, and Faust, and Lohengrin, are far more real than those scarecrows autocracy, bureaucracy, and militarism, triplets of straw, premature births, not destined to live, of which Germany boasts to-day as the most precocious children in the world. They are just that, precocious children, teaching the pallid religion of dependence upon the state and enforcing the anarchical morality of man’s despair of himself. Our descendants will have Werther and Faust and Lohengrin, as the companions of their dreams at least, when that autocracy shall have been blown to the winds, when that bureaucracy shall have dried up and wasted away, when that exaggerated militarism shall be but bleaching bones and dust.
Who has not lived in Germany as a house of dreams, seen the Valkyrie race by, heard the swan song, wept with Werther and with Marguerite, smiled cynically with Mephistopheles, languished with the Palm Tree and the Pine of Heine; who has not sat at the feet of Germany as a philosopher, and traced the very fissures of his own brain in following thinking into thought; but who in all the world longs for this new Germany of the barracks, the corporal and the pedler?Germaniaas a malicious vestal clad in horrid armor and making mischief in the world is a very present danger;Germaniawith a torch lighting the world to salvation is a phantom, a ghost, seen by hasty and nervous observers, who rush out to proclaim an adventure that may excite a passing interest in themselves. Her methods to-day are solution by suffocation; no wonder those of us who loved her in our youth see in her a ghost to-day. I am thankful that I was her pupil when she had other things to teach, when she wore other robes, when she was modest, and not snatching at the trident of Neptune, nor clutching at the casque of Mars.
“Wir wissen zu viel, wir wollen zu wenig,” became the national complaint, and Germany has attempted to transform herself. She has succeeded in the transformation, but the transformation is not a success. Even that learned English friend of Germany, Lord Haldane, does not see, or will not see, that a people thinking themselves into action, instead of developing into action naturally, through action, must suffer from the artificiality of the process. Lord Haldane applauds their thought-out organization in industrial, commercial, and military matters, but he fails to mention the squandering of individual capacity and energy that has resulted in Germany’s growing dependence upon a wooden bureaucracy. Organization is only good as a means; it is stupefying as an end. Germany has organized herself into an organization, and is the most over-governed country in the world. What every democracy of free men wants is not as much, but as little, organization as possible compatible with economical administration of industry, the army, the navy, and the affairs of the state. You can think out a game of chess, but you cannot think out life ahead of the living of it without cramping it and finally killing it. Life is to live, not to think, after all. Neither a nation nor an individual has ever thought out the way to power. This is where the metaphysician invariably fails when he mistakes thinking for living, when he mistakes organization, which can never be more than a mould for life, for life itself. To plan an army is not to produce one, however good the plan; even to plan a campaign, once you have an army, is to court disaster unless there is a living man to thrust the plan aside when the emergencies arise that make up the whole of life, but have nothing to do with organization.
If all men were tailors, or lawyers, or farmers, or miners, then we could think out an organization into which they would fit, but unfortunately for the metaphysician, all men are not categories; all men are men! In like manner, if all men were cases, then government by lawyers would be successful, but men and women are neither categories nor cases. It is purely fantastic, the mere reasoned confusion of the philosopher, to point to Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel and their successors as the originators of Germany’s progress. If Germany had developed along those lines, she would be something quite different from what she is. The Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and Bismarck made Germany, and her philosophers and pedants are only responsible for the softness that made it possible. Metaphysicians and lawyers have their place, but they will inevitably ruin any people whom they are permitted to govern.
The reader will perhaps look back through these pages to discover a contradiction. He will seem to find evidence that Germany’s position in the world called for just this present Germany, which is a factory town with a garden attached, surrounded by an armed camp. I deny the contradiction. I have tried to analyze and to give the reasons for Germany’s development along these meretricious and disappointing lines, but I am the last to admit that the outcome is satisfactory, or that the rest of the world should look to Germany to point out the way of salvation. A steaming orchid-house is not the place to go to learn to grow the fruits of the earth in their due season for the nourishment of a free people. You will find some brilliantly colored flowers there, in the gay uniforms of the artificial tropics, but they shrink and shrivel in the open air. They have been trained to grow luxuriantly in this stifling atmosphere, but they feed no one, please no one, who will not consent to live in a glass house with them.
Because a people is blindfolded, its preachers and pedagogues gagged, its officials subservient, is all the more reason why they should be easily led, but no reason at all for supposing that they will lead anybody else.
I have said here and there that I have learned much, and that we all have much to learn from Germany. I permit myself to repeat it. She has shown us that the short-cut to the governing of a people by suppression and strangulation results in a dreary development of mediocrity. She has proved again that the only safety in the world for either an individual or a nation is to be loved and respected, and in these days no one respects slavery or loves threats.
From an American point of view, any sacrifice, any war, were better than the domination of the Prussian methods of nation-making. No nation should be by its traditions and its ideals more ready to arm itself, and to keep itself armed if necessary for years, against the possibility of the transference of such methods to the American continent than the United States of North America.
“Theuer ist mir der Freund, doch auch den Feind kann ich nützen,”Zeigt mir der Freund, was ich kann, lehrt mir der Feind was ich soll,”
writes Schiller.
We Americans have much to learn from both our friends and our enemies. We have both in Germany, and we should cultivate the temper of mind which profits by the encouragement of our friends and the criticism of our foes.