'For this German intriguing against supposedly friendly nations there can be no defence. For the more constructive side of Germany's effort to win Sweden, there is a good deal to be said, not only in defence, but in praise. It was not wholly selfish or hypocritical, and it was directed with an intelligence worthy of emulation. All the best German qualities played a conspicuous and successful part in that effort,—enthusiasm, thoroughness, systematic thinking and acting, intellectual curiosity, adaptability, and a constant linking of national and personal interests.'[7]
'For this German intriguing against supposedly friendly nations there can be no defence. For the more constructive side of Germany's effort to win Sweden, there is a good deal to be said, not only in defence, but in praise. It was not wholly selfish or hypocritical, and it was directed with an intelligence worthy of emulation. All the best German qualities played a conspicuous and successful part in that effort,—enthusiasm, thoroughness, systematic thinking and acting, intellectual curiosity, adaptability, and a constant linking of national and personal interests.'[7]
Men, like Hammarskjold, were naturally affected by an influence which no other nation condescended to counteract. Besides, as a good Swede, Hammarskjold knew that, in a possible conflict with Germany, Sweden had nothing to expect, in the way of help, from the Allies. The German propaganda had convinced many Swedes that it was England that deprived King Oscar of Norway with the view of isolating Sweden and assisting Russia's move to the sea.
The late Minister of Foreign Affairs, Herr Wallenberg, was regarded as a friend of the Entente, and was less criticised than any other member of the Government. Many of his financial interests were supposed to be in France, and he has many warm friends in all social circles in that country. He is a man of cosmopolitan experience. He has the reputation of being the best-informed man in Europe on European affairs.
Dr. E. F. Dillon, in one of his very valuable articles said: 'As far back as March 1914, he gave it as hisopinion that the friction in the Near East would in a brief space of time culminate in a European war.' To Dr. Dillon the English-speaking world owes the knowledge of the points of view of certain activists, entirely under German influence, as expressed inSchwedische Stimmen zum Weltkrieg—Uebersetzt mit einemVorwartverschenvon Dr. Friedrich Steve. The real title is best translatedSweden's Foreign Policy in the Light of the World War. It was a plea for war in the interests of Germany, representing those of Germany and Sweden as one. They were anonymous—now that some of them have had a change of mind it is well that their names were withheld. They were evidently pro-Germans of all Swedish political parties. It may not be out of place to say that the papers of Dr. Dillon, such as those printed in theContemporary Review, are documents of inestimable diplomatic-social value.
It was the leader of the Socialists, Herr Branting, who helped to make evident that a change had been slowly taking place among the Swedish people. Herr Branting is of a very different type from the generally received idea of what a Socialist is. He would not do on the stage. In fact, like many of the constructive Socialists in Scandinavia, he is rather more like a modern disciple of Thomas Jefferson than of Marx or Bakounine. He knows Europe, and he brings to the cause of democracy in Europe great power, well-digested knowledge, and a tolerance not common in Sweden, where religious sectarianism among the bulk of the people was as great an enemy to political progress as the Prussian propaganda.
The most influential man in Sweden, Herr Branting, was obliged to renew his formal adhesion to the Lutheran Church, which he had renounced, to hold office. The strength of Herr Branting's position, which has latelyimmensely increased, may be surmised from the fact that, in 1914, the Radicals gave 462,621 votes as against 268,631. The Government would have been wise to have heeded this warning in time; but the men who had engineered the Activist movement, who had worked the Swedish folk up to their demand for stronger defences and a greater army and navy, seemed to think that Sweden was still to be governed from the top.
The Swedes are not the kind of people who can be led hither and thither by bread and the circus. They know how to amuse themselves without the assistance of their Government and to earn their bread, too; but when the Government, through its presumably pro-German policy, seemed to be responsible for the curtailment of the necessities of life, they turned on their leaders and read the riot act to them. Sweden boldly defied Pan-Germanism.
A great day in Sweden was April 21st, 1917. It was a turning point in the nation's destiny. The people took matters in their own hands. Hjalmar Branting had forced the Swartz-Lindman Cabinet into a corner; no more secret understandings, no more disregard of the feelings of the voters who felt that, to help their nation intelligently, they must know what was going on. Appeals to CharlesXII.or the shade of Gustavus Adolphus no longer counted. What Germany liked or disliked was of no moment to Branting.
On the first of May we were all anxious in Denmark. Our Minister at Stockholm, Mr. Ira Nelson Morris, understood the situation; he expected no great outbreak as a result of Branting's action in theRigstag, revealing the existence of a secret intrigue to raise, on the part of the Government, a guard of civilians to protect the 'privileged classes,' as the Socialists calledthem, against disturbances on the part of the proletariat. Branting gave a guarantee that no tumult among the people should take place. Nevertheless, the German propaganda kept at work; the people were not to be trusted. On May 1st, the party in power protected the palace with machine guns and packed its environs with troops. It was a rather indiscreet thing to do, since Branting had given his word for peace, providing that the pro-German protectorate did not make war. On May 1st at least fifty thousand of the working classes, 'the unprivileged classes,' made their demonstration in procession quietly and solemnly. In the provinces, on the same day, half a million Swedes sympathetically joined in this protest against the pro-German attitude of the Government.
When we entered the war the ruling classes declared, either privately or publicly, that we hadmadea 'mistake'; they hinted that Germany would make us see this mistake—this out of no malevolence to America as America, but simply from a complete lack of sympathy with our ideals. It must be remembered that an aristocracy, a bureaucracy without privileges is as anomalous as a British Duke without estate. The French Revolution was a protest, as we all know, against vested privileges. When Madame Roland, the intellectual representative of a great class, was expected to dine with the servants at a noble woman's house, a long nail was driven into the coffin of privilege.
In Sweden the fight is on against the privileges which the higher classes in Sweden have expected Germany to help them conserve.
On October 19th a new cabinet was formed; the people demanded a Government which would be neutral. This was the result of the election in September. Onthis result—the first real step in the Swedish nation toward political democracy—they stand to-day. Unrestrained or uninfluenced by Prussia, the classes of Sweden who love their privileges, will accept the situation. The death-blow to the landed aristocracy will doubtless be the suppression of the majorats and the conversion of the entailed estates into cash. This seems to be one of the fundamental intentions of the new order. The classes who look to Germany as their model and mentor are now non-existent—naturally!
Germany allowed to the upper classes in Sweden no intellectual contact with the democracies of the world. The world news dripped into Sweden carefully expurgated. Her suspicions of Russia were kept alive as we have seen; the good feeling which existed in Denmark towards Sweden (due to the help the Swedish troops had given when they were quartered at Glorup, near Odense, in readiness to meet the Prussian attack in 1848) had been gradually undermined. While Sweden owed much of her suspicions of the other two countries to German influence as well as her fears of Russia, Denmark was confronted with a real danger.
Whatever progress Sweden has made towards democracy is not due to intelligent propaganda on the part of America or England. It needed a war to teach the Foreign Offices that diplomatic representatives have greater duties than to be merely 'correct' and obey technical orders.
German propaganda had little influence in Norway, but German methods have been used to an almost unbelievable extent in the attempt to lower the morale of this self-respecting and independent people. The German propaganda could get little hold on a nation that cared only to be sufficient for itself in an entirely legitimateway. The Norwegian can neither be laughed, argued, nor coerced out of an opinion that he believes to be founded on a principle, and he looks on all questions from the point of view of a free man thinking his own thoughts.
German propaganda, during the war, took the form of coercion. The ordinary influences brought to bear on Sweden would not be effective in Norway. Socialism seemed to be less destructive to the existing order of things in Norway than it was in Sweden, because it had fewer obstacles to overcome. It was against the Pan-German idea that the three Scandinavian countries should form the Northern Confederation dreamed of by Baron Carlson Bonde and others. When the late King Oscar of Sweden came under German influence—through all the traditions of his family he should have been French—he began to give the Norwegian causes of offence, and his attitude intensified their growing hatred of all privileges founded on birth, hereditary office, or assumption of superiority founded on extraneous circumstances. As we know, the form of Lutheranism accepted in Norway has little effect on the political life of the people, who, as a rule, are attached to their special form of Protestantism because of traditions (part of this tradition is hatred of Rome, as it is supposed to represent imperial principles) and because it leaves them free to choose from the Bible what suits them best. It is a mistake to imagine, as some sociologists have, that the Lutheran Church in Norway inclined the Norwegians to sympathy with German ideas. I have never, as yet, met a Norwegian who seemed to associate his religion with Germany or to imagine that he owed any regard to that country because 'the light,' as hesometimescalls it, came to him through that Germanof Germans, Martin Luther. In his mind, as far as I could see, there seemed to be two kinds of Lutheranism—the German kind and the Norwegian kind. I am speaking now of the people of average education—who would dare to use the phrase 'lower classes' in speaking of the Norwegians as we use it of the Swedes or the English? An 'average education' means in Norway a high degree of knowledge of what the Norwegian considers essential.
This shows that racial differences are much more potent than religious beliefs; and yet, in considering the problems of the world to-day, it would be vain to leave religious affairs out of the question, worse than vain—foolish. The Crown Prince of Germany, having studied the Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, knew this; the Kaiser, knowing Machiavelli, understood it too well. Lutheranism in Norway is not a political factor owing to the peculiar temperament of the people; therefore, Germany could not make use of it. With the intellectual classes, the independent thinkers, it has ceased to be a factor at all. Ibsen, who was in soul a mystic, is accused of leaning towards German philosophies even by some of his own countrymen; but there was never a more individualistic man than he.
In my conversation with learned and intellectual Norwegians, I discovered no leaning whatever to autocratic ideals. They were only aristocrats in the intellectual sense.
'Even our upper classes,' said a Swede, an ardent admirer of the ideas of the Liberal Swede, Count Hamilton, 'are changing. You ought to know our people as you know the Danes. A nation as plastic as ours, capable of breaking its traditions by making a king of Marshal Bernadotte, a person not "born" has great capacities foradaptation; and this is the reason why my country will not be divided between Germanised aristocrats and a Socialistic proletariat.'
This, after all, represents the essential attitude of the best in Sweden. That German ideals were propagated and well received by the ruling classes is true, but, to generalise about any country, simply because of the attitude of the persons one meets in society, is a mistake that would lead a diplomatic representative into all manner of difficulties.
To assume that Sweden could have been governed as Germany was governed, because German is the fashionable language among the aristocracy and the intellectuals, or because Sweden is Lutheran, or because the university and military education is founded on German methods, is too misleading. The Swedish folk are not the kind that would tamely submit to the drastic rule of the autocratic Hohenzollern.
The German attitude toward Norway was frankly antagonistic. There was no power there to persuade thecitizensof that country that all kultur should come from above. The Norwegian is a democrat at heart. He believes, with reason, in the industrial future of his country; he understands what may be done with his inexhaustible supply of 'white coal'; he knows the value of the process for seizing the nitrates from the air. When he heard that supplies of potash had been discovered in Spain, a distinguished Norwegian said: 'Poor Spain! The Prussians will seize it now; but we should be willing to meet all the Prussian fury if we could discover potash in Norway!'
It is an open secret that Norway, at the time of her separation from Sweden, would have preferred a republican form of government. The Powers, Englandand Russia and Germany, would not hear of this, and the Norwegians consented to a very limited monarchy. German or Russian princes were out of the question, and Prince Charles of Denmark, now King Haakon, who had married the Princess Maud of Great Britain and Ireland, was chosen. King EdwardVII.was pleased with this arrangement; he had no special objection to the cutting down of monarchical prerogatives, provided the hereditary principle was maintained, and the marriage strengthened the English influence in Norway. As King Haakon and Queen Maud have a son—Prince Olav—the Norwegians are content, especially as King Haakon knows well how to hold his place with tact, sympathy, and discretion.
Norway is naturally friendly to the United States and England, and, in spite of the Kaiser's regular summer visits, it was never at all friendly to him. The treatment of Norway, when the Germans found that the Norwegians were openly against their methods, was ruthless. The plot of the German military party against the capital of Norway, which meant the blowing up of a part of the city, has been hinted at, but not yet fully revealed. The reports of the attempt to introduce bombs in the shape of coals into the holds of Norwegian ships bound to America were well founded, and the misery and wretchedness inflicted on the families of Norwegian sailors by the U-boat 'horribleness' has made the German name detested in Norway. After the crime of theLusitania, the German Minister was publicly hissed in Christiania.
Remaining neutral, Norwegian business men kept up such trade with the belligerents as the U-boat on one side and the embargo on the other permitted. War and business seem to have no scruples, and the Norwegianmerchant, like most of ours, before we joined the Allies, felt it his duty to try to send what he could into Germany. The British Minister at Christiania, the British Admiralty, and a patriotic group of Norwegians did their utmost in limiting this, and, when the United States entered the war, they were ably seconded by the American Minister, Mr. Schmedeman. The Norwegians, in spite of all dangers, kept their boats running, and they were shocked when the United States tightened the embargo, with a strangle grip.
The Norwegian press openly said that we, the friend of the little nations, had proved faithless, and pointed to their record as friends of democracy. The American Minister, in the midst of the storm, did an unusual thing; he published the text of the prepared agreement, which Nansen had sent to Washington to negotiate. There was a time, before this, when the name of our country, formerly so beloved and revered, was execrated among the Norwegians. Mr. Schmedeman's quick insight calmed a storm which arose from disappointment at the stringent demands of a nation they had hitherto considered as their best friend. This constant friendship for us was shown on all occasions in Copenhagen by Dr. Francis Hagerup and Dr. John Irgens, two of the most respected diplomatists in Europe. Dr. Hagerup's reputation is widely spread in this country.
No human being could be imagined as a greater antithesis to the Prussians than the Norwegians; the Norwegian is in love with liberty; he is an idealistic individual; it is difficult, too, to believe that the Norwegian, the Swede and the Dane are of the same race. The Norwegian is as obstinate as a Lowland Scot and as practical; he is a born politician; he calls a spade a spade, and he is not noted for that great exterior polishwhich distinguishes the Swede and the Dane of the educated classes. A Norwegian gentleman will have good manners, but he is never 'mannered.' For frankness, which sometimes passes for honesty, the Norwegian of the lower classes is unequalled. This has given the Norwegian a reputation for rudeness which he really does not deserve. He is no more rude than a child who looks you in the eye and gives his opinion of your personal appearance without fear or favour; it does not imply that he is unkind. There is a story of a Norwegian shipowner, who, asked to dine with King Haakon, found that a business engagement was more attractive, so he telephoned: 'Hello, Mr. King, I can't come to dinner!'
A Norwegian told me, with withering scorn, the 'stupid comment' of an 'ignorant Swede' on the Norwegian character: 'You have no Niagara Falls in Sweden, no great city like Chicago, no Red Indians!' He had said, 'We have finer cataracts than your Niagara Falls, a magnificent city, Stockholm, the Paris of Scandinavia, and many Red Indians, butwecall them Norwegians!'
One summer day, two well-mounted German officers, probably attending the Kaiser or making arrangements for his usual yachting trip to Norway, came along a country road. They were splendid looking creatures, voluminously cloaked—a wind was blowing—helmets glittering. Our car had stopped on a side road; something was wrong. A peasant, manipulating two great pine stems on a low, two-wheeled cart, had barred the main road, and, as the noontide had come, sat down to eat his breakfast. One of the officers haughtily commanded him to clear the way, expecting evidently a frightened obedience. The peasant put his hands in hispockets and said,—'Mr. Man, I will move my logs when I can. First, I must eat my breakfast, you can jump your horses over my logs; why not? Jump!'
The officer made a movement to draw his revolver; the Norwegian only laughed.
'Besides,' he said, 'there is a wheel half off my cart; I cannot move it quickly.'
The language of the officers was terrifying. Finally, they were compelled to jump. Neither the sun glittering on the fierce eagles nor the curses of the officers moved this amiable man; he drank peacefully from his bottle of schnapps and munched his black bread and sausage as if their great persons had never crossed his path, or, rather, he theirs.
Neither art, literature nor music has been Germanised in Norway. Art, of later years, has been touched by the French ultra-impressionists. There is no humble home in the mountains that does not know Grieg. And why? When you know Grieg and know Norway, you know that Grieg is Norway.
Norway is the land of the free and the home of the brave. There was no fear that German ideas would control it, and the Prussians knew this. What is good in German methods of education the Norwegians adopt, but they first make them Norwegian.
Machiavelli, inThe Prince, instructs rulers in the use of religion as a means of obtaining absolute power; and from the point of view of monarchs of the Renaissance and after, he would have been a fool, if he had neglected this important bond in uniting the nations he governed. It was not a question as to the internal faith of the ruler; that was a personal matter; but outwardly he must conform to the creed which gave him the greatest political advantages. There is a pretty picture of Napoleon's teaching the rudiments of Christianity to a little child at Saint Helena; but who imagines that he would have hesitated to make the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca or to prostrate himself before the idols of any powerful Pagan nation, if he could have fulfilled his plans in the East? 'Paris vaut une Messe,' said HenryIV.of Navarre and France with the cynicism of his tribe. Queen Catherine di Medici and Queen Elizabeth had their superstitions. They probably believed that all clever people have the same religion, but never tell what it is—the religion to which Lord Beaconsfield thought he belonged. It is against the subversion of religion, of spirituality, to the State that democracy protests. Frankly, it is as much against the despotism of Socialism as it is against the Machiavellianism of His late Imperial Majesty, the German Emperor. He hoped to become Emperor of Germany and the world, and tospeak from Berlinurbi et ubi. To be German Emperor did not content him.
The Kaiser's use of religion as an adjunct to the possession of absolute power began very early in his reign. Bismarck could teach him nothing, though Bismarck was as decided a Hegelian as he was a Prussian in his idea of the function of the ruler.
Hegel, the learned author of thePhilosophy of Right, was Prussian to the core. He was on the side of the rulers, and he hated reforms, or rather, feared reformers, because they might disturb the divinely ordered authority. There must be a dot to the 'i' or it meant nothing in the alphabet. This dot was the King. He was the darling of the Prussian Government and the spokesman of Frederick WilliamIII.He loathed the movement in Germany towards democratic reforms, and watched England with distrustful eyes. The teaching of most Hegelians in the Universities of the United States—and the Hegelian idea of the State had made much progress here—was to minimise somewhat the arbitrary and despotic ideas of their favourite Prussian philosopher. No man living has yet understood the full meaning of all parts of his philosophical teachings, but one thing was clear to all men who, like myself, watched the application of Hegelianism to Prussia and to Germany. The State must be supreme.
The Catholics in Germany saw the errors of Hegelianism as applied to the State, but they were not sufficiently enlightened or clever, and they neglected to oppose its progress efficiently. There are various opinions about the activities of the Fathers of the Congregation of Jesus (founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola as acorps d'éliteof the counter-reformation) in Germany and in the world in general. Bismarck heartily disapprovedof them for the same reasons as Hegel disapproved of them. They taught that Cæsar is not omnipotent, that the human creature has rights which must be respected, and are above the claims of the State. In a word, in Germany, they stood for the one thing that the Prussian monarchs detested—dissent on the part of any subject to their growing assertion of the divine right of kings.
Windthorst formed the Centrum, and opposed Bismarck valiantly, but political considerations Prussianised the Centre, or Catholic party, as they moved 'the enemies of Prussianism,' the Socialists, when the crucial moment arrived, and burned incense to absolute Cæsar. It was not a question of Lutheranism against Catholicism inGermanyin 1872, not a question of an enlightened philosophy, founded on modern research against obscurantism, as most of my compatriots have until lately thought, but a clean-cut issue between the doctrine of the entire supremacy of the State and the inherent rights of the citizen to the pursuit of happiness, provided he rendered what he owed to Cæsar legitimately. That the victims of the oppression were Jesuits blinded many of us to the motive of the attack. The educational system of the Jesuits had enemies among the Catholics of Germany, too, so that they lost sight of the principle underneath the Falk laws, so dear to Bismarck. Frederick the Great and Catherine of Russia protected the Jesuits, it is true, but they were too absolute to fear them. Besides, as Intellectuals, they were bound to approve of a society, which in the eighteenth century had not lost its reputation for being the most scientific of religious bodies.
The Falk laws were, in the opinion of Bismarck and the disciples of theKulturkampf, the beginning of themoulding of the Catholic Church in Germany as a subordinate part of the autocratic scheme of government. They had nothing to fear from the Lutherans—they were already under control—and nothing to fear from the unbelieving Intellectuals, of the Universities, for they had already accepted Hegel and his corollaries. The main enemies of the ultra-Kaiserismwerethe Catholic Church and Socialism—Socialism gradually drawing within its circle those men who, under the name of Social Democrats, believed that the Hohenzollern rule meant obscurantist autocracy.
The Socialists, pure and simple, are as great an enemy to democracy as the Pan-Germans. The varying shades of opinion among the Social Democrats,—there are liberals among them of the school of Asquith, and even of the school of Lloyd George, constitutional monarchists with Jeffersonian leanings, Lutherans, Catholics, non-believers, men of various shades of religious opinion are all bent on one thing,—the destruction of the ideals of Government advocated by Hegel and put into practice by the Emperor and his coterie.
Both the Socialist and the Social Democrat came to Copenhagen. They talked; they argued. They were on neutral soil. It was impossible to believe, on their own evidence, that the Socialism of Marx, of Bebel, of the real Socialists in Germany, could remedy any of the evils which existed under imperialistic régime in that country.
The Socialist or the Social Democrat was feared in Germany, until he applied the razor to his throat, or, rather, attemptedhari-kariwhen he voted for war. The Socialists can never explain this away. His prestige, as the apostle of peace and good-will, is gone; he is no longer international; he is out of count as an altruist.The Social Democrat is in a better position; he never claimed all the attributes of universal benignity; he was still feared in Germany, but in that harmless debating society, the Reichstag, with the flower of the German manhood made dumb in the trenches, he could only threaten in vain.
In our country, pure Socialism is misunderstood. It is either cursed with ignorant fury or looked on as merely democracy, a little advanced, and perhaps too individualistic. It ought to be better understood. Socialism means the negation of the individual will; the deprivations of the individual of all the rights our countrymen are fighting for. It is a false Christianity with Christian precepts of good-will, of love of the poor, of equality, fraternity, liberty,—phrases which have, on the lips of the pure Socialist, the value of the same phrases uttered by Robespierre and Marat.
'I find,' said a Berlin Socialist, whom I had invited to meet Ben Tillett, the English Labour Agitator, 'that Danish Socialism is merely Social Democracy. Given a fair amount of good food and comfort, schools, and cheap admittance to the theatres, the Copenhagen Socialists seem to be contented. You may call it "constructive Socialism," but I call it Social Degeneracy. We, following the sacred principles of Marx and Bakounine, different as they were, must destroy before we can construct. In the future, every honest man will drive in his own car, and the best hospitals will not be for those that pay, but for those who cannot pay. Cagliostro said we must crush the lily, meaning the Bourbons; we must crush all that stands in the way of the perfect rule which will make all men equal. We must destroy all governments as they are conducted at present; we have suffered; all restrictive laws must go!'
Ben Tillett could not come to luncheon that day, so we missed a tilt and much instruction. The European Socialist's only excuse for existence is that he has suffered, and he has suffered so much that his sufferings must cry to God for justice. As to his methods, they are not detestable. They are so reasonable, so Christian, that some of us lose sight of his principles in admiring them. The Kaiser has borrowed some of the best of the Socialistic methods in the organisation of his superbly organised Empire, and that makes Germany strong. But sympathy with the Socialists anywhere is misplaced. Their principles are as destructive as their methods are admirable. Their essential article of faith is that the State, named the Socialistic aggregation, shall be supreme and absolute.
As to the other enemies of despotism in Germany, the Jesuits, they were downed simply because Bismarck and the Hegelian Ideal would not tolerate them. They exalted, as Hegel said, the virtue of resignation, of continency, of obedience, above the great old Pagan virtues, which ought to distinguish a Teuton. The Jesuits, German citizens, few in number, apparently having no powerful friends in Europe or the world, were cast out, as the War Lord would have cast out the Socialist if he had dared. But the Socialists were a growing power; they had shown that they, like the unjust steward in the parable, know how to make friends of the Mammon of unrighteousness.
The Jesuits went; the Catholic party, the Centre was placated by the request of Germany to have the Pope arbitrate the affair of the Caroline Islands and by the colonial policy of Bismarck in 1888 in supporting the work of Cardinal Lavigerie in Africa. The Catholic population of Germany, more than one-third of the whole,accepted the dictum that the State had the right to exile German citizens because they disagreed with the Government as to the freedom of the human conscience. However, as the Catholic Germans were divided in sentiment as to the value of the Jesuit system of education, which in this country seems to be very plastic, they were at last fooled by the Centrum, their party, into the acceptance of a compromise.
To Copenhagen, there came, after the opening of the war, an old priest, who had been caught in the net in Belgium; 'That Christians should forgive such horrors as the Germans commit! Why do not the Christian Germans protest? I confessed a German Colonel, a Catholic, who had lain a day and a night in a field outside a Belgian town. He was dying when some of your Americans found him, and brought him to me. "I suffered horrors during the night," he said, "horrors almost unbearable. I groaned many times; I heard the voices of men passing; these men heard me." "There is a wounded man," one said, and they came to me. "He's a German," the other said, "qu'il crève" (let him die). And they passed on. "This,"I thought, in my agony,"this, in a Christian land where the story of the Good Samaritan is read from the pulpits; yet they leave me to die. But when I remembered, Father, the atrocities for which I had been obliged to shoot ten of my own soldiers, I understood why they had passed me by."' The good priest, who had many friends in Germany, repeated over and over again: 'Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad; the Catholics in Germany must be mad!'
Bismarck had used Falk and the Liberals to divide and control. He later found it necessary to placate Windthorst and the Centrum, then a 'confessional,'or religious party. It has changed since that time; it is now, like the Social Democratic block, made up of persons of various shades of religious opinion, but having similar political ideas. It represents a determination not to allow the State to be absolute, and, no doubt, if the United States had realised its position, it might have been strengthened by intelligent propaganda to be of use in breaking the Prussian autocracy. But hitherto even travelled Americans have regarded it as a remnant of the Middle Ages, and hopelessly reactionary. It was part of the Kaiser's policy to make the rest of the world think so, for he had adopted and adapted this Bismarckian chart while throwing the pilot of many stormy seas overboard. Bismarck lived to see the heritage of despotism, which he had destined for his oldest son, seized by a young monarch, whose capabilities he had underrated. Then, the Danes say, he uttered the sneer, 'I will freshen the Hohenzollern blood with that of Struense!'
The German propaganda for controlling the Church in the United States had been well thought out in 1866. The emigrants from Germany, just after 1848, were not open to the influence of Prussian ideas; they had had more than sufficient of them, but when the great crowd of Germans came in later, it was time to inject the proper spirit of Prussianism into their veins.
It is well known that the Emperor William had his eyes on the Vatican. He was wise enough to see that if the Catholic Church lost in one place, she was certain to gain in another; it was not necessary for him to read Macaulay's eloquent passage on the Papacy, as most statesmen who speak English do. But his indiscretions in speech and writing, whether premeditated or not, for theZeitgeistand the orthodox Lutheransmust be propitiated—were constantly nullifying his plans.
As to the spiritual essence of the Catholic Church, the emperor did not recognise it. Papal Rome was dangerous to him as long as it remained independent; he coquetted with Harnack and with the most advanced of the higher critics who whittled the Bible into a pipestem. How he squared himself with the orthodox Lutherans, apparently nearly two-thirds of the population, can only be shown by his constant allusions to the Prussian God. As a State Church, yielding obedience almost entirely to the governing power of the country, he had little fear of Lutheranism in its varying shades of opinion. The Jews he evidently always distrusted. He regarded them as Internationalists and not to be recognised until they became of the State Church; then they might aspire, for certain considerations, to berathand even to wear the preciousvon.
The emperor wanted control of the Vatican. He knows history (at least we thought so in Copenhagen), and he was sympathetic with his ancestors in all their quarrels with the Holy See on the subject of the investitures; the emperor had wisely foreseen that difficulties of the same kind between the Vatican and himself might easily break out, were not the Vatican modernised or controlled. He knew that the claims of the Popes to dethrone rulers could never be revived since they were not inherent in the Papacy, but only admitted by the consent of Christendom, which had ceased to exist as a political entity; but the question of the right of a lay emperor to control the policy of the Holy Father in matters of the religious education, marriage, church discipline of Catholics might at any time arise. He knew thenon possumusof Rome toowell to believe that in a spiritual crisis she could be moved by the threats of any ruler. If His Imperial Majesty could have forced the principle of some of his ancestors that the religion of a sovereign must be that of his subjects, the question might be settled. If he could have arranged the religion of his subjects as easily as he settled the question as to the authenticity of the Flora of Lucas in Berlin in favour of Director Bode, how clear the way would have been! As it was, he knew too well what he might expect from Rome in a crisis where he, following the PrussianZeitgeist, might wish to infringe on the spiritual prerogatives. To understand the world every European diplomatist of experience knows the Vatican must not be ignored, and, while the War Lord, the future emperor of the world, hated to acknowledge this, he was compelled to do it. The Vatican, that had nullified the May laws and defeated Falk, their sponsor, might give the emperor trouble at any time. Catholics of the higher classes all over Europe were ceasing to be Royalists. The Pope, LeoXIII., had even accepted the French Republic, and for the part of Cardinal Rampolla and of Archbishop Ireland in this the Kaiser hid his rancour. He must be absolute as far as the right of his family and those of the hereditary succession went, and quite as absolute in his control over such laws as were for the increase of the Kultur of his people.
At one time, since the present war opened, it was rumoured at Copenhagen that plural marriages were to be allowed, to increase the population of a nation so rapidly being depleted. I was astonished to hear a German Lutheran pastor—he was speaking personally, and not for his church—say that there was nothing against this in the teachings of Luther or Melanchthon.He quoted the affair of a Landgraf of Hesse in the sixteenth century.
'But the Kaiser would not consent to this,' I said. 'Why not?' responded the pastor. 'He knows his Old Testament; he has the right of private interpretation especially when the good of the State is to be considered.'
'Over a third of the Germans are Catholics; the Pope would never consent to that.'
'There would be an obstacle,' he admitted; 'but the Kaiser, in the interests of the nation, would have his way. Our nation must have soldiers. You Americans,' he added, bitterly, 'are killing our prospective fathers in the name of Bethlehem. We must make up the deficit by turning to the Hebraic practice.'
'You cannot bring the Catholics to that, and I doubt whether any decent people would consent to it, in spite of your quotation from Luther's precedent. No Pope could allow it.'
'A Pope can do anything—whom you shall forgive,' he laughed, 'is forgiven.'
'A Pope cannot do anything; the moment he approved of plural marriages in the interest of any nation, he would cease to be Pope. He cannot abrogate a law both divine and natural, and I doubt——'
'Do not doubt the power of the head of the German people, the Shepherd of his Church. The German people are the religious, the spiritual counterparts of the true Israelites, were begotten by the spirit, mystical Jehovah who made Israel the prophet-nation; mystically He has designated the German tribes as their successors. He lives in us. This war is His doing; our Kultur, which is saturated with our religion, is inspired by Him. He must destroy that the elect may live.'
'Again, I repeat, Germany can no more accept such debasing of the moral currency than she can encourage the production of illegitimate children at the present moment. I do not believe that there is a hospital in Berlin, especially arranged for the caring for the offspring of army nurses and soldiers. It is a calumny.'
'We must have boy children,' said the pastor, 'but that is going too far. Still,Deutschland über alles. We may one day have a German Pope with modern ideas.'
My friend of St. Peter's Lutheran German Church was out of town. I asked another friend to report the conversation to him. Our mutual friend said that Pastor Lampe smiled and said,'There are extremists in every country. Tell the American Minister to read Dr. Preuss in theAllgemeine Evangelische,Lutherische Kirchenzeitung.'
But I am out of due time; Dr. Preuss's famousPassion of Germany, in full, appeared later, in 1915.
It is true that Austria's vote at the Conclave had defeated Cardinal Rampolla as a candidate for the Papacy. The Emperor of Austria had permitted himself to be used as a tool of the German Emperor, not willingly, perhaps, for Rampolla stood for many things political which the Absolutists hated. Nevertheless, he had done it, to the disgust of the College of Cardinals, who thus saw a forgotten weapon of the lay power used against themselves. They abolished the right of veto, which Austria as a Catholic Power had retained. But the Conclave elected a Pope who did not please the Kaiser. He was a kindly man of great religious fervour, impossible to be moved by German cajoling or threats. The knowledge of the crime of Germany killed him. Nevertheless, the Emperor William had curbed thepower of Rampolla, as he hoped to destroy that of Archbishop Ireland in the Great Republic of the West. A powerful Church with a tendency to democracy was what he feared, and Archbishop Ireland, a frankly democratic prelate, the friend of France, the admirer of Lafayette, had dared to raise his powerful hand against the religious propaganda of the All Highest in the United States of America, where one day German Kultur was to have a home. The great Napoleon had thought of his sister, the Princess Pauline, as Empress of the Western hemisphere. Why not one of our imperial sons for the crude Republic which had helped Mexico in the old, blind days to eject Maximilian? Napoleon had made his son, later the Duke of Reichstadt, King of Rome. Why should not one of the sons of our Napoleonic Crown Prince be even greater, a German Pope—at least a German Prince of the Church expounding Harnack with references to Strauss'sLife of Jesus? Why not? The vicegerent of the Teutonic God?
From many sources it leaked out that the Kaiser looked on the Most Reverend John Ireland as an enemy of his projects both in Europe and the United States. The Archbishop of St. Paul was known to be the friend of Cardinal Rampolla. All who knew the inside of recent history were aware that he had been consulted by LeoXIII.on vital matters pertaining to France, in which country the ultra-Royalists, who had managed to wrap a large part of the mantle of the Church around them, were making every possible mistake and opposing the Pope's determination to recognise the Republic. Archbishop Ireland had been educated in France; he had served in the Civil War as chaplain; he knew his own country as few ecclesiastics knew it. He, growing upwith the West, in the most American part of the West, had brought all the resources of European culture, of an unusual experience in world affairs, to a country at that time not rich in men of his type. In the East, the Catholic Church had had prelates like Cardinal Cheverus, Archbishop of Boston, a number of them, but St. Paul was little better than a trading station when John Ireland finished the first part of his education in France. The tide of emigration had not yet begun to raise questions on the answers to which the future of the country depended. It required far-sighted men to consider them sanely. From the beginning Archbishop Ireland reflected on them. He saw the danger of rooting in new soil the bad, old weeds, the seeds of which were poisoning Europe. He was familiar with thecoulisses du Vatican, knew that Rome ecclesiastically would try to do the right thing. But Rome ecclesiastically depends very largely on the information it receives from the countries under consideration.
The attitude of the opponents of the Catholic Church is due, as a rule, to their ignorance of anything worth knowing about the Church and their utter disregard of its real history. Their narrow attitude is illustrated by the story that President Roosevelt, in a Cabinet Meeting was once considering the form of a document which official etiquette required, should be addressed to the Pope. 'Your Holiness,' said the President. A member of the Cabinet objected. This title from a Protestant President! 'Do you want me to call the Pope the Son of the Scarlet Lady?' asked the President. The objection was as valid as that of the Puritan who objected to sign a letter 'Yours faithfully' because he was nothisfaithfully!
In the celebratedCenturyarticle of 1908, the handlingof which showed that the editors of theCenturyheld their honour higher than any other possession, an allusion to Archbishop Ireland appeared. I have been informed that it showed the animus of the Kaiser against the Archbishop, who with Cardinal Gibbons, the Bishops Keane, Spalding, O'Gorman, and Archbishop Riordan seconded by the present Bishop of Richmond, Denis O'Connell, had defeated, after a frightful struggle, the attempt of Kaiserism to govern the Catholic Church in this country. Its beginnings seemed harmless enough.
A merchant named Peter Paul Cahensly of Limburg, Prussia, suggested at the Catholic Congress of Trier, the establishment of a society for protecting German emigrants to the United States, both at the port of leaving and the port of arriving. Another Catholic Congress met in Bamburg, Bavaria, three years later. Connection was made with the CentralVerein, which at its convention took up the matter zealously. But the zeal waned, and in 1888, Herr Cahensly came to New York in the steerage so that he could know how the German emigrant lived at sea. He arranged that the German emigrants should be looked after in New York and then left for home. It was reasonable enough that Cahensly should interest himself in the welfare of the Germans at the point of departure, but entirely out of order that he should attempt any control of the methods for taking care of the emigrants on this side.
It was suspected that Cahensly had talked over a plan for retaining the Catholic Germans, especially in the West, where they formed large groups, as still part of their native country. This had already been tried among the Lutherans, and had for a time succeeded. The Swedish Lutherans, segregated under the direction ofGerman-educatedpastors, were considered to have been well taken care of. The war has shown that the Americans of Swedish birth in the West showed independence.
The suspicions entertained by the watchful were corroborated when, in 1891, Cahensly presented a memorial to the Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, making the plea that the 'losses' to the Church were so great, owing to the lack of teaching and preaching in German, that a measure ought to be taken to remedy this evil by appointing foreign Bishops and priests, imported naturally, so that each nationality would use the language of its own country.
The object aimed at was to put the English language in the background, to have the most tender relations, those between God and little children, between the growing youths and Christianity, dominated by a mode of thought and expression which would alienate them from their fellows. In business, a man might speak such English as he could; but English was not good enough for him in the higher relations of life. He might earn money in 'this crude America,' but all the finenesses of life must be German. I think I pointed out in the New YorkFreeman's Journalat the time, that, if there were a special German Holy Ghost, as some of these Germanophiles seemed to believe, he had failed to observe that there was little in the 'heretical' English language so devoid of all morality as the dogmas proposed to govern the conduct of life in some of the Wisconsin papers, printed in German.
Some clear-sighted Americans, Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland at their head, saw what this meant. Kaiserism was concealed in the glow of piety. The proceedings of thePriester VereinConvention, in Newark,September 26, 1892, is on record. The Ordinary of the Diocese, Bishop Wigger, had protested against the stand the German Priests' Society proposed to take; he had announced his disapproval in advance of 'Cahenslyism'; he was stolidly against the appointment of 'national,' that is, trans-Atlantic Bishops selected because they spoke no language but their own.
The choice of the 'Germanisers' was the Reverend Dr. P. J. Schroeder—MonseigneurSchroeder, rather; he had been imported by Bishop Keane, afterwards Archbishop, to lecture at the Catholic University. Bishop Keane, like most Americans before the war, believed that Germany held many persons of genius who honoured us by coming over. When Dr. Schroeder's name was mentioned, a caustic English prelate had remarked: 'I thought the Americans had enough mediocrities in their own country without going abroad for them.' But Mgr. Schroeder had a very high opinion of himself. American Catholics were heretical persons, of no metaphysical knowledge; they could not count accurately the number of angels who could dance on the point of a needle! He arrogantly upheld the German idea. English-speaking priests were neither willing nor capable. The emigrants in the United States would be Germans or nothing—aut Kaiser aut nullus.
The German priests in the West claimed the right to exclude from the Sacraments all children and their parents who did not attend their schools, no matter how inefficient they were. The controversy became international.
In Germany, to deny the premises of Mgr. Schroeder was to be heretical, worthy of excommunication; in this country there was a camp of Kaiserites who held the same opinion. It is true that Bismarck had opened theKulturkampfin the name of the unity of the Fatherland. It is true that the Kaiser would gladly have claimed the right his ancestors had struggled for—of investing Bishops with the badges of authority—and that he gave his hearty approbation to the exile of the Jesuits. Nevertheless, he was the Kaiser! Compared with him, the President of the United States was an upstart, and Cardinal Gibbons was to the ultra-Germans almost an anathema as Cardinal Mercier is! There was a fierce struggle for several years. Bombs, more or less ecclesiastical, were dropped on Archbishop Ireland's diocese.
To hear some of these bigots talk, we would have thought that this brave American was Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun. But the right won. Cahenslyism was stamped out, and here was another reason why the Kaiser did not love Archbishop Ireland, and another reason why Bavaria and Austria, backed up by Prussia, protested against every attempt on the part of Rome to give him the Cardinal's hat. This would have meant the highest approval of a prelate who stood for everything the Kaiser and the Bavarian and Austrian courts detested.
Thecuriais made up of the councillors of the Pope; a layman might be created Cardinal—it is not a sacerdotal office in itself—and while the Pope would reject with scorn the request that a temporal Government should nominate a bishop, he might accept graciously a request that a certain prelate be made a cardinal from the ruler of any nation.
If President Roosevelt had been willing to make such a request to LeoXIII.—he was urged to do it by many influential Protestants who saw what Archbishop Ireland had done in the interest of this country—there is nodoubt that his request would have been granted. The Cardinals are 'created' for distinguished learning. One might quote the comparatively modern example of Cardinals Newman and Gasquet; for traditional reasons, because of the importance of their countries in the life of the Church; and they might be created, in older days, for political reasons. But the wide-spread belief that a Cardinal was necessarily a priest leads to misconceptions of the quality of the office.
If the French Republic were to follow the example of England and China, send an envoy to the Holy See, and make a 'diplomatic'rapprochement, neither Rome nor any nation in Europe would be shocked if His Holiness should consent to a suggestion from the President of the French Republic and 'create,' let us say, Abbé Klein a Cardinal.
Archbishop Ireland with his group of Americans saved us from the insults of the propaganda of Kaiserism. This name was synonymous with all things political and much that is social, loathed by the absolutes in Austria, Bavaria and, of course, Germany. The creation of Archbishop Ireland as a Cardinal would have been looked on by these powers as a deadly insult to them, on the part of the Pope. They made this plain.
The failure of the Cahensly plan caused much disappointment in Germany. The Kaiser, in spite of his flings at the Catholic Church—witness a part of the suppressedCenturyarticle and the letter to an aunt 'who went over to Rome'—was quite willing to appear as her benefactor. Much has been made of his interest in the restoration of the Cathedral of Cologne. This, after all, was simply a national duty. A monarch with over one-third of his subjects Catholics, taking his revenues from the taxes levied on them, could scarcely do less thanassist in the preservation of this most precious historical monument.
He seemed to have become regardless of the opinion of his subjects. He had heart-to-heart talks with the world; one of these talks was with Mr. William Bayard Hale; theCentury Magazinebought it for $1,000.00. It was to appear in December 1908. That its value as a 'sensation' was not its main value may be inferred from the character of the editors, Richard Watson Gilder, Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel—a group of scrupulously honourable gentlemen. This conversation with Mr. Hale took place on the Kaiser's yacht. It was evidently intended for publication, for the most indiscreet of sovereigns do not talk to professional writers without one eye on the public.
Speaking of hisImpressions of the Kaiser, the Hon. David Jayne Hill says: 'It seemed like a real personal contact, frank, sincere, earnest and honest. One could not question that, and it was the beginning of other contacts more intimate and prolonged; especially at Kiel, where the sportsman put aside all forms of court etiquette, lying flat on the deck of theMeteoras she scudded under heavy sail with one rail under water; atEckernforde, where the old tars came into the ancient inn in the evening to meet their Kaiser and drink to his Majesty's health a glass of beer.'
'Did you ever see anything more democratic in America?' the Kaiser asked, gleefully, one time. 'What would Roosevelt think of this?' he inquired at another.
'Hating him, as many millions no doubt do,' Mr. Hill continues, 'it would soften their hearts to hear him laugh like a child at a good story, or tell one himself. Can it be? Yes, it can be. There is such a wide differencebetween the gentler impulses of a man and the rude part ambition causes him to play in life! A rôle partly self-chosen, it is true, and not wholly thrust upon him. A soul accursed by one, great, wrong idea, and the purposes, passions, and resolutions generated by it. A mind distorted, led into captivity, and condemned to crime by the obsession that God has but one people, and they are his people; that the people have but one will, and that is his will; that God has but one purpose, and that is his purpose; and being responsible only to the God of his own imagination, a purely tribal divinity, the reflection of his own power-loving nature, that he has no definite responsibility to men.'
Nevertheless, in Copenhagen, we understood from those who knew him well that he was a capital actor, that he never forgot the footlights except in the bosom of his family, and even there, as the young princes grew older, there were times when he had to hide his real feelings and assume a part. In 1908, he was determined that the United States should be with him; he never lost an opportunity of praising President Roosevelt or of expressing his pleasure in the conversation of Americans. I think I have said that he boasted that he knew Russia better than any other man in Germany, and it seemed as if he wanted to know the United States to the minutest particular.
It is a maxim among diplomatists that kings have no friends, and that the only safe rule in conducting one's self towards them are the rules prescribed by court etiquette. It is likewise a rule that politeness and all social courtesies shall be the more regarded by their representatives as relations are on the point of becoming strained between two countries. How little the Kaiser regarded this rule is obvious in the case ofJudge Gerard, who however frank he was at the Foreign Office—and the outspoken methods he used in treating with the German Bureaucrats were the despair of the lovers of protocol—was always most discreet in meetings with the Kaiser. I was asked quietly from Berlin to interpret some of his American 'parables,' which were supposed to have an occult meaning. There was a tale of a one-armed man, with an inimitable Broadway flavour, that 'intrigued' a high German official. I did my best to interpret it diplomatically. But, though our Ambassador, the most 'American' of Ambassadors, as my German friends called him, gave out stories at the Foreign Office that seemed irreverent to the Great, there was no assertion that he was not most correct in his relations with the German Emperor. Yet, one had only to hear the rumours current in Copenhagen from the Berlin Court just after the war began, to know that the emperor had dared to show his claws in a manner that revealed his real character. Judge Gerard's book has corroborated these rumours.
The fact that I had served under three administrations gave me an unusual position in the diplomatic corps, irrespective entirely of any personal qualities, and—this is a digression—I was supposed to be able to find in Ambassador Gerard's parables in slang their real menace. A very severe Bavarian count, who deplored the war principally because it prevented him from writing to his relations in France, from paying his tailor's bill in London, and from going for the winter to Rome, where he had once been Chamberlain at the Vatican, said that he had heard a story repeated by an attaché of the Foreign Office and attributed to Ambassador Gerard, a story which contained a disparaging allusion to the Holy Father. As a Catholic, Iwould perhaps protest to Ambassador Gerard against this irreverence which he understood had given the Foreign Minister great pain, as, I must know, the German Government is most desirous of respecting the feelings of Catholics.
'Impossible,' I said. 'Our Ambassador is a special friend of Cardinal Farley's and he has just sent several thousand prayer-books to the English Catholic prisoners in Germany.' Thus the story was told.[8]
It seemed that among the evil New Yorkers with whom the Ambassador consorted, there was an American, named Michael, whose wife went to the priest and complained that Michael had acquired the habits of drinking and paying attention to other ladies. 'Very well,' said the priest, 'I will call on Thursday night, if he is at home, and I'll take the first chance of remonstrating with him.'
The evening came; the priest presented himself, and entered into a learned conversation on the topics of the hour, while Michael hid himself behind his paper, giving no opportunity for the pastor to address him. However, he knew that his time would come if he did not make a move into the enemy's country.
'Father,' he said, lowering his paper, 'you seem to know the reason for everything that's goin' on to-day; maybe you'll tell me the meanin' of the word "diabetes"?'
'It is the name of a frightful disease that attacks men who beat their wives and spend their money on other women, Mike.'
'I'm surprised, Father,' said Michael, 'because I'm readin' here that the Pope has it.'
It was necessary for me to explain that this was one of our folklore stories, and could be traced back toGesta Romanorum—merely one of the merry jests of which the German literature itself of the Middle Ages was so full, of the character, perhaps, of Rheinhard the Fox! This is an example of the way our Ambassador played on the Germans' sense of humour, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tried to play on Hamlet's pipe!
The German propaganda went on in the United States. Look at France, look at Italy, in comparison with Germany's respect for religion! The Falk laws were no longer of importance; Catholics were to be encouraged to go into the political service, having hitherto been 'rather discouraged' and even under suspicion, as von Bülow admitted.
The German was obsessed by the one idea—the preponderance of the Fatherland.[9]He was conscientious, he had for years cultivated a false conscience which judged everything by one standard: Is this good for the spread of German Kultur?
'What do you think of all this?' I asked one of the most distinguished diplomatists in Europe, now resident in Berlin, the representative of a neutral country. 'There will be no peace in Europe until Germany gets what she wants. She knows what she wants, and since 1870 she has used every possible method to attain it.'
To return to the indiscretions of the Kaiser—indiscretions that were not always uncalculated. Mr. Clarence Clough Buel, one of the editors ofThe Century,felt obliged, in justice, to give an authoritative explanation of Dr. Hale's suppressed 'interview.' His account was printed inThe New York Worldfor December 26, 1917: 'The proof of this interview had been passed by the German Foreign Office, with not more than half a dozen simple verbal changes. They were made in a bold, ready hand, but as there was no letter, we could not be sure that the proofs had been revised by the Emperor. The usual hair-splitting of great men and officialdom had been anticipated, so with considerable glee, the trifling plate changes were rushed, and the big "sixty-four" press was started to toss off 100,000 copies.'
The LondonDaily Telegraph'interview' of October 28, 1908, was a thunderbolt, and the editors ofThe Century, at the urgent request of the German Government, suppressed the edition. I had been informed by Mr. Gilder of the facts. I was very glad of it, as I was enabled to explain this very interesting episode at the Danish Foreign Office. Mr. Clarence Buel writes (it was his duty to read the last galley proofs):—'But in the last cold reading I had grave suspicion that the Kaiser's reference to the Virgin Mary might be construed by devout Catholics as a slur on an important tenet of their faith. So the sacred name was deleted, and the Kaiser's diction slightly assisted in the kindly spirit for which editors are not so often thanked by the writing fraternity as they should be. This incident is mentioned to show the protective attitude of the magazine, and also to indicate that the original "leak" as to the contents of the interview came from an employee of the printing office. Only some one familiar with the galley proofs could have known that the Virgin Mary had figured in the manuscript, for the name did not appear in the printedpages and consequently could not have reached the public except for the killing of the interview. Let it be said, with emphasis, that there was nothing in the Kaiser's references to the part taken by the Vatican in looking out for the interests of the Church in world politics which could have caused serious irritation in any part of Europe. As a student at the Berlin University, I had attended some of the debates in the Landtag during the famousKulturkampfover the clerical laws devised by bold Bismarck to loosen the Catholic grip on the cultural life of Prussian Poland. Knowing the nature of that controversy, and the usual, familiar attitude of (Protestant) Europeans toward religious topics, I could believe that everything in the article bearing on Church and State, from the over-lord of most Lutherans, was offered in a respectful spirit, and would hardly make a ripple across the sea.'
Mr. Buel admits that the Kaiser criticised the action of the Pope and spoke slurringly of the Virgin Mary. Mr. Buel evidently means that the Foreign Offices of the world would not have been stirred by the censure of the Kaiser or by even some frivolous comments on the Blessed Virgin. Mr. Buel, who is discretion itself, having been one of those who practically gave his word of honour that the 'interview' should be suppressed, was evidently desirous that public curiosity should not be too greatly excited as to its tenor. He does not excuse the Kaiser, but as he is a very liberal Protestant himself, speeches coming from a ruler, that would excite indignation even among Catholics in Europe, naturally do not strike him as insulting. It leaked out long ago that in the 'interview' His Imperial Majesty alluded to Archbishop Ireland in rather disrespectful terms.
Only the staunch Americanism of the Catholics of this country saved them from this insidious propaganda. If this spirit did not exist among them, they would have been led to believe that the Central Powers were the only European countries in the world where a Catholic was free to practise his religion.
We know what the German propaganda working on politicians did in Canada among the French-speaking population. We saw, in the beginning of the war, how the Protestants of Ulster were used. There is a passage in Mr. Wells'sMr. Britling Sees It Throughwhich illuminates this.
'England will grant Home Rule,' said a Prussian closely connected with the Berlin Foreign Office, 'and then Sir Edward Carson and his Ulsterites will, with his mutineering British army, keep England too busy to fight us.' They believed this in very high quarters in Germany.
But when the British Government did not put the Home Rule Bill in force, the propagandists turned to certain Irish Intellectuals. 'You had better be governed by Germany than England,' said the followers of Sir Roger Casement, and the sentiment, whether uttered academically or not, found a hundred echoes.
But first had been heard the German-inspired cry of the Ulsterites, 'We had rather be governed by Germany than the Irish, by the Kaiser rather than the Irish Roman Catholic Bishops.' Most of us knew that there was no such danger, for Home Rule would have naturally cut into the political power of the Irish Bishops by strengthening the secular element forced into the background by the unfortunate conditions in Ireland, which had prevented the Catholic laymen from acquiring higher education,and obliging the clergy to become political leaders. It made no difference. The fermenters of religious dissension in Ireland played into the hands of the Prussians; there was laughter in Hell.
We knew that the slogan, 'Better be governed by Germany than by Ulster,' was not echoed in our own country among men of Irish blood. But when Germany, through her agents, began to suggest an Irish Republic, protected by the Imperial Eagle, a small party formed in the United States, not pro-German, but anti-English. This was before we went into the war. 'Every defeat of the English is a gain for Ireland,' the German propagandist repeated over and over again. It sank in; the Ulsterites thundered, and Sinn Fein, which had been non-political, became suddenly revolutionary.
In our country the effect of all this was marked. Every sentiment of religion and patriotism was played upon. Only those who received the confidences of some of those deceived Revolutionists of the unhappy Easter Day know how bitter was the feeling against England generated by the conspiracies in the interest of Prussian domination. Then we gloriously took our stand and went in. The practical answer came. The Swedish Lutherans and the Sinn Fein Catholics took up their arms without waiting to be drafted; Ireland must look after herself until the invaders were driven out of France and Belgium!
If the Secret Service is ever permitted to take the American public and the world into its confidence, the strength, the cleverness, and the permeativeness of the propaganda, especially religious, in the United States, will be shown to be astounding. 'What, son of Luther, strikes at the German breast of your forefathers!' Touse a phrase that would not be understood at the Berlin Foreign Office, the Prussian propagandist had us 'coming and going.'
One could not help admiring the skill of these people. We, in our honest shirt sleeves were left gaping. Shirt sleeves and dollar diplomacy were beautiful things in the opinion of people who believed that the little red schoolhouse and the international Hague Conference were all that were needed to keep us free and make the world safe for democracy! There are no such beautiful things now. If we are to fight the devil with fire, we ought to know previously what kind of fire the devil uses. That requires the use of chemical experts, and the German experts, before this war, were not employed on the side of the angels. We have won; but do not let us imagine that we have killed the devil.
The propaganda still went on, and honest people were influenced by it. 'The Pope belongs to us,' the German propagandists said. 'He has not reprimanded Cardinal Mercier,' replies some logical person, 'and Cardinal Mercier has done more harm to German claims even in Germany than any other living man.' 'The Pope sympathises with our claims; he is the friend of law and order, consequently, he is with us.' Easily impressed folk among the Allies accepted this. They believed the tale that the Italian rout in the autumn of 1917 was due to Catholic officers, who were paraded through every city in Europe with 'traitor' placarded on each back! A foolish story to direct attention from the efforts of the paid conspirators who did the mischief. They saw only the surface of things. They seemed to think that the theorem of Euclid that a straight line is the shortest distance from one point to another holds in the political underworld. The Popewas attacked, which pleased the propagandists. 'O Holy Father, see how I, Head of the German Lutheran Church, love you, and see! your wicked enemies are my enemies.' And so the German propagandist divided and discouraged!