XXI.—THE PLEA FOR PROTESTANTISM.

It may be said that Protestantism is so closely identified with modern German history that it may almost be considered as the Germanic form of Christianity. Certainly Prussia is an essentially Protestant State. From the beginning it has grown from the secularization of Church property, when a Hohenzollern Grand Master, following the advice of Luther, took the bold step of confiscating the demesnes of the Teutonic Order. But it is not only Prussia that has grown and prospered through Protestantism. The Protestant form of Christianity in whatever form is essential to the very existence of the modern State. For no State can exist unless the spiritual power be subordinated to the temporal power. The Protestant Church must needs accept that subordination because Protestantism must necessarily result in a diversity of rival and powerless sects, and therefore, if it be true that Protestantism is necessary for the State, the State is even more necessary to Protestantism. The old dictum, Cujus regio, illius religio, holds good of Prussia. The spiritual allegiance follows the temporal allegiance. The State alone can secure for those different Churches that peace and toleration without which religious war becomes a chronic evil. Toleration and the peaceful coexistence of many Churches under the protection of the State have been for centuries the boast and glory of the Prussian State.

Catholicism does not accept that necessary subordination. The German State of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire of the Hohenstaufen, perished because of the conflict with the Papacy. The modern Teutonic State, the Holy German Empire of the Habsburg, has equally perished through clericalism. Catholicism is an international power, and the State must be national. Catholicism is encroaching and threatening the national State, and the State must remain independent and supreme; therefore Catholicism, ultramontanism, clericalism, are absolutely incompatible with the modern State.

XXII.—THE NECESSITY OF GREAT POWERS.

Inasmuch as power is the main attribute of the State, it follows that only those States which are sufficiently strong in population, in territory, and in financial resources, have a right to exist. There is a definite limit below which a State cannot fulfil its mission nor defend its existence. We must not be deceived by the example of such States as Athens, Venice, Holland, and Florence, which, although apparently small in territory, yet played an important part in political history. Those States were only small in outward appearance; in reality they were either the centres of a vast political system, like Athens and Florence, or the centres of a vast colonial empire, like Venice and Holland. Moreover, in modern times, the whole relations and proportions of States have undergone a fundamental change. Everything is on a larger scale, and there is an almost general tendency in modern times for all national States to expand and to absorb into themselves the smaller neighbouring States. It may almost be said that modern history is made up mainly of the conflicts between five or six leading States. Contemporary Europe had resulted in the unstable equilibrium of the five dominant Powers of Britain, Russia, Austria, France, and Germany. Europe has almost consolidated into a pentarchy.

XXIII.—THE ANOMALY OF THE SMALL STATE.

If it be true that the national State almost inevitably must develop into a great Power, conversely it is no less true that small States are an anomaly. Treitschke never ceased to rail at the monstrosity of petty States, at what he calls, with supreme contempt, the "Kleinstaaterei." Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, are not really States. They are only artificial and temporary structures. Holland will one day be merged into the German Empire and recover its pristine glory.

The smallness of the State produces a corresponding meanness of spirit, a narrowness of outlook. Small States are entirely absorbed by their petty economic interests and party dissensions. They only exist as the parasites of the larger States, who ensure their prosperity and security and bear all the brunt of maintaining law and order in Europe.

But worse even than the small States is the neutral State. A neutral State in political life is as much a monstrosity as a neutral sexless animal in the natural world. A State like Belgium is only the parasite of the larger neighbouring States. Treitschke never mentions Belgium without an outburst of contempt. The country of Memlinck and van Eyck, of Rubens and van Dyck, the country whose people in the present war have borne the first onslaught of all the Teutonic hosts, are never mentioned by Treitschke except with a sneer.

In no other part of his political system does Treitschke show more sublime disregard of all those political facts which do not fit in with his theories. No other part more conclusively proves how the tyrannical dogma of Prussian nationalism can blind even a profound and clear-sighted thinker to the most vital historical realities. It must be apparent a priori to any student of politics that the life of small communities must gain in concentration and intensity what it loses in scope and extent. And it must be obvious that small States have played a much more conspicuous part than the most powerful empires. The city of Dante, Machiavelli, Michael Angelo, has done more for culture than all the might and majesty of the Hohenzollern. Humanity is indebted to one small State—Palestine—for its religion. To another small State—Greece—humanity owes the beginning of all art and the foundations of politics. To other small States—Holland and Scotland—modern Europe is indebted for its political freedom. And are not the German people themselves indebted for the glories of their literature to the contemptible cities of Jena and Weimar?

XXIV.

We have explained the main tenets of the Treitschkean creed. Even after this exhaustive analysis it will be difficult for an English reader to understand how such a system, if we divest it of its rhetoric, of its fervid and impassioned style, and of a wealth of historical illustration, which has been able to ransack every country and every age, could ever have inspired a policy and could have hypnotized so completely a highly intelligent and gifted race.

Our incomprehension is partly due to that strange disbelief in the power of ideas to which we already referred, which remains such a marked trait of the British people, even as it was a marked trait of the Roman people, and which is perhaps characteristic of all nations who are pre-eminent in action, in colonization and empire-building. This disbelief partly explains why we have revealed such strange impotence in fighting our spiritual battles. Our Churches have remained silent and inarticulate. Our statesmen have seldom risen above sentimental platitudes. No trumpet voice has vindicated our ideas to the world. Our writers, with a few notable exceptions, such as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton and Mr. Wells, have seldom risen above trite truisms. This war has not even produced a masterpiece such as Burke's "Thoughts on the French Revolution."

But our incomprehension is due even more to our ignorance of the strange and devious workings of the German mind. Even to-day few authors understand the reasons which render the German people so responsive and so docile to the most extravagant doctrines and systems. The British are a political people; and a political people only accepts theories in so far as they can be verified, interpreted, and corrected by experience, only in so far as they can be tested by the fire of discussion. The German people, as even Prince von Buelow is compelled to admit, have remained an essentially unpolitical people. They still are under the yoke of countless princelings. There still exist sovereign potentates of Lippe and Waldeck, of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen and Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. The Germans have acquired none of the habits and traditions of free government. But, most important of all, their religion has acted in the same direction as their politics. They are described by Treitschke as the typical Protestant nation; but the misfortune of German Protestantism has been that it has never "protested." Through the fusion and confusion of Church and State the Germans have sold their spiritual birthright for a mess of pottage. Their spiritual life has been almost entirely divorced from action. It has been centred in the intellect and in the emotions. It has moved in a world of abstraction and dreams.

And thus both their politics and their religion have made them a prey to visionaries and sentimentalists, to unscrupulous journalists like Harden and Reventlow, to unbalanced poets like Nietzsche, to political professors, and to fanatic doctrinaires. Of those academic politicians and fanatic doctrinaires, Treitschke has probably been the most dangerous and the most illustrious representative. He will ever remain a memorable example of the power for evil which may be wielded by a noble and passionate temperament untrained in and unrestrained by the realities of political life, who sees the State from the altitude of the professional tripod. The war will have helped to break the spell of the political professor, but the spell will continue to act until all the spiritual forces of Germany, until the Press and the Universities and the Churches, are emancipated from the intrusion of the State, until the German democracy reveals both the spirit and conquers the power to achieve its own salvation.

IV.—GENERAL VON BERNHARDI.[15]

[15] These pages were published in 1912.

As a rule the deliberate military policy of a nation remains the secret of diplomacy and the afterthought of statecraft. As for the military feeling and the military spirit, so far as they exist amongst the people, they generally remain subconscious, unreasoned, and instinctive. It is therefore a piece of rare good fortune to the student of contemporary history when the designs of statesmen are carefully thought out and revealed by one who has authority to speak, and when the instinct of the masses is explained and made explicit by one who has the gift of lucid statement, of philosophical interpretation, and psychological insight. It is precisely those qualities and characteristics that give importance and significance to the recent book of General von Bernhardi on "Germany and the Coming War." The author is a distinguished representative of that Prussian Junkerthum which forms the mainstay of the military party and which rules the German Empire. He therefore speaks from the inside. And his previous works have earned him a high reputation as an exponent of the science of war, and have worthily maintained the traditions of Clausewitz and von der Goltz. Nor are these the only qualifications of the author. General von Bernhardi's new book possesses other qualities which entitle him to a respectful hearing. He writes with absolute candour and sincerity; his tone is unexceptionable; he is earnest and dignified; he is moderate and temperate; he is judicial rather than controversial. Although the author believes, of course, that Germany stands in the forefront of civilization and has a monopoly of the highest culture, yet his book is singularly free from the one great blemish which defaces most German books on international politics—namely, systematic depreciation of the foreigner. Von Bernhardi does not assume that France is played out or that England is effete. He is too well read in military history not to realize that to belittle the strength or malign the character of an enemy is one of the most fruitful causes of disaster.

Altogether we could not have a better guide to the study of the present international situation from the purely German point of view, nor could we find another book which gives us more undisguisedly the "mentality," the prejudices and prejudgments and opinions of the ruling classes. And it is a characteristically German trait that no less than one-third of the work should be given to the philosophy and ethics of the subject. General von Bernhardi surveys the field from the vantage-ground of first principles, and his book is a convincing proof of a truth which we have expressed elsewhere that in Prussia war is not looked upon as an accident, but as a law of nature; and not only as a law of nature, but as the law of man, or if not as the law of man, certainly as the law of the "German superman." It is not enough to say that war has been the national industry of Prussia. It forms an essential part of the philosophy of life, the Weltanschauung of every patriotic Prussian. Bernhardi believes in the morality, one might almost say in the sanctity, of war. To him war is not a necessary evil, but, on the contrary, the source of every moral good. To him it is pacificism which is an immoral doctrine, because it is the doctrine of the materialist, who believes that enjoyment is the chief end of life. It is the militarist who is the true idealist because he assumes that humanity can only achieve its mission through struggle and strife, through sacrifice and heroism. It is true that Bernhardi ignores the greatest of Prussian philosophers, whose immortal plea in favour of perpetual peace is dismissed as the work of his dotage. But if he dismisses Kant, he adduces instead a formidable array of thinkers and poets in support of his militarist thesis; Schiller and Goethe, Hegel and Heraclitus, in turn are summoned as authorities. Even the Gospels are distorted to convey a militarist meaning, for the author quotes them to remind us that it is the warlike and not the meek that shall inherit the earth. But Bernhardi's chief authorities are the historian of the super-race, the Anglophobe Treitschke, and the philosopher of the superman, Nietzsche. Nine out of ten quotations are taken from the political treatises of the famous Berlin professor, and the whole spirit of Bernhardi's book is summed up in the motto borrowed from Zarathustra and inscribed on the front page of the volume:

"War and courage have achieved more great things than the love of our neighbour. It is not your sympathy, but your bravery, which has hitherto saved the shipwrecked of existence.

"'What is good?' you ask. To be brave is good."[16]

[16] Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," First Part, 10th Speech.

It is no less characteristic of contemporary German political philosophy that from beginning to end Bernhardi maintains consciously, deliberately, a purely national attitude, and that he does not even attempt to rise to a higher and wider point of view. Indeed, the main issue and cardinal problem, the relation of nationality to humanity, the conflict between the duties we owe to the one and the duties we owe to the other, is contemptuously relegated to a footnote (p. 19). To Bernhardi a nation is not a means to an end, a necessary organ of universal humanity, and therefore subordinate to humanity. A nation is an end in itself. It is the ultimate reality. And the preservation and the increase of the power of the State is the ultimate criterion of all right. "My country, right or wrong," is the General's whole system of moral philosophy. Yet, curiously enough, Bernhardi speaks of Germany as the apostle, not only of a national culture, but of universal culture, as the champion of civilization, and he indulges in the usual platitudes on this fertile subject. And he does not even realize that in so doing he is guilty of a glaring contradiction; he does not realize that once he adopts this standpoint of universal culture, he introduces an argument and assumes a position which are above and outside nationalism. For either the German nation is self-sufficient, and all culture is centred in and absorbed in Germany, in which case Prussian nationalism would be historically and philosophically justified; or culture is something higher and more comprehensive and less exclusive, in which case national aims must be estimated and appraised with reference to a higher aim, and a national policy must be judged according as it furthers or runs counter to the universal ideals of humanity.

General von Bernhardi starts his survey of the international situation with the axiom that Germany imperatively wants new markets for her industry and new territory for her sixty-five millions of people. In so doing, he only reiterates the usual assumption of German political writers. And he also resembles the majority of his fellow-publicists in this respect, that he does not tell us what exactly are the territories that Germany covets, or how they are to be obtained, or how the possession of tropical or subtropical colonies can solve the problem of her population. But he differs from his predecessors in that he clearly realizes and expresses, without ambiguity or equivocation, that the assertion of her claims must involve the establishment of German supremacy, and he admits that those claims are incompatible with the antiquated doctrine of the balance of power. And von Bernhardi also clearly realizes that, as other nations will refuse to accept German supremacy and to surrender those fertile territories which Germany needs, German expansion can only be achieved as the result of a conflict—briefly, that war is unavoidable and inevitable.



CHAPTER V

FREDERICK THE GREAT: THE FATHER OF PRUSSIAN MILITARISM

I.

Amongst the many discoveries brought about by the war of the nations, an educated British public has suddenly discovered the unsuspected existence of Heinrich von Treitschke. And not only have we discovered the national Prussian historian—we have also unwittingly discovered Prussian history. We have certainly had revealed to us for the first time its secret and hidden meaning. We are only just beginning to realize that for nearly two hundred years it is Prussia, and not Russia, which has been the evil influence in European politics. Prussia has not been a natural political growth. She has been an artificial creation of statesmen. She has been pre-eminently the predatory State. She has never taken the sword to defend a disinterested idea. The ravisher of Silesia, of Schleswig-Holstein, of Alsace-Lorraine, the murderer of Poland, she has never expanded except at the expense of her neighbours. She has corrupted the German soul; she has been the mainstay of reaction and militarism in Central Europe. She has been the bond of that freemasonry of despotism, of that Triple Alliance of the three empires which subsisted until the fall of Bismarck, which has been for generations the nightmare of European Liberals.

II.

In attempting to reread modern history in the light of that new interpretation of Prussian history, we are naturally driven to ask ourselves who is primarily responsible for that sinister influence which Prussia has exercised for the last two centuries. To the unprejudiced student there can be no doubt that the one man primarily responsible is Frederick the Great, the master-builder of Prussian militarism and Prussian statecraft. He it is who has been poisoning the wells; he it is who first conceived of the State as a barracks; he it is who has "Potsdamized" the Continent and transformed Europe into a military camp. Strangely enough, all civilized nations to-day have proclaimed Prussia accursed. Yet we continue to hero-worship the man who made Prussia what she is. A halo still surrounds the Mephistophelian figure which incarnates the Hohenzollern spirit. A legend has gathered round the philosopher of Sans Souci. A combination of circumstances has caused writers almost unanimously to extol his merits and to ignore his crimes. British historians naturally favour the ally of the Seven Years' War. Russian and Austrian writers are indulgent to the accomplice of the partition of Poland. Anti-clerical writers glorify the Atheist. Military writers extol the soldier. Political writers extol the statesman. But the most adequate explanation of the Frederician legend is the circumstance that public opinion has been systematically mobilized in favour of Frederick the Great by the great French leaders of the eighteenth century, the dispensers of European fame.

It was not for nothing that Frederick the Great for forty years courted the good graces of Voltaire d'Alembert. He knew full well that Voltaire would prove to him a most admirable publicity agent. And never was publicity agent secured at a lower cost. Those literary influences have continued to our own day to perpetuate the legend of Frederick. Nearly a hundred years after Rossbach Frederick had the strange good fortune to captivate the wayward genius of Carlyle. It is difficult to understand how Carlyle, who all through life hesitated between the Christian Puritanism of John Knox and the Olympian paganism of Goethe, could have been fascinated by the Potsdam cynic. We can only seek for an explanation in the deeply rooted anti-French and pro-German prejudices of Carlyle. Frederick was the arch-enemy of France, and that fact was sufficient to attract the sympathies of Teufelsdroeckh. It is Carlyle's Gallophobia which has inspired one of the most mischievous masterpieces of English literature.

III.

The conspiracy of European historians has thus attached greatness to the very name of the third Hohenzollern King. Great the Hohenzollern King certainly was, but his greatness is that of a Condottiere of the Italian Renascence, of a Catharine de' Medici. It is the greatness of a personality who is endowed, no doubt, with magnificent gifts, but who has prostituted all those gifts to the baser usages.

It is passing strange how every writer remains silent about the ugly and repellent side of Frederick. The son of a mad father, he was subjected to a terrorism which would have predestined a less strong nature to the lunatic asylum. The terrorism only hardened Frederick into an incurable cynic. It only killed in him every finer feeling. His upbringing must almost inevitably have brought out all the darker sides of human nature.

The first twenty years of his life were one uninterrupted schooling in hypocrisy, brutality, and depravity. A debauchee in his youth, a sodomite in later life, a hater of women and a despiser of men, a bully to his subordinates, a monster of ingratitude, revelling in filth so continuously in his written and spoken words that even a loyal Academy of Berlin has found it impossible to publish his unexpurgated correspondence, he appears an anachronism in a modern Europe leavened by two thousand years of Christianity. Ever scheming, ever plotting, ever seeking whom he might devour, deceiving even his intimate advisers, he has debased the currency of international morality. As a man Frederick has been compared with Napoleon. The comparison is an insult to the Corsican. Napoleon was human, he was capable of strong affections, of profound attachment and gratitude. But neither friendship nor love had any place in Frederick's scheme of the universe.

IV.

To-day we are holding the poor Prussian professor mainly accountable for the greatest and latest crime of Prussian militarism. But those dogmatic professors are only the abject disciples of the Hohenzollern King. There is not one aphorism which is not to be found in the thirty volumes of Frederick's writings. He has perfected the theory of the military State, and he has acted consistently on the theory. It is highly significant that his very first public act, almost never mentioned by his biographers, was his spoliation of the Prince-Bishop of Liege (an historical precedent tragically suggestive at the present day). The Prince-Bishop of Liege had committed the heinous crime of resisting the impressment of his subjects kidnapped by the recruiting sergeants of the Prussian King. On the strength of that theory, Frederick attacked the defenceless daughter of the Austrian Emperor who had saved his life at Custrin. On the strength of that theory he betrayed every one of his allies. On the strength of that theory he committed his most odious crime—he murdered the Polish nation.

V.

We are told that Frederick the Great was an incomparable political virtuoso. We are told that he showed heroic fortitude in disaster, after Kollin and Kunersdorff. But so did Caesar Borgia after the sudden death of Alexander VI. We are told that he was tolerant of all creeds. But that was only because he disbelieved all creeds, and he believed, with Gibbon, that "all creeds are equally useful to the statesman." We are reminded that he was an amazing economist, husbanding and developing the national finances. But his finances were only the sinews of war. We are told that he protected literature and art, but, like religion, he found literature an instrument useful for his political designs. We are reminded that he was himself the servant of the State. But in serving the State he only served his own interests, because the State was incarnated in himself, and in husbanding his resources he was only acting like a miser who is adding to his hoard. We are finally told that as the result of his life-work Frederick succeeded in creating the most marvellous military machine of modern times. We forget that, as is the way with most military machines, the Prussian machine ten years after Frederick's death had become a pitiful wreck in the hands of his immediate successor, and that it required the genius of Bismarck to manufacture another Prussian military machine to be used once more for the enslavement of Europe.



CHAPTER VI

THE APOTHEOSIS OF GOETHE

No less than three books on Goethe have been issued in the course of the last few months, and the fact is sufficient evidence that the cult of the Olympian Jupiter of Weimar, which was first inaugurated eighty years ago by Carlyle, is in no danger of dying out in England. Professor Hume Brown has given us a penetrating and judicious study of Goethe's youth, such as one had a right to expect from the eminent Scottish historian.[17] Mr. Joseph McCabe has given us a comprehensive survey of Goethe's life, and an objective and critical appreciation of his personality.[18] Both are in profound sympathy with their subject, but neither is a blind hero-worshipper. In Mr. McCabe's life we are not only introduced to the scientist who is ever in quest of new worlds to conquer, we are also made acquainted with the pagan epicure ever engaged in amorous experiments! We are not only introduced to the sublime poet and prophet, we are also introduced to the incurable egotist, who could only find time to visit his old mother once every ten years, whilst, as boon companion of a petty German Prince, he always found time for his pleasures. We are not only admitted to contemplate the pomp and majesty of his world-wide fame, we are also admitted to the sordid circumstances of Goethe's "home." And our awe and reverence are turned into pity. We pity the miserable husband of a drunken and epileptic wife rescued from the gutter; we pity even more the unhappy father of a degraded son, who inherited all the vices of one parent without inheriting the genius of the other.

[17] "The Youth of Goethe." By P. Hume Brown. 8s. net (Murray.)

[18] "Goethe, the Man and his Character." By Joseph McCabe. 15s. net. (Eveleigh Nash.)

I.

The first quality which strikes us in Goethe, and which dazzled his contemporaries, and continues to dazzle posterity, is his universality. He appears to us as one of the most receptive, one of the most encyclopaedic intellects of modern times. A scientist and a biologist, a pioneer of the theory of evolution, a physicist and originator of a new theory of colour, a man of affairs, a man of the world and a courtier, a philosopher, a lyrical poet, a tragic, comic, satiric, epic, and didactic poet, a novelist and an historian, he has attempted every form of literature, he has touched upon every chord of the human soul.

It is true that, in considering this universality of Goethe, it behoves us to make some qualifications. His human sympathies are by no means as universal as his intellectual sympathies. He has no love for the common people. He has the aloofness of the aristocrat. He has a Nietzschean contempt for the herd. He takes little interest in the religious aspirations of mankind or in the struggles of human freedom. The French Revolution remains to him a sealed book, and his history of the campaign in France is almost ludicrously disappointing.

With regard to what has been called his "intellectual universality," the elements which compose it cannot be reduced to unity and harmony. It would be difficult to co-ordinate them into a higher synthesis, for that universality is at the same time diversity and mutability. Goethe is essentially changeable and elusive. In his works we find combined the antipodes of human thought. There is little in common between the poet of Goetz von Berlichingen and Werther on the one hand and the poet of Tasso and Iphigenia on the other hand. The intellect of Goethe is like a crystal with a thousand facets reflecting all the colours of the rainbow.

And it may well be asked, therefore, whether this encyclopaedic diversity can aptly be called universality. Universality must ultimately result in unity and harmony, and it is impossible to assert that Goethe's mind ever achieved unity and harmony, that it was ever controlled by one dominant thought.

At any rate, whether a defect or a quality, there can be no doubt that this encyclopaedic diversity has turned to the great advantage of his glory. It is precisely because Goethe is an elusive Proteus that all doctrines may equally claim him. Romanticists turn with predilection to the creator of Werther or the first "Faust." Classicists admire the plastic beauty of Tasso and Iphigenia. The cosmopolitan sees in Goethe the Weltbuerger, the citizen of the world, the incarnation of die Weltweisheit. The patriot acclaims in him the poet who has sung the myths and legends dear to the German race. The sensuous and voluptuous libertine is enchanted by the eroticism of the "Roman Elegies." The domesticated reader is drawn by that chaste idyll, Herman and Dorothea. The Spinozist and Pantheist are attracted by the general tendencies of his philosophy. The Christian is at liberty to interpret "Faust" in a sense which is favourable to his religion. The Liberal politician can point to the author of Goetz and Egmont. The Conservative and Reactionary can claim all the works of Goethe's maturity, when the poet had become the perfect courtier.

II.

There is a second quality which Goethe possesses in a supreme degree, and by which he is distinguished from his contemporaries—namely, mental sanity and serenity. Most of his fellow-poets reveal some morbid characteristics, are afflicted with some Weltschmerz, with some internal spiritual malady. They live in an atmosphere of strife and discord. The marvellous vitality of Goethe has escaped from the contagion. Like his fellow-poets, he passed through the crisis of the Sturm und Drang. But it seems as if he had only known it in order to give to his experiences a final artistic expression. He communicated the "Wertherian malady" to a whole generation, but he himself emerged triumphant and unscathed. The hurricane which wrecked so many powerful intellects spared his own. After the Italian journey he never ceased by example and precept to recommend harmony and balance, and he became so completely the perfect type of intellectual and artistic sanity that the world has forgotten the Bohemian days of Frankfurt and Leipzig, the merry days of Weimar, the repulsive vulgarity of his drunken mistress and wife, the degradation of his son, and has agreed only to contemplate the Olympian majesty of Weimar. Whether the repose and sanity of Goethe were unmixed virtues, or whether they were partly the result of indifference, of impassivity or selfishness, is another question. Certain it is that there is no other trait in Goethe's personality which has done more to raise him in the esteem of posterity. He has proved to the world that internal discord and distraction and morbid exaltation are not the necessary appanage of genius, and that, on the contrary, the most powerful genius is also the most sane, the most balanced, the most self-possessed, the most harmonious.

III.

Without going here into the purely formal and artistic qualities of Goethe's works, there is one fact which, perhaps more than any other, impressed itself on the imagination of the world, and that is the realization of his own personality, the achievement of his own destiny. Of all his poems, the rarest and most perfect is the poem of his life. Hitherto no such life had ever been allotted to a favourite of the Muses. He seemed to have received a bountiful abundance of all the gifts of the fairies—superb health, comfort, and wealth, the love of an adoring mother and sister, the loyalty of illustrious friends, the favour of Princes, the homage of women, and the admiration of men. To him was opened every province of human activity. He exhausted every form of enjoyment. His life until the end was like the unfolding of a glorious version of a happy dream. At eighty years of age he remained the one surviving giant of the golden age of German literature. In his lifetime he was considered by Europe, as well as by Germany, as the most glorious exemplar of his race, and the city of his adoption had become a pilgrimage attracting worshippers from all parts of Europe. Death was merciful to him. The last act of his life was as beautiful as the others. It was not preceded by the gradual dissolution of his physical and intellectual strength; rather was it like the burning out of a flame. He passed away in an apotheosis, and the last words uttered by the dying poet, "Mehr Licht, mehr Licht" (More light, more light), have become for all future generations the final expression of his philosophy and the symbol of his personality.



CHAPTER VII

THE SERVICE OF THE CITY IN GERMANY[19]

[19] Written in 1913.

I.

All English students interested in Germany owe a deep debt of gratitude to the unremitting labours of Mr. William Harbutt Dawson in the fields of Teutonic scholarship. He is one of a gallant band of some half-dozen publicists who, amidst universal neglect, have done their utmost to popularize amongst us a knowledge of German life and German people. Mr. Dawson's last book is certain to take rank as a political classic. It is a lucid exposition of "Municipal Life and Government in Germany" (Longmans and Co., 12s. 6d. net). City administration and city regulations are a subject which no literary art can make very exciting, but, difficult and forbidding though it be, it is a subject which yields in importance and interest to no other. There is certainly no other subject which will reveal to us more of the secrets of German greatness.

II.

For the greatness of Germany is not to be explained by her unwieldy army, her red-tape bureaucracy, her impotent Reichstag, her effete Churches. Her army, Parliament, and Churches are symptoms of weakness and not of strength. The true greatness of Germany is largely due to a factor ignored by most writers, ignored even by Mr. Dawson in all his previous works—namely, the excellence of German municipal institutions, the intensity of her civic life. We have been too much accustomed to think of Germany only as a despotic empire. She might be far more fittingly described as a country of free institutions, a federation of autonomous cities. We fondly imagine that ours is the only country where self-government prevails. Readers who might still entertain this prejudice will carry away from Mr. Dawson's book the novel political lesson that Germany, much more than Great Britain, deserves to be called a self-governing nation, and that, at least in her civic government, which, after all, affects 70 per cent. of her population, Germany enjoys a measure of political liberty which is absolutely unknown in our own country.

III.

The tradition of municipal freedom in Germany is as old as German culture. It still lingers in the haunting charm of the German cities to-day. The Holy Roman Empire possessed only the trappings and the shadow of power; the reality belonged to the burghers of the towns. The Staedtewesen gives its original character to the German Middle Ages. The Hansa towns and the Hanseatic League recall some of the most stirring memories of German history. The League still survives in the three independent republics of Hamburg, Bremen, and Luebeck. The dominant fact that German medieval civilization was a civilization of free cities is driven home to the most superficial tourist. In every corner of the German Empire, in north and south, on the banks of the Rhine and the Elbe, in Rothenburg and Marienburg, in Frankfurt and Freiburg, the thousand monuments of the past prove to us the all-important truth that in Germany, as in Italy and in Flanders, it is the service of the city which has made for national greatness.

IV.

War and anarchy put an end to municipal prosperity. Protestantism brought with it the confusion of spiritual and temporal power, which brought with it the despotism of the Princes, which meant the suppression of civic liberty. The Thirty Years' War completed the ruin of the cities. The end of the seventeenth century put in the place of city governance the tyranny of a hundred petty Princes. Everywhere we see the ancient town halls crumbling into ruin, and we see arising pretentious palaces built on the model of the Palace of Versailles. Germany had to go through the bitter humiliation of Jena before she realized the necessity of reverting to her glorious civic traditions. The statesmanship of Stein (see Seeley's "Life and Times of Stein") understood that such return was the prime condition of a German political renaissance. By his memorable Municipal Law of 1808 Stein restored civic liberty. He made local self-government the corner-stone of German internal policy. The ordinance of Stein remains to this day the organic law and Great Charter of the German city. It has stood the test of one hundred years of change, and even the iron despotism of the Hohenzollern has not been able to challenge it. In every other political institution Germany is lamentably behind. Only in her municipal life is she in advance of most European countries.

V.

As we hinted at the outset, the municipality has far greater powers in Germany than in Great Britain. It is true that the police authority is under the control of the central power, that education inspection is under the control of the Church, which is another kind of spiritual police. It is true that the City Fathers are debarred from mixing with party politics. But within those limitations, and in the province of economics and social welfare, municipal powers are almost unrestricted. It is thus that German towns have been the pioneers in school hygiene. Every German child is under the supervision of the school dentist and the school oculist. It is thus that German cities have established their public pawnshops, and have saved the poor man from the clutches of the moneylender. It is thus that they have initiated gratuitous legal advice for the indigent. They have even established municipal beerhouses and Rathhauskeller. In one word, they have launched out in a hundred forms of civic enterprise.

VI.

One of the most striking fields of municipal enterprise is the policy of Land Purchase. The people were encouraged to enter on this policy by the evils of private land speculation, and by the shocking housing conditions in some of the big cities, and especially in Berlin, where the curse of the barrack system still prevails.

Nearly every German city is an important landowner, owning on an average 50 per cent. of the municipal area.

"While the powers of English urban districts in relation to land ownership are severely restricted by law, German towns are free to buy real estate on any scale whatever, without permission of any kind, unless, indeed, the contracting of a special loan should be necessary, in which event the assent of the City Commissary is necessary. This assent, however, entails no local inquiry corresponding to the inquiries of the Local Government Board, simply because the German States have no Local Government Board, and no use for them; the proceeding is almost a formality, intended to remind the communes that the State, though devolved upon them their wide powers of self-government, likes still to be consulted now and then, and it is arranged expeditiously through the post. For, strange as it may sound to English ears, the Governments of Germany, without exception, far from wishing to hamper the towns in their land investments, have often urged the towns to buy as much land as possible and not to sell" (Dawson, p. 123).

"Within the present year the little town of Kalbe, on the Saale, expended just L14 a head on its 12,000 inhabitants in buying for L468,000 a large estate for the purpose of creating a number of smallholdings and labourers' allotments. During the period 1880 to 1908 Breslau expended over one million and a half pounds in the purchase of land within the communal area. Berlin has an estate more than three times greater than its administrative area. In 1910 alone seventy-three of the large towns of Germany bought land to the aggregate extent of 9,584 acres and to the aggregate value of over four million pounds sterling. Charlottenburg now owns 2,500 acres of land as yet not built upon, with a value of over a million and a quarter pounds, and the value of all its real estate is about four and a half million pounds sterling. In 1886 Freiburg, in Baden, owned nearly 11,000 acres of land with a value of L925,000. In 1909 its estate was only 2,000 acres larger, but its value was then L2,300,000."

"Since 1891 Ulm, under the rule of a mayor convinced of the wisdom of a progressive land policy and strong enough to carry it out, has bought some 1,280 acres of land at different times for L316,000, while it has sold 420 acres for L406,000, showing a cash profit of L900,000, apart from the addition of 860 acres to the town estate. As a result of Ulm's land policy, its assets increased between 1891 and 1909 from L583,500 to L1,990,000, an increase of L1,407,000, equal to L25 a head of the population. Another result is that of the larger towns of Wuertemberg only one has a lower taxation than Ulm. It is solely owing to its successful land policy that this enterprising town, without imposing heavy burdens on the general body of ratepayers, has been able to undertake a programme of social reforms which has created for it an honourable reputation throughout Germany."

VII.

In quite a different direction, in the encouragement of Art and Literature, the German municipality plays a leading part.

"The budgets of most large and many small German towns contain an item, greater or less according to local circumstances, which is intended to cover 'provision for the intellectual life of the town.' This item is independent of expenditure on schools, and, if analyzed, will be found often to include the maintenance of or subsidies to municipal theatres, bands, and orchestras, as well as grants to dramatic and musical societies of a miscellaneous order. In this provision the theatre takes an altogether dominant position, and the fact is significant as reflecting the great importance which in Germany is attributed to the drama as an educational and elevating influence in the life of the community. It may be that the practice of subsidizing the theatre is not altogether independent of the fact that the repertory theatre is universal in Germany, except in the smallest of provincial towns, with the result that a far more intimate tie exists between the drama and the community than is possible in the case of travelling companies."

"If the question be asked, Is the higher drama encouraged by the municipal theatre? the answer must be an emphatic affirmative of the high standard of education in Germany. Speaking generally, no theatres in Germany maintain the drama at a higher level than the municipal theatres in the large towns. The lower forms of the drama will find no home here, for public taste looks for the best that the stage can offer, and as the demand is, so is the supply. Many a provincial theatre of this kind presents more Shakespearean plays in a week than the average English theatre outside London presents in a couple of years. A glance at the repertory of any of the municipal theatres which have been named is enough to convince one that an elevated aim is steadily kept in view. For example, in a recent year the two Mannheim municipal theatres presented 161 separate works, including 93 dramas, 62 operas and operettas, and 6 ballets, and of these works 442 repetitions were given in the aggregate, making for the year 604 performances, a number of which were at popular prices. The dramas given included fifteen by Schiller, ten by Shakespeare, three by Goethe, three by Lessing, five by Moliere, four by Hans Sachs, four by Sheridan, eleven by Grillparzer, two each by Kleist and Hebbel, and several by Ibsen, while the operas included three by Beethoven, three by Cherubini, six by Mozart, three by Weber, and several by Wagner. Could an English provincial theatre—could all English provincial theatres together—show a record equal to this? That plays of this kind are given is proof that the German public looks to the municipal theatre for the cultivation of the highest possible standard of dramatic taste and achievement."

VIII.

The German city has managed to combine efficiency with freedom. She has managed to establish a strong executive and yet to safeguard the will of the people. In France the Mayor is appointed by the State, and he is the tool of the Ministry. In Great Britain the City Fathers are honorary and unpaid. In Germany they are salaried servants, and yet elected by the people. In Great Britain magistrates are temporary, ephemeral figure-heads. They are not even allowed time to serve their apprenticeship. They remain in office one, two, or at most three years, receive a knighthood in the larger provincial towns, and retire into private life. In Germany the Burgomaster and Aldermen are permanent servants, at first elected for twelve years, and on re-election appointed for life. Their whole life is identified with the interests of the city.

There lies the originality of German civic government, and there lies the secret of municipal efficiency. The German Mayor and council are experts. City government is becoming so technical a science that there are now schools of civic administration established in several parts of the German Empire. The city administrator is not a grocer or a draper temporarily raised to office, nor are they only town clerks and officials. They have both the confidence of the people and the responsibility of power, and they are given time to achieve results, to follow up a systematic policy.

IX.

The whole secret of German municipal government is told by Mr. Dawson in a footnote of his book:

"The chief Mayor of Duisburg is about to seek well-earned rest after thirty-four years of work. When in 1880 he took over the direction of the town's affairs, Duisburg had 34,000 inhabitants. To-day Duisburg, with the amalgamated Ruhrort and Meiderich, has a population of 244,000. This remarkable development is specially due to the far-sighted municipal policy pursued by the chief Mayor, who made it his endeavour to attract new industries to the State for the creation of the docks—as the result of which Duisburg is the largest inland port in the world—and the incorporation of Ruhrort and Meiderich in 1905."

This footnote illustrating the history of Duisburg might serve equally well as an illustration for the history of other German towns. On reading that footnote I could not help thinking of a famous English statesman whose recent death has closed a stirring chapter of British history. German and Austrian municipalities give the widest scope for political genius and attract the ablest men. If the same conditions had prevailed in this country, Mr. Chamberlain would have been content to identify himself with the prosperity of his adopted city, as the Mayor of Duisburg identified himself with the greatness of Duisburg; as Lueger identified himself with the greatness of Vienna. And if Birmingham had given full scope to the genius of Mr. Chamberlain, how different would have been the life-story of the late statesman, and how different would be the England in which we are living to-day!



CHAPTER VIII

THE NEGLECT OF GERMAN

There are many urgent reforms needed in our national education; those who are best qualified to speak could make many a startling revelation if they only dared to speak out. And there is ample evidence that almost every part of our educational machinery requires the most thorough overhauling. In the words of Bacon, "Instauratio facienda ab imis fundamentis." But I doubt whether there does exist any more glaring proof of the present inefficiency of our Secondary Schools and Universities than their scandalous attitude towards the study of the German language and literature.

The plain and unvarnished truth is that at the beginning of this, the twentieth century, when Germany is the supreme political and commercial Power on the Continent of Europe, the study of German is steadily going back in the United Kingdom. In some parts it is actually dying out. In many important Secondary Schools it is being discontinued. Even in the Scottish Universities, which pride themselves on being more modern and more progressive than the English Universities, there does not exist one single Chair of German. In Oxford a Chair of German was only established through the munificence of a patriotic German merchant.

And even when there are teachers there are very few students. In one of the greatest British Universities, with a constituency of 3,500 students, there has been, for the last ten years, an average of five to six men students. And the reluctance of young men to study German is perfectly intelligible. The study of German does not pay. It brings neither material rewards nor official recognition. All the prizes, all the scholarships and fellowships, go to other subjects, and mainly to the classics. Let any reader of Everyman stand up and say that I am exaggerating; I would only be too delighted to discover that I am wrong.

Such being the attitude of those who are primarily responsible for our national education, can we wonder at the attitude of the general public? Can we expect it to take any more interest in German culture than the educational authorities? Let those who have any doubt or illusion on the subject make inquiries at booksellers', at circulating libraries and public libraries, at London clubs. I have tried to make such an investigation, and all those institutions have the same sorry tale to tell. It is impossible to get an outstanding book which appears in Germany, for it does not pay the publisher to stock such a book. At Mudie's, for every hundred French books there may be two German books. At the Royal Societies Club, with a membership of several thousands, every one of whom belongs to some learned society, you may get the Revue de Deux Mondes, or the Temps, or the Figaro, but you cannot get a German paper. For the last twenty years I have not once seen a copy of the Zukunft, or the Frankfurter Zeitung, or the Koelnische Zeitung, at an English private house, at an English club, at an English bookseller's, at an English library.

A few months ago the most popular and most enterprising daily paper of the kingdom published some articles on the German elections, which were justly rousing a great deal of attention in this country. I was very much impressed by the cleverness of those articles, but my admiration knew no bounds when the author confessed that he was writing without knowing a word of German, and that when attending political meetings he had to make out the meaning of the language by the gestures and facial expression of the orators. Have we not here, my classical friends, an exhilarating instance of the results of your monopoly? Ab uno disce omnes.

We are constantly being told that "knowledge is power," and that the knowledge of a foreign language means not only intellectual power, but commercial and political power. Yet those in authority do not budge an inch to get possession of such power. We are constantly warned by political pessimists that Germany is making gigantic strides, and that we ought to keep a vigilant outlook. Yet we do nothing to obtain first-hand information of the resources of a nation of sixty-five millions, who is certainly a formidable commercial rival, and who to-morrow may meet us in deadly encounter.[20] On the other hand, we are told with equal persistence by political optimists that we ought to be on the most friendly terms with a great kindred people from whom nothing separates us except regrettable ignorance and superficial misunderstandings. Yet, in order to dispel that ignorance and to remove those misunderstandings, we do not make the first necessary step—namely, to learn the language of the people whom we are said to misunderstand.

[20] Written in 1912.

It is true that Members of Parliament and journalists are ready enough to proceed to Germany on a mission of goodwill, and to be entertained at banquets and international festivities. But how futile must be those friendly demonstrations when we consider that the enormous majority of those Parliamentarians and journalists are unable to read a German newspaper! And how must it strike a citizen of Hamburg or Frankfurt when their English guests have to reply in English to the toasts of their German hosts! And how must a patriotic German feel when he discovers that not five out of a hundred have taken the trouble to master the noble language of the country whose friendship they are seeking!

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending, at the house of a prominent political leader, a representative gathering of politicians, diplomats, and journalists, who were met to consider the best means of promoting Anglo-German friendship. In answer to a speech of mine, an eminent German publicist and editor of an influential monthly review delivered an eloquent address in broken French. To hear a German address in French an audience of Germanophile Englishmen was certainly a ludicrous situation! But the speaker realized that it would be hopeless to use the German language, even to an assembly specially interested in supporting Anglo-German friendship.

How long, my classical friends, are we going to submit to these disastrous results of your monopoly? Quousque tandem! How long are we going to stand this scandal of international illiteracy and ignorance, fraught with such ominous peril for the future? How long is this nation going to be hoodwinked by an infinitesimal minority of reactionary dons and obscurantist parsons, determined to force a smattering of Greek down the throats of a reluctant youth? How long is modern culture to be kept back under the vain pretence of maintaining the culture of antiquity, but in reality in response to an ignoble dread of enlightenment and progress, and in order to protect vested interests and to maintain political, intellectual, and religious reaction?



CHAPTER IX

MECKLENBURG, THE PARADISE OF PRUSSIAN JUNKERTHUM

I.

The tourist who takes the express train between Berlin and Copenhagen, one hour after he has left the Prussian capital reaches a vast plain more than half the size of Belgium, where barren moorlands alternate with smiling fields, where dormant lakes are succeeded by dark pine-forests. Few travellers ever think of breaking their journey on this melancholy plain, the territory of the Grand Dukes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz. They have not the remotest suspicion that these Grand Duchies of Mecklenburg, which they cross in such listless haste, are, from a political point of view, one of the most fascinating countries of Europe. Mecklenburg has for the students of comparative politics the same sort of interest which an Indian reserve territory, or the Mormon State of Utah, has for the traveller in the United States, or which a cannibal tract in the equatorial Congo forest has for the explorer of Central Africa. For this pleasant land of Mecklenburg-Schwerin is the last survival of a patriarchal and feudal civilization. It is the most perfect type of the paternal Prussian type of government, entirely unspoiled by the Parliamentary institutions of a feeble democratic age.

II.

Here alone of all the North German States the conditions of a past generation continue in their pristine vigour. Although the Grand Duke is the only descendant of Slavonic Princes in the German Empire, and still calls himself "Prince of the Wendes," he is the most Teutonic of dynasts. Although Mecklenburg-Schwerin is independent of Prussia, it is the most Prussian and the most Junkerized of all Federal States.

In degenerate Prussia the Kaiser has actually to submit to the financial control of an unruly Reichstag, and is not even allowed to spend the Imperial revenues as any Emperor by right Divine ought to be logically allowed to do. The Duke of Mecklenburg is far more fortunate than William II. He has no accounts to settle, he has not even a budget to publish. He collects in paternal fashion the revenues of his Grand Ducal demesnes, and no power has any right to ask any questions. Even the "Almanack of Gotha," which is generally omniscient in these matters, is silent on the revenues of His Highness. There is a public debt of about one hundred and fifty million marks! The public revenues are the private income of the Grand Duke. The public debt is a private charge on the people.

In degenerate Prussia even the Imperator-Rex has to divide some of his authority with a meddlesome assembly, and has to delegate it to an obedient but ridiculous bureaucracy. In the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg the ruler governs his subjects in the good old patriarchal way. It is true, in the troubled days of 1848 an unwise predecessor granted something like a paper constitution, but that scrap of parchment happily became a dead-letter twelve months after it had been granted. It is also true that there still subsists some faint image of representative government in the two estates of the Grand Duchy, dating as far back as 1755, but those venerable estates of the Grand Duchy are only composed of and only represent the Ritterschaft—i.e., six hundred and ninety noblemen; and the Landschaft—i.e., fifty municipalities. Neither the peasants in the country nor the artisans in the towns are ever troubled to give their advice on matters concerning the common weal. And as, in order that a Bill may become the law of the Grand Duchy, the consent of the two estates is required, nothing unpleasant is ever likely to happen, and the old order, represented by the six hundred and ninety overlords, continues undisturbed.

In degenerate Prussia even the Junkers have to submit to the presence of petty landowners of lowly birth, or even to peasants of servile origin. Do not historians remind us that even Frederick the Great had to surrender to the claims of the Miller of Sans Souci. In Mecklenburg-Schwerin there is no Miller of Sans Souci to worry the Grand Duke. For no peasant owns one single acre of land. One-half of the territory of the Grand Duchy is owned by a few hundred lords of the manor, and the other half realizes the Socialist ideal of the suppression of private property and of the transfer of all private ownership to the State. Six thousand square miles are the absolute property of the State—that is to say, of the Grand Duke. For never was absolute ruler more truly entitled than the Grand Duke to appropriate the words of Louis XIV.: "L'etat c'est moi."

In this paradise of Prussian Junkerthum one might reasonably have expected the monarch and the lords of the manor to enjoy as complete happiness as is ever allotted to mortal man. And the peasants and artisans could equally be expected to share in the universal contentment. Are not the Grand Duke and his knights as closely interested in the welfare of their tenants as a shepherd in the welfare of his flock? But even in a patriarchal Grand Dukedom the spirit of modern unrest seems to have penetrated. If German statisticians may be trusted, the inhabitants of the Grand Duchy do even seem to have preferred the risks and uncertainties of living in a distant and unpaternal American Government to the peace and quiet and security of the Mecklenburg plains. The ungrateful subjects of the Grand Duke have done what the Kaiser once advised his own disloyal subjects to do; they have shaken the dust of the Fatherland off their feet; they have emigrated in such large numbers to the United States of America that this paradise of Prussian Junkerthum, with its 700,000 inhabitants, is to-day the most thinly populated part of the German Empire, and contains fewer industries than any other part.

After all, to a military empire soldiers are more necessary than peasants and artisans. Already in 1815 Mecklenburg could claim the glory of having produced the greatest Junker soldier of the age, bluff and rough Prince Bluecher, the victor of Waterloo. The achievements of the Grand Ducal regiments have fully proved that Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz have in the present war remained true to the glories of their military past and have remained worthy of their feudal present, and the august head of the Grand Ducal dynasty is just now doing most efficient work in the Balkan States as the super-Ambassador of his Imperial cousin.



CHAPTER X

THE GERMAN RACE HERESY AND THE WAR

I.

It is the purpose of the following article to single out one aspect of the war which has been strangely neglected. It is our purpose to emphasize the influence which the obsession of one particular idea, the German race theory, has exercised over the German mind and the part which it has played in bringing about the war of the nations. False ideas have been the dragon's teeth from which have risen the legions of five continents. Amongst those false ideas the most deadly, the most fatal, has been the German heresy of race, the theory of race inequality and race antagonism. It is in the name of that race heresy, in the name of Germanism and Pan-Germanism, of Slavism and Pan-Slavism, of Saxonism and Pan-Saxonism, the war is being waged.

We read the following passage in a recent book by Sven Hedin, the official chronicler of the German armies:

"Here is a (German) reservist. What a tremendous figure! What can Latins, Slavs, Celts, Japs, Negroes, Hindus, Ghurkas, Turcos, and whatever they are called, do against such strapping giants of the true Germanic type? His features are superbly noble, and he seems pleased with his day's work. He does not regret that he has offered his life for Germany's just cause."

In this odious passage we have in a few lines the whole history and the whole philosophy of the tragedy. We have the spirit with which the Germans have waged the war, we have the motive for which they have waged it, and we have the ultimate purpose which they hope to achieve—namely, to force upon a subjected Europe the rule of the super-race of Treitschke and the bionda bestia of Nietzsche.

In former times, in the so-called "Dark Age," nations would fight for the human, rational, but impracticable principle of orthodoxy. To-day we are fighting for the inhuman, for the equally impracticable and immoral principle of race antagonism. Germans fight because through their veins courses the red blood of the Teutons of Tacitus. They are fighting because they are convinced that they have the Might and the Right and the Duty of crushing the French and the Russians, because through French veins courses the tainted blood of the Gauls of Caesar, and because through the veins of the Slavs courses the white fluid of the slave and the yellow fluid of the Tatar.

II.

It is one of the commonplaces of the economic school that the economic motive is the main factor which makes for peace or war, that material interests only count, and that ideas do not matter. It is one of the shallow illusions of the pseudo-rationalist school that the age of religious wars is passed for ever. As a matter of fact, this war is as much a religious war as any crusade that was ever waged. The only difference between the religious war of to-day and the religious wars of yesterday is that in the past dogmas were promulgated by priests and saints in the name of Theology. The dogmas of to-day are promulgated in the name of Science by the high-priests of Universities and Academies. A few mystical Greek words, such as homousios and homoiousios, were the watchwords of the crusades of old. A few equally mystical Greek words, brachycephalic and dolichocephalic, are the watchwords of the crusades of to-day.

III.

It may seem the idle conceit of a dreamer out of touch with reality to assert that it is principles which mainly matter and that it is the ideal which is the ultimate reality. It may seem a ludicrous exaggeration to assert that a mere abstract scientific theory, apparently so innocuous as is the German race theory, could be held responsible for so titanic a catastrophe. Surely there seems to be here no relation and no proportion between cause and effect. Yet it does not take a prolonged effort of profound thinking to understand the portentous political significance of the German race heresy. It is not difficult to understand that according as we believe that history is mainly a conflict of ideals or according as we believe that history is mainly a conflict of material interests, or a conflict of races, we shall consistently either believe in peace or in war as the normal condition of humanity. Conflicts of ideas ought rationally to make for peace. Conflicts of material interests will frequently, although not necessarily, make for war. Conflicts of races must inevitably and always make for war.

If you believe in the materialistic theory that human history is mainly made up of the inevitable antagonism between Aryan and Semite, between Slav and Teuton, between Celt and Anglo-Saxon, then you must also believe that war is the permanent and beneficial factor in human history. For the conflicts of races for supremacy can only be solved through war.

On the other hand, if you believe in the idealistic theory that human history is mainly a conflict of spiritual and moral and political ideals, then peace is the ultimate factor. For human experience and human reason equally teach us that a conflict of spiritual ideals cannot be solved by violence. They can only be solved by discussion and argument, by persuasion and conversion, by the spread of education, by clear thinking and strenuous working, by the diffusion of sweetness and light. Both reason and wisdom teach us that truth and faith are like love—they cannot be imposed by force.

IV.

Underlying the theory of race there is a first assumption that there is such a thing as a distinct racial type; that there are definite breeds of men, Aryans and Semites, Celts and Teutons, just as there are definite breeds of dogs and pigeons; that human breeds are evolved by similar selective processes; that those distinct racial types are the main factor in the history of nations; that those types are endowed with specific anatomical and physiological characteristics, and that those physiological characteristics carry with them equally definite moral, intellectual, and political qualities.

And there is a second assumption which is the corollary of the first. Not only is there a separation of races, there is also an inequality of races. "L'Inegalite des Races humaines" is the title of the epoch-making book of Count de Gobineau. The "Separation of Race" is a biological and objective fact. But to that biological fact we must add a moral and subjective distinction. Some races are noble, others are ignoble. Some races are born to rule, other races are born to obey, to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water." The Slav is born a slave to be controlled by the Germans. The Serbian is born a serf to be controlled by the Austrians. The Bohemian is an outcast. The Pole is a drunkard. The Celt is a weakling. The Anglo-Saxon is a mercenary. The Russian is a Tatar and a brute.

V.

The German race theory is propped up by a formidable array of so-called scientific proofs. All the auxiliary disciplines of biology, botany and zoology, physiology and anatomy, are enlisted in the service of anthropology and ethnology. The question as to whether a particular nation is a Kultur Volk or whether it is only a rabble of slaves depends entirely on whether the facies is square or oval, brachycephalic or oligocephalic. It depends entirely—to use the pedantic jargon of the anthropologist—on the "cephalic index" of the race.

The historical sciences are called in to support the conclusions of ethnology. It is especially philology which is the most efficient instrument demonstrating the existence and the superiority of a distinct race. Just as anatomy reveals to us the structure of the cranium, so philology reveals to us the structure of the mind. The philologist reveals the genealogies of words even as the anthropologist studies the genealogies of races.

In the burning controversies which for the last generation have divided the Tchech and Magyar and Croatian and Roumanian races of the Austrian Empire, it is the philologists who have acted as umpires. In Vienna philologists like von Jagic have all the authority and prestige of statesmen. Similarly, in the Balkan States, Serbians and Bulgarians, Roumanians and Greeks, find conclusive evidence of their respective rights in the dialects of the Macedonian populations. Such and such a province must be allotted to the Serbians, and not to the Bulgarians, because such and such a dialect has more affinity to the Serbian than to the Bulgarian language. Similarly, in the Latin elements of their dictionary, Roumanian patriots find convincing evidence of their Latin ancestry, and finally prove that they are the lineal descendants of the Dacian legions of Emperor Trajan.[21]

[21] The Roumanian language is a composite language like English. Even as the English vocabulary is mainly a blend of Anglo-Saxon and Franco-Norman, so the Roumanian language is a blend of Latin and Slavonic words. Many years ago the British and Foreign Bible Society published a Roumanian Bible from which the majority of the Slavonic words had been eliminated. I pointed out in Everyman that this Roumanian translation was not Roumanian at all. The authorities of the Bible Society indignantly protested and asked me to withdraw. I refused to withdraw. The British and Foreign Bible Society investigated the question, deferring to my criticisms, and prepared and published a new revised version of their Roumanian Bible in which the Slavonic words largely composing the religious vocabulary of Roumania have been restored.

VI.

Those scientific arguments, biological and philological, may satisfy the biologists and the philologists; they certainly satisfy nobody else. All those pseudo-scientific facts belong to the realm of fiction. Serious thinkers have ceased to prattle about the application of biology to ethics since Huxley delivered his Romanes lecture on "Evolution and Ethics." The encroachments of scientific materialism have failed as signally in the political sciences as they have failed in ethics.

It is futile to compare the processes which evolve races of man with the processes which evolve breeds of animals. It is true that in the lower stages of humanity the word "race" has a definite meaning. It may be contended that there is a wide gulf between the races at the extreme end of the human scale, a gulf which even the enthusiastic devotion of missionary effort does not seem able to bridge. There is such a thing as the "blackness" of the nigger and the "yellowness" of the Chinese and the Japanese, although the Japanese have proved themselves capable of assimilating Western civilization, and although the black race has produced the greatest poet of Russia, Pouchkine, and one of the greatest novelists of France, Alexandre Dumas. But it is an all-important fact that as civilization advances the word "race" entirely changes its meaning. Evolution entirely modifies its processes. Biological factors steadily decrease in importance. Moral and political and intellectual factors as steadily increase in importance.

Isolation and selection are the main conditions required to produce a definite breed of cattle. On the other hand, if we want to produce a highly civilized type, it is not isolation which is the main condition, but crossing and blending, mixture and intercourse. As we rise in the scale of humanity there are no fixed types. All types are equally plastic. There are no pure types. All types are equally mixed.

Even if we take the Jewish race, which seems to show extraordinary fixity and stability of type, there is not one dominant Jewish type; there are fully fifty different Jewish types. There is hardly any resemblance between the Jew of Tiflis and the Jew of Tangier, between democratic Ashkenazim and the aristocratic Sephardim. Race is not a cause, but an effect. It is not biology which explains politics, it is politics which dominate biology. It is not the physical which explains the moral, it is the moral which produces the physical. It is not the racial type which produces a racial belief and a racial community, it is the religion which produces the race. It is not the Hindu caste which produces the religion, it is religion which produces the caste. Similarly, it is the religious and political conditions which have kept the Jew apart, and which have preserved the characteristics of the race. Even so, religion and persecution have kept the characteristics of the Armenians or the Parsees and the Greek colonies in the Levant.

VII.

A highly gifted race is invariably the outcome of complex elements, of many cross-currents. Invariably it is the outcome of moral, spiritual, and political factors. It is the outcome of unity of language, of unity of religion, of community of traditions and institutions. It is mainly religion which keeps apart the French and the Anglo-Saxon races in Canada, and which divides the Celt from the Ulsterman in Ireland. Let the religious boundary break down, and the Irish Celt will blend with the Ulster Scot, the French Canadian will mix with the Anglo-Saxon. The race heresy in its modern form is the sinister shadow projected by the biological materialism of the early Darwinians. It is the same materialistic conception which has triumphed in German Marxism and in the economic interpretation of history. It is the same conception which has triumphed in the Realpolitik and Weltpolitik, and the elimination of the moral factor from the activities of high policy. The tyranny of the race dogma permeates the majority of the German historians and publicists from the early nineteenth century. We find it in Mommsen's "History of Rome." It has found a striking expression in his famous chapter on the Celts, which is only a veiled attack against the French, who are assumed to be the lineal descendants of the Gauls. The same dogma is the dominant idea of Treitschke's "History." We find it in the bionda bestia of Nietzsche. We find it in the "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. We find it in the works of Count de Gobineau, who, after working unnoticed in his own country, has been heralded as the apostle of Pan-Germanism in the Vaterland. The race heresy has been the leitmotiv of all political controversies in the Empire. We find it equally in the anti-Semitic, in the anti-Russian, in the anti-French propaganda. It has culminated in the triple dogma of the superman, of the super-race, and of the super-State, and this triple dogma of the German Realpolitik has worked for the enslavement of Europe as inevitably as the triple dogma of the French Revolution—Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite—was bound to lead to the liberation of Europe.

VIII.

For the philosophy of race, with all the liberal demonstrations of its votaries, is essentially and inevitably the philosophy of reaction and the philosophy of militarism, if it is carried to its logical conclusion. And, unfortunately, in Germany it has been carried to its logical conclusion. In Britain and France thinkers have advocated the same deadly theories. The same deadly poison of pseudo-science has infected the body politic. But Darwin and Huxley always saved themselves by inconsistency from the ruthless application of their doctrines. The common sense of the community has shrunk from extreme logic. In a country of free discussion and of free institutions doctrines are counteracted by other influences. Theories are tested by life. In an autocratic country theories are supreme. The undiluted theories of Rousseau and Robespierre were supreme under the Reign of Terror; the theories of Katkov and the extreme Pan-Slavists were supreme in Russia under the reign of Alexander III. Under a government like Prussia, where all the spiritual forces are mobilized, where Universities, Churches, and newspapers are subject to the State, there is nothing to counteract the doctrinaire spirit. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the heresy of race should have become a fixed idea, a monomania, in the German Empire. In Great Britain the theories of the apostate Englishman Chamberlain could not have struck deep root, notwithstanding all the enthusiastic praise which Mr. Bernard Shaw has given to the "Foundations." In France the theories of Count de Gobineau passed unnoticed. In Germany "Gobineau Societies" have been established in order to propagate the gospel of the French diplomat. In Germany one hundred thousand copies of the "Foundations" of Chamberlain, with their ponderous twelve hundred pages compact with facts and arguments, have been sold, have poisoned countless brains, and have wielded enormous political influence.

IX.

The first inevitable outcome of the German race heresy has been to stimulate the belief in the supremacy of the Teuton and to transform the natural conceit of patriotism into an odious megalomania. Once the Germans assumed in accordance with the race dogma that some European races are born to rule and others to obey, it was inevitable that they should draw the further inference that they of all races were the dominant race. It is true that the belief of the Calvinist in religious predestination may lead to a pessimistic as well as to an optimistic conclusion. The believer in predestination may assume that he is predestined to eternal damnation as easily as he assumes that he is predestined to eternal salvation. But the pseudo-scientific mind and the materialistic mind is not so easily addicted to humility and pessimism. The slave morality of the Christian may lead to meekness and charity and to all the negative virtues of a degenerate Christianity. The master morality of the Anti-Christ Nietzsche must lead to the ruthless assertion of power. The belief in race predestination can therefore only result in megalomania, and in Germany it has certainly resulted in the most acute, the most insane, inflation of nationalism and imperialism recorded in modern history. Of that megalomania the Kaiser has been, in innumerable speeches, the eloquent and insolent spokesman.

X.

Even as race heresy must result in racial megalomania, it must result in political reaction and in the government of caste. The principle which is true of the nation as a whole is as true of every section of that nation. And the pride of race in a nation is substantially the same thing as the pride of birth in a class. If amongst the races of man there is one particular breed, the Teuton, which constitutes the born aristocracy of humanity, so amongst those Teutons there is one special caste which is the born aristocracy of Teutonism. It is the rooted belief in the race theory which has maintained the rule of Junkerthum. On the race theory an exclusive aristocratic government recruited and maintained by artificial selection is the only logical and sensible government, and democracy is bound to be considered as a principle of decay. The Kings of Prussia select their rulers on the same principle on which King Frederick William selected his regiment of six-foot grenadiers from the military caste.

That is why we find in Prussia the most exclusive aristocratic government in the world. As a sop to Southern German opinion, Bismarck was compelled to grant universal suffrage for the Reichstag, but in the Prussian Parliament, or "Landtag," Bismarck, the Junker of blood and iron, retained the good old principle of aristocratic government. Under the three-class voting system of the Landtag, one voter constituting by himself the first class may have as much political power as the twenty thousand electors constituting the third class. That is also why the Prussian Junker retains by right of birth a monopoly in the higher ranks of the Army, of the Diplomatic and Civil Service. The Junker is born to greatness even as the princely families of Germany have been born to a monopoly of all the thrones of Europe.

XI.

As the race theory must inevitably lead to megalomania and reaction, so it must inevitably lead to militarism. As it is incompatible with democracy, so it is incompatible with peace. As we pointed out at the beginning of this analysis, if it be indeed true that there are some races which are born to rule, it is their duty to assert their will to power over inferior races. If "the true Teutonic type"—to use the words of Sven Hedin—be indeed superior to the Celt, to the Anglo-Saxon, to the Slav, and to the Latin, he is morally bound to assert that superiority. The Teuton will not only achieve the victory, he will deserve it. Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht (World history is world judgment). History is not a conflict between abstractions, between truth and error, between higher and lower principles, between conflicting ideals; it is, above all, the tragic conflict between higher and lower races. War is necessary and war is beneficial. War is not only the instrument, it is also the criterion, of progress. "Might is Right" ceases to be an immoral principle. "Might is Right" is the ultimate formula of the most sublime morality, for Might is but the Right of the strong to establish the rule of the noble over the ignoble elements of humanity.



CHAPTER XI

A SLUMP IN GERMAN THEOLOGY

I.

In the universal readjustment—or, to use the favourite expression of Nietzsche, in the "transvaluation"—of political and spiritual values which must follow the war, we may confidently expect a general slump in all German values. There will be a slump in German education and in German erudition, in German music and in German watering-places. There will be a slump in that "exclusive morality" for which Lord Haldane could not find an equivalent in the English language, and for which, in his famous Montreal address, he could only find an equivalent in the German word Sittlichkeit. But, most important of all, there will be a lamentable slump in the most highly prized of all German values—German theology.

Germany may still retain a monopoly of toys; Germany may still continue to supply Princes to the vacant thrones of Europe; but it is eminently probable that God Almighty will cease to be made in the Vaterland.

II.

No one who has not been brought up in a Scottish Presbyterian University atmosphere realizes the mystical prestige hitherto enjoyed by German theology. The education of a Scottish divine was thought incomplete, a graduate in divinity, however brilliant and devout, could not get an important charge, if he had not received the hallmark and consecration of a German theological faculty. And what was true of German Universities was equally true of German theological books. Publishers like Messrs. Clark, of Edinburgh, and Messrs. Williams and Norgate, of London, made considerable fortunes merely from their translations of German works of divinity.

The prejudice in favour of German Universities and against French Universities goes back to the early days of the Reformation. Already in "Hamlet" we find the serious young man going to Wittenberg and the frivolous young man going to Paris in quest of worldly amusement. That pro-German and anti-French prejudice has continued until our own day. In vain have I for twenty years attempted in the Universities of Scotland to send our graduates to French Universities. In vain did I contend that one single year spent in the Sorbonne provided greater intellectual stimulus than a whole decade spent in a German University. The old Puritan feeling against France proved too strong. Until the year 1914 the stream of our students continued to be directed to Goettingen and Heidelberg, to Bonn and Berlin. Even in our distant colonies, even in Toronto, I found that the majority of teachers were "made in Germany," whilst of American Universities it is hardly too much to say that many of them had actually become German institutions.

III.

The prejudice which sent Scottish and English ministers of the Gospel to complete their preparation in Germany was all the more extraordinary because Positive Christianity had almost vanished from the theological faculties of Protestant Germany. Even as Holy Russia has remained on the whole the most Christian nation in Europe, Protestant Prussia was certainly the least Christian. It was aptly said by Huxley of the philosophy of Comte, that Comtism was Catholicism minus Christianity. We might say in the same way of German theology, that it was philosophy and metaphysics and philology minus Christianity. Seventy-five years ago David Frederick Strauss, who would be forgotten but for the pamphlet of Nietzsche, wrote a ponderous treatise of a thousand pages, translated by George Eliot, to prove that Christ was a myth. At the end of his life he strenuously attempted in his "Old and New Faith" to find a substitute for Christian theology. German Protestantism travelled the road he indicated. The German people have ceased to believe in Christianity; but they have come to believe in the self-styled Anti-Christ Nietzsche. They have ceased to believe in God; but they still believe in His self-appointed vicegerent, the Kaiser. They have ceased to believe in Providence; but they still believe in a Providential German nation. They have ceased to believe in the Holy Trinity; but they believe all the more fanatically in the New Trinity of the Superman, the Super-race and the Super-State. And it is this new fanatical belief which has brought about the war of the nations.

IV.

The prejudice of our Protestant Churches in favour of German Theological Faculties proceeded on the assumption that German Protestantism was identical with Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. Surely that strange assumption does little credit to the spiritual insight of our divines. German Protestantism has absolutely nothing in common with Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. For whatever may have been adduced against British and American Nonconformity, it must be admitted that at least Anglo-Saxon Nonconformity was generally what it professed to be. Anglo-Saxon Nonconformity actually did refuse to conform, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism did actually protest. The separation between Church and State was a fundamental principle of Anglo-Saxon policy, and that separation was no ideal platonic theory. Nonconformists gave up their emoluments, they again and again risked their lives in defence of their principles. In defence of their principles tens of thousands migrated to distant climes.

For that very reason Anglo-Saxon Nonconformity has rendered inestimable service to political liberty. German Protestantism has never rendered a single service to political liberty, for the simple reason that its political practice has been consistently the reverse. So far from Lutheran Protestantism being based on the separation of Church and State, it was based on the confusion of spiritual and temporal power. That confusion began with the very earliest days of Lutheranism. Lutherans are inclined to depreciate the personality and activity of John Huss, the great Slav reformer, because, judged from worldly standards, John Huss seems to have been a failure. As a matter of fact, the Slav reformer was the ideal spiritual hero. The Teutonic reformer was in many ways a time-server. To Luther must be traced the principle that spiritual allegiance must follow temporal allegiance, that the subjects must follow the creed of their Prince. That belief was expressed in the Protestant motto, Cujus regio illius religio, and that motto even to this day accounts for the bewildering religious geography of the German Empire.

That servile attitude of the Protestant Church to the German State has survived to this generation; whereas the Roman Catholic Church made a brave stand against Bismarck in the Kulturkampf, the Lutheran Church has remained a docile State Church. This Erastianism is illustrated by no one more signally than by the Pontifex Maximus of Prussian Protestantism, His Excellency Wirklicher Geheimrath Adolf von Harnack. Harnack has earned world-wide fame as a bold interpreter of the Scriptures, but he has refused to countenance those ministers who were discharged merely because they acted on his teachings. In his exegesis, Harnack has been the most uncompromising of critics. In his religious politics, he has been the most tame of courtiers, the most pliable of diplomats. He has taken infinite liberties with the Sacred Texts. He has never taken any liberties with the sacred majesty of the Kaiser.

V.

The confusion of temporal and spiritual power in German Protestantism brought about two great evils—servility in politics and indifference in religion. But it also seemed to bring one great compensating advantage—namely, complete toleration of other creeds. People do not fight for a creed to which they have become indifferent. Frederick the Great gave equal hospitality to the free-thinking Voltaire and to the Jesuits who had been expelled from most Catholic countries.

That compensating advantage of religious toleration seemed to further the higher intellectual life of the Universities, and in one sense it did. But it must not be forgotten that neither religious toleration nor the higher intellectual life ever extended to the province of politics. The freedom of the Prussian Universities was always limited by the necessities of the State and the accidents of politics. With regard to religion and political thought, the Prussian State always acted on the principle implied in the cynical epigram of Gibbon: "All religions are equally true to the believer. They are equally false to the unbeliever, and they are equally useful to the statesman." For three hundred years the Prussian statesmen have attempted to utilize the Christian religion, and Prussian Christian divines have in fact proved the most serviceable of tools. Unfortunately, in the process religion has disappeared from Prussian soil, and with the liberating influence of the Christian religion has vanished political liberty.



CHAPTER XII

THE GERMAN ENIGMA[22]

[22] Georges Bourdon, "L'Enigme Allemande," Librairie Plon, Paris.

I.

The present investigation into Franco-German relations conducted on behalf of the Figaro is the work of one of the ablest publicists of modern France. It is the work of a good European who wishes to put an end to the senseless competition in armaments, and to the international distrust and nervousness which are the main causes of such armaments. The book is also the work of a good Frenchman who realizes that no settlement can be durable which does not safeguard the sacred rights of the conquered peoples of Alsace-Lorraine, who are the first victims of outraged justice. There lies the originality of the book. It reveals the new direction which public opinion and political thought are taking in contemporary France. The whole question of the relations between France and Germany is lifted to a higher plane. We hear no more of the humiliation of France, of her pride and dignity, of rancour and revenge. We hear less of the balance of military force. The main question which is raised is a question of moral principle and of international right.