BRITAIN versus GERMANY An Open Letter to Professor EDUARD MEYER, Ph,D., LL.D., of the University of Berlin. Author of " England, her National and Political Evolution and the War with Germany." BY The Right Hon. J. M. ROBERTSON, M.P. Author of ^^ The Evolution of State s^* « IVar and Civilization^' « the Germans^' etc. T. FISHER UNWIN LTD. LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE PRICE SIXPENCE BRITAIN versus GERMANY BRITAIN versus GERMANY ' An Open Letter to Professor EDUARD MEYER, Ph.D., LL.D., of the University of Berlin. Author of "England, her National and Political Evolution, and the War with Germany." BY The Right Hon. J. M. ROBERTSON, M.P, Authoj'of'-'-The Evolution of States^'' " ^Var and Civilization^'' " The Germans^'' etc. > 1 'a > T. FISHER UNWIN LTD. LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE 1917 "W DMx M57eZ CONTENTS Chapter Pa^e I. Introductory 7 II. English and German Political Evolution ... 14 III. English and German Civilization 34 IV. England's Internationai. Bias... ... ... 57 V. The Causation of the War 87 VI. The Way of the War : Its Consequences ... loi •il'4H;K) BRITAIN versus GERMANY An Open Letter to PROFESSOR EDUARD MEYER, of Berlin. Chapter I INTRODUCTORY |EIN HERR, I observe that your book, "England," has been translated and published in the United States by the firm of Ritter & Company, of Boston, who warmly recommend it in a preface in which they assert that "the Americans, who, as a whole, are readers of English literature only, have practically received their impressions of England and the Enghsh people exclusively from English sources — the insider s favourable view of his own state and his own people." This allega- tion indicates about as deep a knowledge of American hfe as most Prussian pronouncements do of English ; but it need not detain us. The Americans are well able to speak for themselves. I merely take the occasion of the issue of your book in Enghsh to criticize it with the seriousness proper to an examination of any work of a scholar and historian of your distinction. As one of your former British readers and admirers, I was specially interested in your per- 7 8 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY formance, at the outset. You were a student of social evolution, at least in antiquity ; and in your youth you knew something of British and American life. As you have told us, you were for two years — 1875-6 — a tutor in the family of Sir Philip Francis, the British Consul-General at Constantinople ; and you have given a vivid account of the sufferings endured by an educated German from the moment he sets foot on Ameri- can soil till the moment he leaves it. You had earned, too, the reputation of being a man of large views and original historical grasp. It is true you exhibited from time to time, in your greatest work, the significant German tendency to reduce historical generalization to verbiage in terms of racial theories. I well recollect the astonishment with which I read, for instance, your generaliza- tion of the social history of ancient Italy — a point to which I shall recur later. In spite of such startling lapses, however, you handled ancient history to a large extent in a scientific spirit ; and I have often profited by your research. When, then, I first heard that you had gone the way of the Harnacks and the Euckens, unpacking your mouth with words, as Hamlet has it, seeking to shroud German national crime and military failure in a vapour of vituperation, my first sensation was one of pure surprise. The next, I am half ashamed to confess, was one of — shall I say ? — malicious satisfaction. "So their better brains also are overthrown," I mentally commented. Von Harnack and Eucken I had never put in that category. Von Harnack is to BRlTAIX V^^RSUS GERM AX V 9 Baur, in point of thinking power, what Eucken is to Hegel. Hackel is now a very old man ; and, as a specialist^ in natural science, with no quali- hcation as a humanist, he counts for little when he takes to political doctrine. His verdict on the action and policy of a people is about as valuable as would be mine on the life of the Radiolaria. But you had been a student of societies and their growths ; you ranked, in my opinion, above Mommsen in that sphere ; and you comforted yourself as did poor Hackel. A study of your performance, then, is of some critical importance, and I desire so to handle it. To this end, I will abstain from putting in the forefront of my critique any such account of your race and country as you give in your "Fore- word," where you assert that "English gentlemen do not shrink from any crime, not even from that of assassination, if only appearances can be pre- served" ; and that when you first wrote those words you were "fully informed of a plot made by the English Foreign Office to assassinate Sir Roger Casement." For these assertions the sole proof you offer is an unverified document which purports to plan the capture of Sir Roger Case- ment. When, later, I shall have something to say of the crimes of your Government, I shall offer rather stronger evidence. In this connection I will merely point out that it is not an English oi- a French or a Russian manual that lays down the following principles : — "International law is in no way opposed to Ihc exploitation of the crimes of tliird parties (assas- io MITAIN VERSUS GURMANY sination, incendiarism, robbery, and the like) to the prejudice of the enemy. . . . The necessary aim of war gives the beUigerent the right and imposes upon him, according to circumstances, the duty not to let shp the important, it may be the decisive, advantages to be gained by such means." That is the teaching of the manual on "The Usages of War on Land," issued by the Great General Staff of the German Army. It is the same authority that observes: — "A prohibition by international law of the bombardment of open towns and villages which are not occupied by the enem}^ or defended was put into words by The Hague Regulations, but appears superfluous, since modern military history knows of hardly any such case." That defect, you are aware, no longer exists. Perhaps, on the whole, you had better have avoided such topics. Indeed, your whole book raises a preliminary question as to the state of the German oflicial mind. After the date appended to your preface, but some time before the publication of your book, there appeared in Switzerland the German work "J' Accuse," written by a German born and bred, in which the deliberate causation of the war by the German and Austrian Governments is set forth with the deadliest completeness. It is a stone wall of proof against your idle reiteration of the charge that "England" was the instigator of the war. Yet I can hear of no official German attempt to rebut that demonstration ; if there be one, it has not reached the other belligerent and BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY ii tieutral countries as yours has done. Instead of answering the carefully drawn and completely documented charges of your own countryman, you have compiled, evidently with official coun- tenance, what in German is called a Schimpfwerk, a work of abuse, vilifying the enemy instead of meeting the enemy's indictment. The character of 3^our tactic is made clear, once for all, when we recall that the official German Weissbuch, setting forth German^^'s diplomatic case, expressly declares that the guilt}' Power is Russia. "How Russia and her Ruler betrayed Germany's confidence and thereby made the European War " is the sub-title. No sooner has England entered than you announce that it is she who "made the war." We are evidently dealing with polemists bent on something else than truth-telhng. In the meantime, however, it is desirable that your book should be examined, in these pages, in the temper of the study rather than in that of the court-martial or even of the police-court. You claim, of course, to write as beseems an historian, and I to write as beseems a critic. Is it not well, then, that we should preserve at least the semblance of the temper of the study before we come to the business of summing-up ? A recollection of the figure cut by Von Harnack, and Eucken, and Hackel, and other infuriated old German gentlemen — to whose attitude you so edifyingly assimilate in your preface — confirms me in my preference for another metlujd. Yours is to create by a series of aspersive chapters as bad an 12 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY impression as you can achieve of English Hfe and history in general, by way of winning, if possible, a hostile verdict on England as the real cause of the present war. A scrupulous judge, surely, would have sought a verdict on the merits of the case. But I will follow you in your course. You begin your book with a singularly bald and jejune survey of English political history from the reign of Henry VII to the nineteenth century. As a summary of centuries of life it revives in me the question I have sometimes put to myself in reading your and other German histories of antiquity: — "What is the real content and the veridical value of these nutsheh summaries of whole ages of evolution ? " and I fear that hence- forth that question will always haunt me when I read you. However, as you know little of English history, you doubtless did well to be very summary. As you once wrote: "In history generally, where we have no firm ground under- foot, a too-httle is better than a too-much." * The trouble is that in your opening chapter you have achieved both, as I shall try to show you. You will, I doubt not, pardon me if I give my own English renderings or summaries of your words. Your translator, laudably anxious to make a German style move in an American manner, has treated your book with a friendly freedom which on my part would be presumptuous. If you will compare the second, third, and fourth para- graphs of the translation with your German, you will see that your propositions have been gently * Geschichte des Alterthums, ed. 1884, Vorwort, p. vii. BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 13 but firmly transmuted into more readable form. I cannot guess what you will think of the manipu- lation of your sentence on the divine right of kings (which I give in the next chapter) into two, of which the second runs :— "That it [monarchy] may be free ever to uphold the right, its power must he unlimited, and it cannot therefore be responsible to man, but to God alone." That would perhaps please the Kaiser even more than what you have written ; but it is hardly for me to lend myself to such transmuta- tions. I prefer to follow your own utterance, at the cost of dullness. Taking 3^our book as a whole, I find that your exposition falls into five logical movements, so to speak. You do not so divide it, but I propose so to deal with it, under the heads : — 1. The special political evolution of England ; 2. The defects of English civilization ; 3. The bias of England in international politics; 4. The causation of the World War ; 5. Its course, and the probable consequences. 1 shall tr}^ to exhibit it in its true inwardness. Chapter II ENGLISH AND GERMAN POLITICAL EVOLUTION |N order to understand rightly England's place in world-history and the motives which have led her into war with Germany, you tell us, " we must clearly reahze that England's political development has taken exactly the opposite direction to that of the continental States." On the Continent, the duahstic organiza- tion of the Middle Ages, in which the Overlord and the Estates were generally at strife, passed into monarchy pure and simple, the Estates lapsing into impotence and oblivion. "Thus was established the monarchic State,* and with it the State-conception of the modern monarchy." And the typical continental monarchy not only sub- dued the chaos of mediaeval anarchy, but secured "law and order, security, and well-being" ; where- fore it "claims the authority of a higher Divine Right ; the power of the ruler comes forward as Kingship by the Grace of God, which shapes law and possesses the law-giving power in the fullest degree, and therefore is responsible to no human being, but only to the Godhead." Let us not linger over the question of the amount of law and order that had been secured in Germany by the common run of its Princes, with " Faustrecht "* * Fitrstenstaat. Your translator renders this "slate sovereignty," which must puzzle Americans. The translation of your^ Staatsrecht (p. 17), again, by " Common Law," is rather staggering, and creates some mystery as to your meaning. 14 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 15 in full blast down to the time of Luther. Let us try to see what you are driving at. At the very outset, your case is divided against itself. Formally, 3^ou set out to show that England began her unique and evil course when she chanced to preserve the early forms of self- government in an age in which all the continental States lost them. Later, you are driven to avow that as a result she was in much better case than they in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What, then, becomes of your formula ? Your position would now appear to be that it was better to lose free institutions for centuries and then create them afresh than to develop on English lines. If it be not that, you have no theory left as regards the point from which you start to "explain" EngUsh iniquity. Your starting-point is that England is a solitary case, in that she preserved her free institutions as aforesaid. This is in itself a bad historical blunder, the result of your preoccupation with the case of Germany. In a footnote you have confessed that in the Netherlands things went even further than in England, the Estates triumphing there "over the monarchic tendencies of the Spanish King- ship." So the Dutch and we are partners in reprobation, though you leave them, after the footnote, to their own consciences ; and it hardly needed your severe aspersions on American life to indicate that you think the democratic evolution of the United States as lamentable as that of England. As for the Swiss, I infer that you iind their case too hopeless even for a footnote refer- i6 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY ence. Italy, it would seem, you consider to have been saved from herself by her happy subjection in the sixteenth century to Spain, whose career was such a triumph of progress — intehectual, moral, and scientific—till she became infected by parliamentarism a century ago. Supposing your first touchstone to be the true one, it would still seem desirable, on the part of a professedly scientific historian like yourself, that such a thesis should have been a little elaborated. To say that England is a solitary case in Europe ; to add in a footnote a mention of the Netherlands as another case ; to ignore altogether the salient case of Switzerland ; and to leave us asking whether the subjection of Greece by Turkey and of Italy by Spain were fortunate examples of the saving grace of the autocratic as against the " parhamentary " principle, does not look like the proceeding of an historian with his wits about him. At first, by your express thesis and your pro- cedure of disparagement of even early English parliamentarism, you set us asking whether you think it worked worse than did the Fiirstenstaat in Germany from the Reformation onwards ; whether you think the Thirty Years' War pro- moted civilization ; and whether you admire the German spectacle from 1650 to 1750. But it does not appear that you really do. Your general formula is speedily thrown overboard ; the "unique case" is forgotten ; and we are presented with a "diametrically opposite" thesis, as you yourself might say. In your section on "The English Idea o BRITAIX ]'ERSUS GERMANY iy Freedom" you avow that, bad as is the EngHsh padiamentary system to-day, it worked well "in the time of its establishment (!) and development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, above all because it guarded the personal freedom of the citizens and called a portion of the population ... to participate in public life, thereby strength- ening the foundations of the activity of the governing power.. Thereby came free play in commercial life and the resulting increase in the means of developing the State and the nation. But since then the English State organization has been long passed by ; and since the beginning of the nineteenth century England has fallen into the rear, and has slowly and against the grain and therefore only imperfectly caught up what in other States has long been much more fully developed." What has become noic of the primary thesis ? It is now declared that ithile England was a solitary case (which she was not !), she did very well. The uniqueness of- her case, remember, was the first fact posited by you as explaining her political course and her special share in bringing about the present war. You now tell us that England has long ceased to be a solitary case, having fallen far in the rear of other States ; which means, I suppose, that she is more medievally dualistic than not only Germany, but Russia, France, (Turkey ?), Holland, and the Scandinavian States. Belgium, you incidentally observe, is the most backward of all the northern European States. That, of course. After \()ur i8 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY national crime against her, you are bound to . insist upon her unworthiness. We can now always count upon that procedure from Germans. But supposing this pleasing proposition to be granted, what becomes of your account of England as having evolved in "exactly the opposite" way to that of the continental States ? And, further, if she is thus far in the rear of political evolution, and as inefficient and incompetent as you allege, how comes it' that she is able, as j^ou affirm, to upset the lives of all the other States, which are so much more highly progressive ? She first went wrong, you say, through being ahead ; latterly she is still worse through being behind. Have you ever read ^Esop's Fables ? All that is clear is that the foundation and formula of your opening have already gone to pieces. The "solitary case" has vanished. And as regards the past, down to the nineteenth century, we are left with the fact that not England but Germany is the awful example. While France and England can each cite twenty remembered and distinguished names in literature for each of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you have not one between Hans Sachs and Leibnitz. I do not say this by way of taunt. I utterly repudiate the pseudo-principle 3^ou lay down in regard to the civilization of ancient Italy, that what a people does not do, it proved that it could not do. I am simply discussing your nugatory thesis. For the rational historian, a nation's evolution is a resultant of the organism and the conditions. You allege that a certain condition is bad, and the contrary good. Where does your evidence begin ? BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 19 The plain fact is that the "soUtary case" in the pohtical evolution of Western Europe is that of Germany. While ever}' other State has followed, sooner or later, the footsteps of England on the path of constitutional government, Germany has remained essentially mediaeval, unfree, uncon- stitutional. The promises held out by the Prussian Government to its own patriots in 1814-5 were never fulfilled ; the Prussian constitution is to this day a fraud, in which democracy is stultified ; and the Imperial constitution accepted by the German States in 1870 is one of Prussian hege- mony, assented to b\^ them partly in a state of war fever, partly in despair of anything better. The system under which the Prussian Kaiser is uncontrolled master of war, peace, and imperial taxation is one that has been abandoned by every other Western European people. It is in keeping with your logic that as you go on you nevertheless treat the adoption of a parliamentary system of some sort as a necessary development for civilized States. After a time you actually boast that Germany has universal male suffrage and that Britain has not. Once more, what has become, then, of your thesis ? Is it that you find comfort in reflecting that in Prussia the suffrage is stultified by the system of representation which preserves class supremacy in the Diet, while for the Empire the Reichstag is powerless to impose any policy on the Kaiser's Chancellor ? You are entitled so to argue. But do you ? All that you make clear is your hope that in Germany the political power will m^vcr 20 HRlrAlN VERSUS GERMANY lie in the hands of the representatives of the people; Whether England is too democratic or too undemocratic is a question as to which you evi- dentl}/ cannot make up your mind. In turn you take up evety possible position. Her monarchy Was once absolutist, and yet was not ; the power of the Crown was destroyed, and yet Edward VII was able to raise it to unheard-of heights ; he determined the whole course of recent inter- national politics, and yet he was finally a failure ; the Cabinet completely dominates Parliament, and yet Parliament retains its monstrous control over taxation, and all members individually are ruled by their constituents ; the country is swayed by the caucus, and yet a small minority always turns the elections ; the mob rules, and still England is the most aristocratically ruled country in the world. Thus do you blindly throw your missiles in all directions. On one point, however, you are comparatively clear. In your chapter on "The English Idea of the State and the English Idea of Freedom" you expound anew your conviction that Britain has developed in a "diametrically opposite" direction to that of foreign States in respect to the British notion of the idea of the State : — "England, or let us say the United Kingdom, has no conception of the idea of the State as it has been evolved on the Continent" [or, "let us say," in Germany alone?] "in relation to the regal power. For us, not onl}'^ in political thought but intimately in the experience of every citizen. BRITAIX VERSUS (.ERMA.W ji the State is the highest expression of the collective unity of all the powers of the people included in the boundaries of the realm in active efficiency {active Wirksamkeit !), the indispensable expression of the life and the activity of every individual, and therefore entitled and bound to secure from each the fullest devotion for the carrying out of its task. . . . The State and its organ, the Government, is bound to stand free and indepen- dent of all the conflicts of individuals, of classes, of economic groups, of parties ; and as against these to represent the interests and problems of the whole. . . . It is something much higher than any of these groups, and infinitely more than mereh^ the aggregate of all the individuals in- cluded in it ; it has a hfe of its own ; its task is unending ; its existence is in theor}^ — if it be not destroyed by force from outside — eternal, all generations, backwards and forwards, co-operating towards a unity, to a mighty historical entity. This idea of the State, which for us is bound up with our flesh and blood, is not only unknown to the English constitution, but is wholly alien to the thought of the Englishman and also of the American . ' ' After this dithyramb, you avow that both Britain and the United States have nevertheless attained to the notion of unified State action, the latter achieving it as against the principle of State-sovereignty through the Cixil War : so that Britain pursues an energetic foreign policy and has a "strong national feeling." I'.iit tor all that, you tell us, it is with us, as with all States governed by Parliaments, always a (juestion of 22 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY majorities and minorities, never of a definite unity of the State. "So it is explained that the unitary State-idea does not exist in England. The word ' State ' is not translatable in English : there is no possibility of rendering it in an equivalent, embod3dng the idea. The Englishman knows only on one side 'the Empire,' which is something much wider . . . and on the other side 'the Government,' which is something much narrower. Instead of a unified State ruling over parties, party rules." Hence constant changes in British foreign policy — except in so far as it does not change! Finally, "like the idea and the word 'State,' the Englishman lacks the idea and the word 'Fatherland.' . . . The Englishman has indeed a 'home,' but no 'fatherland.' The feeling which the German connects with this word, which signi- fies for him his highest and holiest possession, and frees and stirs all the deepest sentiments of his soul, is to him entirely foreign." We cannot understand, 3"ou inform us, your national song, "Deutschland iiber alles, iiber alles in der Welt," in which, by a puerile misconception, we see an aspiration towards world-dominion. At the same time you inform us that "Britannia rules the waves" is an assertion of England's mission to supremacy on all oceans, as against the aspira- tion of any other people "to maintain its inde- pendence in the world and in general to signify something as a national unit." This aspiration, you say, our popular song treats as an injury to English interests and a crime against humanity. I have never met with a more remarkable BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 23 exhibition of self-deception, or a more idle display- of verbal sophistry by a writer of distinction. The puzzle is to know what you think you are proving. That Germans now in general worship with human sacrifices the abstraction of the State, we knew. That is our indictment. It is the claim of a resultant moral superiority that eludes our powers of comprehension. Broadly speaking, the Briton's concrete idea of the State is that of a commonweal in which he shares, paying his taxes and voting with the idea of improving the total Hfe ; while the German's is that of a great machine to which he belongs and in whose army he must serve when a quarrel is picked with any other State. As you expressly argue, the British power of aggression is small : the Navy, the typical British force, is essentially one of defence. The German is essential^ one of aggression. How, then, should the latter elicit the less aggressive frame of mind ? If the argument is to turn on popular songs, can you explain to yourself or to us why " Deutsch- land iiber alles" is now habitually (or was, earlier in the war) sung by German soldiers as a battle song ? We knew well enough that it was originally a call to national unity, as against the ruinous particularism, the internecine hatreds which left the German States bloodily divided against each other in the Napoleonic wars, some zealously aiding him against the rest. " Deutschland," then, was to be the ruling thought, as against the old separatism. But what had that idea to do with the entr}/ into Brussels ? Was it still necessary that 24 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY Bavarians and Saxons and the rest should strive to forget their old hate of Prussia ? Your argument from a popular chorus to the conclusion that Britannia is bent on dominating all other nations comes delightfully from ^the spokesman of the State that championed Austria in her attempt to crush Serbia, that herself bludgeoned innocent Belgium, and that warned the small States, by the mouth of Herr von Jagow, that their day is over. As you have not named one instance in which Britain has interfered with the freedom of the seas in peace during the past hundred years, we can at once draw the proper inference. Britain's crime, as we all know, is to put her fleet between you and France when you plan to attack, as Germany put her "shining armour" between Russia and Austria when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. But your most memorable performance is your dissertation on "State" and "Fatherland." It recalls, at first, the criticism of Dr. Guttmann, in the Frankfurter Zeitung, that your knowledge of the English language is very imperfect. But there must be more in it than that. Supposing even that "the State" were not as much discussed here as in Germany, in a hundred books carrying the word in their titles, could you really suppose that the notion is excluded from English consciousness by the fact that here parties can aspire to Govern- ment, while with you they cannot ? Is not the very fact of party strife an extra reason for insisting in debate on the interests of "the country" ? When 3'ou are good enough to admit BRITAIX ]'ERSUS GKRMANY 25 that there is a "strong national feehng" in England, do you attach any idea t(^ what \-ou say ? You realize, apparently, that "England" is very determined in this war to beat Germany. What, then, do you think is meant in English b\- the phrase "For England's sake" ? The Govern- ment's sake ? The party's sake ? Your theorem about the word "Fatherland," I confess, wellnigh baffles serious discussion. It suggests a wrangle between the children of rival villages as to the merits of their respective idioms. Apparenth' you suppose that when an English poet sings of "England, my own," or an American repeats "My country, 'tis of thee," he is thinking just of a quantity of land, with towns and houses on it, whereas 3^our ineffable countrymen soar into the emp^^rean of the high and holy when, over beer and sausage, they say "Fatherland." As regards the educated class, it is a somewhat modern development, is it not ? Lessing, you may remember, observed that that kind of sentiment was a noble weakness which he was glad to be without. Goethe, you may also remember, wrote of "the eternal blundering complaint, 'We have no Fatherland, no patriotism,' " and commented : "From the patriotism of the Romans, God deliver us ! " And it was Schiller who declared that mere love of country was important only "to unlearned nations — to the youth of the world." Those renowned Germans would clearly not have acclaimed your State could they have fore- seen it in the spirit ; and their great contem- porary, Kant, was one of the first to see and say 26 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY that while nations regarded only their own inter- est, and kings were uncontrolled masters, there would never be secure peace in the world. So far from praying for a world of apotheosized States, he yearned for a Republic of the World. You will tell us that you have changed all that. But, granted that you have, are you sure that the other nations, which were, nations long before yours, may not also retain the love of country which in them is innate and not inoculated ? Are you not jealous .of the Dutch, who speak both of "Vaderland" and "Moderland," "going you one better," as they say in the United States ? German patriotism has the rawness of a new cult. At a time when Germania was a w^orld of internecine strife, Englishmen knew "the common- weal," which relatively ethical expression meant for them both "State" and "Fatherland." Be- coming part of their instinctive natures, it has not latterly had to be employed as a toast or a war- cry. But the instinct has not changed. I am really not concerned to explain to 3^ou that "my countr}/" means just what "la patrie" does ; and just what "Fatherland" does, or "Motherland." "The land of my fathers" was an English expres- sion before your German Fatherland-State was welded ; and it carries memories which are non- exietent for Germans. A professed scholar who does not spontaneously understand all this is on that side mentally and spiritually defective : there is no other way of describing him, unless we say "war-mad." I doubt whether it is worth while to point out to you the counter-sense you BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 27 are creating in your general case. You do not appear to deny that the French, with their love of la patrie, are as much as England the enemies of Germany. What is the connection, then, between the English ps^xholog}- and the war at this point ? And if the English are, as you say, devoid of the conception alike of "the State" and "the Fatherland," why did 3^our diplomatists ever attempt to have an\^ dealings with them ? Clearly, having a fundamentall}- different psychology, they could have no community of ideas with you. Could the}^ even be relied upon to have the same multiplication table ? I will confess to suspecting that there is one radical difference between the two populations. The English capacity for talking nonsense is finite : the German infinite. That is the conclusion suggested by your theorem about "the State." But there is realh* a special psychological fact behind your dithy- ramb. The idea of "the State" is an old battle- ground in England. Hobbes fought thereon when Germany, shattered into three hundred segments, had been hurled back to barbarism by the Thirty Years' War ; and, ever since, students have been operating over it. But the effect of Hobbes's doctrine here was to set men on their guard against a wholly non-moral conception of the State, an idolatry of a "Leviathan" without a heart or a mind. In France, the "I'Etat, cest mot" of Louis XIV had a similar effect. Rousseau worked at the problem before your philosojihers took it up ; and, whatever his fallacies, he kept hold of the fact that the essential thing in "the State" is 28 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY just the good life of its people, considered as part of the human race. In Germany, you have not yet attained to that simple conception. Your "State-idea" is just the idea of the tribe, physically expanded to cover a "Reich," but morally expanded not at all. You have but blended the hundred particularisms of Germany into one German particularism as against non-Germany. The new cult is not yet fifty years established : hence its primitive character. One of its founders, Hegel, began political hfe as a champion of Napoleon, and but for the chances of war might have remained a good (Cesarean under Napoleon's flag. The same ethic and the same temper, turned to German account, give us the German State-Fetish. Your ideal, as revealed by your culture-class in^ this war, is to affirm your national superiority to all other nations, and your determination to impose your will on Europe. We shall see this in the most exact detail when we come to your account of the causation of the w^ar. For the present I am dealing with 3/our theory. The French and English peoples, being morally ruled in the main by common sense and common honesty, avoid building up an ideal of the State which is only a menacing magnification of the ideal of the fighting tribe. They know that "the State" is simply the aggregate of national organi- zation, representing what the majority have so far enacted. Your exposition, stripped of its verbiage, tells in effect that "the State" is the ImperiaLGovernment, culminating in the Kaiser. All your rhetoric about something, independent of lilU TA IN VERS I '5 GERM A X \ " 29 parties, something apart from majorities and minorities, means just that in your Reichstag there is one official fixtiire, that very poor phe- nomenon, the (lianceUor. As your own jurist, Jelhnek, tells you : "The State can exist merely through its organs : imagine the organs away, there does not remain a State as the operator of those organs, but merely a juristic nullity " {Nichts). Your State is, finally, just the power of Germany, wielded by its War-Lord. Delbriick has avowed that Prussian officers "would never tolerate the rule of a War-Minister drawn from the Reichstag." Such is the true inwardness of your precious "State." You tell us that we cannot "understand" this marvellous psychological development of yours. It is really not in the least difficult for outsiders to understand ; in fact, it is only outsiders who can explain it. An English writer gave the rationale of the matter long ago : — "Instil from his earliest infancy into man the idea that he belongs to another, is the property of another ; let everything around proceed upon this idea ; let there be nothing to interfere with it, or rouse suspicion in his mind to the contrary, and he will yield entirely to that idea. He will take his own deprivation of right, the necessity of his own subservience to anotlier, as a matter of course. And that idea of himself will keep him in order. He will grow up with the im})ression that he has not the right of'ownership in himself, in his passions, any more than he has in his work. He will thus l)e coerced from icithin himself, but noi 30 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY by himself ; i.e. not by any active faculty of self- command, but by the passive reception of an instilled notion which he has admitted into his own mind, and which has fastened upon him so strongly that he cannot throw it off."* The passage is worth the attention of your- psychologists ; let them improve upon it if they can. The German State-idea is simply a manipu- lation of the feudal idea, carried by 3^ou in Prussia to a great height, though not higher than it was carried in Zululand under Cetewayo. For the name of the chief or overlord has been necessarily substituted the name of the State, but the resul- tant is an abstraction behind which the overlord operates much more effectually than he did in the Middle Ages. The old German Kaisers were generally powerless just because the function was avowedly embodied in the man. Your Kaiser is at a pinch all-powerful just because you call the power which he embodies and dominates "the State," and because the abstraction is really believed by the many to be the object of it all. The illusory abstraction which you have thus created, you alone among modern nations may be said to have deified, very much as Athens made Athene out of the idea of itself. But your ideal is no Pallas : it is much more the Assur that Assyria made out of its abstraction. Of course, you think yours the noblest of all hypostases. So did the Assyrians. In a word, the countries now confronting Germany, even the more imperfectly developed *Mozley, Ruling Ideas in Early Ages, 1877, pp. 42, 43. BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 31 among them, have in general transcended ahke tribahsm and feudahsm, and seek an international Ufe in which nation shall respect nation. Until this is brought about, until all the nations realize that a nation is to a nation what an individual is to an individual within a nation, a fellow, bound by a law of reciprocity, there is no security for mankind. You avowedly tolerate no such con- ception. Kant proclaimed it ; Hegel repudiated it ; and Treitschke, growing more and more of an immoralist as he grew Prussianized, has for \'our generation made the anti-moral ideal the current one. Have you not told us that for you the wholly self-regarding State is the highest conception — the earthly infinite ? Have not all your mouth- pieces for half a century proclaimed that you are the nation, without peer ? That is just what other people have learned to shrink from saying. Over a century ago, Burke, whom you rather ignorantty extol, spoke in a certain mood of "the great mysterious incorporation of the human race." It is a recognition of that ideal that governs the ideal of the State in the nations that are now fighting Germany. Of course, you have occasional glimpses of the idea. While you officially sink all (ierman humanity in a Germandom which is, as you would say, "wholly foreign" to humanity in general, you begin to have dark visions of a "Gcitter- dammerung," a Twilight of the Gods, in which all civilization is in jeopardy as a result of the German cult of the German Self. What is to becomi- ol the polity of the nations, of the general civiliza- 32 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY . tioii of Europe ? you ask at the close of your book. You may well ask it last ; it is the last thought to reach the German intelligence. But is it not rather incongruous with your dithyramb about "the State," the ineffable, the earthly infinite, the all-sufhcient, the political Absolute ? Can anything else really matter ? Sooth to say, you are beginning to learn the Nemesis of Egoism even as the child learns it, if one can speak of your people in terms of anything that is innocent. It always needed hell-fire to teach them collectively any vital social lesson. It took thirty 3^ears of mutual massacre to teach them religio-political toleration. The Napoleonic wars could not bring them to political unity. Their appointed Moses, Bismarck, rightly realized that only over a blood sacrifice could they ever be got even formally to fraternize. Only when wading in a sea of their own blood, it seems, can they begin to think of the welfare of a collective humanity that is greater than their State. To speak thus may to some look like a mere answering of your railing with railing. But I am not forgetful of my negation of your vain pro- nouncement about ancient Italy. To her, you wrote, however she might energize in politics and law, "there was denied the capacity to shape a culture [Cultur, not Kultur !] for herself, to energize independently and creatively in the sphere of art, poetry, religion, and science."* Before writing that, you had expressly argued that Greece developed her culture only under the * Geschichle des Alterthums, ii, ed. 1893, p. 530. BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY, 33 stimulus of foreign culture ; and that Western Greece, though as richly endowed by nature as the eastern parts, failed to develop simply because "here there lacked the foreign stimulation."* When I write on German evolution, I do not say that Germans have been denied the capacity to shape a culture for themselves, though their culture, like other cultures in general, is mainly derivative ; and theirs is in a special degree derivative from those of Italy, France, and England. As little do I sa}- that they are racially incapable of transcending tribalism. I simph' say that they have not yet done it, and that it is their retrograding tribalism and feudalism that have dragged us all into the W^orld War. Attaining political unit}^ last of all among the leading nations, they are still civically in the barbarian stage, worshipping a Tribal God ("Gott mit Uns"), and kneeling to their Kaiser as to his vicegerent. Holding the creed of barbarism, they do its deeds. That it is a creed recently re-learned at the hands of their professors does not alter the fact, as it does not alter the infernal consequences. * Geschichte des AlteHhums, ii, ed. 1893, p. 155. Chapter III ENGLISH AND GERMAN CIVILIZATION FOLLOWING your national practice of vilifying the opponent before you come to the issue as to what he and you have just done, you devote several sections to the defects of English life and civilization as 370U see them. These sections illustrate the state of mind to which a German historian can sink. In time of peace, even vou, I suppose, would recoil from a battle of mud-throwing. Civilized men in general, at least outside of Germany, had been supposed to have reached the perception that civilization at its best was terriblv defective ; that all countries had much to learn and to do ; and that each did well to learn from the others. It is significant that in Germany, the country whose civilization is most largelv derivative, which only in the past two generations has got rid of the dirt of the Middle Ages, and which owes most to" the culture- example of neighbour lands, there has alwa^^s been and is now the maximum amount of boasting about its native superiority. In France and in England, for generations past, the national effort has been directed to social reconstruction, political reconstruction going on as a means to that end. It would be difficult to name an eminent English writer of the past seventy or eighty years who has not gravely criticized English civilization, and who did not ■34 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 35 owe some of his influence to such criticism. Coleridge, Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Spencer, Arnold, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, Morris, Morley — all have abundantly criticized the national life in all its aspects. Since the beginning of the present century, the tendency is more than ever pronounced. In all political parties, social reconstruction has become the absorbing thought. To say this is to say that all recognize grave defects in the national life. So far, your case is given you read}^ made. Even in German3^ with your ritual of boasting, you have a certain undercurrent of criticism, as you well may, since your literature reveals a social corrup- tion not to be matched in any western land. But what, has all this to do with the question of who is responsible for the World War ? This, of course, that you hope to get a verdict by vilifica- tion before you come to the real issue. But from whom ? To write your book for Germans was surely a task of supererogation. The "Hymn of Hate" was being roared all over Germany before your book appeared. Your book was surely written for neutrals — unless it was written for us in England, on which view you are grown puerile indeed. Now, educated neutrals know that in England there is far more competent criticism of English social blemishes than you can supply. In England, no educated man dreams of denying that the criticism of home life by leading writers is beneficial, though it has been said of Mill and Arnold that they exhibited "the bias of anti- patriotism." 36 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY We did not need you, then, to tell us that we need reforms ; that alongside of wealth we have poverty ; that there is a Highland question ; that there is an Irish question. These things we anxiously discuss, in war time as in peace time. Your characteristic attempt to turn them to the discredit of the British people invites the question whether you think the modern handling of the Irish question is on a level with the Prussian handhng of the Pohsh. No one could conceive of a present-day British Government officially flog- ging thousands of Irish children as your school- masters in Poland have flogged Polish children to make them say their prayers in German, and further sentencing their parents to long imprison- ments for making a protest. x\fter generations of dragooning, your Danes, your Poles, and your Alsatians, are more anti-Prussian than ever. Of course, this will not disturb Prussian self-suffi- ciency. Goethe tells that in his day there was an old German gentleman who said : "Even in God I find defects." It is only in the imperialized Germany of our da}^ that there are none — in the opinion of her academics. But what then ? The superiority of German Kultur was pleaded in 1914 as a defence of German massacres and rapes in Belgium, and the plea appealed to nobody. Even the notoriously musical character of the German speech is not a proof that the German people, or the academics, or the Government officials, are truthful. You used to write a good deal better than you write now ; but even in old days your style could not atone for a HRiiAix ry-.A'.srs (,/:/ 40 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY more strictly relevant to point to your official statistics of prosecutions for Beamtenbeleidigung, contempt of officials. In the work "An Australian in Germany" (1911), whose author resided there as a teacher for something over two years, I read : — "During the time I have been in Germany the list of cases of fine or imprisonment inflicted on journahsts and others for commenting on officials' actions would fill several pages." The same work indicates that far more heresy-hunting was recently going on among the German clergy than among the English. Doubtless you have a "freer Sunday" ; but I have read that when your Kaiser once told some recruits at Potsdam that "only good Christians could be soldiers," and your chief comic paper published thereupon a cartoon in which Satan removed from heaven, as his property, Alexander, Hannibal, Csesar, Napoleon, and Frederick, the editor was sent to prison for two months. Striving to understand what you mean by free- dom in any general sense, I note your diatribe against American life : — "From the moment he lands on the New York pier to the moment he leaves it, the educated German feels himself under a constraint that is to him strange and antipathetic, but which he cannot evade. Everywhere he comes up against firmly fixed usages and dominating notions which demand that he shall absolutely submit to them, and which curtail his rights of personahty, his inner freedom. He who really knows America will recognize as the special problem presented to him BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 41 by that 'land of contrasts,' that of comprehending how this people is inspired with the belief that it is a free people, or rather the free people, when it really lies under a burdensome compulsion, which, however, having grown up thereunder and re- garding it as a matter of course, it does not perceive to be a burden ; under the constraint of countless traditionally sanctified conceptions in social life and, above all, in the field of religion, which fetter free expression of opinion and independent thinking ; under the constraint of 'public opinion' and what passes for such, making itself dail}' felt in the intolerable plague of the obtrusive interviewer and the incursion of pub- licity in all the private affairs of the individual and his family (as to which nobody is secure that next day the grossest trumped-up charges will not appear against him in the newspaper, from which he has no means of protection) ; and, further, under the frightful tyranny of organized labour and the domination of an unscrupulous crowd of 'politicians' which rule State and community, and which the ordinary American regards as an unavoidable evil, letting it multiply as it will. ' Politicians are despised in this country ' ; but he gives them a free hand." To offer you condolences might suggest sym- pathy. Personally, I have found life as free in the United States as elsewhere ; the restraints of which you speak being of the same order as subsist in your own country, and far less stringent. It is much safer to criticize the President with them than to criticize tin Kaiser with you ; 42 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY and I doubt whether anything' would have hap- pened to you if you had courteously explained the superiority of the German political system to the American. Perhaps you preferred other methods. In most' countries one has to take a little care not to tread upon people's corns ; and in yours there subsists a law forbidding mutual criticism among religious sects. But I prefer to leave it to Ameri- cans to speak for themselves. I will merely say, in this connection, that many thousands of your countrymen seem to prefer American life to German, as thousands more prefer English ; and that I have heard of a German who could hardlv contain his delight when he got back to New York after a visit to the Fatherland. He jumped upon the driver's platform of a car, and when the driver cursed him for getting in the way he "could have hugged him," as he afterwards avowed. All that, I admit, is very un-German. Evidently the idea of "freedom" varies greatly from land to land. An American, like a Briton, knows that he has a one-vote control in politics, and knows that it counts. If the vote of his party altered the majorities in the Legislature, or the tenure of the Presidential chair, and yet no change happened, he would certainly feel outraged. In Germany, where no vote in the Reichstag can alter the Chancellor's policy, you are well pleased with your "freedom." Doubtless politicians are abused in all countries ; it happens, alas, even in the Fatherland. Is it not Prince von Biilow who has declared that Germans are the worst politicians BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 43 in the world ? We outsiders can give the explana- tion : where politicians count for nothing in policy they are necessarily inept. But you appear to feel that under a constitution which excludes all control b}' the nation, either of policy or taxation, you are secured a kind of "freedom" which does not subsist among the English-speaking races. What you mean, I confess, I still cannot divine. There is certainlv no more criticism either of Church or State, religion or Government, beliefs or doctrines, in Germany than in Britain. No eminent German — certainly not Strauss — ever said with impunit}- such things about Christianity and theism as have been said with perfect im- punity by Arnold, Spencer, and Swinburne, to sa}^ nothing of the avowed militant freethinkers. No German critic of religion ever had the popu- larity and status of the American Ingersoll. Certainly, bigotry still operates, as it does in German}' ; but apart from the comparative free- dom of your university professors to undermine the creeds they ostensibly support, I have never been able to see any special freedom of speech or thought in Germany. In Britain there is a "con- science clause" for parents who object to having the orthodox religion taught to their children in the schools. In Germany there is no such thing. Even if things were as you say, it would still be impossible to see what bearing such charges have on the question of Britain's entrance into the World War. If the question of relative freedom arises at all in this connection, it must surely be on the political side of things ; and I nni unable 44 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY to find in your book a single relevant argument — unless it be a false assertion — going to show that the alleged lack of public freedom in Britain could in any way affect British relations mth Germany. You yourself allege a general British hatred of your country. You grossly err as to pre- war feeling ; though certainly there was no appre- ciable amount of opinion, even among Socialists, against the war from the moment of the invasion of Belgium. Whether the amount of peace feeling among German Socialists would under any system of representation have overruled German Chau- vinism I do not pretend to say. Your most specific assertion in regard to free- dom of political speech in Britain is that while there are no prosecutions for lese majesU, "every infraction of the 'privileges' of Parliament, every attack on Parliament and its Acts, was and is still relentlessly prosecuted and punished with heavy and degrading penalties : an unsparing criticism of Parliament, which in continental States passes as a matter of course, is still not permitted in England ; and he who ventures upon it must very carefully choose and weigh his words." A more ludicrously false account of the case was never penned even in Germany. Prosecutions for infringement of the "privileges" of Parliament are latterly very rare, being laid only for special technical offences ; and the culprit usuall}' escapes with, at most, a slight penalty on pleading contrition. And such prosecutions never take place in respect of "criticism of Parliament or its Acts." Any journalist can criticize Parliament or any of BRITAIN VERSUS (iHRMAXY 45 its Acts to his heart's content ; it is done evety day. You evidently have not the faintest compre- hension of what "privileges of Parliament " means. If you wrote ancient history' as you write modern, your tenure of your Chair would soon be in danger. Equally absurd is your solemn statement that any member can cause the expulsion of strangers from the galleries during a sitting of Parliament b}^ announcing that he "spies strangers." That usage of an age in which most of the continental States had no semblance of a Parliament at all is now resorted to only by way of dealing with a disturbance or securing a "secret session" such as you have had of late in the Reichstag — a very rare event in the British Parliament. Do you seriously suggest that any Legislature should be deprived of the power to hold such a session ? If you do not — and I do not see how you can — your remarks on the subject amount only to another irrelevant display of ignorant malice. To the same order belong your remarks as to the opposition which in the past has been made to reforms in England. If in any country important reforms were ever made without opposition ; if in Germany there had not been furious opposition to all reforms, political or social, made since the time of Napoleon, your words might be worth answer- ing. But even you, I suppose, will hardly pretend that the abolition of serfage in Prussia in the early years of the nineteenth century was accomphshcd without resistance. Do you happen to remember that in 1819 Stein and Gneisenau were put undei' police supervision ? 46 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY Such attacks as 3Aours reveal the consciousness of "a bad case." To meet your tissue of petty aspersions with a list of the sins against freedom in German life would be an easy enough task. The imprisonment of journalists for a jest about the Holy Coat of Treves or about the Kaiser's the- ology ; the ten thousand punishments of men, women, and children, for Use majesU in respect of irreverence to the Kaiser and for Beamtenhe- leidigung ; the endless imprisonments of Socialists, from Bebel and Liebknecht — these alone would make a sufficient answer to your unctuous claims. But on this whole matter of comparing the general aspects of civilization in the two countries, I decline to follow your lamentable lead. In war time, apparently, the Berlin Chair of History becomes a department of Wolff's Bureau. In other civilized countries such work as yours is not undertaken by men of letters. If, however, you want to know how 5^our vituperation can be countered, you should try to procure an English book called "Degenerate Germany." But I ought to warn you that it may drive you either to frenzy or to despair. For every pebble of spite you throw, here are a dozen hearty half-bricks. The horrors of German his- torv, from the Thirtv Years' War onwards : the backwardness of your civilization ; 3^our gross- ness ; 3^our table manners ; your crime ; your vice ; le vice allemand ; your satyrs ; your volup- tuaries ; your sexual perverts ; your corrupt and decadent literature ; your physical degeneracy ; your brutalized and depraved officer caste — you BRITAIN VERSUS GERM AX Y 47 will find it all handled here with a malice equal to \'our own ; and all more or less documented, which can hardl}^ be said of 3''our farrago. When the book appeared here it was condemned by all the decent journals : not that they doubted its general truth, but that that is not in Britain an accepted style of polemic either in war or peace. You, I gather, have had a more favourable recep- tion for your work in Germany. I will just say, then, that if you care to see your abuse met \vith abuse plus criminal statistics, police reports, and abundant extracts from German and other works illustrating German manners, morals, and de- generation, you may find it in the work I have mentioned. If you want something more readily obtainable in war time, you might do well to read a few of the novels on Army life which have made such a sensation in Germany in recent years. I have read several — with an effort. They are poor novels, as all German novels now seem to be ; but they are a terrible offset to your polemic of alternate panegyric of the German Army and abuse of the British. The latter kind of aspersion is pitiful enough to make your friends uneasy. The "con- temptible little army" had broken the rush of a German one five times its strength ; its cavalry had ridden through yours wherever they met ; and you take your academic revenge by vilifying its personnel. On this head I will not trouble you with a defence. The future histories of this war will tell the tale of the stand that broke the rush of your hosts to Paris and to Calais. German 48 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY historians will doubtless continue to get comfort from aspersing the little army that did so much to foil them. The history of other nations will tell the tale of the massacres wrought by your heroes upon unarmed citizens in Belgium and France, the slaughter of old and young — men, women, and children — the devilries, the robbery, the rapes, the incendiarism. Your writers will continue to deny it all : the neutral world, faced by the collected evidence, will estimate you accordingly. The trouble for you is that the record is so largely made up of facsimiles of pages from German diaries, and by neutral testimony. Those testimonies are quite enough for me ; and I proffer no indictment beyond what they conve}^ As to the character of your own Army, I am content to refer you (i) to 3'X)ur German "Army novels," which have drawn a far worse picture of it than was ever drawn by aliens in time of peace. They make intelligible what your armies have done in war. For the rest, I am content to cite the published extracts from the diarv of Private J. Becker, 6th Company, Ersatz Battalion, 3rd Foot Guards, Landsturm, who in civil life had been Professor of Latin in the Bonn Gymnasium, and who served on the Eastern front in August- September, 19 15. Of a long transcript taken from the diary found upon his person, I have elsewhere published extracts.* They record (i) the habitual brutality of the non-commissioned officers to the younger recruits ; (2) the habitual under-feeding of the men, while the officers — commissioned *Wcir q^nd Qioilization, 1916, p. 150. BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 49 and non-commissioned — feed themselves (where possible) abundantly, the latter "sticking close to the travelling kitchens" ; the former "stealing bread and wine from the wagons," though all the while "drawing big rations." Further, (3) the officer in command of the company, also the section leaders and the non-commissioned officers, stay behind, while the sections and groups without leaders attack an enemy position in an "indes- cribable jumble," suffering "heav}^ losses." Three weeks later (4) the officer commanding the com- pany gets the Iron Cross ; (5) a week later he is drunk for an entire day. This is a transcription from the diary of a German Professor serving as a private. I invent nothing and exaggerate nothing. It seems a sufficient reply to your aspersions and your correlative claims. The summing-up is, in the Professor's words, that "the German soldier has no personality : he is a machine." If I were to recite British narratives of German \illainies in war I could lill a volume. But I make no use of such evidence. 1 am content to take German testimony as to the degradation of the German soldier and the morale of the officer class, adding only that I beheve there are many naturally good men in both classes. But is not the essential worthlessness of your whole polemic in this connection revealed by one sentence ? In the third section of your first chapter you tell us that "a mercenary arni\ can be held together only by rigid discii)hn('"— this by way of aspersing the English Army. Now, 50 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY when your Army was accused of committing a multitude of foul deeds in Belgium, what was the German answer to the charge ? It was that the "iron discipline" of your Army made impossible such savagery and licence as were alleged to have taken place. So that "rigid discipline" is the damning mark of a "mercenary" army ; and it is also the regular boast of the German Army ! Is it not well, in such an undertaking as yours, to preserve some small semblance of judicial decency ? Is it well that the world should see the Berlin Professor of History carrying on criticism in this fashion ? Certainly your Army still preserves, for certain purposes, a good deal of its "iron discipline." An American reporter, officially welcomed to witness the efficiency of one German army on its passage, has told that he "only once" saw a German officer slash a soldier twice across the face with his whip for forgetting to salute him. And Private Becker has recorded in his diary how hungry soldiers "are tied to trees for eating [? stealing] biscuits and apples," while well-fed officers steal "bread and wine from the wagons." Discipline, for certain purposes, is evidently still cherished. Private Becker tells how Captain B , after a repulsed attack in which his regiment lost 170 men, muttered: "It is stupid to attack so strong a position." "All the same," adds the diarist, "that did not prevent him from firing on his own men." We have many accounts of the strict concern for discipline with which 3/our officers march behind their troops, revolver in hand, like BRITAIN X'ERSUS GERMANY 51 Captain B . The British disciphne, I admit, is different. But 3^ou are the first Prussian writer whom I have known to suggest that rigid mihtary disciphne is a British specialty. We used to be taught that rigid disciphne was a German inven- tion. Savagely brutal discipline certainh- was. To which position do you propose to hold ? Of one of your subsidiary miscarriages 1 cannot here forgo mention. In a footnote you observe that among the mass of the English and a great part of the people of the United States "the blind belief in the letter of the Bible far exceeds anything in the most orthodox circles of Ger- many, and this not seldom among men who in other fields think very freely and independently." You explain that the habit of treating religion thus as a thing apart enables the British people to ignore religious and moral considerations when they conflict with the interests of the individual or the State. This comes indeed deliciously from the colleague of Von Harnack, who has pro- claimed to pious German}' that the invasion of Belgium was a parallel to, and was justified bv, David's eating of the shewbread ! It was, I learn, another leading light of German theology. Dr. G. Adolf Deissmann, Professor of Theology at Berlin, and author oi "Bible Studies," a work of high scholarly pretensions, who esLvly in 1915 published an interpretation of the vision of the four horses in the Apocalypse, showing that the white horse, which "went forth conquering and to concpuT," is Germany! When similar things are said by provincial clergymen in 52 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY England, educated English people smile. It is among the foremost professional scholars of Germany that they are produced and acclaimed. And it is only in Germany that preachers and theologians can acclaim the war as a splendid expression and excitation of religious feeling, and can announce that "God is a Pan-German" ; "God is not neutral." It is only fair, however, to add that one preacher is recently reported to have been prosecuted for saying that "God is not a Pan-German." To be told by you, after these things, that British religion is hypocritical, is indeed edifying. One thing you may be said to have proved for us afresh, that the ordinary moral standards have practically disappeared from German academic life. In another of those footnotes in which you so particularly shine you state that when your ships bombarded Scarborough and West Hartlepool in December, 1914, the English loudly complained of the act of bombarding an unfortified seaport, and at the same time announced that the forts of West Hartlepool had returned the fire. This appears to you to be a striking display of incon- sistency. Do you, then, suppose that Scarborough and West Hartlepool are the same place ? Or do you argue that if a place with a fort fires when bombarded the German Navy is thereby justified in bombarding an entirely unfortified place ? Some such theory, perhaps, underla}^ the German massacres in Belgium, when crowds of women and children were shot down on the rumour that "some one has fired." It is interesting to find a BRITAIN ]'ERSUS CHRMAXY 5j Professor of History applying that principle in the way you do. The facts are simple. One di\^ision of your raiders attacked Scarborough, which has no fort ; another attacked Whitby, which has no fort ; and the Hartlepools, which have one old fort, with a battery of small and antiquated guns, which were duly fired. You will doubtless be gratified to learn that your naval heroes killed far more women, children, and babies at the Hartle- pools than they did at Scarborough or at Whitby. Your remarkable comment on the episode reveals the thorough sympath}^ between your academic class and your naval authorities. The latter selected seaside resorts for bombardment because they were undefended. Had vScarborough and W^hitby and the Hartlepools possessed modern defences, they would not have been attacked. And yet it was your Baron Marschall von Biberstein who at The Hague Conference of 1907 said this :— "Military proceedings are not regulated solely by the stipulations of international law. There are other factors — conscience, good sense. A sense of the duties which the principles of humanity impose will be the surest guide for the conduct of seamen, and will constitute the most effectual safeguard against abuse. The officers of the German Navy — I say it with emphasis — will always fulfil in the strictest manner duties which flow from the unwritten law of humanity and civilization." And now it is the scholarly countrN-man of 54 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY Baron Marschall who affects to convict us of inconsistency when we denounce the dastardly bombardment of undefended Scarborough and mention that the old fort at Hartlepool did what it could with its old guns. Some day, perhaps, your countrymen will be surprised to think that you should have dwelt on these things. You might leave it to us to remember them. I never had any doubt about the defeat of Germany from the moment when your rush on Paris was herded back ; but when I read the news of that raid on Scarborough, and when I saw next morning the companies of volunteer recruits in the London streets multiplied fivefold, I knew with a deeper certaintv what the end would be. If we have to fight till we are in rags, we will out-stay your State. And this heightens m}' interest in your demonstration of the defects of English civiliza- tion. Perhaps the best summing-up of the issue is that the country whose scholars so laboriously — and incompetently — go about to indict her enemies for incivilization, is the country which, when one of her submarines had sunk the non-com- batant Lusitania, drowning hundreds of women and children, made the occasion one for a festival in its schools, and celebrated the event with rejoicings, even as far away as the German club in Chicago. In view of all that, your polemic about the inferioritv of non-German civilizations savours somewhat of low comedy. Boasting, we know, is the specialty of the savage, and no civilized nation boasts with the BRITAIN VERSUS GERMAXY 55 systematic zest of yours. On the eve of Jena, your Prussian officers were boasting that the French would run away at the sight of them. As soon as Napoleon was down by the help of Russia and Britain, the boasting recommenced, and it has been in crescendo ever since. That gives us our clue. Not only was Germany the last of the Western Powers to undergo modern civilization (Herder, you remember, wrote : "the inhabitants of German}' a few centuries ago were Pata- gonians" ; and Goethe said something similar), but Prussia was one of the last States in Germany to exhibit the influence in average life. Consulting the Prussian criminal statistics of last century, I find that of the seven provinces of Old Prussia, Prussia proper was nearly the worst. In 1822 it was the worst. Whereas in Pomcrania, in respect of crimes against persons, the proportion was one criminal to 2,634 persons, in Prussia it was one in 1,242. In i8ig it was one in 1,044, only Posen having a worse percentage. In 1825, with one criminal to 2,749 persons in Pomerania, there was one to 1,433 in Prussia, Posen again being the only State that was worse. During 1835, when the population of Berlin was about 250,000, the number of German civilians arrested by the police was 10,134 ; so that about one in 25 of the inhabi- tants spent some part of that year in prison. I do not pursue this line of investigation. 1 merely indicate these facts as being historically suggestive in a much broader way tlian are your random impeachments of Englisli life. If eiglity years ago Prussia was, with unc small ('xcef)tion, 56 BRITAIN VERSUS (GERMANY b}' far the most criminally given of all the Old Prussian provinces, we can understand the effects in war to-day of the predominance of Prussia in German life. Chapter IV ENGLAND'S INTERNATIONAL BIAS jOMING to your sections on British foreign policy, I involuntarily recall how in 1814 Count F. L. Stolberg wrote to the pub- lisher Perthes apropos of the attempts of the German revolutionaries of that time to blacken England. He called her "that countrv whose constitution secures the liberty of the individual and the welfare of the nation more than an\' that ever existed, while at the same time it is the bulwark of the independence of every other country in Europe ; defeats every attempt to subjugate any continental countr}^ ; has no desire ^can have none — to make conquests in Europe ; and has just freed the whole of Europe from the hardest and most ignominious yoke. To reproach England with acting from selfish motives is to reproach her with having her welfare inextricably bound up with our existence, her freedom with our independence, no less than our freedom with her independence." That was written before Waterloo ; and Perthes agreed — Perthes, to whom Niebuhr was already preaching, in the Prussian manner, your gospel of the great State, "in which a full and free life is now alone possible." At the same time, other Germans were writing that "Prussia is actuated solely by the thought of her own personal interest, and her own aggrandizement." 57 58 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY That period in Germany's history you naturally pass over, commenting mereh^ that in resisting German demands for the dismemberment of pre- Revolution France in 1814, England sought "that Germany's strength should remain as much as possible restricted, so that she should not grow into a commercial rival." Thus vou reach the conception of "the ruthless selfishness of English policy." Your proof in detail is interesting. On page go you inform us that in the great wars from the eighteenth century onwards " a ground prin- ciple of English polic}/ came clearly to light, which up to the present has always ruled her : she allied herself with the weak States of the Con- tinent, in order to fight the stronger" — a curious kind of evidence of her selfishness. On page 102, however, you announce that "she was powerful only against the weak and the timid : for a serious war she betrayed a deep-rooted aversion, only too well grounded in her inner organization." Thus do you continue to exhibit the critical rectitude of your method and the unity of your thought. Now, I am not at all concerned to maintain, even as against such a critic, that British foreign policy in the past was not as a rule addressed to what seemed to be the national interest, or even to deny that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was at times unscrupulous. It never, indeed, attained to the cynicism of Frederick ; but it acted on Bismarck's principle that all nations seek their own interest. And it was not always just. English historical literature abounds BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 59 in impeachments of past British poHcy. Past English misgovernment of Ireland has been as severely arraigned by Englishmen as by Irishmen ; and a great English party is pledged to secure for Ireland Home Rule. Can you say anything similar in regard to Prussia's dragooning of the Poles, the Danes of Schleswig, and the people of Alsace ? But our self-criticism does not end there. Our fathers' treatment of Holland under Charles II and later ; our beginnings of empire in India ; our policy in the Crimean War ; our opium wars with China — these and other matters you will find discussed in our books in a fashion to which Prussian historiography oifers no parallel. I do not remember to have seen a Prussian history/ of the Seven Years' War in which Frederick's brutal aggression was otherwise than gingerly criticized. Ranke, who was always so fluently moral in censure of the acts of French kings, when he came to deal with the deeds of Frederick simply declined to discuss the question of his claim to Silesia, pronouncing that "happily this is not the task of the historian." Such is the ethical operation of the Prussian mind. I will waive, then, the task of answering in detail your edifying characterizations of all English foreign policy. One item will suffice as a sample: your assertion that in 1839 "in the midst of peace Aden was torn from Turkey." In 1839 Aden was held by an independent sultan, as it had been since 1735, when the sheikh of Lahej threw off his allegiance to the Sultan of Sana (who had held the supremacy after the Turks rohn- 6o BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY * quished their conquests in Yemen) and founded an independent line. When in 1837 a ship under British colours was wrecked near Aden, her cargo was plundered and her passengers cruelly ill- used. On being challenged b}^ the Bombay Government, the Sultan agreed to make com- pensation, and also to sell his town and port. When an agent of the Bombay Government went to carry through the transaction, the Sultan was deceased, and his son, now in power, declined to fulfil his father's undertakings. Then an expedi- tion was sent, and the place was annexed. Turkey had nothing to do with the matter. This is the unvarnished truth as against your untruth in one clause ; and to deal with the whole series of your charges would take a great deal more space than they are worth, especially seeing that no educated person in Britain pretends to think the entire foreign policy of his country in the past is at all points strictly defensible. A vital difference between Britain and Germany is that the former aims at the purification of international morality, and the latter at its annihilation. I prefer to come to your main argument. You allege not only that Britain's polic}^ was always self-seeking, but that this made her generally distrusted and detested — at least (such is your delightfully Prussian way of putting it), after she began in the second half of last century to show a disinclination for great wars. Here, to begin with, one has to challenge 3'our veracity. Despite the talk of your revolutionaries, the majority of the people of the anti-Napoleonic BRITAIX I'ERSLS (rliRMAXY 6i States in (lermany were friendl\- and grateful to England for a generation after 1814. Spain was not unfriendly after England had helped her to throw off the yoke of Napoleon. Portugal has remained friendly. Greece seemed rather grateful than otherwise for being helped to secure her independence ; and even Turkey regarded Eng- land as her friend until recent years — as she well might, after the Crimean War, waged by France and England in her defence, and after the Berlin Treaty. Curiously enough, even now, in Austria there is said to be much less hatred of England than in Germany. Hungarians, again, used to speak habitually of England with friendship, having known something of English svmpathy ; and though it was France that freed Italy from Austria, Italians, like Hungarians, recognized that the\' had always had the sympathy of the island kingdom in their struggles. Bulgaria, too, used to be grateful for Gladstone's championship, though gratitude is not a Bulgarian specialty ; and the other Balkan peoples have not shown themselves distrustful of Britain. So far, then, your argument from the general detestableness of England refuses to march. It is true that during the Boer War there was much anti-British feeling on the Continent. As Prince von Billow has so candid!}' informed us, Germany then refrained from attacking us only because her Navy was not yet strong enough. It is one of the most edifying things in history to realize that the nation which bludgeoned Belgium in 19 14 was quite indignant in 1899 against P>ritaiii 011 (lie 62 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY score of the Boer War, in which the Boers com- mitted the mistake of declaring war first. You are much chagrined to note that the hostihty of the other continental States on that score had died down years ago. Did it ever occur to you to ask yourself why that happened ? The answer is not difficult. It was because within five or six years of the close of the war the British Government granted complete self-govern- ment to the former Boer States. The result of that example of benighted British Parliamentarism is that not only did the mass of the Dutch stocks in South Africa stand fast to the British connection in spite of all German blandishments in 1914-15, but that the two renowned Boer generals, Botha and Smuts, have taken a leading part in driving your countrymen out of their former possessions in Africa. And now we come to grips with your general thesis. I need hardly ask you whether you think any one believes that Germany, had she conquered the Boer States, would have given them self-govern- ment. You would scorn to pretend such a thing. But, you see, these things count. No sensible Afrikander believed for one moment that the victory of Germany in this war could mean any- thing but the subjection of this people to a strictly despotic German rule. Between Britain and Germany there is thus one vital difference. Britain is known to do things for freedom and Germany is not. Outside of the empire, half a dozen small States regard Britain as having done them a good turn. Could you name any country that takes that view of Germany ? BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 63 This is the simple test that puts in the category of absurdity your arraignment of British foreign poHcy in the past. Britain has some old misdeeds to answer for. Germany has nothing else ! Once, in a moment of expansion, when out of office, Gladstone declared that no man could lav his linger on an}^ spot in Europe and say that there Austria had done a good deed. It was an indis- cretion, seeing that we were then at peace with Austria ; but it was not an untruth. And if that can truly be said of Austria, what is to be said of Prussia ? An unselfish deed by that State is not recorded in any earthly chronicle. Her whole history is one of rapacious aggrandizement ; her policy never for an instant had any higher motive than avarice ; of all modern European Powers she has been the most shameless in aggression ; and she has latterly inoculated with her character the German Empire. These issues, observe, are not of my raising. Nobody in Britain ever pretended that the guilt of Germany in this war was to be proved by a catalogue of Prussia's political crimes. It was not the Allies who claimed privilege of Kultur for an act of gross international wickedness. It was the academics of Germany. The Allies, like the bulk of the rest of the world, have said all along that the question of the guilt of this war is a jjorfectly open and simple one. They have tabled all their documents and defied sane mankind to find any but on^ verdict. The issue has been patiently and dispassionately expounded, stej) by step, in a multitude of writings by Britisli as by Erenc h and 64 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY Italian writers. These expositions said nothing whatever of Germany's past. They were judicial documents. The country that in this dispute has from the first resorted alternatively to vilification and self-laudation sufficiently indicates the state of its consciousness. A litigant who can rationally and juridically^ defend himself does not spend time in libelling the ancestors of his opponent and assuring the jury of his own moral and mental superiority. Since, however, you have appealed to the character test, to the character test we will go. We shall not falsify German history : malice could hardly hope to outgo the reality. We start wdth the Prussian State as Frederick the Great found it, a people bred like sheep and ruled like dogs, and we follow^ its aggrandizement. The seizure of Silesia, at his outset, is an act of national burglary not to be matched in modern history : it belongs to the polity of the Assyrians and the Redskins. It led in due course to the Second Silesian War and the Third or Seven Years' War, an inferno of misery that recalled the devastation of the war of Thirt}' Years, the last great German act in the tragedy of civilization. In his first w^ar, which he began by tearing up a national treaty as your Government has torn its "scrap of paper" in regard to Belgium, Frederick thrice betra^^ed his allies. Prussia had thus found her first great man, the forerunner of Napoleon, the criminal type of the man of military genius ; and for his efficiency he has been haloed as the national hero. His chief BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 65 victories were won over a woman ; and with all his efficiency he was saved from rnin at the end of the Seven Years' War only by the death of the Russian Tsarina and the accession of her crazy son, who was Frederick's admirer, l^ut that does not affect the Prussian worship of Frederick ; and it is from his worshippers, Treitschke and the rest, that there comes the charge of national self- seeking against Great Britain. After inflicting untold miseries alike on his own people and on their antagonists, he became of necessity much concerned for peace ; and thenceforth a profession of peace-seeking also becomes part of the ritual of national self-glorification. The next Prussian triumph was the Partition of Poland. Already, presumably, there was a Prussian love of Father- land. Through Frederick, it operated to the acquisition of another people's Fatherland. For the First Partition there was the sorry excuse that the territories taken by Prussia had three cen- turies before been under German dominion. German they had never really been ; and the Teutonic Knights had themselves been invaders among a Slav people, who actually sought the protection of Poland against their Teutonic oppressors. There was further the pretext that in 1772 Poland was anarchic. But in the case of the Second Partition, carried out by Frederick's successor in 1793, the last excuse was not ax'ail- able ; and Frederick William \\\, who had actually made a treaty of alliance with Poland in 1790, gave as the pretext for his treachery an alleged dissemination in Poland of "the spiril of 66 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY French democracy and the principles of that atrocious sect." The self-pit}^ of the Prussians during their and their king's later sufferings under Napoleon never induced any self-reproach for his treachery to Poland and his annexation of fresh Polish territory. Yet the Prussian King had pledged himself b}^ the treaty of 1790 to protect Poland from foreign interference "at any time or in any manner." It is pleaded that Danzig, which was annexed in that episode, was a German city. But it was a Hanse city, whose freedom had been guaranteed in 1767 by five Powers, including Prussia, and it had not the slightest wish to be annexed to Prussia. The very pretence in regard to Danzig is the condemnation of the seizure of Thorn and Posen. Prussian ethic condones and eulogizes the whole procedure of the Partitions of Poland as having been in the interest of Prussia. It is the same moralists who profess to contemn Britain as a State always pursuing its own interest. You, I presume, have nothing to say against the robberies and the treacheries of either Frederick or his successor, or, for that matter, against Austria, whose Empress, as Frederick observed, "wept, but took," and later even forestalled Frederick William III by annexing Zips. You would really have been well advised to leave the history of the eighteenth century out of your survey. The Partition of Poland has become a byword for international iniquit}' ; and in that iniquity Prussia was the efficient mover. Your charge of self-seeking in foreign pohcy BRITAIN ]'ERSUS GERMAXY 67 doiibtless holds good against England in respect of her support of Frederick against /Vustria and France. The motive was a desire to help the "Protestant State" that was in danger of being crushed by the Franco-Russo-x\ustrian combina- tion. British subsidies and Anglo-Hanoverian forces accordingly saved him at one stage as Russian reversal of policy saved him at another. It ma}^ or ma}^ not have been a moral impulse that moved George III at his accession to with- draw British support, while faithfully stipulating in 1762-3 for the cession by France of all Prussian territor}^ in French possession. It may have been a simple common-sense recognition of his absolute faithlessness to his allies. However that might be, Frederick, the most shameless of all treaty- breakers, furioush' denounced Britain for openh^ and justifiably deciding to withdraw from an alliance by which she gained nothing. i\t any moment that suited him, he would have thrown over Britain or any other ally, as he had cheated one ally after another in the First Silesian War, to make an advantageous peace with any enemy. The one ethical principle for him was that Prussia must receive the fidelity she never gave ; and that simple principle has become the gist of German thought on international questions. For Prussia, "the end justifies the means," be it in stealing Silesia or in partitioning Poland. Treitschke has no difficulty over that issue. But that any other State should consult its own interests, even witli- out resort to crime, is a tiling not to be endured. The fate met by Prussia twenty years after 68 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY Frederick's death is a revelation of the true inwardness of the State policy of mihtarism, calculated aggression, and autocratic "efficiency." Rule b}/ divine right, with no ray of hope for self- government, and no smallest opening for indivi- dual political initiative, reduced Prussia in half a generation to a state of utter impotence. Begin- ning by an insolent and inept intervention in the affairs of revolutionary France, in which she was shamefully defeated, her Government in its rela- tions with Napoleon pla3'ed a pitiable role of vacillation, cowardice, and fear. The great army, on which had been spent the bulk of the national revenue for a century/, ruled by an arrogant and incompetent officer caste, broke like paste-board at Jena, to which it had gone with a litany of boasts of coming victory ; and for six years Prussia drank the cup of humiliation to the dregs. The example of Spain, which made an instant and unfaltering resistance to the invader of which Prussia was collectively incapable, and for which half of Germany had no wish, gradually inspired her patriots, and with the help of Russia and Britain the great oppressor was overthrown. Then Prussia resumed her autocratic and mili- tarist course, all the aspirations of her democrats being trodden under foot with the promises that had been made to them ; and instead of a general evolution towards international fraternity there began a new progression in autocracy and mili- tarism, heading towards new aggression, new aggrandizement, and finally to the World War. For Germany, the wheel has gone full circle. All BRITAIX \I:RSiS (,/:RMA\V 6q her progress — intellectual and material has been subordinated to the non-moral cult of the State, of Power, of national vainglory. Everything — the thought of the philosophers, the research of the scholars, the education of the people, the skill of the men of science, the enterprise of the mer- chants and captains of industry — has gone to build up a Napoleonic State, worshipped as at once the abstraction and the concentration of racial pride and national lust of dominion. The national destinv was determined b\- Bismarck. Alwa\'s there were men in Germany who yearned for a nobler way of life than that of subjection to autocracy. They aspired eagerly in 1814 and for 3^ears thereafter ; they aspired again in 1848, when the initiative of democracy in France had again stirred the waters. But they lay under the curse of inherited unhtness. Never having had any training in self-government, they were utterly unprepared to begin at the point at which they proposed to begin. And so Bismarck and his school triumphed, and the Frederician polic}^ was recommenced. First the attack on Denmark and the annexation of Schleswig- Holstein, with the complicity of Austria ; next the war to humiliate Austria, leaving her, how- ever, intact, to keep her quiet when the war with France should come ; then deliberate pre})aration and no less deliberate provocation of the war with France, who had submitted her destinies to a Caesar who was incompetent. Thus was achieves! the Prussian dicain ol supremacy in Germany, and iti no otlici \\a\ 70 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY could it'' be attained while Prussia stood deter- minedly in the way of any true federal union. Your assertion that in 1848 England "stood on the side of the opponents" of the German move- ment for national unity is a sample of your method. England did nothing, and could do nothing, in the matter. You yourself admit that she always sympathized with Liberal movements in Germany : that is part of your grievance against her. Prussia was determined that there should be no union save one in which she was dominant. She could have had union at any time on a federal basis, bad as was her reputation in Germany for absolute self-seeking. But she always lived up to her reputation. It was always a Prussian adminis- tration that she offered to the German peoples. On the eve of Jena, boasting how the}' would put down Napoleon, the Prussian officers passing through Gotha "behaved as if in a conquered countr}^" with all the insolence and licence of their caste. In Napoleon's place, they would have done all that Napoleon and his marshals did. The Napoleonic policy of universal plunder was their ideal : it is the German military ideal to-day. It was only the military triumph over France in 1870 that reconciled the other German States to an empire which meant the barely disguised perpetual domination of Prussia. They made their bed, and they have lain on it. Under a constitu- tion which gives them no real power over their own destiny, they have been but the instruments of traditional Prussianism. And this is the summing-up on the issue you BRITAIN VF.RSUS GERMAXY 71 have raised as to the comparatix-e pohtical evohi- tion of the British and the German States. During the nineteenth century, the self-governing States have been advancing not only in ci\'ilization and well-being, but in international moralitv. The conception of self-interest, as inevitable in national as in individual life, has been gradually modified in international as in social life. The law of reciprocity, which is the foundation of all ethic, has been continually widened. The habit of boasting, long ostracized in private life, has been in non-German countries restrained in public life. Conscious of their imperfections, the nations have increasingly substituted self-improvement for self- praise, and they had for a generation past been more and more concerned to guard against war. Those menaced by Germany naturally drew together ; but still they hoped for better things than Armageddon. In the case of the last Balkan wars, British statesmanship was acknowledged by the German Government to have preserved the peace among the great Powers. Meantime, what has been the development of Germany ? No one could glean an idea of it from your book. You tell us in the customary manner that the German people, from the Kaiser down- wards, desired above all things peace. Meaning what ? A peace, apparently, in which (iermany could impose her will on Europe. Here are ynnr own words (page 135) : — "Thus had Germany in the shortest time developed . . . into a mighty and aspiring empire, that already through its commanding 72 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY importance {Schivergewicht) exacted respect and could always enforce it. For England she became more and more the chief competitor. That in the affairs of the Continent Germany spoke the decisive word, and by her Arm}^ preserved the peace (!) of the Continent and made impossible the wars between European Powers which were so advantageous to England's expansion, had to be submitted to." When, then, wars did take place in Europe, it was by Germany's wish. The essential thing was that Germany should always "speak the decisive word," and "enforce respect" to her decisions. Meanwhile, what decisions was she preparing ? The student of German political literature of the past dozen years is faced by a whole literature to which you make no allusion. I refer to the litera- ture of Pan-Germanism. I do not ask you to take my account of it : I refer you to the summary of its propaganda given in the work of the American Professor Roland G. Usher, first published in 1913. With that literature there is absolutely nothing comparable in the modern world. French officers might from time to time produce a book on the next war ; and English romancers might occa- sionally follow suit ; but here is a literature permeating a nation, and representing an ideal of universal conquest which had its devotees in all classes. You may tell me that it was not govern- mental, and that it did not represent the feeling of the nation. What, then, do you make of the work^of Professor Ottfried Nippold, " Der Deutsche BRITAIN VERSUS GERM AX Y 73 Chauvinismus," published in IQ14 ? Hero are his words : — "Chauvinism has grown enormously in Ger- many during the last decade. This fact most impresses those who have returned to Germany after living for a long time abroad. Man}^ such Germans have expressed to me their surprise at the change which has come over the soul of the nation in recent years ; and I myself can say from experience how astonished I was, on returning to Germany after long absence, to see this psycho- logical transformation. "Hand in hand with this outspoken hostility to foreign countries are conjoined a one-sided exaltation of war and a war mania such as would have been regarded as impossible a few years ago. . . . These people not only incite the nation to war, but svstematicallv educate the nation to a desire for war. War is pictured not as a possi- bility that may come, but as a necessity that must come, and the sooner the better. . . . From the idea of a defensive war for urgent reasons the Chauvinists have advanced with the utmost facility to the idea of an offensive war for no reason at all ; and they flatter themselves that the German nation has undergone the same transformation." Against that testimony, what credence do \(>u think is to be attached to your j^retence that the German nation above all others desired j^eace ? That the better men in Germany protested, wf know ; their very ])rotests are the proof of tlic spread of the mania. "Never," wrote lli<' cditoi 74 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY of the Neue Rundschau in April, 1913, "never was the idea of an offensive war so vigorously or so criminally played with as in recent years." And all the while the militarists were explaining that there must be not merely war, but conquest. Laymen like Medical Councillor Dr. W. Fuchs eloquently explained that "war is the only means of saving us [Germans] as a nation from the physical enfeeblement and demoralization which to-day imminently threaten us" (Die Post, January 28, 1912). But the militarists were more practical. In March of 1913, General Wrochem told the new German Defence Association that "a progressive nation like ours needs more territory, and if this cannot be obtained by peaceable means it must be obtained by war." And in January of the same year. General von Liebert told a Pan-Germanist congress at Hamburg that "nations which increase in population must carry on imperialistic policy and a policy of power aiming at territorial expansion. A people which has increased like the Germans is bound to carry on a continuous policy of expansion." Such was the prevalent gospel in 19 13, in which year, we know, the Austrian Government, in concert with the German, desired to make war on Serbia. That multitudes of your merchant class desired war no less than your militarists and your aristocrats is notorious. In what other European country did men openly reckon on the national wealth to be obtained by new indemnities to be extorted by war from defeated antagonists ? That your Kaiser had long hesitated about pro- BRITAIN VERSUS GERM AW 75 yoking the conflagration is doubtless true. That he had begun to give way to the general clamour in 191 1 is, however, no less true ; and in that year war would have broken out were it not, as you are aware, that the Berlin bankers were financially unprepared. What, then, remains of your case, thus far, against English development as making for a planned war with German}'- ? Had Britain shown an\- desire for new territorial acquisitions ? The German grievance was that she needed none : it was German}' that for ever sought expansion ; and there you are at one with the Pan-Germanists. You ^re bitter against Caprivi for his conviction that expansion in Africa was valueless. Your Crown Prince latterly seems to have agreed with him ; for it was he, was it not, who declared a few years ago that you had not a colony "worth twopence" ? Your trade with civihzed countries was, in point of fact, enormously more profitable than any you could do with your African colonies. But the dream of Weltherrschaft had captured your nation ; and the Pan-Germanists carried all before them. You admit that the British Government re- peatedly made overtures to the German for a joint restriction of naval armaments, the last being for a " fleet-hohday-year " ; and you com- ment that it "fell through as impracticable despite the strong sympathy (starken Entgegen- kommens) of Germany." You know that this is untrue. You know that Prince von Hiilow liad declared that no scheme whatever could bv 76 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY devised for a reduction of armaments that would be acceptable to his Government. And you your- self go on to declare that "no independent Great Power can bind itself in this way in matters vital to its independence, and thereby give a foreign State the right of control over its measures and war material, even apart from the fact that according to English usage it was perfectly certain that England would get round the agreement by one or other of the formulas she has always at hand, and that Germany would be the dupe." So the "strong" disposition of Germany to accede is your figment ? May one further ask, in this con- nection, why, with such "perfect certainty" as to England's treachery, the German Government was at any point surprised, as it professed to be, at England's hostile action ? The rest of your case consists in a strenuous assertion that, conscious of her military weakness, England grew more and more afraid of the "German peril"; that in countless publications the dangers of a German invasion were set forth ; and that "even as in France, in the whole popular literature and in the school-books, down to the little children's copy-books, the Germans were pictured as bloodthirsty barbarians, who shrank from no cruelt}^ and no crime. The Government did its part to stimulate and spread this frame of mind," and so forth. Upon this it may suffice to cite the comment of Dr. Guttm^ann in the Frank- furter Zeitung : — "I hereby testify, in so far as England is concerned, that this is not true ; that this is a wide generalization from a few solitary BRITAIN VERSUS GERMAXY yy examples." Dr. Guttmann knows England : you do not. And this raises the question : Upon what kind of information do yon found \-')ur aspersions in general ? In a passage in which 3^ou parade some of your crudest psycholog}^ and sociology, you enlarge first on the "arrogance and conceit" of the English, then on "the deep-rooted lack {tief eingewurzelter Mangel!) of mental elasticity" which, "as a result of the fixed traditions of English culture and education," has "become an important characteristic of the nation." They are so unteachable that even their study of foreign languages in recent years has had no effect what- ever. They cannot understand the ideas and institutions of other countries ; and so forth. But after this tirade you go on to avow that "it would be a serious error on our part to suppose that in Germany a deeper comprehension [of foreign affairs] is extended through a wider circle [than that of the well-informed English]. Especi- ally of England and North America and their ideas and life-conditions, so widely divergent from our own, a really penetrating knowledge is limited to a very narrow circle. Our daily Press is almost entirely uninformed on the subject, and brings us only scanty and inadequate news. Very often, indeed, we find among highly educated Germans the most incredible judgments and opinions." Whether this startling confession of German ignorance of British and American life was intended to suggest that, after accusing us of arrogance and conceit, you could at a jiindi he 78 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY modest, I will not stay to inquire. I rather go on to note your avowal that this ignorance of British affairs is the heav}^ penalty for "the inconceiv- ably short-sighted and narrow-minded school policy of the Prussian Government, which, having no perception of the true needs of life and the problems they set up, has completely neglected English in the higher schools, and in the collegiate schools treats it as a completely subordinate and merety optional secondary subject." You add that ignorance of English is a very grave injury to the students leaving those colleges, hampering and even almost arresting their development, seeing that alike in the fields of philosophy, history, and natural science, American literature has attained an ever-increasing importance.* The outcome is, you avow, that a knowledge of English is much commoner in your middle and even in your lower classes than in those responsible for the guidance of the intellectual life. "How little distinguished is our diplomacy for knowledge of foreign affairs, how little it is thereby prepared and able to keep in touch with and to influence powerful circles abroad, we have constantly seen in recent decades, as well as in the pre-history of the war, and even during its progress." It would appear, then, that in respect of inacquaintance with each other's affairs England and Germany are in your opinion on one footing. But you collect yourself to affirm that while your ruling classes know next to nothing of us we know still * Your translator has modestly omitted this testimonial to American scholarship. BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 79 less of you. We lay under a "total ignorance" of Germany, a "complete incapacity" to understand your prevailing ideas., and "the therefrom arising national and military institutions" ; whence our "monstrous undervaluing" of your military power, your organization, "and, above all, the living national feeling" that inspires you. Your residual proposition, then, would seem to be that "in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed is king." It will not, I fear, gratify you to know that we really had a very high estimate of your military strength and organization, and knew perfectly that in entering on this war we were probably beginning the greatest struggle in which our nation ever engaged. But such is the fact. And as the question at issue now seems to be, Which of the two nations made the greatest miscalcula- tion in regard to the fighting power of the other ? I propose to offer rather better testimony as against Germany than you offer as against Britain. In that regard you place your usual reliance on asseveration. That you personally considered the fighting power of Britain to be contemptible, as apart from the Navy, you show us all along. The only obscurity on that point is the co-existence of so much exasperation with so much contempt. Since we are so weak, why all that fury over our intervention ? Leaving the riddle unsolved, I come to the question of the German forecasts of the course of the war. Your severe indictment of your diplomatic service seems at the very outset to indicate that in \"iir 8o BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY opinion your department of Foreign Affairs was very ill-informed. And it certainly was. Let me again present to you a German pro- novmcement, made, I think, in April, 1915, by Der Tag, the German journal which in the first month of the war exclaimed: " Herr Gott, sind diese Tage schdn!" ("Lord God, how lovely are these days"). Eight months served to bring disenchantment to this extent : — "So many of our calculations have deceived us ! We expected that British India would rise when the first shot was fired in Europe ; but in reality thousands of Indians came to fight with the British against us. We anticipated that the whole British Empire would be torn to pieces ; but the colonies appear to be closer than ever united with the mother country. We expected a triumphant rebellion in South Africa, yet it turned out nothing but a failure. We expected trouble in Ireland ; but, instead, she sent her best soldiers against us. We anticipated that the party of 'peace at any price ' would be dominant in England ; but it melted away in the ardour to fight against German}^ We reckoned that England was degenerate and incapable of placing any weight in the scale, yet she seems to be our principal enemy. "The same has been the case with France and Russia. We thought that France was depraved and divided, and we find that thev are formidable opponents. We believed that the Russian people were far too discontented to fight for their Govern- ment, and we made our plans on the supposition BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 8i of a rapid collapse of Russia ; but, instead, she mobilized her millions quickly and well, her people are full of enthusiasm, and their power is crushing. Those who led us into all those mistakes and miscalculations have laid upon themseh'es a heavy responsibility." In the last sentence you would seem entireh' to concur ; ma}' we, then, infer that you assent to the entire jeremiad ? It really matters little whether you do or not. The world knows that it broadly and accurately sets forth the prevailing expectations in Germany. And, to come to the vital point, this avowal is the annihilation of all your rhetoric about the peaceful purposes of Germany. These miscalculations as to what was going to happen to the British Empire were not mere hastv estimates framed after the ist of August, 1914. They were the estimates that had been current in Germany for years, the estimates upon which your Government and your militarists and the mass of your people were not merely confident of the impotence of Britain, but eager to demonstrate it by w^ar. \Mien some of them began after the first failures to raise the plaint that Germany had been "forced into the war," Herr Maximilian Harden in his journal gave them the lie, praying that the Teutonic devil might strangle such whimperers. "We wanted this war," was his truthful declaration. It is quite true that your Governnunt did not want to have Britain on their hands at the same time with France and Russia. That goes without saying. They despised the power of ltal\ ; hut 82 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY they naturally did not want to fight four Powers at once. No, in the German calculation, Britain's turn should have come either sooner or later. The naval situation prevented its coming sooner, as Prince von Biilow has avowed. You would have attacked in 1900 if you dared. But in view of the pleasing practice in your Navy of drinking to "The Day" of war with England, and all those estimates of British impotence avowed b}^ Der Tag, and revealed by the whole course of German intrigue in India, Ireland,- and South Africa, the general disposition in Germany to crush the British Empire is just as certain an historic fact as the war itself. Your pretences to the contrary are surely very idle when your very partisans in the neutral countries — for instance. Professor Steffens, in Sweden — vehemently claim that Germany was bound to destroy the power of Britain. So your indictment of Britain as war-guilty beforehand by reason of the evolution of her foreign polic}/ has come to nothing. After asserting that her practice in the eighteenth century was to attack great continental Powers, and that she has adhered to that policy down to the present, you declare that in the nineteenth she was bold only against the weak. You appear to think that you salve this contradiction by asserting further that she thought Germany weak — an absurdity too gross for contradiction. At the same time you afhrm that her consciousness of military impotence made her dread Germany's power ! Every con- ceivable proposition finds its place in your farrago of blind aspersion. The sole semblance of support MITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 83 for your imputation of designs of conquest is the citation of the fact that Britain showed herself read}- to stand b}/ France against a M'anton German attack. That we not merely admit, but avow. On the other hand, \'our own avowal concurs with a mass of German testimony in positing the growing determination of modern (iermany to dominate the world, and the habitual calculation of the possibilities. The gross folly of that calcula- tion is a result not merely of that essential ignor- ance of foreign conditions which you angrily impute to your own governing class, Imt of the spirit of overweening arrogance that inspires the German view of things in general. On the side of political science, your people approximate to the level of the Chinese of a century back, or, for that matter, to the Ariovistus of Caesar's day. You remember : Ariovistus ad postulata Ccesaris pauca respondit: de suis virtutibus multa pro'dicavit. In one of the hundred boasts with which, in the German manner, 3'ou punctuate your book, you announce that "the Englishman" is wholly devoid [everything is "wholly" with youj of that concern to frame a theory of the universal which is inborn in every German. It is true that you have that predilection, alike in philosophy and in sociology. In a space of forty years you had at least five outstanding philosophies — -Kant's, Fichte's, Schelling's, Hegel's, Schopenhauer's, each destroying those which went before. What is now current among you, 1 do not pretend to say. They were all, broadly speaking, ideal construe tions of th(i cosmos in terms of the ego ; and ;ts 84 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY that is equally the principle of your racial sociol- ogies it may be that the political predilection has for the time swallowed up the other. The fact remains that it is latterly your national habit to sum up the communities of mankind as you used to sum up the cosmos. And you do it with the same perfect confidence in your power to realize all things in your inner consciousness. I somewhat fear lest I follow in your footsteps in thus summarizing one German stream of tendency. You are all so ready to sum up the life of any other country, and you are mostly so ignorant of your own. But this really does seem to explain itself. You of the academic class are all specialists, ill-related to the totality of things ; and yet you must generalize on the totality of things. You are. a specialist in ancient history ; and you now set yourself to generalize that of modern England, incidentally producing fifty generalizations on the whole life of a great nation which you know mainly through books, German newspapers, and German gossip. Is it not in this very fashion that your governing class reached those egregious forecasts of what was to happen to the British Empire as soon as Germany gave the push ? Are you really in a position to reproach your diplomatists ? On page 187 you inform us that Mr. Charles Trevelyan resigned his position "at the same time that his father. Sir George Trevelyan, . . . left the Cabinet." Sir George Trevelyan withdrew from parliamentary life in 1897. Your diplomatists could hardly beat that, could they ? BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 85 The fundamental trouble, learned sir, is just the national vice of systematic self-praise. .Nothing more surely undermines a man's judgment of others than a cultivated vanity ; and still more fatal to sound judgment of mankind in general is the eternal iteration by a people of its own praise. That has been the Germans' rule of life for over a hundred years. The very backwardness of their civilization set them upon comforting themselves, first by boasting of their past, and then by boast- ing of their present as soon as they felt they had one. "The old national vice of self-laudation" was imputed to them by a highly sympathetic English critic seventy years ago. How things went after 1870 I need not recall to you. Making up 3/our minds in advance that 3^ou are at once the salt of the earth, and the sun, moon, and stars thereof, how could you possibly have a "pene- trating knowledge" of any other nation, any other State ? How is knowledge of anything to be acquired in a vertigo of vanity ? In the process of auto-intoxication you have wholly lost the mental leadership of Europe. Nobody now talks of new German philosophy. German energies have indeed been abundantly addressed to the practical side of life, with impor- tant results ; but that inner life for which the practical life ultimately exists (according to civilized ideals) seems in German}^ to have descended to the physical plane. In other lands, the idea of national greatness has more and more taken the form of an ideal of national good life, to which peace is indispensable. In yours, it has 86 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY more and more meant expansion, territory, Weltmacht, W either rschaft, supremacy in arms, the power to dictate, the dominion of the holy Ger- manic stock over all other races. Your people have produced a whole library of such doctrine in the past twenty years. That way national mad- ness lies ; and the fit came in 1914. Thus have we followed you step by step in your polemic, everywhere finding irrelevance, self-con- tradiction, nugatory vituperation, defect of evi- dence. At last we come within sight of the issue which a justice-loving investigator would have put in the front and not at the back of his inquiry — the issue as to who actually forced this war on Europe. If " England" were the guilty party, why not show as much in terms of the documents of the war ? If she were guilty, what matter her national blemishes, her past, her inferiority to a Germany which is superior to everything earthly ? The guilt of causing the World War is surely great enough to swallow up every other : you yourself say as much. And yet only after 175 large pages of historical preliminaries do you come to the point, to which you devote seventeen, whereafter you resume the congenial task of simple vitupera- tion. To the real issue, then, let us come. Chapter V THE CAUSATION OF THE WAR jflS we approach the real issue, your pre- 'i^ (^ursory narrative more and more reveals the fact 3'ou are concerned to conceal, namely, that for 3^ears before 1914 the German Government and the German nation were becom- ing more and more determined on a European war — or, rather, series of wars. You reveal as much by your crescendo of anger. The policy of Edward VII, the Entente with France and Russia, the military conversations with Belgium — all constitute in your eyes a damning indict- ment. You represent them as plans for a general attack on Germany, knowing very well that they were strictly defensive. They were the simple outcome of the obvious determination of Germany to become the World Power, with the "decisive word" on sea as well as on land, mistress of the very life of Great Britain as she was mistress on the Continent. And 3^ou reveal that you know this : you expressly insist on Britain's conscious- ness of her real danger from German power. All you omit to mention is the voluminous literature of German aspirations. The anger of (Germany at British foreign policy long before 1914 you reveal all along. Then Germany was by your avowal in a consciously hostile attitude. \'our counter- asseveration thai she was lull n| pciiccliil senti- ,S7 88 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY ment is simple counter-sense. 1 have already indicated the facts of the case. On the real issue, I will first of all simply state your case as you put it, and, assuming it to be true, draw the plain inferences. Nothing else is required to expose Germany's guilt. England, France, and Russia, you say, had completed their arrangements for a war in the spring of 1914. A war of what kind ? Of attack on Germany ? Upon what pretext ? All the menaces of war since 1871 had come from Ger- many. It was she who threatened it to France in igo6, to Russia in 1908, to France again in 191 1, when she made ready for the rush, only to be held back by her bankers. On what grounds did you expect the Entente to declare war ? You do not on that point give us a single hint. You proceed, perforce, to deal with the actual origina- tion of the war — Austria's ultimatum to Serbia. It has taken you long to reach it, but there 3^ou at last arrive on page 179. And this is your argument. By the Austrian ultimatum, Russia was given the choice of letting Serbia fall or going to war in her defence. For her to yield to Austria, as you avow, would have meant recognizing Austria's supremacy in the western part of the torso of the Balkan peninsula — a tolerably stiff proposition, as you admit. On the other hand, you contend, the subjection of Serbia was necessary to Austria's "existence," now that the Serbian agitators had taken to assassination. The proper course, then, was for Russia to stand aside and let Austria work her BRITAIX ]'ERSUS GERMAXY 89 will on Serbia. And this, you feel sure, she would have been able to do if only England had refused to be a partv to the war. Russia would have given wa\' to Germany's menace as she did perforce in 1908, when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia was still too weak and disorganized after the Japanese War to fight. Russia yielding, Austria would have done as she wished with Serbia, and we should all have lived happy ever after. That is your case ! I really desire no more damning indictment of the Austro-German alliance. What you call "peace" is the peace of European submission to every Austro-German aggression. Once the Central Powers were supreme in the Balkans, they could proceed to their further designs. The Bagdad Railway, as their Pan-Germanists pro- claimed, would put them in a position to seize Egypt, whereafter they could absorb Turkey. At that stage Britain would presumably be a com- paratively easy morsel. But even at the start, the "existence" of Germany, as you and your statesmen inform us, called for the subjection of Belgium. As it was Russia's duty to stand by and see Serbia subjected, so it was ours to stand by and see Belgium bludgeoned. How long it would take to make the seizure of Holland necessary for Germany's "existence" you do not inform us; but, enlightened on that subject by your Pan- Germanist literature, we can guess. The necessity would certainly not have been long delayed. And then would have come "The Day" for reckoning with England. 90 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY It is quite unnecessary to argue the latter point. Your express positions in regard to Serbia and Belgium are absolutely sufficient ; and there can be no more overwhelming proof of the madness that has seized the German mind than your assumption that these positions constitute a tenable case. Perhaps, indeed, I do you personally an injustice. The fashion in which you hurry over this — the real issue — suggests that perhaps you know as well as I do the monstrosity of your argument. You speak of what you call the "cool effronter};- " of Lord Grey's handling of his terrible dilemma. I will not pretend to impute coolness either to you or to any other champion of Ger- many. As for effrontery, the only ground for hesitation about applying the epithet is the fashion in which, as aforesaid, you hurry over the real issue in seventeen pages after spending 170 in preliminary irrelevance. Perhaps the accurate description would be "suppressed shame." It is after your avowal that the Kaiser's speech on June 20 indicated the near approach of war that you make this egregious assertion : — "The German Under-Secretary went so far [in striving to avert war] as to explain to the English Ambassador that the German Government had not prompted the hurried return of the Kaiser from his northern summer trip, which was ex- pected on the evening of July 26th, and that they regretted it because 'thereby disquieting rumours might arise.' " And you add the footnote : "The German Kaiser had undertaken this journey in spite of the murder of the heir to the Austrian BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 91 throne, and had not yet cut it short, in order to show all the world that Germany stood aloof from the negotiations and was making no military preparations, but was quietly awaiting the course of events." Such is your official lesson, duly recited. I doubt whether any intelligent neutral will feel complimented by your assumption that stuff of this kind will serve to hoodwink neutrals in general. The make-believe of the Kaiser and the German Foreign Office is too gross to deceive a child ; and you contrive to make the farce still worse by obliviously confessing elsewhere that on June 20 the Kaiser had made up his mind that war was at hand. Had he then gone to the north to try to recover a peaceful frame of mind ? Would it not be well to stick to one hne of fiction at a time ? Yours is indeed a pitiable position. With what semblance of conviction, I wonder, did you frame your proposition that the assassination at Serajevo had made it necessary to Austria's "existence" to lay her hand on Serbia ? You were, of course, aware that Austria had formally proposed to Italy that the Triple Alliance should make war on Serbia in 1913. You will doubtless deny this ; but if you will turn to your book you will find that on page 179 you expressly admit that the assumption of a coming war was made in Germany before the assassination. When at the launching of the ship Bismarck at Hamburg on June 20 the Kaiser repeated, "with a rising emphasis," Prince Bismarck's phrase : "We Germans fear God, aiirl 92 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY nothing else in the world," his words, you avow, left hardly a doubt that war was at hand. Quite so. Multitudes of Germans had been expecting it for a 3^ear and more. And you had further revealed, in your immediately previous remarks on the damage to German prestige that had accrued from the Turco- Bulgarian War, your conviction that Germany needed somehow to reaffirm herself. The assassination at Serajevo was simply seized on as a pretext either for the war determined on or for a blow at the prestige of Russia and a de- cisive imposition of Pan-German power on the Balkans. Whether Germans really believe that Russia and France would not have gone to war if Britain had remained neutral, I am not greatly concerned to inquire. You all pay extraordinar\^ compli- ments to Britain's influence, after all your declama- tion about her effeteness, her impotence, her cowardice. Some Russian statesmen, on the other hand, seem to have held that if Britain had definitely declared from the first that she would join in any Russian resistance to Austro-German aggression, German}/ would have given way. These generalizations, obviously, are alike incap- able of proof. Even if war could have been staved off in 191 4, the evolution of Germany was fatally advancing in the one direction. The growth of Chauvinism which so startled and alarmed Pro- fessor Nippold was going on at an accelerating rate. A nation which could put forward, through its scholars, such a plea as you advance in regard to the general duty of letting Austria work her BRITAIX ]^liRSi'S (,I':RMA\Y yj will on Serbia, and such a plea as your literati framed for German Kiiltur as justifying the atrocious invasion of Belgium, had passed the point of rational recovery. The more carefully your pleas are weighed, the more monstrous are they seen to be. If ever there was an international case in human history in which a settlement was feasible, it was the case of the assassination at Serajevo. Serbia's acquiescence in Austria's demands was carried to the very verge of utter national humiliation : it surprised all observers. Were it not for the plain fact that Austria's ultimatum was meant to bring about either war or abject submission, every sane man in Europe would have counted on a settle- ment on some of the lines suggested by the Allies. But, as you avow, all efforts for peace were frustrated by "the determination of the Vienna Cabinet to take no backward step." Here we come to our last issue. You in effect suggest German regret that Vienna was- so in- flexible. No German document has ever been produced to show that Berlin put any pressure on Vienna to modify its demands ; but you quaintly cite an intercepted letter of the Belgian charge d'affaires at Petrograd, to the effect that both there and at Vienna Germany had tried "every means to prevent a general conflict." What, pra}', does that mean ? We know very well that Ger- many did not want a general conflict at that moment. She wanted a walk-over for Austria. But did she press Austria to limit lier (l(Muands ? On your own i)rinciples, it was lici" duty to do so. 94 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY That is to say, if it was Britain's duty to try to deter Russia from fighting, it was Germany's duty to try to deter Austria. And, may I ask, do you really expect us -to believe that Austria would have persisted if Germany had said she would not back her up against Russia ? You considerately spare us that flight of dialectic. You in effect confess that Germany tnjould not put pressure upon Austria. Here are your words (page i8i) : — "England . . . urged a conference of England, France, Germany, and Italy, which should make proposals of mediation. This proposal was, of course, unacceptable : it would be a heavy humilia- tion for Austria and also for Germany if the Hapsburg monarchy, of which the existence was threatened in the gravest degree and mortally injured (!), were to come before the Forum of Europe practically in the character of one accused (!), on an equal footing with the Murderer- State Serbia, and there let herself be pressed to make concessions." Now, at last, all the cards are on the table. Once more we learn that Germany held that Austria ought to have her way with Serbia. If the assassination of a prince or dignitary [or why not a simple citizen ?] of State A by a subject of that State is supposed to result from the machina- tions of somebody in State B, the former, being thus mortally injured "in its existence," is entitled to demand to be let take over the poHce and judicial system of State B, because to ask it to accept any sort of arbitration would be to BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 95 propose to put it on the same footing with a Murderer-State. To comment upon this masterpiece of Germanic ethic and jurisprudence would be to disturb the moral and literary effect. I will merely point the moral. When I first saw it seriously maintained that the assassination at Serajevo was really brought about by the machinations of the agents provocateurs of Austria, known to have been other- wise abundantly active in Serbia, I was strongly incredulous. Even Austrian corruption did not seem capable of such Satanism as that. But when I read (i) your vindication of Austria's insistence on the absolute submission of Serbia, and your deliberate attribution of the guilt of the murder (2) to the Serbian State, and (3) finalty to Russia ("Russia was the really guilty one, and had instigated the Serbians to their procedure" : page 180), I see something like a juridical com- pulsion to take up the point of view indicated. If Austria and Germany indict at once the Serbian and the Russian Governments for the crime, there is only one way of settling the question. The world-jury, if it is to consider your charges, must inquire at the same time whether the Austrian police engineered an assassination which, by your account, gave Austria an absolutely irreducible case for demanding the surrender of Serbia. That which seemed incredible, your polemic raises to the plane of the credible. Pending the possible inquest which may one day disclose the facts, we must be content for the present to sum up over your proposition that 96 BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY Austria could not be put to the humiliation of a peaceful settlement, that her war ought to have been permitted, and that the real peace-breaker was England, which encouraged Russia and France to shield Serbia, and wickedly declined to let Germany bludgeon Belgium, where no Teu- tonic prince had chanced to be assassinated. On that our debate ends. Let the issue go so to the world, to posterity, by all means. I have no misgiving about the verdict. It will simply be that Austria was Germany's tool, and that, whatever were the true inwardness of the assassination, that event was fixed upon as the pretext for a course which must either pre- cipitate war at once or ensure its early outbreak. "Quite striking," you observe (page 192), "is the fact that Austria, the ostensible originator of the war, immediately upon the last decisive negotia- tions was already thrust into the background : the Governments and the peoples were fighting not against Austria's seizure of the Balkan peninsula, but against the German Empire and the German people." Precisely so. Germany was the real mover ; and your formulas about the impossibility of humiliating Austria and Germany by asking Austria to arbitrate would be merely nauseous if they were not so exquisitely absurd. Austria would never have forced war but for Germany's backing. The war was engineered between them ; and there remains in Austria's regard only the memory of her startled percep- tion, at the last moment, that after all her bullying she was to be taken at her word, and was to put BRITAIN VERSUS GERMANY 97 at stake her own existence for Germany's behoof. By your account, the first move in the World War took place because Austria must not be humiliated when she made a monstrous demand. She has since had humiliations enough added to her long historical list — the humihation, in par- ticular, of seeing her invading army driven out of little Serbia by the Serbians, and Serbia re- occupied only by Germany's help. Had that and other things been foreseen, we should not have had the present war. The world is paying its immeasurable penalty because Austria has been, as of old, contemptible, and Germany more than ever insane. The wrecking of European peace is your joint work. On a simple survey of your own case, any honest jurist would be driven to pro- nounce that you are collectively either the most iniquitous politicians or the worst controversialists in Europe. The true summing-up is that you are both. The destruction among you of all sense of international reciprocity has entailed the perver- sion of the reasoning faculty. If any rational neutral had any doubt as to Germany's having planned the war, he would find his solution in the simple fact that Germany was prepared for the war in every way save one. Her land armament was overwhelmingly strong, especially in great artillery. The one vital point at which she v