GERMAN PROSPERITY AFTER UNION
After 1870 Germany entered upon a period of peaceful prosperity. Forges clanged, workshops throbbed, looms hummed, and within twenty years, the ebb of emigration had entirely ceased. Indeed, not only was there work in the Fatherland for all its sons, but for others besides; so that long before another twenty years had passed away, the tide had turned and immigrants were pouring in.
At first the larger part of German exports was cheap and nasty, with a piratical habit of sailing under false colours, and simulating well-known British and other national trade-marks. But this was a brief interlude. The sagacity, thoroughness, and enterprise of manufacturers and merchants soon guided their steps past this dangerous quicksand, and the labelmade in Germanyceased to be a reproach.
Students and lovers of truth laboured at discovery; and hard upon their heels followed a crowd of practical inventors—the gleaners, scavengers, and rag-pickers of science. Never had the trade of any country thriven with a more wonderful rapidity. Though still of necessity a borrower by very reason of her marvellous expansion, Germany nevertheless began to make her influence felt in the financial sphere. Her own ships carried her products to the ends of the earth, and fetched home raw materials in exchange. And not only this, her merchant fleets began to enter into successful competition for the carrying trade of the world, even with the Mistress of the Seas herself.
LIFE'S WORK OF BISMARCK
For a score of years after the fall of Paris, Germany found but little time for dreaming. Meanwhile, by an astute if somewhat tortuous policy, and under the impenetrable shield of the finest army in Europe, Bismarck kept safe the empire which he had founded. He declined to be drawn into adventures either at home or abroad, either in the new world or the old. He opposed the colonial aspirations of a few visionaries, who began to make some noise towards the end of his long reign, and silenced them with some spacious but easy acquisitions in Africa and the East. He consolidated the Prussian autocracy, and brought its servant, the bureaucracy, to the highest pitch of efficiency. He played with the political parties in the Reichstag as if they had been a box of dominoes, combining them into what patterns he pleased. At the same time he fostered the national well-being with ceaseless vigilance, and kept down popular discontent by the boldness and thoroughness of his social legislation. But for Bismarck himselfthe age of adventure was past. It was enough that by the labours of an arduous lifetime, he had made of Germany a puissant state, in which all her children, even the most restless, could find full scope for their soaring ambitions.
[1] 1814.
[2] 1818.
[3] 1821-1829.
[4] 1830.
[5] 1905.
[6] 1859-1861.
[7] 1875-1878.
[8] The admixture of Slavonic and Wendish blood in the Prussian stock is usually calculated by ethnologists at about half and half.
With the dismissal of Bismarck in 1890, Germany entered upon a new phase. Then once again her people began to dream, and this time furiously. They had conquered in war. They had won great victories in peace. According to their own estimate they were the foremost thinkers of the world. They found themselves impelled by a limitless ambition and a superb self-confidence. But the vision which now presented itself to their eyes was disordered and tumultuous. Indeed it was less dream than nightmare; and in some degree, no doubt, it owed its origin, like other nightmares, to a sudden surfeit—to a glut of material prosperity.[1]
Why did Germany with her larger population still lag behind Britain in commerce and shipping? Surely the reason could only be that Britain, at every turn, sought to cripple the enterprise of her young rival. Why had Britain a great and thriving colonial empire, while Germany had only a few tracts of tropical jungle and light soil, not particularly prosperous or promising? The reason could only be that, out of jealousy, Britain had obstructed Teutonic acquisition. Why was Germany tendingto become more and more isolated and unpopular in Europe? The reason could only be that the crafty and unscrupulous policy of Britain had intrigued, with some success, for her political ostracism.
It is useless to argue with a man in a nightmare. He brushes reason aside and cares not for facts. But to seekers after truth it was obvious, that so far from making any attack upon German commerce, Britain, by adhering to her system of free trade at home and in her dependencies, had conferred a boon immeasurable on this new and eager competitor. So far from hindering Germany's acquisition of colonies, Britain had been careless and indifferent in the matter; perhaps too much so for the security of some of her own possessions. It was Bismarck, much more than Britain, who had put obstacles in the way of German colonial expansion. With a sigh of relief (as we may imagine) this great statesman saw the partition of the vacant territories of the world completed, and his fellow-countrymen thereby estopped from wasting their substance, and dissipating their energies, in costly and embarrassing adventures. So far from holding aloof from Germany or attempting to isolate her among European nations, we had persisted in treating her with friendliness, long after she had ceased to be friendly. One of our leading statesmen had even gone the length of suggesting an alliance, and had been denounced immediately by the whole German press, although it was understood at the time that he had spoken with the august encouragement of the Kaiser and his Chancellor.[2] It was Germany herself, deprived of the guidance of Bismarck, who by blustering ather various neighbours, and threatening them in turn, had aroused their suspicions and achieved her own isolation.
The grievances against Britain which figured in the phantasmagoria of the German nightmare were obviously tinged with envy. There were other grievances against France, and these were tinged with annoyance. For France, although she had been beaten on to her knees, had nevertheless had the impudence to make a successful recovery. There were also grievances against Russia, and these were tinged with fear. Her vast adjacent territories and teeming population, her social and industrial progress, the reformation of her government, and the rapid recuperation of her military and naval power, constituted in German eyes the gravest menace of all.
Self-confidence and ambition were the original stuff—the warp and the weft—of which the German dream was made; but these admirable and healthy qualities rapidly underwent a morbid deterioration. Ambition degenerated into groundless suspicion, and self-confidence into arrogance. It was a considerable time, however, before Germany was realised to have become a public danger by reason of her mental affliction. Until her prophets and high priests began preaching from the housetops as a divine ordinance, that Germany was now so great, prosperous, and prolific as to need the lands of her neighbours for her expansion, her symptoms were not generally recognised. It was not really pressure of population, but only the oppression of a nightmare which had brought her to this restless and excited condition. In terms of psychology, the disease from which Germany has been suffering of late years isknown as megalomania, in the slang of the street-corner as madness of the swollen head.
The dreams of a nation may be guided well or ill by statesmen, or they may be left altogether unguided. The dreams of Italy under Cavour, and those of Germany under Bismarck, were skilfully fostered and directed with great shrewdness to certain practical ends. But in considering the case of Germany under William the Second, our feeling is that although popular imaginings have been controlled from above with even greater solicitude than before, the persons who inspired and regulated them have been lacking in the sense of proportion. The governing power would seem to have been the victim of changing moods, conflicting policies, and disordered purposes.
TWO FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS
When we piece together the various schemes for the aggrandisement of the Fatherland, which German writers have set forth with increasing boldness and perfect gravity during the past ten years, we are confronted with an immense mosaic—a conception of the most grandiose character. On examination each of these projects is found to be based upon two fundamental assumptions:—The first, that the present boundaries of Germany and her possessions overseas are too narrow to contain the legitimate aspirations of the German race:—The second that it is the immediate interest of Germany, as well as a duty which she owes to posterity, to remedy this deficiency, by taking from her neighbours by force what she requires for her own expansion. There is a third assumption, not however of a political so much as an ethical character, which is stated withequal frankness and conviction—that war on an extensive scale is necessary, from time to time, in order to preserve the vigour of the German people and their noble spirit.
One school of dreamers, with its gaze fixed upon the Atlantic trade-routes, insists upon the absurdity of resting content with a western sea-board of some two hundred miles. The estuaries of the Elbe and the Weser alone are exclusively German; that of the Ems is shared with the Dutch; while the far more valuable harbour-mouths of the Rhine and the Scheldt are in the possession of Holland and Belgium. Put into plain language what this means is, that both Holland and Belgium must be incorporated in the German Empire; if by treaty, so much the better for all parties concerned; but if diplomacy should fail to accomplish the desired absorption, then it must be brought about by war. Nor has it been overlooked, that in order to complete the rectification, and to secure the keys of the Baltic, it would be necessary to 'admit' Denmark also into the privileges of the Germanic Empire.
Another school looks to the south-east and broods upon the day, not far distant, when the Germans of Austria-Hungary—a small but dominating minority of the whole population—will be driven, by reasons of self-defence, to seek a federal inclusion in the Empire of the Hohenzollerns. And it is surmised that for somewhat similar reasons the Magyars of Hungary will at the same time elect to throw in their lot with Teutons rather than with Slavs.
When that day arrives, however, it is not merely the German and Magyar territories of the Habsburg Emperor-King which will need to be incorporatedin the Hohenzollern Empire, but the whole congeries of nations which at present submits, more or less reluctantly, to the rule of Vienna and Buda-Pest. There must be no break-up of the empire of Francis Joseph, no sentimental sacrifice to the mumbo-jumbos of nationality. The Italians of Trieste and Fiume, the Bohemians, the Croats, the Serbs, the Roumanians of Transylvania, and the Poles of Galicia must all be kept together in one state, even more firmly than they are to-day. The Germans of Austria will not be cordially welcomed, unless they bring this dowry with them to the altar of imperial union.
THE AUSTRIAN DOWRY
But to clear eyes, looking into the future, more even than this appears to be necessary. Austria will be required to bring with her, not merely all her present possessions, but also her reversionary prospects, contingent remainders, and all and sundry her rights of action throughout the whole Balkan peninsula, which sooner or later must either accept the hegemony of the German Empire or submit to annexation at the sword's point. Advantageous as it would be for the Fatherland to obtain great harbours for her commerce at the head of the Adriatic, these acquisitions might easily become valueless in practice if some rival barred the right of entry through the Straits of Otranto. Salonica again, in her snug and sheltered corner of the Aegean, is essential as the natural entrepôt for the trade of Asia Minor and the East; while there can be no hope, until the mouths of the Danube, as well as the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, are firmly held, of turning the Black Sea into a Germanic lake.
The absorption of the Balkan peninsula, involvingas it must the occupation of Constantinople and European Turkey, would carry with it, as a natural consequence, the custody of the Sultan and the control of his Asiatic dominions. These vast territories which extend from Smyrna to the Caucasus, from Syria to the Persian Gulf, from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Aden, contain some of the richest and most fertile tracts upon the surface of the globe. Massacre, misrule, and oppression have indeed converted the greater part of these regions into a state hardly to be distinguished from the barest deserts of Arabia. But a culture which has lapsed through long neglect may be reclaimed by new enterprise. All that is required to this end is such shelter and encouragement as a stable government would afford.
What more suitable instrument for this beneficent recovery than the peculiar genius of the Teuton race? Would not the whole world gain by the substitution of settled order for a murderous anarchy, of tilth and industry for a barren desolation? The waters of Tigris and Euphrates are still sweet. It needs but the energy and art of man to lead them in channelled courses, quenching the longings of a thirsty land, and filling the Mesopotamian waste with the music of a myriad streams. The doom of Babylon is no curse eternal. It awaits but the sword of Siegfried to end the slumbers of two thousand years. Where great cities and an ancient civilisation lie buried under drifted sand, great cities may be raised once more, the habitations of a hardier race, the seminaries of a nobler civilisation.
This vision, more fanciful and poetically inspired than the rest, has already advanced some considerableway beyond the frontiers of dreamland. When the Turko-Russian War came to an end[3] the influence of Germany at Constantinople was as nearly as possible nil; and so long as Bismarck remained in power, no very serious efforts were made to increase it. But from the date of Bismarck's dismissal[4] down to the present day, it has been the steady aim of German policy to control the destinies of the Turkish Empire. These attempts have been persistent, and in the main successful.
THE WOOING OF TURKEY
It mattered not what dubious personage or party might happen to be in the ascendant at Stamboul, the friendship of Germany was always forthcoming. It was extended with an equal cordiality to Abdul Hamid; to the Young Turks when they overthrew Abdul Hamid; to the Reactionaries when they overthrew the Young Turks; to the Young Turks again when they compounded matters with the Reactionaries. The largesse of Berlin bankers refreshed the empty treasuries of each despot and camarilla in turn, so soon as proofs could be produced of positive, or even of presumptive predominance. At the same time the makers of armaments, at Essen and elsewhere, looked to it, that a sufficient portion of these generous loans was paid in kind, and that the national gain was not confined to high policy and high finance. The reform of the Turkish army was taken in hand zealously by Prussian soldiers. Imperial courtesies cemented the bricks which usury, commerce, and diplomacy had laid so well. At a time when the late Sultan was ill-regarded by the whole of Europe, on account of his supposed complicity in Armenian massacres, themagnanimity of the Kaiser took pity on the pariah, and a visit of honour to the Bosphorus formed an incident in the Hohenzollern pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre.
The harvest of these endeavours was reaped at a later date in the form of vast concessions for lines of railway running through Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf. It is needless to enter here into a discussion of the famous and still unsettled controversy regarding the Baghdad route, except to say that this project for the benefit, not merely of Turkey, but of the whole human race, was to be realised under German direction and according to German plans and specifications; it was to be administered under German control; but it was to be paid for in the main out of the savings of England and France.
The scheme was no less bold than ingenious. Obligations were imposed upon Turkey which it was clearly impossible for Turkey to discharge. In the event of her failure it was likely to go hard with the original shareholders, and somewhat hard with the Sublime Porte itself; but on the other hand it was not likely to go hard with Germany, or to involve her in anything more irksome than a labour of love—a protectorate over Asia Minor and Arabia.[5]
These are the main dreams which German writers, with a genuine enthusiasm and an engaging frankness, have set out in the pages of books and periodicals—the North Sea dream, the Austrian dream, the Balkan dream, and the Levantine dream. But these dreams by no means exhaust the Teuton fancy.
Wars are contemplated calmly as inevitableincidents in the acquisition of world-power—war with France, war with England, war either of army corps or diplomacy with Belgium, Holland, and Denmark. And as victory is also contemplated, just as confidently, various bye-products of considerable value are likely to be secured during the process, and as a result.
ACQUISITION OF AFRICA
The greater part of north-western Africa, which lies along the seaboards of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, is under the French flag. The greater part of eastern Africa from Alexandria to Capetown is in the hands of the British. The central region of Africa is Belgian. In the north there is Tripoli which is now Italian; and in various quarters patches and scattered islands which are Portuguese. The former might be tolerated as a harmless enclave; the latter might readily be acquired by compulsory purchase. What would then remain of the Dark Continent is already German. So that, as the results of the wars and victories which are considered by German thinkers to be inevitable, the whole of Africa would shortly pass into German hands.
With the destinies of Africa in the keeping of a virile race, accustomed to face great problems in no piecemeal fashion, but as a whole, vast transformations must ensue. Before their indomitable will and scientific thoroughness, the dusky savage will lay aside his ferocity, and toil joyously at the arts of peace. Under an indefatigable and intelligent administration, desert, jungle, forest, and swamp will yield their appropriate harvests. Timber, oil, cotton, rubber, tea, coffee, and every variety of raw material will gradually become available in limitless supplies. Jewels and precious metals willbe dug out of the bowels of the earth. Flocks and herds will roam in safety over the rich uplands—no robber bands to drive them off; no wild beasts to tear them limb from limb; no murrain or envenomed fly to strike them down by tens of thousands. For as the armies of the Kaiser are invincible against all human foes, so also are his men of science invincible, in their ceaseless war against disease of man and beast. In the end they also will conquer in their own sphere, no less certainly than the soldier in his; for their courage is as high and their devotion faces death, or worse than death, with equanimity.
The Dark Continent, which in all its history has never known either peace or order, will then at last know both. Even the stiff-necked Africander, jealous of his antique shibboleths of freedom, will not refuse incorporation in an Empire to which the land of his forefathers will already have become bound in federal ties. And the dowry which Holland is expected to bring with her, will be not only the good will of the South African Dutch, but the rich islands of the East, where merchant-adventurers planted her flag, in days when the fleets of Rotterdam disputed, not unsuccessfully, with London herself the primacy of the seas.
THE EASTERN DREAM
Finally, there is the dream of the farthest East. This is of such simple grandeur that it may be stated in a few sentences. When the war between China and Japan came to an end in 1895 Germany, acting in concert with France and Russia, forced the victorious troops of the Mikado to forgo all the fruits of their conquest. When three years later Germany herself seized upon the reversion of Kiao-Chau, shesaw a vision of an empire, greater than that which had been secured to her envied rival by the daring of Clive and the forethought of Warren Hastings. If England could hold and rule India, a mightier than England could surely hold and rule China, containing though it does a full quarter of the human race.
[1] "L'Allemand est né bête; la civilisation l'a, rendu méchant."—HEINE.
[2] Mr. Chamberlain at Leicester on November 30, 1899.
[3] March 1878. Treaty of Berlin, July 1878.
[4] 1890.
[5] Cf.The Anglo-German Problem, by C. Sarolea, p. 247, and following.
The German project of empire is a gorgeous fabric. The weft of it is thread of gold, but the warp of it has been dipped in the centaur's blood. It is the pride of its possessor; but it is likely to be his undoing. It ravishes his fancy with the symmetry and vastness of the pattern; yet these very two qualities, which so much excite his admiration, have shown themselves in the past singularly unpropitious to high imperial adventures.
No man of action worthy of the name will ever take history for his guide. He would rightly refuse to do so, even were it possible, which it is not, to write history truthfully. But with all their deficiencies, history books have certain sibylline qualities which make them worth consulting upon occasions; and as to symmetry and vastness this oracle, if consulted, would speak clearly enough. Of all false enticements which have lured great princes to their ruin, these two have the biggest tale of victims to their score.
SYMMETRY AND VASTNESS
The British Empire, like the Roman, built itself slowly. It was the way of both nations to deal with needs as needs occurred, and not before. Neither of them charted out their projects in advance,thereafter working to them, like Lenôtre, when he laid out the gardens of Versailles. On the contrary, a strip was added here, a kingdom there, as time went on, but not in accordance with any plan or system. In certain cases, no doubt, the reason for annexation was a simple desire for possession. But much more often the motive was apprehension of one kind or another. Empire-builders have usually achieved empire as an accident attending their search after security—security against the ambition of a neighbour, against lawless hordes which threaten the frontier, against the fires of revolution and disorder spreading from adjacent territories. Britain, like Rome before her, built up her empire piecemeal; for the most part reluctantly; always reckoning up and dreading the cost, labour, and burden of it; hating the responsibility of expansion, and shouldering it only when there seemed to be no other course open to her in honour or safety. Symmetry did not appeal to either of these nations any more than vastness. Their realms spread out and extended, as chance and circumstances willed they should, like pools of water in the fields when floods are out.
We cannot but distrust the soundness of recent German policy, with its grandiose visions of universal empire, if we consider it in the light of other things which happened when the world was somewhat younger, though possibly no less wise. The great imaginative conquerors, though the fame of their deeds still rings down the ages, do not make so brave a show, when we begin to examine into the permanency of their achievements. The imperial projects of Alexander, of the Habsburgs, the Grand Monarque, and Napoleon—each of whom drew outa vast pattern and worked to it—are not among those things which can be said with any justice to have endured. None of them were ever fully achieved; while some were broken in pieces, even during the lifetimes of their architects.
To treat the whole world as if it were a huge garden, for which one small race of men, who have worked busily in a single corner of it, can aspire to make and carry out an all-comprehending plan, is in reality a proof of littleness and not largeness of mind. Such vaulting ambitions are the symptoms of a dangerous disease, to be noted and distrusted. And none ever noted these tendencies more carefully or distrusted them more heartily than the two greatest statesmen whom Prussia has produced. Frederick the Great rode his own Pegasus-vision on curb and martingale. The Great Bismarck reined back the Pegasus-vision of his fellow-countrymen on to its haunches with an even sterner hand. "One cannot," so he wrote in later years—"one cannot see the cards of Providence so closely as to anticipate historical development according to one's own calculation."
MASTERY OF THE WORLD
Those very qualities of vastness and symmetry which appear to have such fatal attraction for the pedantocracy repel the practical statesman; and woe to the nation which follows after the former class rather than the latter, when the ways of the two part company! To the foreign observer it seems as if Germany, for a good many years past, has been making this mistake. Perhaps it is her destiny so to do. Possibly the reigns of Frederick and Bismarck were only interludes. For Germany followed the pedantocracy during a century or more,while it preached political inaction and contentment with a shorn and parcelled Fatherland. She was following it still, when Bismarck turned constitutionalism out of doors and went his own stern way to union. And now once again she seems to be marching in a fatal procession after the same Pied Pipers, who this time are engaged, with a surpassing eloquence and fervour, in preaching discontent with the narrow limits of a united empire, and in exhorting their fellow-countrymen to proceed to the Mastery of the World.
Among an imaginative race like the Germans, those who wield the weapons of rhetoric and fancy are only too likely to get the better of those surer guides, who know from hard experience that the world is a diverse and incalculable place, where no man, and no acre of land, are precisely the same as their next-door neighbours, where history never repeats itself, and refuses always—out of malice or disdain—to travel along the way which ingenious Titans have charted for it. But it is not every generation which succeeds in producing a Frederick the Great or a Bismarck, to tame the dreamers and use them as beasts of draught and burden.
The complete mosaic of the German vision is an empire incomparably greater in extent, in riches, and in population, than any which has yet existed since the world first began to keep its records. Visionaries are always in a hurry. This stupendous rearrangement of the Earth's surface is confidently anticipated to occur within the first half of the present century. It is to be accomplished by a race distinguished for its courage, industry, and devotion,—let us admit so much without grudging.But in numbers—even if we count the Teutons of the Habsburg Empire along with those of the Hohenzollern—it amounts upon the highest computation to less than eighty millions. This is the grain of mustard-seed which is confidently believed to have in it 'the property to get up and spread,' until within little more than a generation, it will dominate and control more than seven hundred millions of human souls.
Nor to German eyes, which dwell lovingly, and apparently without misgiving, upon this appalling prospect of symmetry and vastness, are these the sum total of its attractions. The achievement of their vision would bring peace to mankind. For there would then be but two empires remaining, which need give the overlords of the world the smallest concern. Of these Russia, in their opinion, needs a century at least in which to emerge out of primitive barbarism and become a serious danger; while in less than a century, the United States must inevitably crumble to nonentity, through the worship of false gods and the corruption of a decadent democracy. Neither of these two empires could ever hope to challenge the German Mastery of the World.
In South America as in North, there is already a German garrison, possessing great wealth and influence. And in the South, at any rate, it may well become, very speedily, an imperative obligation on the Fatherland to secure, for its exiled children, more settled conditions under which to extend the advantages of German commerce and Kultur. President Monroe has already been dead a hundred years or more. According to the calculations of the pedantocracy, his famous doctrine will need some strongerbacking than the moral disapprobation of a hundred millions of materially-minded and unwarlike people, in order to withstand the pressure of German diplomacy, if it should summon war-ships and transports to its aid.
UNIVERSAL PEACE
So in the end we arrive at an exceedingly strange conclusion. For that very thing, which the philanthropists have all these years been vainly endeavouring to bring about by means of congresses of good men, and resolutions which breathe a unanimity of noble aspirations, may be achieved in a single lifetime by a series of bold strokes with the German sword. Then at last Universal Peace will have been secured.
At this point the Prussian professor and the pacifist apostle, who turned their backs upon one another so angrily at the beginning, and started off, as it seemed, in opposite directions, are confronting one another unexpectedly at the other side of the circle of human endeavour. They ought surely to shake hands; for each, if he be honest, will have to own himself the convert of the other. "You admit then after all," cries the triumphant Pacifist, "that Peace is the real end of human endeavour!" "Whether or no," grunts the other in reply, "this at any rate was the only road to it."
One wonders—will the Pacifist be content? He has reached his goal sure enough; though by means which he has been accustomed to denounce as the end of all true morality? Will the Professor, on the other hand, be well pleased when he discovers that by the very triumph of his doctrines he has made war for ever impossible,—manliness, therefore, and all true virtue likewise impossible,—thereby damningthe souls of posterity to the end of time? "To put questions in this quarter with a hammer, and to hear perchance that well-known hollow sound which tells of blown-out frogs"[1]—this is a joy, no doubt; and it is all we are ever likely to arrive at by the cross-examination of dreamers.
[1] Nietzsche,The Twilight of Idols.
The dream of German expansion, as year by year it took firmer hold upon the popular imagination, produced, as might have been expected, a desire that it might be realised. From the stage of vague and ardent longing it was but a short way to the next, where a determined will began to put forth efforts towards achievement. But as mankind in the mass, whether in Germany or England, is still to some extent hampered by human nature, by a number of habits, traditions, and instincts, and by various notions of good and evil, justice and injustice—which the subtlest philosophers and most eloquent rhetoricians have not yet succeeded in eradicating—a need was felt for what the text-books in their solemn nomenclature callan ethical basis. In plain words, the German people wanted to have right on their side—if possible, old-fashioned, Sunday-school, copy-book Right. Failing that, even such a plea as the wolf maintained against the lamb would be a great deal better than nothing.
This tendency in a nation to look about for justification and a righteous plea, when it is preparing to possess itself of property belonging to its neighbours, is for the most part a subconscious process, not onlyamong the common people, but also among the leaders themselves. It resembles the instinct among hens which produces in them an appetite for lime when the season has come to begin laying. It was through some natural impulse of this sort, and not through mere cynicism, hypocrisy, or cool calculation, that German publicists discovered all the grievances which have been already touched upon. For even if the possession of these grievances did not altogether give the would-be aggressors right up to the point of righteousness, it certainly put their neighbours in the wrong, and branded the French dove and the British lamb with turpitude in the eyes of the German people. The grievances against France were, that although she had been vanquished in 1870, although her population had actually decreased since that date, and although therefore she had neither the right to nor any need for expansion, she had nevertheless expanded in Africa as well as in the East, to a far greater extent than Germany herself, the victorious power, whose own population had meanwhile been increasing by leaps and bounds.
GRIEVANCES AGAINST ENGLAND
The grievances against Britain were that she was supposed to have made war upon German trade, to have prevented her young rival from acquiring colonies, and to have intrigued to surround the Teuton peoples with a ring of foes. Britain had helped France to occupy and hold her new territories. Britain had been mainly responsible for the diplomatic defeat of Germany at Algeciras in 1905 and again over Agadir in 1911. Moreover when Germany, during the South African war, had attempted, in the interests of international morality, to combine the nations against us, we had foiled her high-mindedand unselfish endeavours. When at an earlier date she had sought, by the seizure of Kiao-Chau and by a vigorous concentration, to oust British influence and trade from their position of predominance in China, we had countered her efforts by the occupation of Wei-hai-wei and the Japanese alliance.
As regards command of the sea we had likewise frustrated German ambitions. After a certain amount of vacillation, and a somewhat piteous plea for a general diminution of armaments—backed up by an arrest of our own, which Germany interpreted, perhaps not unnaturally, as a throwing up of the sponge and beginning of the end of our naval supremacy—we had actually had the treachery (for it was nothing less) to upset all her calculations, and turn all her efforts and acceleration to foolishness, by resuming the race for sea-power with redoubled energy. And although to our own eyes, and even possibly to the eyes of impartial observers, none of these doings of ours—in so far as they were truly alleged—could be rightly held to constitute any real grievance, that consideration was irrelevant. For when a man is in search of a grievance he will find it, if he be earnest enough, in the mere fact that his intended adversary stammers, or has a wart upon his nose.
German statesmen were happy in having established these grievances to their own satisfaction; but something more was necessary in order that their morality might rest upon a sure foundation. German policy must be absolutely right, and not merely relatively right by contrast with those neighbours whose power she sought to overthrow, and whose territories she wished to annex. And although thiseffort to establish German policy on the principle of Right involved a recasting of Christian morality, it was not shirked on that account. On the contrary it was undertaken in a most energetic spirit.
The first great influence in this readjustment of popular conceptions of right and wrong was the historian Heinrich von Treitschke.[1] He boldly differentiated the moral obligations of the private individual from those of a government charged with the destinies of a nation.[2] The duties of a man to his family, neighbours, and society Treitschke left undisturbed. In this sphere of human life the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount not only remained unchallenged, but was upheld and reinforced. Statecraft, however, fell under a different category.
THE STATE IS POWER
The true principle of private conduct was Love for one's Neighbour, but the true principle of the state was Power. The duty of a virtuous ruler was to seek power, more power, and always more power, on behalf of the nation he was called upon to govern. The internal power of the state over the action of its own subjects was absolute, and it was a duty owed by each generation of rulers to posterity, to see to it that in their own time, the external power of thestate was increased at the expense of its neighbours.[3] To secure this end wars were inevitable; and despite the sufferings which wars entailed, they were far from regrettable, for the reason that they preserved the vigour, unity, and devotion of the race, while stimulating the virtues of courage and self-sacrifice among private citizens.[4]
Nations, he maintained, cannot safely stand still. They must either increase their power or lose it, expand their territories or be prepared to see them shorn away. No growth of spiritual force or material well-being within the state will preserve it, if it fails to extend its authority and power among its neighbours. Feelings of friendliness, chivalry, and pity are absurd as between nations. To speak even of justice in such a connection is absurd. Need and Might together constitute Right. Nor ought the world to regret the eating-up of weak nations by the strong, of small nations by the great, because—a somewhat bold conclusion—great and powerful nations alone are capable of producing what the world requires in thought, art, action, and virtue. For how can these things flourish nobly in a timid, cowering state, which finds itself driven by force of circumstances to make-believes and fictions, tothe meanest supplications and to devices of low cunning, in order to preserve an independence which, as it can only exist on sufferance, is nothing better than a sham?[5]
As the Hohenzollerns, the noblest and most capable of modern dynasties, had never been content merely to reign, but had always maintained their 'divine right' of ruling and dominating the Prussian Kingdom—as Prussia itself, the most manly and energetic of modern nations, had not been content merely to serve as the figurehead of a loose confederation, but had insisted upon becoming supreme master and imposing its own system, policy, and ideals upon all Germany—so was it the duty and destiny of united Germany, under these happy auspices, having been taught and seasoned by long centuries of stern and painful apprenticeship, to issue forth in the meridian vigour of her age and seize upon the Mastery of the World.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
If Treitschke, the eloquent historian, succeeded to his own satisfaction and that of a very large proportion of German statesmen, soldiers, intellectuals, and publicists in taking high policy altogether out of the jurisdiction of Christian morals, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,[6] the even more eloquent and infinitely more subtle poet-philosopher, made a cleaner andbolder cut, and got rid of Christian morality even in the sphere of private conduct.
Nietzsche was but little interested or concerned in the practical problems of statecraft which engrossed the patriotic mind of Treitschke. The destinies of the German nation were for him a small matter in comparison with those of the human race. But nevertheless his vigorously expressed contempt for the English, their ways of life and thought, the meanness of their practical aims, and the degradation of their philosophic ideals,[7] was comforting to his fellow-countrymen, who were relieved to find that the nation whom they desired to despoil was so despicable and corrupt. This train of argument was deceptive and somewhat dangerous; for it led his German readers to overlook the fact, that the broad front of his attack aimed at enveloping and crushing the cherished traditions of the Teuton race no less than those of the Anglo-Saxon.[8]
Nietzsche's derision and dislike of the Prussian spirit, of militarism, and of what he conceived to be the spurious principle of nationality, his vague, disinterested cosmopolitanism or Europeanism, are as the poles apart from the aims and ideas of Treitschke and the German patriots.[9] Nietzsche is not concerned to evolve a sovereign and omnipotent state, but a high overmastering type of man, who shall inherit the earth and dominate—not for their good, but for his own—the millions who inhabit it. His ideal is a glorious aristocracy of intellect, beauty, courage, self-control, felicity, and power, scornfully smiling, exuberantly vital. The evolution, ever higher and higher, of this fine oligarchy of super-men is the one absolute end of human endeavour. The super-men will use and direct the force and instincts of 'the herd'—even the capacities of kings, soldiers, law-givers,and administrators—to make the world a fit place for their own development. The millions of slaves are to be considered merely as a means to this end. Concern about them for their own sakes, above all pity for their sufferings, or regard on the part of the super-men for their resentment—except to guard against it—is a mistake. The serenity of the superman must not allow itself to be disturbed and distracted by any such considerations. It is for him to take what he needs or desires, to impose order on the world, so that it may be a fit environment for the evolution of his own caste, and, so far as he can compass it, to live like the gods.[10]
THE BLONDE BRUTE
It is clear that although Nietzsche chaunts a pæan in admiration of "the magnificent blonde brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory,"[11] and although he is constantly found, as it were, humming this refrain, he had no intention of taking the Prussian as his ideal type—still less of personifying Prussia itself as a super-state engaged in a contest for supremacy with a herd of inferior nations. He does not trouble himself in the least about nations, but only about individual men. Yet, like others who have had the gift of memorable speech, he mightwell marvel, were he still alive, at the purposes to which his words have been turned by orators and journalists, desirous to grind an edge on their own blunt axes.
General von Bernhardi[12] may be taken as a type of the sincere but unoriginal writer who turns all texts to the support of his own sermon. He is an honest, literal fellow. In spite of all his ecstatic flights of rhetoric he is never at all in the clouds—never any farther from the earth's surface than hopping distance. Notwithstanding, he quietly appropriates any Nietzschean aphorisms the sound and shape of which appear to suit his purpose, and uses them to drive home his very simple and concrete proposition that it is the duty of Germany to conquer the world.
One imagines from his writings that Bernhardi has no quarrel with Christianity, no wish whatsoever to overturn our accepted notions of morality. He is merely a soldier with a fixed idea, and he is very much in earnest. His literary methods remind one somewhat of the starlings in spring-time, perched on the backs of sheep and cattle, picking off the loose hairs to line their nests. This is the highly practical and soldierly use to which he puts philosophers, poets, and men of letters generally—laying them under contribution to garnish his discourse.
INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY
It is probably true that the average soldier who fought on the German side at Ypres and elsewherewas hardly more conversant with the writings of Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Bernhardi than the average British soldier opposed to him was with those of Herbert Spencer, Mr. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Norman Angell. It is very unlikely, however, that the battle of Ypres would ever have been fought had it not been for the ideas which sprang from these and similar sources. The influence of the written and spoken word upon German policy and action is glaringly manifest.[13] It inspired and supported the high bureaucrats at Berlin, and had equally to do, if indirectly, with the marching of the humblest raw recruits shoulder to shoulder to be shot down on the Menin Road. For by a process of percolation through the press and popular literature, the doctrines of these teachers—diluted somewhat, it is true, and a good deal disguised and perverted—had reached a very wide audience. Though the names of these authors were for the most part unknown, though their opinions had never been either understood or accepted by the common people, the effects of their teaching had made themselves felt in every home in Germany.
The German private soldier would not have been shot down unless these eloquent sermons had been preached. None the less, he had never grasped or understood, far less had he adhered to and professed, the cardinal doctrines which they contained. He still believed in the old-fashioned morality, and thought that states as well as individual men were bound to act justly. It was this faith which gavehim his strength, and made him die gladly. For he believed that Germany had acted justly, the Allies unjustly, that it was his task, along with other good men and true, to win victory for his Emperor and safety for his Fatherland, and to crush the treacherous and malignant aggressors.
In spite of all this preliminary discoursing which had been going on for many years past, like artillery preparation before an infantry attack—about world-power, will-to-power, and all the rest of it—nothing is more remarkable than the contrast presented, immediately after war broke out, between the blatancy of those writers who had caused the war and the bleating of those (in many cases the same) who sought to justify Germany's part in it to their countrymen and the world.
On the enlightened principles of Treitschke and Bernhardi, Britain would have acted not only wisely, but in the strictest accordance with her duty to her own state, had she indeed contrived and compassed this war, believing circumstances to be favourable for herself and unfavourable for Germany. Not another shred of right or reason was required.[14] But when war actually burst out, all these new-fangled doctrines went by the board. Though the ink was hardly dry upon Bernhardi's latest exhortation—of which several hundred thousand copies had been sold, and in which he urged his fellow-countrymen to watch their time and make war when it suited them, without remorse and no matter on whatplea—in spite of this fact, there was a singular lack of Stoicism among 'the brethren' when war was declared against Russia and France. When Britain joined in, and when things began to go less well than had been expected, Stoicism entirely disappeared. Indeed there is something highly ludicrous, at the same time painful—like all spectacles of human abasement—in the chorus of whines and shrill execration, which at once went up to heaven from that very pedantocracy whose leaders, so short a time before, had been preaching that, as between the nations of the earth, Might is Right, and Craft is the trusty servant of Might.[15]
APOSTASY WHEN WAR CAME
These scolding fakirs were of an infinite credulity, inasmuch as they believed that Sir Edward Grey was the reincarnation of Machiavelli. Yet on their own principles, what was there in this discovery to be in the least shocked at? British statesmen (it is hardly necessary to repeat it) had not walked in the footsteps of the Florentine; had not provoked the war; had not wished for it; had tried with all their might to prevent it; but if they had done the very reverse, would they not merely have beentaking a leaf out of the sacred book of the pedantocracy—out of Bernhardi's book, out of Nietzsche's book, out of Treitschke's book? Why, then, all these unpleasant howlings and ravings?
The answers are not hard to find. The careful plans and theories of the German bureaucrats had been turned topsy-turvy because England had joined in the war when, according to the calculations of the augurs, she should have remained neutral. That mistake must have been sufficiently annoying in itself to disturb the equanimity even of professional philosophers. And further, in spite of all the ingenious, eloquent, and sophistical exhortations of the prophets, the old morality still kept its hold upon the hearts of men. When trouble arose they turned to it instinctively—priesthood as well as people—and the later gospel fell flat like a house of cards. Immediately war came there was an appeal to old-fashioned justice, and the altars of the little, new-fangled, will-to-power gods were deserted by their worshippers.
When statesmen are laying out policies, and moralists are setting up systems, it is worth their while to make certain that they are not, in fact, engaged upon an attempt to make water flow uphill; above all, that their ingenious new aqueducts will actually hold water, which in this instance they certainly did not.
[1] Heinrich von Treitschke, son of a Saxon general of Bohemian-Slavonic origin; born at Dresden 1834. Deafness following upon a fever in childhood prevented him from adopting the profession of arms; 1858-1863 lectured on history at Leipzig; 1863-1866 professor at Freiburg; 1866-1874 professor at Heidelberg; 1874 until his death in 1896 professor of history and politics at Berlin.
[2] "Thus it follows from this, that we must distinguish between public and private morality. The order of rank of the various duties must necessarily be for the State, as it is power, quite other than for individual men. A whole series of these duties, which are obligatory on the individual, are not to be thought of in any case for the State. To maintain itself counts for it always as the highest commandment; that is absolutely moral for it. And on that account we must declare that of all political sins that of weakness is the most reprehensible and the most contemptible; it is in politics the sin against the Holy Ghost...."—Selections, p. 32.
[3] "That must not hinder us from declaring joyfully that the gifted Florentine, with all the vast consequence of his thinking, was the first to set in the centre of all politics the great thought:The State is power. For that is the truth; and he who is not man enough to look this truth in the face ought to keep his hands off politics."—Ibid.p. 28.
[4] "... to the historian who lives in the world of will it is immediately clear that the demand for a perpetual peace is thoroughly reactionary; he sees that with war all movement, all growth, must be struck out of history. It has always been the tired, unintelligent, and enervated periods that have played with the dream of perpetual peace...."—Selections, p. 25.
"It is precisely political idealism that demands wars, while materialism condemns them. What a perversion of morality to wish to eliminate heroism from humanity!"—Ibid.p. 24.
[5] "... if we survey history in the mass, it is clear that all real masterpieces of poetry and art arose upon the soil of great nationalities;" and "The poet and artist must be able to react upon a great nation. When did a masterpiece ever arise among a petty little nation?"—Ibid.p. 19.
[6] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, son of a village pastor of Polish ancestry; born at Röcken in Saxony 1844; served in the German army for a few months in 1867; injured in mounting his horse; 1869-1879 professor of classical philology at Bale which entailed naturalisation as a Swiss subject; served in ambulance in war of 1870-1871; 1879-1889 in bad health, wrote and travelled; 1889 became insane and remained so till his death in 1900.
[7] "What is lacking in England, and has always been lacking, that half-actor and rhetorician knew well enough, the absurd muddlehead, Carlyle, who sought to conceal under passionate grimaces what he knew about himself: namely, what was lacking in Carlyle, realpowerof intellect, realdepthof intellectual perception, in short, philosophy."—Beyond Good and Evil, p. 210.
"The Englishman, more gloomy, sensual, headstrong, and brutal than the German—is for that very reason, as the baser of the two, also the most pious."—Ibid.p. 211.
"The English coarseness and rustic demureness is still more satisfactorily disguised by Christian pantomime, and by praying and psalm-singing (or, more correctly, it is thereby explained and differently expressed); and for the herd of drunkards and rakes who formerly learned moral grunting under the influence of Methodism (and more recently as the 'Salvation Army'), a penitential fit may really be the relatively highest manifestation of 'humanity' to which they can be elevated."—Ibid.p. 211.
"The European ignobleness, the plebeianism of modern ideas, is England's work and invention."—Ibid.p. 213.
[8] "I believe only in French culture, and regard everything else in Europe which calls itself 'culture' as a misunderstanding. I do not even take the German kind into consideration.... The few instances of higher culture with which I have met in Germany were all French in their origin."—Ecce Homo, p. 27.
"Wherever Germany extends her sway, sheruinsculture."—Ibid.p. 38.
"Culture and the state are antagonists: a 'culture-state' is merely a modern idea. The one lives upon the other, the one flourishes at the expense of the other. All great periods of culture have been periods of political decline; that which was great from the standpoint of culture was always unpolitical—even anti-political.... In the history of European culture the rise of the (German) Empire signifies, above all, a displacement of the centre of gravity. Everywhere people are already aware of this: in things that really matter—and these after all constitute culture—the Germans are no longer worth considering.... The fact that there is no longer a single German philosopher worth mentioning is an increasing wonder."—The Twilight of the Idols, p. 54.
"Every great crime against culture for the last four centuries lies on their [the German] conscience.... It was the Germans who caused Europe to lose the fruits, the whole meaning of her last period of greatness—the period of the Renaissance...."—Ecce Homo, p. 124.
"The future of German culture rests with the sons of Prussian officers."—The Genealogy of Morals, p. 222.
"If any one wishes to see the 'German soul' demonstratedad oculos, let him only look at German taste, at German arts and manners: what boorish indifference to 'taste'!"—The Antichrist.
[9] "What quagmires and mendacity there must be about if it is possible, in the modern European hotchpotch, to raise questions of race."
A Nation—"Men who speak one language and read the same newspapers."—The Genealogy of Morals, p. 226.
[10] "A boldly daring, splendidly overbearing, high-flying, and aloft-up-dragging class of higher men, who had first to teach their century—and it is the century of themasses—the conception 'higher man.'"—Beyond Good and Evil, p. 219.
"This man of the future, this tocsin of noon and of the great verdict, which renders the will again free, who gives back to the world its goal and to man his hope, this Antichrist and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of Nothingness—he must one day come."—The Genealogy of Morals, p. 117.
[11] "The blonde beast that lies at the core of all aristocratic races."—The Genealogy of Morals, p. 42.
"The profound, icy mistrust which the German provokes, as soon as he arrives at power,—even at the present time,—is always still an aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which for whole centuries Europe has regarded the wrath of the blonde Teuton beast."—Ibid.
[12] Friedrich von Bernhardi: born 1849 at St. Petersburg, where his father Theodor von Bernhardi was a Councillor of the Prussian Legation; entered a Hussar regiment in 1869; military attaché at Berne in 1881; in 1897 he was chief of the General Staff of the 16th Army Corps; in 1908 he was appointed commander of the 7th Army Corps; retired in the following year. He was a distinguished cavalry general, and is probably the most influential German writer on current politico-military problems.
[13] Probably not less so upon British policy and inaction. As water is the result of blending oxygen and hydrogen in certain proportions, so is the present war the resultant of German militarism and British anti-militarism in combination.
[14] "Every State has as sovereign the undoubted right to declare war when it chooses, consequently every State is in the position of being able to cancel any treaties which have been concluded."—Treitschke,Selections, p. 15.
"It is not only the right, but the moral and political duty of the statesman to bring about a war."—Bernhardi,Germany and the Next War, p. 41
[15] Towards the end of March 1915 General von Bernhardi published in theNew York Sunan article the object of which was to explain to the American people how much his previous writings had been misunderstood and perverted by the malice of the enemy. Long before this date, however, there was strong presumptive evidence that the distinguished military author was unfavourably regarded by the Super-men at Berlin. He had been useful before the war for preparing the Teutonic youth for Armageddon; but after hostilities began it was discovered that, so far as neutral opinion was concerned, it would have been better had he been wholly interdicted from authorship under the national motto—verboten. As to the tenour of imperial communications to the popular fire-eating publicist during the winter 1914-1915, might we venture to paraphrase them into the vulgar vernacular as follows?—"We've got to thank you and your damned books, more than anything else, for the present mess with America. Get busy, and explain them all away if you can."—Any one of the labours of Hercules was easier.