Recorded November 3d, 1920
When I imposed an indemnity of five billion francs on the French people in 1870 we knew that the money could and would be paid. But there is no parallel between Germany in 1920 and France in 1870. The Reparations Commission has only succeeded in proving its incompetence. The German delegates have shown that the Allied war claims amount to more than five hundred billion marks (gold), which is nearly four thousand billions at the present rate of exchange.
This fantastic sum, one hundred times more than France paid to Germany in 1870, is expected of a country on the verge of revolution and chaos. I charge this Commission with incompetence, extravagance, luxurious living, and claims at once absurd and ridiculous.
You punish some of the most dangerous criminals by indeterminate sentences, whichfrequently end after a year’s imprisonment, but you expect to hold the German people in financial bondage for more than a generation to come because of the criminal blunders of less than a hundred individuals.
I was blinded by material factors at the time of my seeming triumphs but now I can see some of the things which will never come to pass. The French and the English are repeating some of the blunders I made fifty years ago. They are counting on conditions which will never exist, like a bird sitting on a nest of mixed eggs from which the cuckoo will eventually oust all the other birds.
French people are under the illusion that Russia will meet the obligations undertaken by the late Czar. To expect such a thing shows the child-like illusions under which French fanatics are living. They are still wrapped in the swaddling clothes of politics.
We committed crimes that have brought civilization to the brink of chaos, but we are not capable of such naivete.
The logic of a Frenchman is no better than the mysticism of a Russian or the sentimentality of an Englishman. French peoplelearned nothing from the blunders of Napoleon III and the debacle of Sedan. And the reason? They have remained provincial while the Germans imitated the commercial cosmopolitanism of the English.
Advice is the cheapest of all things. Nevertheless, I advise your statesmen to place no reliance on sentimental contracts written on paper foredoomed to become “scraps.”
I do not hesitate to declare that no agreement signed since 1913 is worth more than the seals. In Europe, leaders and rulers have passed from an international game of chess to a national gamble with marked cards.
You have now to deal with an element which did not exist in my time. This element embraces all factions of the new radicalism, no matter in what country or under what leader. Some of these elements may unite, but they are not going to change. How, then, can you undertake to insure the future by contracts signed and sealed by elderly gentlemen with good intentions and poor judgment?
The war gave the new factions the long wished-for opportunity. They seized it inRussia, in Germany, in Poland, in Britain, and other countries. But the opportunities created by the war are one thing, the opportunities of tomorrow will be different, and it is this contingency for which your leaders are not prepared. You will have to select men of vision who will judge events as they arrive, without regard to the distant future, which belongs to no man.
One of my greatest mistakes was in separating Protestant Prussia from the interests of the Catholics of South Germany.
The new radicalism is opposed to some things which are irrevocably linked with religious doctrine.
Without the Catholic Church all Europe would be in the throes of the Commune. The principal cause of our disintegration was that we sanctioned Protestant flirtation with modern materialism.
France is beginning to see that even a weak monarchy is better than a radical government without a God.
You may expect a return of the monarchy in more than one country. Agnostics and Protestants, moved by fear on one side, anddisgust on the other, will unite for a restoration as their last hope. There will be a repetition of historic events.
Bonaparte was ushered in by the French Revolution, and his advent was followed by three kings and one emperor.
The majority treat their rulers as children treat their toys: when the novelty wears off a change is demanded.
Political psychology and religious sentiment are not the same thing. Nevertheless, they must be considered together. The Germans are now awaiting the hour when the inevitable change will be demanded. Events take crowns from some heads and place them on others. If the ex-Kaiser ever occupies the throne again a modern Nero will fiddle amidst the ruins of German imperialism, for you know he meddled with fiddle strings as well as with political wires.
You think it strange? The impossible is always happening. Never lose sight of the fact that an organized minority is more formidable than a disorganized majority. Three men brought about the coup d’etat that placed the outcast Louis Napoleon on thethrone, one man started the Russian Revolution, I planned the overthrow of the Second Empire with the aid of Count von Moltke. The majority put their trust in numbers, but the bigger a thing grows the nearer it is to disintegration. An autocratic minority ruled in Germany, an automatic majority rules in France and England. Two men started the present rule in Moscow, both of them from the outside.
“God has been merciful to us,” said Cavour, in the Italian Senate, “He has made Spain one degree lower than Italy.” God has been merciful to Germany, He has made Russian communism more abhorrent than German socialism.
Nothing will be left undone by the French government to secure permanent occupation of the coal district of the Rhine.
Conditions will not remain long as they are. They are preparing decisive coups in Bavaria, Hanover, Austria and Hungary. New combinations will amaze your statesmen and diplomats, who are ignorant of the fact that changes and upheavals operate in cycles of three and seven. What they call chance is theworking of law. Spiritual forces operate through the physical, and nature will take a hand in the reactions in Petrograd and Moscow. Cold, hunger and starvation will dissipate the hopes of the ruling minority. Untold numbers will be sacrificed.
During the French Revolution philosophers and thinkers were decapitated. In Russia such men are killed by hunger, the difference being one of method.
Such conditions will be repeated in different countries until people learn that the spiritual cannot be separated from the material without pain and slaughter.
After all the long-winded conferences and shorthand reports nothing is left but a confusion of blots on the tissue paper of time.
I may say more on another occasion.
The happy-go-lucky humor of the day is no match for the cool calculation of European communists. English and American humorists do for the public what the court jester once did for blasé kings.
In the sardonic temper of the Russian revolutionist, I see a return of the French temper of 1793.
Most of the sermons and speeches of the time are chameleon in character and tepid in feeling. English humorists developed a flagrant cynicism, spotted with a varioloid paradox, while French writers have halted between the isolation of the hospital and the insularity of the home.
The war brought Anatole France to his senses, the last of the Gallic wits, who possessed a greater charm than Voltaire without attaining his universal prestige. Prince Bismarck declares that the French have learned nothing since their defeat at Sedan.Yet French writers have learned more from the great war than the writers of any other country.
English humor is meant to entertain a public lost in the cynical buffooneries of materialism; American humor is meant to amuse a public lost in the mazes of extravagant pleasures and provincial inanities.
English humor has a certain seal; American humor a certain mark—the difference between sealing wax and a postage stamp. Both aim to fill the ghastly gap left by the doctrine of evolution since it caught the fancy of agnostic freebooters in 1870—forerunners of something grimmer than the Soviet symbols of a return of puritanism even now creeping into view as ivy creeps up the water spouts.
Laughter will vanish, since there will be nothing left to laugh at. Dancing will cease, for curfew will ring at nine and people will begin work at five.
Remember that all the great modern movements had an obscure origin. Spiritualism began in a country farm-house, ChristianScience developed out of mediumship, prohibition was started in a village, woman’s suffrage was started by a Quakeress, Theosophy began at a farm-house in Vermont, the Salvation Army was started by a group of obscure persons.
The new puritanism will start by a committee of persons unknown to the public, chosen from the ranks of the Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians. Grim determinists, they will ignore satire, sarcasm and irony, ignore party politics, ignore the opposition of luke-warm Christians, form committees, in which they will be aided by drastic reactions during the period of readjustment.
Centers will soon be formed in Atlanta, Nashville, Cleveland, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia and Washington, D. C.
What is causing so much crime? Not one, but many elements of decadence, all operating together, among which I can name rag, jazz, high balls, cabarets, free verse, neurotic art, sentimental optimism, cheap notions of progress, neutral sermons, automobilism, lack of child discipline, absence of fearamong people under the age of forty—evils which you may apply to all English-speaking countries.
The licence of the cities dominates country life and country thought. The city minority rules the majority in the country, and it is in the country that the reaction will begin.
(Second Message)
Many of the smaller nations, instead of being content with their liberty, have thrown it away for the licence that always goes with land grabbing. For a nation is nothing more than an individual with a certain amount of collective ambition.
Much of the work of the League of Nations will have to be undone. But it will not be undone by any League. The nations will settle differences in accordance with the law that permits the more powerful to wield control commensurate with their geographical and intellectual importance.
All people have rights which ought to be respected, but some have privileges as well as rights, and the privileged will hold the upper hand as long as intelligence takes precedence of illiteracy, energy dominates over lethargy, and the power of organized numbers rules over minorities.
Your statesmen and your mediators will have to learn the distinction between rights and privileges. All are supposed to possess common rights under the common law, but it is wisdom, supported by poise and power, that constitutes privilege. David and Solomon were privleged. So were Alfred the Great, Washington and Lincoln.
A nation is temperamental like an individual. The temperament may be vascillating or it may be stolid; it may be logical or it may be commercial; or a combination of the Saxon and the Celt.
The nations that will hold the balance of power in the future will be the ones with the most will and poise, backed by number. Riches, alone, will not save. Wealth did not save Germany from disaster, nor did it help Nopoleon III to ward off the Prussian invasion in 1870. Wealth invites invasion and conquest. This is why England and America will now be the principal target for the ambitious and the discontented. This is why Japan seeks a firm foothold in China, and the Russians an entrance to India through Persia.
Without the prospects of loot there would be no war. When ambition and glory lure a nation on, the desire for loot supplies the motor force. When hunger forces a people to invade a nation, loot becomes a necessity.
What the wealthy of every nation refuse to understand, or even to consider, is that material force engenders vanity, individualism, rivalry and envy. All manifestations of force contain an element of disintegration. The type of a nation will always represent the policy and the trend of the nation.
The supreme blunder of the Peace Conference was made when the delegates, with Mr. Wilson at their head, refused to face the fact that no nation can rise above the ideals and idiosyncrasies of the national temperament, and that sudden liberation from restraint is as dangerous for a country as it is for an individual.
There is but one step between liberty and licence, and that step meant pandemonium for all classes in Russia. For other peoples it may mean political bondage and the total loss of a national spirit. For the Hindoos it will mean civil wars between the different nativerulers, for China it has meant a series of revolutions and counter revolutions which may have to be suppressed by the drastic hand of a Japanese Bonaparte.
The League Conference at Versailles took no account of the working of natural law. Sentimentality was the key-note of Mr. Wilson’s idealism, and commercial expansion the dominant idea of his opponents.
As for religion exerting any fundamental influence for peace and right thinking, it caused Protestants to fight Protestants and Catholics to fight Catholics, while German and Austrian cardinals did all in their power to aid in the invasion and conquest of Belgium and France, on one hand, and Italy, the stronghold of the Papal See, on the other; and all this in the face of the statement of the Kaiser that Catholicism must be destroyed. Nothing like it has been known since the dawn of Christianity.
The only apparent reason for the quiescent attitude of some of the smaller nations is that they are without the material means of waging war on their neighbors.
Just as long as politicians are impelled by self-interest there will be found nations that will have to use force for the suppression of licence and the curtailment of liberty. In every country the people are getting what their thoughts and deeds create for them.
Events come and go in cycles—there is a beginning, a middle and an end. The League of Nations had a beginning and it will have an end. But what kind of an end? Will it be one of victory or one of ignominy?
The two fatal blunders of the Kaiser and his cohorts consisted in the delusion that England could not raise, equip and transport a body of troops sufficient to offer adequate resistance to the invaders of France in conjunction with the French and Belgian armies, and that America could not or would not join the European Allies.
At the present juncture the inimical forces, both in continental Europe and in America, are repeating the old blunders under fresh conditions.
History is a repetition of the old tunes with new variations. Just now the fireworks of sophistry and rhetoric drown out the familiar tune and what is heard is the buzz-saw of political machinery.
Hyenas are gnawing the bones left by the lion rampant of Czardom; and Siberia, the remnant, is being consumed by jackals from Japan. It remains to be seen how long voters with American pedigrees will be influenced by demagogues who would induce them to part with their birthright for a mess of pottage burnt on the bottom.
The longer you wink at anarchy in Europe the greater will be the menace of social chaos at home. The worship of shibboleths cannot be kept up beyond a point where the majority grow tired of hocus-pocus politics and academical agnosticism.
There should be harmony of interests in dealing with the people of Mexico, from whom you have much to learn in many ways.
The Obregon Government should be recognized at Washington and immediate steps taken to insure cordial relations between the two countries.
The City of Mexico is a capital with a great future.
You are about to pass through a period of great confusion. Warnings have been given but not heeded. Unless you cease to theorize,and propagate a spirit of justice and judgment, the near future will develop something more than storms in the blue china teapots of diplomacy.
Washington needs a breaker of images.
The pedestrian sauntering down Pennsylvania Avenue cannot but note the hefty Hancock on horseback, looking as if he had just left a meeting of ward politicians, and, in another part of the city, McClellan, the Beau Brummel of the Civil War, on a charger, sniffing the smoke of battle from a safe distance, and others whose names are writ in water but whose effigies remain in bronze.
To the scrap heap with these, and in their places erect memorials for the women, who did as much for America as Joan of Arc did for France, the intrepid pioneers of their race, the prophetic patriots of the nineteenth century—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony.
It would take a Lincoln Memorial to depict their serenity, a National Capitol to symbolize their nobility, a Washington Monument to typify the towering height of their achievement and the scope and clarity of their vision.
A war between America and England would fill your homes with desolation and bring ruin to the whole country. Do your sins of omission merit such a punishment? I am here to tell you what to expect if such a hurricane of disaster ever sweeps the two countries.
Millions of people are under the impression that the United States can act independently of the conditions prevailing in the other great nations. This suggestion, coming, as it did, from a professional joker in England, has met with eager response from revolutionary emissaries now in your midst, supported by political fillibusters who are masking the truth.
If England ever starts such a war she will lose India. Her direction of the reins of civilization in many quarters of the world would cease on the day hostilities began. But I am speaking for America.
A war with England would Russianize the United States within three months. Even if the navy could keep the enemy at a safe distance the destructive forces at home would loot the principal cities and spread terror from ocean to ocean.
The first to lose in such an upheaval would be the wealthy propagandists of disorder and violence, who, living in security now, would be hurled with destructive force against the weapons of their own creation.
Late Commander of the Military Department ofSouthern California, Arizona and New Mexico
In 1914 western civilization was threatened by a military autocracy centralized at Berlin. Europe is now threatened by a communistic tyranny centralized at Moscow and by an autocratic aristocracy centered in Japan, anti-Christian, anti-democratic, anti-American. You may call it fate or destiny, it matters not so long as you know what the signs and portents are.
We can see what is going on in the navy yards of the Nipponese Empire. We have noted the strenuous efforts put forth in naval preparations there.
A Japanese Bonaparte will soon dominate China and prevent Christian propaganda throughout Asia. I could give you the dates fixed for certain maneuvers and events in connection with Japanese ambitions relatingto America, but they could change the dates. Suffice it to say they are making ready as fast as possible, much faster than many in this country could be made to believe. When the decisive moment arrives for action it will come suddenly, like the invasion of Belgium by the Germans.
Here are some of their expectations:—
The invasion of the coast of Mexico and a coalition of Japanese forces with some military faction in Mexico likely to be of practical aid, the bombing of American cities on the Pacific Coast from the air, virtual cessation of communication between certain sections east of the Rocky Mountains and California, brought about not so much by physical means as by revolutionary influences. They are counting on a Soviet revolution east of the Rockies while they are gaining a foothold in California.
One of their first attempts would be to bomb the railway passes in the Cascades and the Sierra Nevadas.
General Grant has warned you in regard to the Panama Canal and other points that need immediate attention. Millions would bealarmed if they could realize how much the Government at Washington resembles the British Government just before the German descent into Belgium. Are they waiting until they can spy the enemy through field glasses?
I could give a map of the plans of approach of the Japanese navy, intended to operate in separate units, but it would do no good. They are ready to change their tactics at any time, and have done so more than once.
Let me add that the bellicose attitude of the war party in Japan is such that a war between England and America would be hailed as a symbol of their divine destiny.
Do not be surprised when I say that they proclaim the end of Christian civilization was reached when the Anglo-Saxons took possession of the Pacific Coast.
In the Far East, British domination attained its zenith in India; in America, Anglo-Saxon influence attained its limit in California. The possession of the Pacific Coast of North America is, therefore, the limit for the dominant white race. The tocsin hassounded for a Japanese avatar who will unify the political, commercial and religious forces of Japan and China, give the coup de grace to a tottering civilization and dominate the world. So do they reason and preach.
What do the clouds on the social horizon predict? Is Nature a book of fate? If so, is it sealed or open? Whoever understands the political actions of the past can foresee the reactions of the future.
Human nature is always the same.
The two things brought to the surface by great upheavals are extreme virtues and extreme vices. The virtue of self sacrifice, on the one hand, the vice of self interest on the other. Vice is flexible, cunning, adaptable.
You are living at a time when profiteers amaze by their cynical audacity, but profiteers have always existed. Before the war the nobles of Russia and Germany were profiteers in landed privileges and governmental perquisites. The tillers of the soil were free in name, serfs in practice. In England two or three hundred lords and peers possess the land. In America food profiteering began during the Civil War. This national vice has never been attacked at the roots.
Your age is characterized by a high level of predatory ability and a low level of prophetic visibility.
The old hackneyed phrase, “This is a free country,” has been applied in varying degrees according to the caprice of the individual with the most aggressive will.
New words, definitions, excuses, have been invented to meet the new conditions, but of all the words yet brought into use, “camouflage” is the only one that covers the cynical effrontery of predatory hypocrisy. It is a vocable of universal utility. It applies to the cock-pits of commerce as well as to the arena of bull and bear politics.
It depicts a Hindoo patience in the pulpit and a Hoodoo palsy in the pews.
The word “democracy” itself is the stripes painted on the sides of the old Ship of State in her zig-zag course to elude the torpedoes of the proletarian submarines.
A capitalistic profiteer is a high brow optimist who lives by the sweat of the low brow pessimist. The stretching process will cease suddenly like the snapping of a rubber string stretched beyond the limit.
The masses without a voice always find articulation in the unlooked-for man, the unlooked-for group.
The people without a mouthpiece are a mob, and no mob can run itself for more than a few days. It is the initiated who lead, and leadership requires time, patience, judgment.
In the world of genius there are no upstarts.
The great leader never rises suddenly. Bonaparte was a military graduate, Grant was a product of West Point, Lincoln was thirty years preparing for the Presidency, Lenine spent twenty years in the study of economics. All countries have the same experience.
Voltaire endowed the middle classes of France with a voice, united the disaffected of all classes, and peppered their indignation with pungent epigrams. He created an intellectual garden for lovers of liberty, and from the realm of the mind flung the thorns of ridicule in the face of titled imbeciles and crowned the heads of scholars with laurel.
The people of France were washed by Louis XIV, wrung by Louis XV, and dried in the back yard of tyrannical economics by Louis XVI.
But it was the orators and pamphleteers who ironed out the frills and furbelows of the old order.
Statistical facts may convince but they do not compel. Who knows how the French Revolution would have ended had Mirabeau, orator of the great and solemn days, survived to put into action the idealism of Rousseau? Intellect alone never passes the halfway house. When intellect, reason and emotion are fused in one, the summit of achievement is attained.
The time for discipline is approaching. Happy are those who, under Divine direction, consent to be led, for, in the words of Quintilian:—Nulla poena est nisi invito, or as Seneca expressed it, Fata volentum ducunt, involentem trahunt,—those who refuse will be dragged.
You must in some manner experience the ordeals common to other peoples, and you have seen from a distance what has overtaken many cities and nations, the inhabitants of which felt themselves as fixed as the rocks in the soil. Yet, all that is happening is in harmony with Divine law. You will find it in Isaiah and Jeremiah. The repetition is inevitable except for those who possess vision.
The time for appeals is past.
“The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth, the haughty people of the world do languish.”
“When thou shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled, and when thou shalt make an end to deal treacherously, they shall deal treacherously with thee.”
Are the people astonished? Let them marvel at their own willfulness.
“The kings of the earth and all the inhabitants of the world would not have believed that the adversary and the enemy should have entered into the gates of Jerusalem.”
Titus, with his army, destroyed the Holy City. The enemy entered the gates from without but your adversaries have long been entrenched within.
Mammon is heavily laden and will fall from the top. Material power is volatile.
In the day of trial, the retainer and the hireling will seek a refuge, every man for himself. They will melt like the wax image before the heat of the furnace. On that day humility will be as a precious gift and poverty as a peace offering.
Blessed is he who uses the spade and the hoe, for by the sweat of his brow he shall eat the bread of security.