WALDSTEIN (^LIBRARY j UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA I SAN DIEGO \ r- C#-uJP an d other smaller organisations, as laid down, gramme not only in the well-known book of Bernhardi, but All _ in numerous documents and in all the speeches made deutsche by the representatives of these parties, was step by carried step adopted in its completeness by the German through Government with the Kaiser at its head. The in its en- tirety Alldeutsche Partei, which in the past was supposed to present ^e, anc * definitely maintained by German authorities Govern- to be, a negligible minority, now has absolute and ient> undisputed control of the fate of the German nation. GERMAN EXPANSION 13 But even at the time that diplomatic negotiations preceding the outbreak of the war were progressing, and on the actual declaration of war, this aggressive programme had for all practical purposes already been adopted. It can be shown beyond all doubt that the war was begun by Germany, not because of the danger threatening the self-preservation of Germany and of German culture from the Russian and the Slav ; that the Teuton had no place in the Balkans, where the claims of the Slav must be admitted to be paramount ; and that, so far from the Western Powers of the Triple Entente (certainly England and probably France) being a party to Slav aggres- sion, which endangered the independence of Germany and her people and the development and expansion of its culture, they had intimated clearly their opposi- tion to such an aggression and even their readiness to enforce it. The war was beyond all doubt forced upon the world by those who were convinced that the German race and German civilisation must expand in extent and in power all over the world on the same scale as the British Empire. Wherever this expansion might be impeded or blocked by British power and British interests such obstacles should be removed by force of arms. Above all, that the Teutonic race and Teutonic civilisation should supersede the world-hegemony of Britain and should wrest from its hated rival the possessions and pre- dominance which English forefathers, under favour- able circumstances of history, had won for England, together with the numerous and grave responsibilities and duties which Great Britain thereby owed to the civilised world. How, within the last ten or twenty years, this national programme, this " destiny " of the German peoples, had been impressed upon the German nation, with what systematic organisation among the adult population, and with what thorough 14 THE IMMEDIATE CAUSES OF THE WAR and far-reaching pedagogic training it had been spread and fostered among the youthful population, who are now righting the German battles, in schools and universities, Professor Nippold's book amply proves by documentary evidence. The glorification of might, irrespective of right, is the leading moral, or immoral, factor in this national movement ; and it has ended, as is now finally proved, in this ruthless war of frightfulness by land and sea, ignoring all human feeling, human pity, all Christian charity, all chivalry and military honour, dealing at the outset with treaties as scraps of paper, and breaking the national plighted troth in repudiating those inter- national agreements to which Germany was a signa- tory. It has led to the complete demoralisation, or rather, amoralisation, of the German people. German In the light of this supreme result of German Kultur. Alldeutsche patriotism, the invocation of higher moral aims, conveyed by the cant use of the term Kultur, does not only strike the impartial observer as in- sincere, but as grotesquely paradoxical. The highest flight to which the apologists of German ruthlessness can soar in upholding the cause of German civilisa- tion is embodied in the letters published by the Times, in which Herr Ballin and Herr Rathenau (the director of the large commercial electrical works at Berlin) extol German culture and German moral elevation as compared with English degeneracy and the idleness of the English nation, whose conception of life and all the aims of science and art do not exclude the cultivation of leisure, physically and spiritually, in developing the amenities of civilised existence. English culture and life are contrasted with a German conception of science and human existence entirely subordinated to commercialism, to industrial progress and wealth in one word, a life of banausic materialism. But these captains of GERMAN KULTUR 15 industry who, with the ruthless militarists and the penurious Alldeutsche Streber, now rule Germany show, with singular naivete, how their conception of science, art, and social life, entirely subordinated to the immediate and ultimate aim of material wealth, has superseded all other ideals of German Kultur on which the Germans once prided themselves, and which they even now occasionally claim with mani- fest insincerity, when extolling so-called " German idealism." Let us consider the comparative weight and value of this German Kultur which is arrogantly put for- ward as so superior to that of all other nations, that it ought, in the Tightness of things, to supersede all other forms of civilisation. Concomitant with the spirit of antagonism as its more positive complement, the Germans cultivate an inflated national pride and exalt, far beyond its intrinsic and comparative value, German Kultur. Kultur, be it noted, is not quite synonymous with our term "culture"; but connotes the individual state of civilisation to which each nation has attained. In the first instance, they contrast their Kultur with that of Russia, and rightly maintain that it would be a misfortune to the whole world if their Germanic civilisation were superseded by that of the Slavs. We may at once admit that we should all regard such an eventuality as a loss to humanity. But, as we shall see, there never was, and never will be, any danger especially as regards the power of Great Britain to regulate or influence the course of his- torical events of such a catastrophe. Much as we appreciate and prize the civilisation represented by Pushkin, Gogol, Llermontof, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Solovev, Yakovlev, Chekhov, Gorky, Merezhkovsky, Krylov, Kolstov, Nekrasov ; of Glinka, Dargomijsky, Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, 4 16 THE IMMEDIATE CAUSES OF THE WAR Moussorgsky, Boroudin, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Glazounov, Stravinsky, Scriabin ; of Mendeleyev, Metchnikov, Pavlov, Lebedev, Hvolson, Kovalevsky, Lobachevsky, Minkovsky, and Vino- gradov we do not think that the Russia of to- day, and for some time to come, can, with any advantage to the world at large, effectually impose its civilisation on any one of the Western civilised powers. But these Chauvinists claim moral and intellectual pre-eminence for German civilisation, and, appealing to the world history which is " the final tribunal of the world " (Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht), they are convinced that the predominance of Germany is thus morally justified, nay, is a necessary conse- quence of any reasonable and equitable regulation of the destiny of the world. Let us at once deal with this chimera of German Kultur and assign to it its right place. It is futile and childish to institute such comparisons in things of the mind, which are im- ponderable and ought never to be compared with a view to establishing comparative claims of pre- eminence. As Heine has said : " Who can weigh flames ? " But when such a childish comparison is forced on us, let us make it truthfully. Many of us The hege- gratefully and unstintingly recognise and acknow- Serman* ledge the hegemony of Germany in several depart- cuiture in ments and aspects of civilised life and higher mental depart- activity. We have profited by German achievement ments. anc j have endeavoured to learn and to absorb the spirit of it. The foremost and most characteristic achievement of the German mind, for which the world must thus be grateful and by which we have profited, is the thorough and rational organisation of thought and science, especially on the pedagogic side, as embodied in their educational system from schools to universities. This has resulted in the ORGANISATION OF THOUGHT AND SCIENCE 17 most striking and effective modification of the whole life of the German people, and is the source of all the success which they have achieved even in the most material and practical aspects of their existence. It means the realisation of the value of the highest, and even the most abstract, thought and science, by the whole population, including the industrial and commercial world. In this respect we have all learnt from Germany and are still endeavouring to follow her lead. But in the actual advancement of Science NO such and Thought itself, in the imposing of new directions ^e- .^ of thought, which puts a stamp on the spirit of the other as- age as it directly advances each department of human cMifsa- knowledge, Germany has no pre-eminence over France tion. and England. Our thinkers have thus contributed as much to the advance of civilisation as have those of Germany. Probably a strong case might be made for the pre-eminence of both England and France in this respect. In the domain of art we may at once admit that Pre- Germany has in modern times led the way in music. e ence We need not go the lengths of Nietzsche and deny man this by asserting that " a German cannot know what music - music is. The men who pass as German musicians are foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italian, Dutchmen, or Jews." Even if (as he asserts) Beethoven was Dutch in origin, and even if Wagner, as he suggests, had Jewish blood, the Dutchman certainly became an Austrian German, and if Wagner had Jewish blood, he was as much of German nationality as most modern Teutons, and much more so than a Prussian semi-Slav. The latter, by the way, has hardly pro- duced any of the great men upon whose achievements German Kultur rests its claims. But in all the other arts and in literature, especially within the last century, the place of Germany is distinctly second to that of France and England. i8 THE IMMEDIATE CAUSES OF THE WAR in the More than all this, however, in all that concerns the and C in rtS " Art of Living," in the political and social education political of the people, Germany has much to learn from the standards Western European nations. The average political the education of the British people has for centuries " A|*-f- QT Living" been, and is at present, higher than that of the Germany Q erma ns ; and their domestic and social life, the second to .... . France true art of living and their home-life, all tending to England anc ^ conforming with the higher standards of social ethics, which have as their ideal the type of the " gentleman " are such, that it would be a sad day, not only for England, but for the world, if military efficiency and power were to replace these by the Kultur dominating Germany. 1 Ignorance But ^ *k e ^^ an< ^ Literature of France and Eng- of the land and all that home and social life in England German mean, the German professors who have made them- and the selves the mouthpieces of the Chauvinists know very men as little, if anything. How many of them have even a regards no dding acquaintance with British architecture not Kuitw only Mediaeval and Renaissance, but since the days and ranCe f Christopher Wren of the paintings of Gains- England, borough, Reynolds, Romney, Raeburn, Hoppner, Turner, not to mention contemporary masters ? How many have read (though they may know Byron) Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth, Browning and Tennyson ? They apparently do know the works of Wilde and Bernard Shaw ; but are they acquainted with any of our leading contemporary writers and poets ? And, as far as our national life and our life at home are concerned, how many of them have lived among us and entered into the life of every class of the community ? I am told on the best of authority that the coryphceus among the political and official university professors, who for years has written 1 Further exposition of these facts will be found in later portions of the book . GERMAN MISINFORMATION 19 and, as an authority, has been listened to with con- vinced respect by the German public on England and English affairs (Professor Schiemann), visited England for the first time two years ago, when he took part in the Historical Congress held in London. On the other hand, I venture to state that there are very large numbers of people in England and in the United States who have spent years in study and in travel in Germany, and have had opportunities of intimate acquaintanceship and intercourse with repre- sentatives of every class and occupation among the population of that country. The question must have forced itself on the minds of many, after the experiences since the war began, how men with the best of training in scientific discipline should have proved so incapable of forming an unbiassed opinion as was manifested by the various proclamations signed by the most distinguished names in modern science and learning. What to my mind is still more astonishing is the fact that with the highly developed sense of truth such as a scientific training ought to give, they should have at all ventured to express decided opinions when they had not at their disposal the facts and sources of information upon which an induction could be made or a judgment formed. For I am informed that, while we here had before us the German White book and published accounts of the German communiques concerning the war, our own White and Blue books and similar publications of our allies were, until quite recently, forbidden in Germany, a fine of 3,000 marks or thirty days' im- prisonment being imposed upon any person found in possession of such publications. It would lead us too far astray to account for the mentality of the German man of learning and his preparatory training to explain the singular phenomenon of his incapacity to judge fairly of matters political and international. 20 THE IMMEDIATE CAUSES OF THE WAR But in this one definite case, it is enough to say that most of them were not possessed of the true facts upon which to base a fair judgment. In any case we can account for the almost arrogant assump- tion of superiority assigned by them to the Kultur of Germany over that of the Western States, though this assumption is in no wise justified. CHAPTER II THE OLDER GERMANY THERE was and there still exists a German Kulturihe which we all acknowledge and respect. This national civilisation had its roots deep down in the historic the past past and produced the generation which achieved ^ r ^ ted German unity, established the German Empire, deep- spirit of ened and widened German thought, raised on high Germany, and carried far afield the torch of science and of learning, and, above all, instilled into the whole of the German people and into the very air they breathed the spirit of thoroughness. The Germans of to-day did not achieve these results themselves ; but they have received them as a priceless gift from their fathers and grandfathers, and from these results whatever success they may have achieved in peace or in war has come to them. They have, in the present generation, directed this vital and elevating force exclusively into the channels of material interest, have tarnished its brightness, have materialised its spirituality, and have, and are, continuously dimin- ishing the rich patrimony which the Germans of old handed down to them. The Germany of to-day is^the Germany of com- German mercial Streberthum in the service of military f orce . The age which has grown up to initiate and to carry on this war will be marked as the apotheosis of Stre- berthum. Now the Streber is not the impostor or adventurer of old. He has learnt something and 22 THE OLDER GERMANY knows something, and he might learn and know much more. But no time is left for the deepening of his knowledge and the elevation of its uses, because he is swayed by the premature and superlative desire if I may be forgiven a modern vernacular phrase " to make it pay at once, and to get there at once." The English and the Americans have their " climbers " and " pushers," and the French have their struglifers and their arrives. But these repulsive off-shoots of modern commercialism are with us free from cant and self-deception ; they are clear-cut types who openly, and often with coarse cynicism, repudiate all higher professions. But the German Streber uses great phrases : he plays the part of the poor man of science or scholar, nobleman or diplomat, or even soldier. In the spirit of these individual Streber the nation as a whole, which aims at power and nothing more, whose professed goal is commercial and financial expansion, will pose before the world as the champion of Kultur ; and, a revolver in the one hand, raises high with the other the school- master's birch, threatening the world with pedagogic chastisement to improve its mind and manners ; while speedily dropping the friendly swish, it grasps at the money-bags of its recalcitrant pupils. This is the world and these are the aims of the Alldeutsche Streber who have made this war. But it would be as inaccurate and untrue, as it is unfair and misleading, to believe or maintain that the whole German nation is made up of such Streber, though, for the time being, they have won the day in Germany and have succeeded in imposing their own would-be ideals upon the bulk of the nation. The older type of the true German not the Prussian junker, the learned or unlearned adventurer still exists and represents the majority of the German nation. His ideals still persist in moving and guiding the mass of the people, THE GERMAN STREBER 23 however much they may be cast into the remote and invisible distance for the time, and however much his eyes may be bedimmed by the untruths, the sup- pression of facts, and the misdirection of patriotic devotion which the militarists have spread over the nation. When the eyes of the sane majority among the Germans can again stand the bright light of truth which has been withheld from them, and they revive from this fit of barbarous madness which has come upon them, they will return to their true selves and the fatherland will again be the country and the nation which so many of us have loved and admired. The Germany of old that has been swept aside or The effect submerged by the Germany of modern Streberthum**? CQn ~ and militarism, the domination of German Chauvin- tkm. ism, with Berlin as a centre of influence and focus of vision, was really the product of the Germany that consisted of numerous small States and principalities. Through these and through the consequent system of decentralisation, their Kultur which we admired was called into existence and received its differentiating stamp. It was at once individualised in these several centres, giving varied character to the different forms of spiritual life, and at the same time diffusing such spiritual life into every distant part of the country and into every social layer of the nation. It differed in this from the culture of France and England and every other nation, where the large capital, the metropolis, was the dominant home and centre draw- ing to itself all intellectual forces and all talent and diffusing from this centre that one dominant form of civilisation and even way of thinking. In the other European countries culture was not only stereotyped into one dominant form, but, by irre- sistibly attracting and centralising the spiritual life within the metropolis, the various provincial centres were drained of their talent and of their spiritual 24 THE OLDER GERMANY vitality, and the nation at large, outside the metro- polis, fell into apathy and lethargy in matters of the mind, resigning itself to narrowness and inactivity and spreading an atmosphere of vulgar materialism and provincialism. German culture did not thus become metropolitan ; it did not depend upon one capital with a huge population, concentrating all culture as well as all misery, but was diffused over the whole country and throughout the whole people. Idealism could thus thrive ; and out of this idealism grew the quality of thoroughness which is the greatest spiritual asset which the German nation possesses. These forces again were favoured in their growth and persistency by the decentralisation and particular- isation of national life throughout the numberless principalities, the smaller capitals with their great universities and their highly organised schools. Each principality had its leading theatres, opera-houses, and concert halls, with highly trained artists, dramatic and musical ; its poets and men of letters ; its com- posers, painters, and sculptors. These were not attracted to the one national metropolis, but pre- ferred to live in the smaller towns and principalities among the congenial society where they were honoured and appreciated. The tradition of paying tribute and honour and of conferring tangible and manifest dis- tinction upon these leaders of culture was created and fostered by the petty princes and rulers, even by the civic authorities of these numerous centres of higher life. No general or cabinet minister, or judge, still less a successful financier and captain of industry, could rob them of the distinction conferred upon them from above and which was reflected throughout the population. There was thus bred and fostered, as a potent reality among the population, the hero-worship of the " Knights of the Mind," of the representatives of art and science ; and the young man of the day THE OLD AND NEW IDEALS 25 in his dreams of glory turned to the vision of the great personalities of a Schiller, a Goethe, a Heine ; of a Beethoven and Mozart ; of an Alexander Humboldt and of the great band of philosophers and men of science ; and his imagination and his longing dreams of fame were fired by these monumental figures in the Valhalla of German greatness. He would have preferred to wear the mantle of their sovereignty to that of any of the great statesmen or generals in Germany's past. What a change in spirit has come over the German people within the last decade or two, through the influence of the Chauvinists, may best be appreciated in their own words when, as quoted by Nippold, one of their spokesmen, Medizinalrath Dr. W. Fuchs, addresses the German youth in the following words : l " Who are the men who soar to the greatest heights in the history of the German people, whom do the heart-beats of the German encircle with the most ardent love ? Do you think Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, Marx ? O, no ; but Barbarossa, the Great Frederick, Bliicher, Moltke, Bismarck, the hard men of blood (Blutmenschen) . They who sacrificed thousands of lives, they are the men towards whom, from the soul of the people, the tenderest feeling, a truly ador- ing gratitude wells forth. Because they have done what we now ought to do. Because they were so brave, so fearless of responsibility, as no one else. But now civic morality must condemn all these great men ; for the civilian guards nothing more jealously than his civic morality and, nevertheless, his holiest thrills are evoked by the Titan of the blood-deed ! " The supreme expression of the last phase in this The Em- earlier glorious tradition of the German people con- Express centrated round the court of the Crown Prince Fred- erick. 1 Die Post, January 28, 1912. 26 THE OLDER GERMANY Frederick and his consort. It was through their influence that Germany undertook, as a great national feat in peace, the excavations of Olympia which aroused such interest throughout all layers of Ger- man society and filled the nation with just pride, initiating a movement in that one department of the study of the Hellenic past which caused renewed activity and emulation in every other civilised country. In the palace of the Crown Prince, and later of the Empress Frederick, the great men of the day in literature, science, and art were the familiar and welcome guests. Helmholtz and Virchow, Curtius and Mommsen, von Ranke, Joachim in fact, every leader of art and thought in Berlin were drawn to this imperial centre ; and every person of distinction who came as a visitor, even those from distant countries, found an honoured welcome there. It has been said by more than one observer of Ger- man affairs, not only that this war would have been inconceivable had the Emperor Frederick survived ; but that German national life would, on the lines of its true eminence, have advanced to greater heights in our own days and would have had a last- ing and elevating influence on the life and civilisa- tion of all other European countries and of the world at large. No greater loss has been sustained by the world at large in the death of one man, per- haps in the whole of history, than by the premature death of the Emperor Frederick. Theedu. Above all, however, was this spirit of ideal thor- cational oughness fostered in the Germany of old by the system of education. The distinctive advantage which Germany thus possessed is again closely knit up with the decentralisation of its smaller States and principalities. This distinctive advantage, in which Germany differs from all other countries in modern times, is to be found in the fact that in those days FRUITS OF THE OLDER EDUCATION 27 the educational system was constructed from its highest manifestation downwards it was, as it were, deductive and theoretical and not inductive and empirical. Education did not begin from below, arising out of elementary or elemental needs of daily life, and then, spasmodically and unsystematically, work its way upwards in slow and uncertain and irrational progression, as was and is the case in most other countries ; but the direction was given, the keynote was struck, by the highest institutions of learning in their purest and highest spiritual form, namely their universities. Pure knowledge and systematic thoroughness were aimed at as the ulti- mate goal, and up to this all the lower and more elementary stages were to lead. Every one of these smaller principalities thus had its university, where pure science and learning were studied thoroughly for their own sake. In those days, to a lesser degree even in the present day, the smaller provincial uni- versities could retain on their staff the higher repre- sentatives of science and learning, and they produced more remarkable work than did the great metro- politan universities of Berlin and Vienna. The same applied to their schools, especially their higher schools or gymnasia. Many a small town (not by the excep- tional possession of rich and aristocratic foundations, such as some of our public schools have) was famed for having some of the best schools in Germany. It is a noteworthy fact that the present Emperor and his brothers were sent to the gymnasium of Ploen, a small provincial town, even the name of which is unknown to most foreigners. Step by step, from the universities downward, the schools and the whole educational system of Germany was thus built up on the thorough and systematic conception of purest and highest knowledge. In spite of all endeavours to the contrary, the Chauvinists and Streber have 28 THE OLDER GERMANY not been able utterly to destroy this spirit ; but, in spite of themselves, and unknown to themselves, they have been able to profit by it in skilfully using this spirit in their militaristic and wholly mercenary tendencies and aims. Though they wish to replace the spirit of pure science, learning, and philosophy by the narrow standards of applied science only, and though in their hearts they despise the bene- factors upon whose efforts they live and succeed, they have not been able to suppress the successors of men like the mathematician Gauss, who drank a toast to the study of pure mathematics in extolling that study as " the only science which had never The older been polluted by a practical application." In recent entirely * vears > however, the university is being more and lost, but more replaced by the technical schools, the scientific super- 7 pursuits of which are directly made subservient to sededby the ruling spirit of commercialism, as the gymnasia. modern r . . f* material- the homes of the humanities among schools, are Briber being more and more replaced by the schools directly thum. ministering to material gain. The spokesmen for science and its claim to respect in Germany are now the captains of industry like Herr Rathenau and Herr Ballin, 1 who glorify before the world the achievements of German Kultur and limit it to the complete subordination of all spiritual effort to the increase of industrial activity and of material wealth. They glory in the fact that their scientific researchers have been ensnared and enslaved entirely in the service of their great industries, and that the German worker forgoes all the other amenities and recreative refinements of life in the subordination of the soul's forces to this one and only criterion of material success and the final goal of all culture. That the British people, like the ancient Greeks, could culti- vate physical vigour and a common spirit of recrea- 1 Letters quoted above, p. 12. THE TRUE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE AND LEARNING 29 tive social impulse in their national games and sports, is to them a clear mark of national inferiority and degeneracy. Some of their more far-sighted countrymen always regarded the results of our national sports and pastimes as a great national asset in our favour and endeavoured, during the years preceding the war, to introduce these British institutions into Germany. They would do better were they to remind us of their past inheritance in their national and civic theatres and concert-halls and museums throughout the country, and the facility with which the popu- lation at large can enjoy these means of spiritual relaxation. It is in this one particular sphere that other nations can learn from them and are willing to learn from them. But their industrial success and the realisation of the spirit of thoroughness which underlies it was the product of the Germany of the past, the very existence of which they have been undermining, and against which their militarism and the present war with its barbarous and degrading methods of warfare are striking the death-blow. Year by year, since 1871, Berlin is asserting itself as the centre of German Kultur, destroying or sap- ping the vitality of all these numerous centres from which emanated the true vitality of the German spirit. It is the home and fountain of all Streberthum, which means the undoing of the moral and spiritual vitality of the German nation. Let us pause for a moment and endeavour to recall a picture of the German as we have known him, and let me endeavour in a few strokes to recall to memory the various types of Germans who existed before and who, I repeat, still exist in great numbers. To begin with the most prominent and most powerful caste. I can vividly recall to mind in memory the personality of one of the rulers of the 30 THE OLDER GERMANY lesser German States, who died at an advanced age shortly before the war. He was, like the Prince Consort of England, a successor to those princes who created the Court of Weimar in which Goethe lived, and from which an atmosphere of most refined cul- ture emanated over the world. Well over six feet in height and of military and commanding erectness in stature, he had none of the stiffness and assertive awkwardness of the typical Prussian soldier. A soldier he was, however, having fought through the whole of the Franco- Prussian War in a high com- mand, and having profitably devoted much time and thought to the theoretical and scientific study of military matters ever since. But he restricted such activities and interests to his military duties and occupations and never carried the manners or tone of the soldier into his civil life as the ruler of his country, and still less into his private and social intercourse. With his clean-cut and refined features, his bright clear eyes and fair complexion, his long, silvery beard, he presented a most attractive per- sonality and combined to the highest and fullest degree dignity, kindness, and gentleness. This gentle- ness was carried so far as to produce a strong element of almost childlike sensitiveness and shyness in his nature, which his own imposing bearing and the visible attributes of his exalted position could not quite obscure or hide. I can hardly recall among the many people I have met in my life one whose range of education and intellectual interests were at once as wide and deep, as versatile and as thorough, for an example of which one naturally turns back to the great personalities of the Italian Renaissance. One figure in modern times at once occurs to one's mind as being of the same calibre and quality, namely, that of a woman, the Empress Frederick. His school and university studies had been most AN ENLIGHTENED GERMAN RULER 31 systematic and thorough, and were completed in his youth by extensive travels. General education was supplemented by almost professional training in drawing and painting, which led to such proficiency that the leading German painter of his time, the elder Kaulbach, expressed his regret " that the Prince could not devote himself entirely to the pursuit of the painter's craft, as he would certainly have won for himself a prominent place among the artists of his day." In music his catholic and refined appreciativeness covered the whole field of past and contemporary art and led him to sympathetic sup- port of the new movements which he stimulated and encouraged, he himself being a distinguished per- former. None of the arts were foreign to him, in- cluding sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts. In literature his interest, appreciation, and understanding covered the same wide field, far beyond the limits of his own country and its lan- guage Well versed in French and Italian, his English was imperfect ; and yet he strove to master and to follow the great movements of English letters and thought, and was one of the most thorough Shakespeare scholars in Germany. The same interest was manifested in science and philosophy. He sought the company and friendship of the leading scholars and scientists in the neighbouring university, took the keenest and most active interest in learning and research as pursued there, and was himself a direct supporter of the more practical application of science to the higher optical production of scien- tific instruments, which have not only made his small capital the centre of one of the most advanced and scientifically refined industries for the whole world, but have at the same time given an example for economic co-operation and the direct bestowal of commercial profit for the social betterment of the 5 32 THE OLDER GERMANY community. Besides this, he was a keen sportsman with the true sportsman's spirit, fond of horses, an exceptionally good shot, who even when eighty years of age stalked and bagged his stag in the woods and laid him low in the most perfect style, avoiding all cruelty and pain. From his earliest days to his recent death he made of his principality and its capital a centre of highest culture. He attracted to it and held there, by the material and social induce- ments which he could offer, the leading representa- tives of art and culture. From the early days when Otto Ludwig, the novelist and critic (whose essays on Shakespeare will always remain a classic), was resident in his capital, he invited thither the poets Geibel and Bodenstaedt, the dramatist Paul Lindau, and many others. He drew to his capital the musician Hans von Buelow and many of the now prominent conductors of Germany, to all of whom he gave official positions in order to enable them to devote themselves to their art without material care, and at the same time made their homes the centres of highest culture for the community over which he presided. Brahms became his personal friend, con- stantly visited the capital, so that his own home was one of the centres from which the music of that great master emanated over the world . The orchestra of that small town was one of the foremost in Europe and astonished audiences as far away even as London by the perfection of their rendering of classical mas- terpieces. The most widely known, however, among these peaceful achievements was the theatre ; and here, under his personal direction, a new phase of modern dramatic art was initiated, which, owing to the visits paid by the company to most of the capitals of the world, marked a distinct epoch in dramatic presentation. When we add to this that the capital of this thinly populated principality was not long THE -GERMAN ARISTOCRAT 33 ago inhabited by not more than 15,000 people, and now does not exceed 20,000, it will be understood what the influence of this one leading personality meant. To these qualities must be added the gracious, kindly, and warm-hearted attitude which he held towards all those who came in contact with him. He was a true gentleman. Finally, I must add that he was strongly opposed to the modern spirit which he identified with Prussia and with Berlin, even though his first wife was a Prussian princess, and that he deplored the change in morals and in tone which he saw coming over Germany from that direction. I can further call up to my mind many Germans of the aristocratic class, narrow though they may have been, and bred in a restricted atmosphere of to us an unnatural survival of the feudal system. These are distinct from in fact, may be contrasted to the Junker-class out of which many a Streber has been enlisted. Through their education they sincerely believed that, by their birth and traditions, they were differentiated in character, in manners, and in habits from the rest of the people among whom they lived. To the modern Englishman or American the sincerity of such a conviction is not quite intelligible. What makes it most difficult for us to understand is the fact that, in spite of their education, thought, and experience, their wide range of knowledge and interest, their acquaintance with other countries and peoples, and the widening of their mentality through travel and reading, such a conviction could still remain intact and sincere. But the fact that they held it truly is beyond all doubt, and is apparently explained by the fact that they only applied it to their own country and people, and admitted that it might not apply to other countries. Yet, with the limitation of this narrowness of personal 34 THE OLDER GERMANY outlook as it concerned their own social relation to their own people, there was associated, as an out- come of it, a high development of the sense of honour and of the social responsibilities which rested upon them. The merchant and money-making classes and the pursuits which they followed did not in their eyes favour the lofty integrity of their own principles and conduct. They were pronouncedly unmercenary, despisers of money, and would spend their gold freely en grand seigneur or bear their poverty un- complainingly and with dignity. Many of them were men of cosmopolitan culture, students of the arts and sciences, with the most profound respect for achievements in every direction. Next to their own immediate caste the " Knights of the Mind " held the first place. In fact, in most cases they would, if the choice had been put before them, have sought the company, and valued the regard of, the repre- sentatives of higher culture even more than those of the feudal magnates. Many of them were keen sportsmen, and, if only on this ground, bestowed admiration and sympathy on Englishmen above all foreigners. Their home-life, though retaining most of the simple German characteristics, was chiefly modelled on the pattern of the English country house. Their bearing and manners were marked by reserve and dignity, with strict maintenance of politeness and affability, with slight reminiscence of German stiffness, but with the avoidance of the typical and assertive formality of the Prussian officer. Such men would at once be characterised as men of refine- ment and distinction and would be called in Ger- many " Vornehme Herren." I can next recall brilliant representatives among the merchant class and manufacturers and the old- established bankers. They generally belonged to the former free cities, where their class had maintained THE GERMAN MERCHANT OF OLD 35 social superiority continuously from the Middle Ages to the present time, from Hamburg and the Hanseatic cities, through Frankfort and Nuremberg, even to the Swiss towns. The traditions of the old German merchant, and even the leading craftsman, absorbed by the modern manufacturer and upheld by the best representatives of finance which dominated the mediaeval life of the free cities, still pertained and opposed their obstinate vitality of business honour to the onslaught of modern commercial degeneracy. To them a man's word was as good as his bond ; the prospect of insolvency or bankruptcy was to them as great a calamity as death itself. When shortly after 1870 the whole of Germany and the world at large were scandalised by the revelations of the promoting swindles (Grunderschwindel) , a cry of indignant reproval came from the representative merchants, manufacturers, and financiers who upheld the older traditions of commercial morality. 1 These men of sterling moral character had received a sound education, generally classical, at the gymnasium and at the university ; they had travelled much and were conversant with several languages ; and they made of their homes centres of higher culture in which the arts were practised and appreciated, and in which the literatures of foreign countries, as well as of Germany, were cultivated by its members, including the women. I can recall such homes where the Revue des deux Mondes and the best English periodicals were always to be seen and read, together with the leading authors of France and England, and even Italy and Russia. Few homes of such cosmopolitan culture could be found in any other country. But, not only in the towns I have mentioned, but even in Berlin itself, such homes and 1 In the Reichstag it was especially the National Liberal party, headed by Lasker, who held up these promoters to public contempt. 36 THE OLDER GERMANY such social centres existed and carried on traditions of previous generations reaching back even to the eighteenth century. The letters of Varnhagen and the memoirs grouping round the Mendelssohn family give a picture of the cultured life of such circles at Berlin. The social tone, moreover, was more gracious and graceful, more distinctly expressive of the men and women of the world, than that of the higher bureaucratic, militaristic, and even aristocratic world of the Berlin of those days. I now gratefully turn to another group of German personalities : namely, the men of science and learn- ing. Many of these were in the past, as they are to-day, narrow and underbred craftsmen, who hap- pened to have chosen a more intellectual craft in lieu of a handicraft, upon which they have specialised to the exclusion of all other humanising, refining, and elevating pursuits and practices. But a large number in those days were men of the highest character, of refined general education, and of the loftiest ideals and practices of life. Moreover, how- ever interesting, typical, and expressive the type of the poor German professor immortalised by Carlyle's Teufelsdrockh may have been, the men I have now in mind were not poor or .circumscribed in their means of living, with corresponding habits and manners of life. It ought to be more widely known for it has frequently led to important and far- reaching misconceptions that the German univer- sity professor and man of science and learning was in the past, and is in the present, in his material and financial position, as well placed as the highest representatives in the military, bureaucratic, judicial, and even the ministerial walks of life. The men whom I have in mind lived on the same scale of affluence, and cultivated the amenities of life to the same degree, as those of the wealthy upper classes. THE TRUE SCHOLAR AND MAN OF SCIENCE 37 They travelled and widened the horizon of their ex- periences and sympathies. But the whole of their existence and mentality was dominated by higher spiritual aims, which they recognised as being the same for all nationalities. I have endeavoured to portray such a man in " Professor Baumann " in my book on Herculaneum, 1 and have made him the mouthpiece for the ideals of the true German scholar and scientist. Such men will ever remain the types of what is highest and best in human nature, and will always be the upholders of the higher interests of civilisation, however much they may for the time being be diverted from their true course by passion and ignorance of the truth. When we now recall the tradesmen and shop- keepers of the older days, there rise before us men most capable in the pursuit of their own business, thoroughly versed in its every detail, who took a definite pride in their life-work. The tradesman brought system and high intelligence to bear upon the sale of his goods and considered the needs of his customers, taking a pride in meeting their wants and tastes. Where could there be found such book- sellers as existed in every one of the towns and especially in university towns ? The purchaser who asked for some new book was not met with the eternal, irritating questions in order to identify author and publisher, usually ending up with the statement that " it is not in the shop, but can be procured in a few days." Such booksellers kept in touch with the production of all their goods in every country and every language. You were greeted by them almost as a literary friend and met with new information or new suggestions about books that might possibly interest you and to which your attention was drawn. 1 Herculaneum, Past, Present, and Future, ppt 181 seq. (C. W. and Leonard Shoobridge). 38 THE OLDER GERMANY They made a point of knowing your own inclinations and your own pursuits, as they studied thoroughly the markets of production. " Something new has arrived from England (or from France) which I am sure, sir, must interest you." Many of these book- sellers were living bibliographical reference books themselves, men of wide reading and high standing. Some still exist in England and in France, but are quite exceptional ; whereas in Germany of old they were the rule. Now all these tradesmen and crafts- men, outside of the sphere of their own business, had their higher intellectual and artistic interests. They were members of the glee clubs, were most of them musical performers, and regular attendants at the theatre and opera, which their municipal or national institution made accessible to their class. Even if we go lower down in the social scale to the least intellectual occupations, the smallest trades- man, artisan, and labourer, through his school educa- tion and through the intellectual atmosphere about him, was at least in sympathetic touch with the higher domains of learning and of art, appreciated and valued them and respected those who repre- sented the spiritual capital of the nation. I shall never forget how, when a student at one of the German universities, during a walking tour with a party in the Black Forest, we came to a small village inn and were greeted by the burly inn-keeper. When he learnt that we were students, he showed the greatest interest in the universities whence we came and asked us to which of the faculties we belonged, whether the theological, the philosophical, the juridical, or the medical faculty. To this man, and men of his stamp, the universities were national institutions in close touch with national life ; and, though they could not pretend to follow the higher studies, they took a deep and sincere interest in the work that was carried THE TRADESMEN AND ARTISANS 39 on and did not feel that such higher intellectual work was divorced from the actual life of the people. Throughout the whole nation in those days there was reverence and respect for knowledge ; not so much because of the material advantages which it brings (as is the case now), as because of the spiritual, and hence the social, value which it presents to national life. Among all these people collectively there was, in the last generation, a spirit of friendliness and cor- diality, which indicated a kind heart and produced what they call Gemuthlichkeit ; and this friendly spirit was also extended to the foreigner. There was an understanding of, and even an admiration for, the " foreign " as such, the Fremdartige, not the ignorant English opposition to the foreigner and to what is foreign. At one time perhaps as a result of the dominance of Louis XIV over the life and fashion of the princeling-courts throughout Germany, as well as the heritage of Napoleonic rule this admiration of the foreigner and the foreign may have led to a preference over what was indigenous and national, and may have encouraged a certain absence of self- confidence, if not of servility, which led some true German patriots to combat what they considered the signs of Lakaien-natur in the German. But in those days the German mind, like the Ger- man language, showed its assimilative power and its appreciation of the life and thought of all other civilised nations. The wide-reading public in Ger- many kept in touch with, and enjoyed fully, the literature of every other country. The cheap popular translations (sixpence or sevenpence per volume), such as those published by Reklam, brought within their reach, not only the most recent books of Eng- land and France, but also Italian, Scandinavian, and Russian authors. The wider public thus became 40 THE OLDER GERMANY acquainted with the national psychology of even the Russian mujik, as depicted by a Gogol, as they appre- ciated the national music of every country. And this widened their own national sympathies. There was no country in the world where the mass of the inhabitants were to the same degree capable of sympathetic understanding of the life of foreign nations, and where they brought towards all foreigners such friendly curiosity, a readiness to understand, to tolerate, to admire, and to welcome their foreign fellow-men. All this healthy growth of moral, intel- lectual, and artistic humanism underlying a friendly feeling towards other nationalities has been checked, weakened in its growth, and finally extirpated, and has been replaced by an over-weening arrogance and pride in their own superiority through the growth of Chauvinism and Militarism, and has at last been fanned into consuming hatred of the foreigner, especi- ally the foreigner whose prosperity or position they envied. We are thus convinced that Germany is the aggres- sor in this war ; but we believe that this war has not been forced on the world by the German nation as a whole, the heirs of the past spirit of Germany, but by that section of the nation which represents militarism and has for the time being effectively gained power over the German mind. The mind of Germany, more- over, has been prepared to receive these baneful influences by the steady growth of Chauvinism since 1 870. From another point of view it means the domi- nance of Prussia and the Prussian spirit over the rest of the empire the prussianising of Germany. CHAPTER III PRUSSIAN MILITARISM AND THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM SINCE 1 870 THE GLORIFICATION OF WAR. WE all know what is meant by militarism in the Miiitar- narrower acceptation of the term. In its wider c s ^ l u. n acceptation it includes a modification or an exag- vinism. geration in the conception of the State both as regards internal as well as foreign policy. On the one hand, the guardians of national security, the ^Xa/ee? as the ancient Greeks called them, become the rulers, and their own special function, which ought only to be concerned with one side of national life, becomes the all-absorbing end of national existence : all national life is subordinated to the chief object of wars. On the other hand, under the militaristic domination, the State as a whole in its relation to other States naturally assumes an antagonistic char- acter, regarding all other nations as their actual or potential enemies and fostering this inimical and warlike attitude of mind throughout the people. In one word, it leads to Chauvinism. I have on more than one occasion defined Chauvinism, as distinguished from patriotism. 1 Patriotism is the love of one's country and one's people ; Chauvinism is the hatred of other countries and other people. The culmination of this spirit of militarism, pene- trated and saturated by Chauvinism, has found its 1 See Appendix I. 41 42 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM The clear, forcible, and uncompromising expression in the oiMUltar- writings of Treitschke and Bernhardi and many other ism and prominent authors. However much it may be denied, vhSmin tne f act remains that these historico-philosophic modern views, elevated to a definite theoretical system of life y 'and morals, have penetrated into the national life of Germany and have gained practical vitality. This has been brought about, in the first instance, by the action of the State in matters military and diplo- matic ; by the systematic corruption of the press both at home and abroad ; by the elaborate and costly army of secret agents, spread all over the world in times of peace, in order to undermine the national life and solidarity of possible future enemies ; by the State-subventioned penetration of commerce and trade in all parts of the world directly subservient to the chief military aims. Not only in these mani- festations of military Machiavellism does this nefarious spirit show itself ; but it has been systematically and directly introduced into national pedagogics through the schools, with a well-drilled and subservient army of masters, even in the most elementary phases of education. It has also found its way, through all intermediate branches, to the very pinnacle of German Education in their great universities. There the leaders of thought in the highest regions of science and learning become the responsive tools of tyrannous State-administration, and prove to the world how scientific and literary education may be entirely divorced from political education, and how these leaders of thought have not yet acquired the political insight and training of many a humble and illiterate citizen or subject of a truly free country governed on constitutional principles. Those who have known the Germany of the past and the Germany of the present realise this complete change in the whole character and moral of its people. They also realise GROWTH OF MATERIAL WEALTH 43 that, compared with the national life of the past, Moral in addition to this dominance of the militaristic and mo dern Chauvinistic spirit, there has been insinuated into Germany, the very heart of civil life a moral degeneracy more marked and more virulent in its form than the diseases of social life manifested in any other civilised state of modern times. That it should have attacked the German people in a form so much more virulent than is the case elsewhere is, perhaps, due to the fact that, since the great victories of the Franco- Prussian War which made Germany a great empire, and the concomitant and unique rapidity of industrial development leading to the influx of great wealth, the German people, previously poor and possessed of all the virtues that go with simple conditions of life on moderate means, have been subject to all the physical and moral diseases of the nouveau riche, the parvenu. Wealth has come to them unprepared to withstand its temptations, and the virus which dis- solves the moral fibre has, in their case, not been gradually and continuously administered by weaker solutions of its potent venom to ensure some immunity. It is a curious phenomenon, that the Germans have charged us with this very disease of moral degeneracy from which they are suffering in so acute a form. We are surely not untainted as regards this modern morbus occidentalis ; and there certainly is danger, in view of the more spasmodic and more localised manifestations of the disease among us, that we may diffuse and cultivate its germ still further, and even that, through this very war and its final results, we may suffer from the contagion of those German dis- eases which have led to this huge moral crime in the world's history. For, even at an early stage of the war, even before it had properly begun, there had been danger signals lest we should be inoculated with militarism, the spirit 44 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM Danger of of which will surely grow as the war proceeds. We from lgl0n have growing among us, and spreading its fibre Miiitar- throughout all classes of the community, the malig- Chau nant disease of Chauvinism from which in the past vinismin W e were comparatively freer than other nations ; though we may hope that the symptoms of moral degeneracy so clearly manifest before the war may be checked by the sternness of the national uprising and of our sacrifices, and by the lessons which we may learn from its sinister effects in the corruption of the old healthy German life of the past. I have said that even at the beginning of the war there was fear of contagion from the militaristic spirit of a Treitschke or a Bernhardi. Paradoxical as it may appear, this peril has come, in the first instance, from high-minded and high-spirited prophets who vainly warned us against the Teutonic danger, which so many of us failed to realise, and which we must now admit they wisely foresaw. Nevertheless, in their own anti-militaristic teaching there may be found the insidious and hidden dangers of such contagion. I will but take one leading type of these wise men as manifested in the writings of the late Professor Cramb. Treit- In impressing upon British people in the most f rc ikle manner the peril threatening our very national existence from the growth of German military power, and in warning us in time to defend our homes and our position in the world as an empire, he has been carried away by his dramatic instinct, and the exer- cise of that rare function of intellectual sympathy and altruistic imagination, to put the case of our enemies in so glowing and favourable a light, that the result upon the impressionable reader may be to engraft on his imagination the spirit and essence of militarism as Treitschke conveyed it to the German people. Perhaps also Professor Cramb himself, evidently TREITSCHKE AND PROFESSOR CRAMB 45 endowed with an ardent imagination, attended the lectures of Treitschke during the impressionable period of his youth, and came under the spell of that powerful personality, until he lost sight of the clay feet of his idol, and, while opposing the doctrines of the master as they affected the national life of the pupil's country, unconsciously became, at least in part, a disciple himself. 1 For my own part I cannot understand that Treitschke should have had any such influence upon anybody, excepting a born Prussian with violent Prussian prejudices. Nor can I understand the high estimate which so learned a scholar and versatile a man of the world as was the late Lord Acton should have formed of Treitschke as an historian. I attended several courses of his lectures during the most impressionable years of my student life when, fresh from my American home, I studied at the University of Heidelberg from 1873 to 1876. The effect which he then had upon the large number of foreign students attending his lectures at that uni- versity, and even upon the mass of South Germans, in fact upon those who were not purely Prussian by birth or in spirit, was distinctly one of antagonism. His enthusiasm, his emphatic diction, and violent 1 This conjecture is strongly confirmed by a passage in Mr. W. H. Dawson's book, What is Wrong with Germany ? perhaps the ablest book produced by this war. On p. 38 and the following pages Mr. Dawson, who attended Treitschke' s lectures in 1875, gives a masterly portrait of Treitschke, the lecturer, and shows the influence he had on his audience. He endeavours to distribute light and shade, praise and blame, justly, and ends his strong summary with the following words : " Even at this long distance of time, the instincts of loyalty and gratitude refuse to be overborne, and I confess that I, for one, am still as unredeemed, that were I required to throw stones at Heinrich von Treitschke, I should wish my stones to be pebbles, and when I throw them I should want to run away." This passage does much credit to the sense of delicacy and the loyalty of Mr. Dawson. But such was not the effect produced upon my English and American fellow-students who attended Treitschke' s lectures at Heidelberg in 1873 46 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM assertiveness were all expressive of the Prussian spirit in its most unattractive form ; and the ruth- lessness (tactlessness would be too mild a term, as he would have repudiated any claims to such refined social virtues) with which he disregarded and directly offended the national or social sensibilities of many of his hearers showed how he was imbued, not necessarily with the greatness, but certainly with the brutal force, of Bismarckian principles of blood and iron. 1 To summarise the chief impression which his per- sonality made upon us foreigners, I should say that we were all strongly impressed with the fact that he was not what we should call a gentleman. On the other hand, I believe he himself would have accepted this stricture and would have gloried in the fact that he did not approve of such an ideal. Were he still alive he might himself have urged, as recently has been done if the report be true that that term, hitherto adopted in the vocabulary of the German language, should be expunged and replaced by a new German word ein Ganzermann (a wholeman) ! It also appeared to us, and does so to many highly qualified historical scholars now, that he was not a true historian, according to the old-established higher conception of that type, of which so many represen- tatives have been given to the world by Germany. I mean those who were primarily and ultimately 1 Let me but quote one illustrative instance, though I could show how (with many English, American, and French students among his pupils) he constantly made insulting, and sometimes grossly ignorant, remarks about their national characteristics, their political ideals, and even their social habits. In referring to the Balkan peoples, though he knew that there were several Bulgarian, Servian, and Rumanian students in his class, he roared out in a voice and with gestures indi- cative of a mixture between anger and contempt : " Serben, Bulgaren, und Walachen und wie diese schweinetreibende Volker alle heissen mogen I " ("Serbians, Bulgarians, and Walachians, and whatever else these swine-driving peoples may be called "). TREITSCHKE'S POLITICAL SUBSERVIENCY 47 imbued with the scientific Eros, the almost religious striving for pure and unalloyed truth, the devout and humble servants of the goddess Wissenschaft (Science). At best he could be called a publicist, swayed by the spirit of the journalist (whom he despised), consciously subordinating his search after truth and his study of the past to the fixed demands of a living policy ; full of what the Germans in science and art stigmatise as a grave fault, the dominance of Tendenz, the fixed aim, prejudicial to the appreciation of truth, direct- ing the tendency towards an immediate and personal goal. He was thus one of the many who since 1870 have Thede- consciously endeavoured to undermine the highest S^ Germanic spirit of philosophy and thoroughness in Idealism science, of purity in ideal strivings the real Kultur, ^f^g which with its army of scholars and students Germany influence gave to the world. He thus became one who in- " directly led to the establishment of that Streber- thum, to which I referred above, centred in Berlin, and percolating through all the towns and villages of the provinces, which has been destroying all Ger- man idealism and has put into the hands of the militaristic leaders the tools with which to effect their nefarious purposes. Frequently appealing to the authority of Bismarck in his lectures, I remember his quoting a saying of the great statesman, directly affecting the system of education in the German universities, and this applied to the faculties of juris- prudence, history, and political science : " Ich will keine Kreisrichter haben " ("I do not want trained magistrates "marking the first step in the juridical and administrative career) ; nor did he want pure scientists or scholars, unless they could be made subservient to his political ends ; but he did want diplomatic and skilful politicians who could be directly used for State purposes. How different this 6 48 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM spirit is from that in which the high ideals of science, scholarship, and philosophy reigned supreme in the universities, where the pure, supreme, and ultimate goal of university life was untainted by ulterior and lower motives a spirit which we in England and in America, and even in France, admired and respected, and which for some years past we have been en- deavouring to infuse into our own academic life. Germany, on the other hand, has been and is doing her best to quench its fire and to exalt the lower mentality arising out of the natural conditions of English and American enterprise, the dominance of which the best minds in both these nations are endeavouring to counteract, in part by the inspira- tion which came from the older Germany. Bismarck This spirit of disintegration which has steadily the C po^ undermined the good which Germany possessed liticai before 1870 though, of course, great bodies and the of 'the 10n ver y nature of the Good are slow in dying, this disin- German tegration, working more rapidly and effectively, in recent years, began about the year 1871 and was not due only to the new school of militaristic leaders and of servile professors grouping round the Kaiser with his Real and Interessen-politik and his com- mercial materialism. It was really initiated by Bis- marck himself, in his attempt to supplement his successful foreign policy by (what the future will recognise as the great failure in the life-work of that statesman) his home policy. What was needed to crown his great achievement in founding the German Empire after 1870 was the development of a great nation within, the political education of the people and the consolidation of the truly national German Kultur in its highest form as it already existed. In these lofty and most important aims the Great Chancellor failed. And he failed, not only because he gave an inadequate constitution to BISMARCK'S RESPONSIBILITY 49 the German Empire, and because he did not estab- lish a clear and efficient system of political education for the German nation ; but also because, in his personal conduct as the leading statesman, in the example which his own character and his every act could give to the people, directly affected by the one great personality who had their reverence and grati- tude and whose every word and act became to the whole nation a lesson to learn and an example to follow, because he repressed rather than developed their sense of political freedom and responsibility, the rights as well as the duties of a citizen in a modern constitutional State. The tone of his speeches before the Reichstag in which he would even venture to refer to his own health or the state of his nerves for the consideration of those who opposed his definite political proposals was always that of the Prussian non-commissioned officer, wounding to the self-respect of the elected representatives of the people and ultimately crushing in them their inde- pendence and their training in the thoughts, customs, and habits of parliamentary government. Naturally the people as a whole were a fortiori repressed in their political aspirations and deprived of the political education which they so sorely needed. Only one section of the community withstood him ; and they, who would have formed the constitutional pro- gressive section, were forced into the more violent forms of socialistic agitation, claiming for all practical purposes to be inimical to the State and to society as well, outside the state in fact, if not outside of society as it exists. Still more did he contribute to the destruction of the ideals of pure and high thought as established in the academic life of Germany. The foundation-stone of this huge national structure, the very core and centre of the national life of the whole country, was 50 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM Academic Liberty, the German Lehr- and Lern- freiheit (freedom to teach and to learn). Though the universities were State institutions, nominally under the Ministry of Education, they were practically self- governing in their own administration, and the election of the professors was practically in the hands of the body of academic teachers themselves . This tradition was rudely broken by Bismarck's action, when he forced his own personal physician, Schweninger, into academic honours. The professors, the independent men of science of old, had to obey and to submit to military discipline. Bismarck But still more destructive, though more insidious, fcshed the tnan tn ^ s direct crushing of the spirit of academic worship independence was the manner in which science was made subservient to the will of the State, the research thum, and an d the thorough spirit qf scientific investigation, the it mo- purity and single-heartedness of all the striving after nolo f ^ trutn m i ts highest and unadulterated form, which Chau- guided (and to a great extent still guides) the life- vmism. wor k O f the German savant. These were curbed to the pragmatical service of a definite line of policy which the great Chancellor knew how to impress upon the whole nation and to make the dominant idea of all life and thought. During my student days this dominant thought was expressed by the term Germanenthum. Not only political science and history were defiled and tainted into conformity with the demands of Bismarck's political views ; but the studies most remote from practical politics were made to fall into line with the advance of the Teuton army. Chauvin- ism, which in some form or other may always have existed among the nations and the communities of the world who looked upon their neighbours as rivals or enemies, now took a more thoroughly scientific and philosophic form, and widened its basis on a POLITICAL PERVERSION OF LEARNING 51 broad ethnological and scientific foundation in the spirit of Teuton pedantry. National Chauvinism claimed an ethnological foundation. It was no longer the German State, with its history throughout the Middle Ages, a fusion of so many races constantly changing their territories and dwellings as they rushed to and fro over Central Europe, which claimed the allegiance and love and patriotism of the German people. Nor was it on the ground of the numerous separate States and principalities and their variegated, almost kaleidoscopic, history during the last centuries, which were at last, by the supreme and heroic effort of Bismarck, his predecessors and his followers, welded into the unity of a German Empire, welded together by their very diversity out of which grew the fructifying spirit of their potent and character- istic Kultur, made one by the very sufferings and sacrifices through which they had passed during centuries of cruel wars. In all this common life of suffering, achievement, and heroism was not to be found the moral justification for the foundation of a German Empire ; but in a racial unity that could be measured in terms of the dominant natural sciences of the day, and of the youngest, least developed of them all, the conclusions of which we must doubt, namely, the study of ethnology. The distinctive solidarity of the Teutonic race had to be established. On this unity of race was to rest, not only the claim for the unity of the German Empire, but also its separate and antagonistic interests in regard to the other nations, its rivals and potential foes. From 1870 and onwards it is of melancholy interest to note how the German professors, the free upholders of truth and pure science, bent their every effort to establish and to prove the claims of this Germanen- thum. It was not only opposed to the Latin world, to France and to Italy (which had not yet become a 52 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM part of the Triple Alliance), not only to the Slavs ; but, in so far as Great Britain was not purely Saxon, to Great Britain as well. While on the one side Germanenthum could thus be identified with a nation opposed to the Italian Papacy, on the other side it proved most expedient for the time to use it as a lever, perhaps even a bait, to be thrown to the socialists and to lead them to concentrate their antagonism in a single groove and so to liberate the main current of policy against the Jews. Ger- manenthum, as the supreme expression of the Teuton world thus stood in direct opposition to the Jews, the Semites. The anti-Semitic party was then organised . It mattered not that a great part of Prussia, and of other German states as well, could be shown to be of Slav origin ; that the names of many of its greatest men should end in " ow " and other Slav endings ; l that some of its leaders of life and thought, and even its soldiers, were of recent French origin ; that among the foremost men in every department of life, from whom emanated the actual German Kultur, were many of Jewish origin ! The modern world had to be split up into its prehistoric ethnical constituents by a most inaccurate and misleading scientific induction, so that the modern German State should not only be confirmed in its imperial unity, but should foster in its people an antagonism which should be based on physical, anatomical, and physiological foundations, and bring them nearer to the animal world, where the difference of species implies animosity. The response and echo to this wave of ethnological Chauvinism was soon to be heard throughout the whole of Europe ; it aroused in France and in Italy the same spirit of pedantic intolerance, and gave 1 Treitschke is a Slav name. ETHNOLOGICAL CHAUVINISM 53 life to the Pan-Slav movement in Russia. Even in Great Britain there were isolated and less powerful attempts at a revival of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, which in Freeman and others took the less violent and more poetic form of the antiquary's and his- torian's love for his own country. But in Germany, during the whole of the period preceding our own (though it bore some beneficent fruit in the growing study of early Germanic literature and language), history, philology, and ethnology were biased and vitiated by the more or less conscious desire to provide a scientific basis for the unity and dominance of the Germanic spirit. Perhaps in the future, when the history of the study of Ethnology is written, this period in German research will be characterised as the " Indo-Germanic wave." The last and most characteristic though certainly caricatured sum- mary of all these efforts the swan-song of German- enthum has been produced by a writer of English birth, Houston Chamberlain, in his Die Grundlagen des XIX Jahrhunderts? According to him even Christ during His sojourn on earth was not a Semite, but embodied the Germanic spirit. It is interesting and suggestive to note (and I can personally vouch for the accuracy of the statement) that this book was considered by the Kaiser the most important work of modern times, and that it no doubt has furnished him with the historical and scientific ground upon which his political aspirations are based. Thus the foundations for this great structure of 1 An English translation of this book has since appeared with an introduction by Lord Redesdale. A more amateurish and unbalanced piece of historical generalisation than this book cannot be found in the whole of historical literature. Lord Redesdale's introduction, besides bestowing most fulsome praise upon the author, summarises and compresses these over-generalisations and thus exaggerates all the faults of this work. 54 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM Chauvinism, in a generally theoretical and specially ethnological form, were laid since 1871 by the policy of Bismarck, and on these has been erected the vast and complicated structure of active militarism pervading all forms of national life. It has left its stamp upon the whole spirit of scientific research. It has consciously directed the efforts and the con- duct of the whole bureaucracy, not only in the Foreign Office, but in the home departments as well. It has penetrated and directly modified the varied and huge machinery of their growing commerce and industry ; it has even saturated the very soil of the land and furthered the interests, the financial pros- perity, and the social vitality of the classes who live by agriculture. There is not a single aspect of German life which has not been shaped or essentially modified during the last forty years by this dominant Chauvinistic impulse, steadied and made permanent by calculated pedantic forethought. The Rep- The climax, however, was reached when the policy, fond' ou t f which it grew and on which it fed, was directly used by the State, and found ready to hand the most demoralising and depraved machinery, another one of the great inheritances of Bismarck's successful statecraft, arising directly out of the victories of 1871. This has, perhaps more than any other factor, directly tended to vitiate to the very core the national life of the German people, and has even contaminated to some extent the workings of the Foreign Offices of every one of the Western Powers. This inheritance is the so-called Reptilien- fond, the money set apart out of the milliards taken from France for secret service in every form. It has been used not only in the famous, or rather infamous, Press-bureau of the Wilhelmstrasse, which directly gained control of the German press by bribery and corruption or " subvention " ; and, as THE REPTILIENFOND 55 we also know now, of the foreign press in every nook and corner of the globe as well. Not only was and is it used for every form of spying at home ; but it has established a band of secret agents, spreading over the whole civilised, and even the uncivilised, world, to further the ends of the Berlin Foreign Office by seducing into treason the citizen subjects of other countries, friendly allies, and actual or potential antagonists. And, as the World-policy, the Realpolitik, grew, so did this nefarious activity extend beyond the great powers and rivals them- selves, to the colonies and dependencies and neigh- bouring peoples or lands which in the future might turn to be troublesome enemies to any one of the Germanic Powers . We have presented to our horrified moral conscience the picture of a huge web of lying and intrigue, sedition and treachery, at which even a Macchiavelli might have shuddered with horror. And all these evil spirits are now invoked under the banner and in the name of Kultur \ Even in Bis- marck's lifetime the central direction of these forces which were to establish German Kultur must have been most complicated and puzzling ; for every country, even that of the allies, required curbing and perverting into the course of German Chauvinism. Treaties had to be ensured by counter-treaties, as in the famous case of the Russian and Austrian agree- ments. But since then, with the full consolidation and the conscious formulation of Weltpolitik and Realpolitik, the ends as well as the means of German policy have become so varied and confusingly uni- versal, that not a single country or a single people or any of their dependencies remained which they were not forced to consider as potential enemies, and for which their Reptilienfonds could not furnish the means of demoralising activity. From this horrible and grotesque point of view of modern 56 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM politics, what country could Germany fail to con- sider its actual or potential enemy, including even its own allies ? Contemporary history has shown, and will still more show in the immediate future, that Italy, could not be looked upon as a friend. 1 I myself had it impressed upon me by the very highest authority in German affairs some years ago in reference to a peaceful scientific propaganda, that " Italy cannot be trusted." There remains Austria. But the Dual Monarchy, with its motto Divide et impera, is made up of so many separate races and interests and parties representing them, that a most exacting sphere of enterprise and activity was constantly and continuously furnished to the directors of the Reptilienfond, to further the Teuton claims, to repress both the Magyar and the Slav elements, so that ultimately, through the dominance of Teuton Austria on the road to the East, straight through the Balkans to Salonica, and by rail along the Bagdad Railway, when the Austrian and the Turkish Empires should become a thing of the past, the German Weltreich should push its way towards the East, and swiftly enter its course of encircling the world. Imagine what definite corruption, what huge sums of money it spelt successfully to supersede the British and Russian preponderance at Constanti- nople in the time of Abdul Hamid, and then to overcome the effects of the crushing blow to German policy when that tyrant's rule made way for a violent and liberal movement on the part of the Young Turks, whose initial antagonism to Teutonism must have been aggravated by Austrian annexations, lead- ing to a boycott of everything Austrian until finally again Teuton influence at Constantinople became so powerful that it could force the Turks into an alliance and into a disastrous war ! Even their 1 This was written before Italy joined the Entente Powers. IMMORALITY OF FOREIGN POLICY 57 allies thus became their enemies in time of false and perfidious peace, and their action was directly destruc- tive of national loyalty, of truth and honesty within the realms of the friendly country. And as for all the other States, their avowed rivals or enemies, actual documents have revealed the monstrous universal diffusion, their poisonous activity through- out the whole world, civilised and uncivilised, even to the remotest regions of the East and West, the North and South. Think for a moment of the continuous and persistent moral degeneracy which such chauvinistic and militaristic policy implies, and how it directly contravenes the moral principles and the moral consciousness upon which modern civilised life rests. Let me pause here and show how dangerous mayThegiori- be the exaggeration of that literary and historical ficatlonof virtue of intellectual sympathy embodied in the fervent appeal of the late Professor Cramb. 1 For he exalts the spirit of war on grounds which approach dangerously near to national Chauvinism, such as 1 The Germans themselves have a strong rendering of our adage " Man is the creature of habit," which exists in nearly every language, Der Mensch ist ein Gewohnheitsthier. It is sad to realise how, even since the above was written, the war with its constant repercussion of impressions of horror evoked by the loss of human life, by treachery and infamy of every kind, has affected the mentality of the civilised world, has blunted feelings, coarsening and hardening the sense of morality and chivalry. When we recall how in times of peace the horror which struck millions of hearts in every country at the loss of the Titanic ; how a mining disaster, in which less than a hundred miners were suffocated in one pit thrilled with sympathy and pity the inhabitants in distant countries ; how the death of Captain Scott and his heroic fellow- explorers was felt like a personal loss by people in every hemisphere, and when we then compare with these experiences the mentality of all civilised people to-day, we realise how this habituation may lead mankind at last to regard with indifference the loss of human life. A few more sinkings of Lusitanias may find us unmoved by such disasters. Nay, worse than this, even people of most refined moral sensitiveness may not be able to repress a thrill of joy when they hear 58 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM has dragged Germany from its moral and intellectual heights of the past down to the very depths of the diabolical perfidy of the present. We may admit that every great act of self-sacrifice, individual and collective, must, from some one aspect, produce something good and something admirable, especially when raised through its very mass into heroic dimen- sions. The uprising of millions of people willing to risk their lives for any cause has in itself something inspiring, and points to an ennobling element in human nature. Great masses of treasure and blood cannot be expended without producing some possible good. Institutions and charities that dispose of, and spend, great sums must do some good ; but the question before us is always : " Is there any due proportion between the expenditure and the results ; and what are the evils that arise in the wake of the good which we may admit has been effected ? " There is hardly a single institution, or charity, or business, which disposes of large sums from which some benefit is not derived by somebody. But it may be found that the proportion of such good is ridiculously small ; that the evils which it creates or perpetuates are disproportionately large, and that the employment of such treasures by a more rational or more moral institution or organisation is made impossible because of the existence of what is inferior or almost wholly bad. We are bound, then, to call such institutions, charities, or businesses bad, and must reform or destroy them root and branch, of the death of a mass of innocent enemy munition-workers, even though the disaster may have been caused by treachery in their midst. The greatest curse of war, perhaps, is its lowering of the moral consciousness, not only of the peoples at war, but of the whole neutral world as well. The whole moral fabric, built by the efforts of ages of good men, is apparently razed to the ground. How long will it take to rebuild it ? THE IGNOBLE ASPECT OF WAR 59 and erect in their stead institutions expressing the rational and moral convictions of our own days and conditions of life. Where is to be found in modern warfare the nobility in outlook or in practice ? See what it en- genders before the actual war breaks out, in the preparation for hostilities, not only in the concentra- tion and the hypertrophy of the armament industry and traffic, the evils of which in our economic and social life have been so amply and convincingly shown by many able writers ; but by the activity of home and foreign policy subservient to militaristic ideals, as I have sketched them in the case of Ger- many. Consider the degradation of all the funda- mental virtues upon which the moral conscience of civilised people rests, the sense of truth and honesty and loyalty for all those concerned, for all who con- sciously lead, and for all the mass of the people who semi-consciously or unconsciously follow ! Is there anything heroic to be found in such duplicity cluster- ing round the poisonous plant of financial interests, of gold and silver, of money in its vilest form and uses ? As to war in itself, though there be numerous instances of individual and collective heroism, even of chivalry, consider what this war of ingenious and stupendously effective machinery for destroying life, of broken pledges, of deception and trickery, means ! Are not the heroic valour and self-sacrifice entirely submerged in the cruelty and deceit of modern war- fare, so that the total result is complete dissolution of all moral fibre ? We need not invoke the contra- ventions of the plighted word given at The Hague by Germany when unfortified towns are bombarded, asphyxiating gases used, and Lusitanias sunk. It is enough to realise what emotions and passions are stirred up in battle in the breasts of people who were presumably normally moral human beings in 60 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM time of peace. I cannot do better than to give a passage from J* Accuse by a German writer to bring home to the imagination of readers the real influence of actual warfare. He says (pp. 300-2) : " A very interesting contribution to the solution of the question, whether war develops the noblest virtues of man [Field-Marshal Moltke] or whether it does not on the contrary produce more bad men than it removes [Kant], is furnished by the account of a battle published in the Tageblatt of Jauer on October 18, 1914. The author of this account is the non-commissioned officer Klemt of the ist Company, i54th Regiment, and his statements are vouched for and subscribed to by the Company- Commander Lieut, von Niem. The heading of this letter in the newspaper is : ' A Day of Honour for our Regiment, September 24, 1914.' The account deserves as a human, or rather a bestial, docu- ment to be printed in extenso ; but I regret that space will only permit me to give extracts : " ' Already we are discovering the first Frenchmen. They are shot down from the trees like squirrels, and are warmly welcomed below with the butt-end of rifles and bayonets ; they no longer need a doctor ; we are no longer fighting against honest foes ; but tricky robbers. With a jump we are over the clear- ing here ! there ! in the hedges they are crouching ; now, on to them ! No quarter is given. Standing free, at most kneeling, we shoot away, nobody troubles about cover. We come to a hollow : in masses dead and wounded red-breeches lie about ; the wounded are clubbed or stabbed to death ; for we already know that these rascals will fire at us from behind. There lies a Frenchman stretched out at full length, his face to the ground ; but he is only shamming death. A kick from a lusty Musketier teaches him that we are there. He turns and begs for his life ; but already he is nailed to the earth THE HUN 61 with the words : " Do you see, you B . . ., this is how our bodkins prick." Beside me an uncanny cracking sound comes from the blows of the butt-end of a rifle which one of our 154*3 rains on a French bald-head. Prudently he uses a French rifle for the purpose, not to smash his own. Some of us, especi- ally tender-hearted, finish the wounded Frenchmen off with a charitable bullet, others strike and stab as much as they know. Bravely our enemies fought, they were crack regiments we had before us. They allowed us to come on from 30 to 10 metres, then it certainly was too late. ... At the entrance of the watch-huts they lie, lightly and seriously wounded, vainly begging for quarter, but our good Musketiers save the fatherland the expensive maintenance of so many enemies.' " The account concludes with the picture of the tired troops lying down to sleep after the " blood work " : the god of dreams paints for some of them a lovely picture. " A prayer of thanks on our lips, we slept on towards the coming day." I must add the further comments of the author of J' Accuse : II The most horrible features of this account are not only the incidents narrated, but almost more than these the brutal naivete with which they are represented as feats of heroism, especially acknow- ledged by superior officers and published in the most prominent part of the official newspaper of the dis- trict. It is possible that brutalities were committed by the other side as well. When the beast in man is set free it is not astonishing that bestialities should be committed. But I have sought in vain in the foreign press for the publication of such ' heroic deeds.' That, after such murderous work, one can sit down in cold blood and report such low horrors to one's fellow-citizens at home, one's friends, to one's own wife and children, makes the whole affair infinitely sadder than in itself it already is. Of 62 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM course the ' prayer of thanks ' to God could not be omitted from the German battle-report. His Royal Highness Prince Oscar of Prussia had to be cited by Sergeant Klemt as admirer of the ' heroic action ' : ' With these Grenadiers and 154*5 one can storm hell itself,' the Prince exclaimed, and assured the two regiments that they were worthy of the name ' The King's Own Brigade.' The Jauer Report unites as is the case in veterinary handbooks where a horse is drawn showing all possible diseases all the ' noblest virtues ' which war can produce and must produce : bestiality, bragging, false piety, etc. Whether ' the world would degenerate and would be lost in Materialism ' if these qualities remained undeveloped, I leave to the decision of the wise." Did not the men who risked their lives when aviation started, so as to develop such an invention for the use and advancement of the world at large, did they not show courage indomitable the aes triplex and more than triplex of which the soldier marching to attack shows no loftier or more self- sacrificing form ? Nor doctors and nurses in the sick-room ; the researchers who on their own person make dangerous experiments for the benefit of man- kind ; every policeman on his beat ; every one who day by day curbs his instincts of selfishness and greed out of due regard to the claims of his fellow- men do these not give ample opportunities for the development of altruistic enthusiasm ? When we look forward to the day when, consciously brought up to a higher level by a universal education based upon the ideals of modern times, not only will the .rich willingly give their larger quota of taxes to further the needs of the State and of an advancing society, but even the poorer and the poorest will directly pay their contributions to the State so that others should be saved from hunger and thirst. Then will the sick, the halt, the needy be comforted, SELF-SACRIFICE IN PEACE 63 the aged live out their lives without anxiety for the morrow, the honest unemployed no longer wander aimlessly along the roads. All great causes of com- mon humanity may then be fostered by the immediate sacrifice of the individual. Consider also the effects of war (whether it end in victory or defeat) upon those who have engaged in it, upon all those who in reality or in imagination have passed through this hell of internecine bloodshed ; when " Thou shalt not kill " as a fundamental tenet for all civilised life has lost all constraining meaning through the con- stant repercussion of the slaughter of thousands, fathers of children, sons of parents, and husbands of wives ; when to deceive and to spy and to try every trick that may mislead and bring one nearer to a destructive goal becomes a virtue ! Where is the heroism ? It is noble to be a patriot, nobler than to limit one's affections to one's county or one's village ; it is even nobler to show active affection for one's village than to concentrate it only upon one's family. A good son, a devoted father, a con- siderate brother, is surely nobler than the pure egoist who is only absorbed in his own life and desires. But the man who encourages himself to hate and to slay his fellow-man, not because he is vile or because he endangers his own existence, but because he lives in another country and talks a different language ; whose feelings for humanity, whose ideals for the human race, whose striving after divine perfection throughout the world are not only limited to his own country and the people living in it, but who develops active and violent antagonism towards all people and all things beyond this narrow range, such a man cannot be called a patriot ! Patriotism then turns to Chauvinism ; it no longer is the love of one's own country and one's own people, but the hatred of others. There is nothing ideal in 7 war, certainly not in modern warfare ; and, though every one of us must feel that it is our duty and our privilege to fight for our country and to offer up our lives when our national existence is in danger, we should do it because it is our duty, as a means to safeguard what is best and most holy in our national existence, but we are never to turn this means into the end of civilised existence. We should go to the operating-table with composure and fortitude when it may dispel disease, prolong our life so that we can continue to support those who depend upon us ; but we cannot consider the torturing and maiming of our bodies as a supreme end of our physical existence. The patriot must never allow himself to be carried away by the hysterical enthusiasm of the panegyrists of war ; he must not admit Bellona into the cycle of his divinities ! Every patriot must beware lest he become a Chauvinist who learns to hate the stranger so intensely and effectively as to lose all power of loving, and that the absorbing in- tensity of his hatred will lead him at last to loathe his neighbour and grow cold towards his wife and children. For this is the end of the doctrine of hate. Militar- Now this militaristic Chauvinism has found the ^* ic most fertile field for its growth on German soil. No Chau- . . vinism other country and no other people, certainly not irom' ding England and the English, could show conditions so Germany, favourable. Perhaps until the " German scare " began some years ago, no people were freer from this antagonistic attitude towards those of other nation- alities than were the English. They were hospitable in spirit, and hospitality became a national charac- teristic in every layer of society. Definite human envy and jealousy may unavoidably have arisen and shown themselves, especially where certain trades or larger groupings of occupations may have suffered by the sudden intrusion of more or less alien bodies in ENGLISH FREEDOM FROM CHAUVINISM 65 definite localities, whether they were " foreign," whether they came from abroad or from Scotland into England, or from the neighbouring town or county. But Englishmen were ever ready to receive, and even to acknowledge the qualities, in some cases even the superiority in definite lines and character- istics, of those who came among them from foreign parts. Perhaps it may have been due to an under- lying consciousness of our own merits, if not of our own ultimate superiority, which made us indifferent to those incitements of envy and jealousy. If so, such self-confidence, even if at times unfounded in fact, is not a grave national vice. But the truth re- mains that we were thus and let us hope will con- tinue so in the future the least Chauvinistic of modern civilised peoples. Of all peoples manifesting this disease to a greater or lesser degree, the Germans were certainly foremost. The main reasons for its growth on German soil Further are to be found in two national characteristics ; the J^ the* one is the prevalence and intensity of envy as a growth of national characteristic; the other is the absence, vin ^ in from the national education in all its aspects, of the German sense of Fair Play, which might have been the one and 1 the y element exercising a salutary counteracting influence to the spirit of envy. The Germans have their idea recent life of honour, they even have their courts of honour, and the duel, especially in military circles ; but these are not effective in modern life to counteract envy and to foster generosity. On the contrary, within such social groups, ruled by such courts of honour and appealing to the duel as the arbiter, they de- veloped truculence, which is most directly opposed to the spirit of Fair Play. Militarism, in its effect upon the nation, counteracted the establishment and the rule of Fair Play, until at Zabern and after, the official Seal of State was stamped upon the prevailing power 66 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM of the bully. One of the curses of militarism is, that, while it, to a certain extent, democratises the people collected together in military service to the State, by the establishment of fixed ranks and gradations, the higher grades having unquestioned authority over the lower, it naturally leads to bullying and weakens the sense of social fairness and justice among the whole population. Envy. If we were to attempt to single out, among the numerous causes which have led to this war, one primary and underlying factor in the national charac- ter of the Germans, which, more than any other, has led to this catastrophe, it undoubtedly is Envy. It has almost become a platitude to say that people are most prone to ascribe to others the faults which they have themselves ; and we need not therefore be astonished to hear it frequently stated of late that England's antagonism towards Germany, and which led to the war, was her jealousy, and conse- quent fear of German rivalry in commerce and in political power. It is quite possible that among in- dividuals and among certain groups of people competition and rivalry may lead to jealousy, and that, as human nature goes, English trades and occupations which have suffered from German com- petition may thus have produced jealousy in those suffering from this very competition. These cases, natural though they be, are limited and isolated, and certainly have not sufficed to produce a national characteristic or a movement which in any way would have driven the country into war. I venture to repeat that there is hardly a nation among the civilised peoples as ready, on the whole, to welcome the foreigner, admit his qualities, and, by the exer- cise of the supreme national virtue of fair play, to counteract all the impulses of national jealousy. Let us only hope and pray that the results of this GERMAN ENVY 67 great war, the over-stimulation of the sense of antagonism and of hatred towards others, the sus- picion of the foreigner in moments of great national danger, may not counteract this comparative freedom from that most dangerous and lowest of national vices, and may not end in encouraging the growth of national Chauvinism among us. The symptoms of such a danger are rife at this moment when the nerves of the people are shaken into abnormal irritability by the constant pressure of suffering and anxiety. But with the Germans the national vice of envy has been greatly stimulated by the recognition of the fact that, in spite of their rapid and stupendous advance in every direction within the short period since their victory over the French, they have not as yet acquired a colonial empire such as Great Britain possesses ; that, owing to what might be considered the accident of historical fate, Germany came too late, after the colonial possessions throughout the world had already been divided among all the other peoples. This one fact, though it may naturally lead to regret and sorrow in the heart of the patriotic German who loves his country and believes in its great mission in the world, and though it may move us to understand and sympathise, does not justify the envy and hatred towards Great Britain, nor their criminal action which has plunged the whole world into misery. Though we* can understand the conditions which might create envy or encourage it in the hearts of the Germans, we recognise that they have fallen upon the fertile soil of a national vice which the Germans, as Germans, possess to the highest degree. As such it does not only turn collectively outwards towards other nations, but it undermines and disturbs the whole inner social life of the nation. This fact is recognised by their own thinkers and statesmen and appears to have 68 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM been their ruling vice in the early days of their racial ancestors, when, as is noted by Prince Biilow, 1 Tacitus tells us that " the Germans destroyed their liberators, the Cherusci, propter invidiam." The Imperial Chancellor, who knew his people well, says of them: 2 " Just as one of the greatest German virtues, the sense of discipline, finds special and dis- quieting expression in the social democratic move- ment, so does our old vice, envy." I remember that one of the wisest of the German diplomats, for some time German Ambassador in London, singled out this vice as being the national fault of his country- men. Envy necessarily produces hatred. The Hebrew composite word Kinah-Sinah combines envy with hate in one word and points to this causal pro- cess in the psychology of man. For it means envy- hatred, the hatred which follows upon envy. And when this passion penetrates into the national system of Chauvinism, intensifies its violence, and directs its animosity, we can well understand the otherwise singular phenomenon of the rapidity with which the all-absorbing antagonism and hatred of Russia at the beginning of the war, then held up as the one supreme cause and justification of the national up- rising, should within a short time have disappeared from the public press and the consciousness of the German people, and have been entirely supplanted by the hatred of England, which finds its supreme expression in the Hymn of Hate. This " Hymn " has since been officially established as the national War Hymn by a German prince and military leader. This is, by the way, a very striking instance of the ready servility of the press and the effectiveness with which the Press Bureau can manipulate the public 1 Bismarck referred to the same passage in Tacitus and also con- sidered envy a national characteristic. 2 Imperial Germany, p. 184. ENVY OF ENGLAND 69 opinion of a whole nation. In a few months, or even weeks, the Russian " bogy " and the old French animosity were completely dropped, and, at the word of command, were at once superseded by an- other " battle-cry " throughout the whole nation, culminating in the most passionate and violent hatred that even the history of barbaric periods can recall. But though, for the time being, the an- tagonism to the Slav may have superseded the in- grained historical animosity to the French, from whom they suffered so much in Napoleonic days, both these national antagonisms but thinly covered the hatred towards their " racial " kinsmen and former allies, because this hatred was based upon, and intensified by, the envy so ingrained in their natures. No doubt some disappointment and the frustra- tion of monstrously stupid plans may have had something to do with the momentary intensification of their hatred of England. They may have been sufficiently blind or unwise to assume that, in spite of the gross breach of Belgian neutrality, and in spite of the recognised fact that some agreement existed between England and France, we would stand aside without lifting a finger and see Belgium crushed, her liberties trampled upon, and France crushed as well. I do not think that England has ever been more grossly insulted than by the assumption quite apart from the Belgian crime that she would follow only her instincts for peace, national security, and pro- sperity, and would not stand by her moral agreement with France to shield her in any case of unjustifiable aggression. Whatever the exact legal definition of this entente cordiale may have been, an entente cor- diale did exist ; and if England had stood aside, she would have merited the ridiculously unjust epithet of Per fide Albion, and the world would justly have 70 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM stigmatised us as a " nation of shopkeepers." What- ever disappointment (and such disappointment could only be felt by those wilfully blinded by the expecta- tion of utter subservience of everybody and every- thing to their own interests) may have been felt by the Germans, and thus intensified their passion against Great Britain, the real cause is to be found in their national vice of envy. Class- As the spirit of Chauvinism develops the passion and^envy ^ natre d in the people collectively towards other in Ger- nations, and as we realise at the present moment my< how this is concentrated upon ourselves, this passion manifests itself also as a dominant factor in their whole internal life. If we take their characteristic modern poetry as an expression of popular senti- ment, we can find many an instance of a most flagrant kind in which hatred inspires the lyric imagination of their poets. We search in vain in the contemporary literature of other nations and in our own for such expressions. To find them at all in ours we must look to the depiction, by an appeal to historical sympathy, of other ages and other con- ditions of life, in which hatred as a passion is forcibly conveyed in dramatic lyrics, such as those of the poems of Robert Browning. We can thus recall how that poet imagines himself a tyrant who finds one independent spirit blocking his way and whom he cannot subdue. 1 Or again, Browning, where in his " In a Spanish Cloister " he shows us the narrowing life with its compressed passion of jealousy when monks are herded together and personal antipathy fans the fire of hatred in the breast of one of them for another. But we have nothing in modern litera- ture like the notorious Hymn of Hate evoked by this war, and nothing in daily life like that powerful poem of Liliencron's, the exponent of the spirit of 1 The poem is called " Instans Tyrannus." ILLUSTRATIONS IN MODERN POETRY 71 modern Germany, which expresses as a dream the most intense personal hatred. It is called " Unsur- mountable Antipathy," and describes the almost animal hatred felt by two people, causing them to spring at each other's throats like wild beasts. But this hatred springing from envy and it is to this that Prince Biilow refers in the passage quoted is especially marked in Germany by the envy of one class towards another, leading to burning hatred between them. It is only natural that those who are poor and ill-favoured should covet the blessings of those upon whom fortune has copiously showered her gifts. This is but human, and has existed in all times, and it exists with us as well. The recognition of such inequalities in the possession of the good things of this world may make socialists or even anarchists of us. However, fortunately for us, we cannot say that resentment and envy of the better fortune of our neighbours have led to manifest antagonism between classes in the daily life of our people. It may be because with us the rich have been more manifestly conscious of the duties which their better fortune imposes upon them, and the poor are fairer-minded and more generous of heart. It may also be due to our free political institutions, which through countless ages have given to every man his chance before the law and his opportunity of expressing his will and pursuing his interests by constitutional means in the government of the country. No doubt also our national sports and pastimes have effectively brought us all together in common games which rest upon the spirit of fair play as the foundation of all British athletics. I can recall that even during the heat of Nationalist agitation and resentment about 1886, when the peasant classes in Ireland were filled with the strongest hatred of the landlords and the wealthier classes, that, 72 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM while riding to or from hounds, the sportsmanlike spirit was nevertheless too strong in the peasants one met, and evoked a smile or a twinkle in the eye of the brother sportsman, to be found in the poorest labourer, and venting itself in a cheery greeting and the question : " Had you good sport, and did you catch him ? " Whatever the cause, the fact remains, that the actual life of the British people in town and country has not to any marked degree been vitiated by the spirit of class antagonism and of social envy. On the other hand, I can also recall how, while riding through woods in Prussia with my German hostess, I was struck by the resentment and scowl in the eyes of the labouring people and the peasantry we met, which seemed to express clearly the hatred they felt towards all who were possessed of more wealth ; until, passing through a village, we were met by a shower of stones from the boys who looked upon us as representatives of the favoured classes. Envy Jealousy is unfortunately a rudimentary passion Fni^even" m man ' s breast and may exist wherever there are into the human beings congregated together. But in Germany Science! tne Brodneid, the jealousy of trade and professional envy, for which they have invented so definite a term, is most rampant. It permeates all classes, in themselves regulated by bureaucratic gradations of rank, and sets one class against the other. Even in the highest and most enlightened spheres, where we might least expect it, owing to the atmosphere per- vading regions of lofty thought, occupation, and habits of mind, such as in the scientific world, this spirit has of late years encroached. It has disfigured the pure and noble type of the German scholar and scientist who, though fortunately still surviving in some splendid instances of a simple life, is gradually receding and making room for the new type of the militaristic Streber in science and in learning. The THE GROWTH OF MONEY-GREED 73 temptations of profit are too strong in a world con- sciously ruled by commercialism, in which from Kaiser and Reichs-Chancellor onwards Real-Politik and Inter essen-Politik are preached to dispel the sup- posed prevalence of idealism or dreamy Utopianism which have long since departed from among the German people. These temptations and the possi- bilities of power coming from wealth have completely altered the spirit of the old German savant, the Teufelsdrockh of Carlyle, whom we read about and admired in our youth. And thus in the laboratories and in the " seminars," where the free interchange of ideas and of work, where the spirit of unity in one supreme endeavour bound the commilitones of former days into one serried rank of a scientific army advanc- ing boldly towards the summit of truth these have all given way to a petty and envious spirit of seclusion and of distrust among the workers, jealously guard- ing each new fact that might lead to important material results, until the rivalry and struggle for priority becomes the dominant passion of the workers, the modern successors to the noble and generous- spirited men of old. We saw it coming after 1870, when, for some years, there were signs of discontent with the old order of things, leading to the prevalent pessimism of that period. I endeavoured to define it in 1878 in an article on "The Social Origin of Nihilism and Pessimism in Germany " ; but ventured to hope that it would tend to a more healthy change and revival. In that article I said : l " The German's nature is essentially and incontest- ably an idealistic one. Idealism is an essential coefficient of his well-being ; rob him of this, and he will always feel its want. Everywhere our German finds himself repulsed in his innermost longings. We have seen how it is as to family, society, and woman. 1 The Nineteenth Century Review, April, 1878. 74 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM What aspect does the inner man present on this point ? His idealism is soon cut off by stern reality. The young man who formerly lived from hand to mouth, happy with the honour paid him, now experiences, without such compensation, the mean and depressing cares for bread which life from hand to mouth must necessarily bring. The romantic age has passed, when youths walk about with long flowing locks and threadbare coats, and so entered even the princely drawing-room, respected in spite of their nonconformity, or even perhaps because of it. Formerly a young man's poverty brought him respect, and such a delicious vain self-contentment. He had no money, nor did he wish for any ; it would soil his philosophical or poetical hands. He had enough to eat and drink and live on ; and was he not beloved by the fair-haired, blue-eyed, dreamy Marguerite ! When age drew on he became a ' philister,' and, either as a small official in some little town, or as a professor or a librarian, he lived quietly on with his wife and family, and revelled in the luxury of the recollections of his youth ; his drooping spirits were revived, and the material cares cast off, as then by facts, so now by the remembrance of them. " Such was the Elysian life of the German thirty years ago, and he was happy. In his cries and lamentations against political institutions and social states, one could always trace the inner self-content. He was perhaps not satisfied with his surroundings, but he was satisfied with himself. At every moment the feu sacre burst forth in a flame of youthful poetical eccentricity, Hegelian fanciful speculation, or political martyrdom ; but in himself there dwelt the sweetest harmony. His imprecations were directed against that life, but not against life in general. The Wer- therian melancholy was only adopted for its aesthetically beautiful dark cloak. He, if we may use the word, had lived himself into that melancholy, because he admired it, but it did not spring from those deep physical and social conditions from which the modern melancholy springs. His romantic lamentations and invectives were the outbursts of a SYMPTOMS FORTY YEARS AGO 75 too great energy and vital force, not the apathetic reasonings of to-day's pessimist. He felt Welt- schmerz ; our pessimist professes to be indifferent. He pointed out the causes of his woe, for they lay not in himself. He was like the philosopher who says, ' That is not the way to cognition/ and not like the sceptic who says, ' There is no way to cognition.' He was what Carlyle would call a ' worshipper of sorrow,' who waged internecine warfare with the ' Time Spirit,' while the other, our pessimist, combats against the whole spirit, because he feels himself a child of his time. The misanthrope loves man and hates men. " How different is it at present from what the romantic idealist's life was then ! The admiration of the poor, threadbare-coated poet or philosopher has disappeared. What was formerly a source of pride is now the opposite. The writer himself knows a German poet of great worth and repute, who is not treated by society with the honour due to him, because he is not in the position to offer expensive hospitality to his friends, while others, acknowledged to be smaller, are the lions of the day. To-day, young idealist, your genius will not suffice. You must be a business man, and make money, and wear a new coat, and cut your hair short like everyone else, or you will be laughed at ; for a schwdrmer is out of fashion. This kills the very idealism which he needs. He finds all romance ridiculed. Like Hamlet, he is not understood by his surroundings, and so becomes indifferent towards the outer world, a despiser of mankind, as Schopenhauer was. Whither, in his distress, does he fly with his idealism ? Not to his home, nor to his family, nor to his maiden, for he has them not. Into himself ! Here he buries all his treasures. Here there is no Grunderschwindel , no insolence of office, no law's delay ; here he who was wont to float on the high paths of idealism need not stoop down and pick up the tiny piece of copper that lies in the dust on the roadside, and that buys bread. Here he is lord, and he revels in the feeling : ' everything is bad ; only I am good (for he who can 76 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM see the bad must stand outside it).' This is prob- ably unknown to themselves, the basis of all their pessimist reasonings. Pessimism is the highest stage of Romanticism. Only he is nihilist who has done away with all the desires of life, who has relinquished everything, because to him everything must be nothing. No one is more in need of fulness than he who feels the universal emptiness. No one is more in need of the world than he who weeps for it or inveighs against it. The only true nihilist is the indifferent and the laugher, the blase and the satirist ; but the pessimist is the schwarmer par excellence. Both Optimism and Pessimism are, so to say, forms of motion, while Nihilism is stagnation. Optimism and Pessimism are like plus and minus, while nihilism is the only zero." Growth of Since 1878 the commercial spirit has made still further strides in its predominance throughout the and ma- whole life of the German people. Practically it means the desire for wealth, the greed of money, the realisation of the power of money. The Real and Interessen Politik, preached by the rulers, writ large on the national banner of the people, claiming national expansion in the world to increase the material wealth, and fostering the envy and hatred of those more for- tunate in the possession of such a world empire, and above all, the hatred of England, these have con- tributed to the materialisation of the German spirit. I remember how astonished I was, some sixteen or eighteen years ago, at an answer I received from a German prince, who had been sent to study for a time at one of our great English univer- sities. I asked him what he would choose to be, if he had the power of effecting his choice directly ; what was his ideal of future activity ? His answer was : "I should like to become a Cecil Rhodes." Cecil Rhodes (long before his death and the founda- tion of the Rhodes scholarships) or Pierpont Morgan REAL AND INTERESSEN POLITIK 77 were the ideal types of many a young German who were supposed to be, and for themselves claimed to be, actuated by the highest ideals ; who were thought to be by their political leaders fantastic dreamers and unpractical Utopians. There are, no doubt, many young men living among us who have the same ideals ; but we have never had the reputation abroad of being idealists and dreamers, and those young men would hardly understand what an idealist means. It is precisely among the upper classes who assert the feudal conditions of life and the prestige which it bestows upon them, and who also would shrink from the actual struggle and toil of honest com- mercial or industrial work (which they more or less despise), that this desire for gold and the wish to possess the inordinate means with which their industrial magnates are blessed it is among these that crass materialism shows itself and that the value of money is most clearly realised. But it is also in the upper middle classes, among those who have gathered all the fruits of the best education and thought, and who, in the Germany of old, held high the torch of idealism, where the want of money is most keenly felt and the desire to possess it is one of the strongest passions. But here again it is not coupled with the simple and stern determination to cast off all pretensions and honestly to enter into commerce or industry as a noble vocation in itself. They must base their social claims on being "officers of the reserve," and fly the colours of militarism for social distinction. Out of this class grows the band of malcontents and agitators ; and in this class are to be found the haters of England, who are moved by violent envy towards the economic prosperity of the English Empire and its subjects. This lust of gold on the part of those not favoured by its possession, is most powerfully put, again in lyric form, in a poem 78 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM by that same exponent of the militaristic spirit of modern Germany, Liliencron. I need not say that I in no way wish to reflect on the personality of this vigorous poet ; nor am I blind to the fact that to depict the passions and moods of all manner of people and in all conditions of life is one of the great tasks of the poet ; and that we should be absurdly wrong in ascribing to him the vices and faults which he describes with powerful poetic self-detachment. Nevertheless, in his poem called " Auf der Kasse " he does present to us a typical instance of the modern life about him, from which, according to Goethe's injunction, the poet seizes the subjects of his art. He there presents to us the sudden impulse of the poor man who is drawing his few shillings from the bank. Upon seeing the masses of gold which the cashiers are sorting he suddenly imagines how, if only they were all blind, he would dive into this mass of gold and carry it off, filling his pockets with it, pursued by the policemen whom he evades, and how he then would enjoy the fruits of his theft. The impulse and the momentary dream pass, and he returns to the bare reality and the mean conditions of his life. It is all both natural and human and is expressed with forcible poetic power. The impulse may have come to many people all over the world. But the mood of this poem and of many others by this same author expresses directly, in the subjective form of personal experience (as the poems of Heine directly expressed the romanticism of his age), mental conditions which are most characteristicof the develop- ment of modern Germany, and certainly show, not only this insidious spirit of envy and hatred, but also the direct material form, the desire for wealth, so foreign to the spirit of Teutonic life and of the German people of the past. Furthermore, however, this sudden growth of MORAL DEGENERATION 79 wealth has led to a degeneration of the social life Depravi of the people on a wider scale, especially in the degener material and sensual depravity prevalent at Berlin tion and in many of the larger provincial towns. Always remembering what the Germany of old Berlin was and keeping before our minds the attractive picture of its healthy simplicity, its solidity, coupled with its lofty idealism, if we then turn to the Germany of to-day as seen in the life of Berlin and the larger provincial cities, such as Hamburg, Frankfort, and Munich, the contrast will be most striking. These centres again affect the life of other towns as patterns of metropolitan elegance and culture, and, by direct contagion, the life of all the inhabitants in smaller towns and in rural districts who pay occasional visits to these centres of recreation and pleasure, and carry away with them the germs of degeneration which there find such favourable pabulum for their " culture." If we recall the pictures of the life and the entertainments at court and in the upper circles at Berlin in the days of the old Emperor William, the simplicity (which was not, therefore, necessarily attractive or refined), the absence of display, the meagreness of the means of entertainment, and the comparatively small cost which it entailed, with the present expense and luxury, the change will impress itself more forcibly. Not only have the ordinary expenses of daily life grown in huge proportions, from house-rent onward ; but the change shows itself in the lavish entertainments, which are not domestic in character, and partake of a tone of dissipation. These entertainments do not reflect, as they may in other countries, the well-founded wealth which has become habitual and is directly in proportion to the more luxurious and brilliant conditions of life in which the wealthy classes pass their normal existence. They are given at the restau- 8o THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM rants and hotels, or are sent from there to the homes. But far more significant of moral de- cadence are the social disintegrating excesses in the desire for amusements and display of Berlin dis- tinctly tending towards the abnormal and morbid. I boldly venture to maintain that of all the great capitals of the world, including Paris, London, Vienna, and New York, Berlin is the most patently and crassly depraved, and this depravity is admittedly organised and recognisable. The night-life of Berlin stands quite by itself among the cities of the world. Night is not devoted to sleep, but to the seeking of pleasure in all its forms. It may be said as has often been replied to the critics of Paris, the Paris of old that it chiefly concerns the visitors and strangers, and is organised for them. No doubt the life of depraved amusement in Paris during the Second Empire, still surviving to some extent in our day, was chiefly provided for the hosts of foreign visitors. Yet in Berlin these strangers and visitors are not foreigners ; but constitute the mass of the German people from every part of the German Empire, who thus are contaminated and depraved. Nor is it true that these amusements are meant to meet the demands of visitors only ; for the night- clubs cater chiefly for the residents of Berlin ; and among the habitues are representatives of old historic houses, even the princes of the Empire, government officials and officers, as well as representatives of great wealth, or those who not having great wealth have the facilities of making great debts. This life of dissipation, in its worst and most degenerate forms, goes on all night. The managers of the leading hotels assert that, when their work is started at six o'clock in the morning, about two-thirds of the keys in the hotel are still hanging on the board in the office, showing that the inmates of the hotel DEPRAVITY OF BERLIN 81 have not yet returned. Novels have been published telling how this poison has filtered through the whole of the country, even to the distant provinces. I cannot continue to dwell upon the character of some of the clubs frequented by men of high rank. I have said enough, and I only say it to point out the contrast between the life of recent years and that of Germany before 1870. Nor, as I have said above, is it limited to Berlin, as London and Paris are recognised as the only centres in England and France where flagrant vice flourishes in a huge city. I have had it on good authority that some of the Palais de Danse in certain of the more important towns of the provinces attract even a large proportion of the Bourgeoisie. The sums expended and received in these Palais de Danse are incredibly large. We all know that such places of amusement, and even worse ones, are to be found in Paris, and, though not to the same extent, in London. As many a German feared, the nation has lost some of the warlike efficiency possessed by their fathers of 1870, and to this degeneracy is perhaps to some extent to be traced the revolting forms of excesses which their cruelty has taken in Belgium and in France, and which, in some cases, is only to be explained by a pathological perversion of sensuality. In France, on the other hand, it cannot be denied, that since the days of the Second Empire there has been a regeneration of the moral fibre of the French people, especially among the young men of to-day. The infusion of the athletic spirit and all that it means morally, as consciously adopted from England, fostered by the direct efforts of several individuals, among whom I may single out the Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the Vicomte de Jansey, and others, in their Association pour I' Encouragement des Sports Athletiques, and the seriousness with which the youth of France has been beginning to recognise its duty towards the State, have done much to prove them far different adversaries from those whom the Germans met in 1870, and I venture to predict that this war will have a still more salutary effect in the moral regeneration of the French people. Still, there remains in France the great blot of financial corruption in the political life of the past, the dominance of the haute finance in every form of public activity ; and, above all, the evil traditions of a Press which is admittedly in so many, if not in most, cases representative of a definite financial group of interests. The reform, of all others, which is most needed in France, as it may be else where, 'is that by new laws, corruption in the election of national repre- sentatives should be made impossible, and the immunity of the people's representatives from the disease of financial enterprise and speculation should be jealously safeguarded and maintained. As for us here in England, we may also take timely warning. The tone of certain " sets " in the huge society which centres in London has of late drawn dangerously near to degeneracy and decadence. London is fortunately so large that it can never be said to be dominated in its social character by any one group of people or any so-called set. The Court no doubt exercises, and will always exert, a powerful influence as a type and example to direct the social aspirations of the people ; but it cannot be said that its tone of intercourse and habits of life in any way strike the dominant keynote to the symphony or cacophony of the social world, as is to a far greater extent the case in the society of Vienna or Berlin, or as was the case in the time of monarchical France. No doubt, however, it also exercised considerable influence on the " surface ethics " of the people. DANGERS IN FRENCH AND ENGLISH LIFE 83 There were and still exist, however, so many varied groups, based on similarity of rank, wealth, occupa- tion, or amusements, that no one set could be said definitely to lead and to prescribe as the case may be the tone or the pace. This multiplicity of social influence and social standards has made it quite impossible, with any approach' to truth, to speak of " society " in London with any idea of accuracy, certainly not in the sense in which it was applied by our forefathers in the eighteenth and earlier centuries, or even in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Nor could the term " Society " be used in the sense in which self-complacently the residents in a small provincial town or village use it. On the other hand, owing to the modern system of publicity, certain cliques have attained to a con- spicuousness before the world, which no doubt has led to their setting the tone and establishing a tra- dition among wider social groups, if not for the general public. But it must always be remembered that these sets form a very small minority ; and that numerous other sets in London and in the country, more completely representative of true British traditions of life and morals, command the respect of a wider public, and far outweigh that minority in numbers, eminence, and influence. These latter still represent what is best in English life. The tone of this minority in London society, constantly before the public, was decidedly lowering to public morals and public taste. Their outer life was luxurious, pleasure-seeking, and even dissolute. Especially was it opposed to the fundamental tradi- tion of home-life, which has ever been essentially private and unconcerned with publicity and display. Their lives were pre-eminently lived in public. The restaurant had with them superseded the home ; 84 THE GROWTH OF GERMAN CHAUVINISM and their amusements and entertainments were thus enjoyed before the eyes of the multitude. The traditions of the modern press, with its advertising publicity, came in to diffuse still further the elements of luxury and of profligacy and the dissolution of the traditional home. As foreign habits of restaurant-life were engrafted, so also foreign tastes in art were established, which not only hampered the natural growth in expression of national character in art, but actually fostered exotic tastes which exercised deeper influences on life itself. It is no doubt good to broaden one's taste towards catholicity and to increase the capacity of appreciat- ing, not only the life and art of bygone ages, but also of contemporary peoples remote from ourselves in every way. To have had presented to us the characteristic art (and through it the characteristic life as well) of modern Sicily, Belgium, and even of China and Japan, through the masterly performances of Sicilian, Belgian, Chinese, and Japanese plays enacted by their own people, was an artistic delight and a step towards an extension of aesthetic and intellectual sympathy. Not so, however, the position which was assigned to the Russian ballet. The Russian ballet and the masterly and exquisite performances witnessed in London of late years presented us with superior art of its kind. But it would be a mistake to assign too prominent and re- presentative a position to this particular form of art even in the general national art of Russia. It is well to appreciate and to enjoy such artistic pro- duction. But to assign to it a central or dominant influence on our artistic nature, by submitting con- tinuously and for a long period to its charm, until it pervades our whole taste, is a dangerous exaggera- tion which may have deeper and far-reaching effects upon national taste and national morals. The bril- SALUTARY EFFECT OF THE WAR 85 liancy and oriental sensuousness of such displays, though justified in due proportion in our artistic experience, cannot be healthy for us when they be- come predominant, and must, should they take hold of our moral, destroy the essential elements of our national character as expressed and confirmed by art. The Arabian Nights are a classic in the world's literature. But to make them the ordinary daily literary pabulum of Western readers and the central standards of Western taste can only pervert the moral as well as the artistic side of our national life. It appears that, with the recent exaggerated pro- minence given to the Russian ballet, such influences have already been at work and have permeated into the life of its devotees, even to the modification of taste in dress. These dangers of degeneracy from the example of social minorities and from exotic interference with the true and natural expression of our national life, character, and tastes have been checked by the war. With all its horrors, miseries, and degradations, it has certainly, by the self-sacrifice of our manhood, the devotion and inwardness of effort of our women in fact, the temporary moral revival of the whole nation brought us back to our elemental principles of national morals. May it thus pave the way for a lasting national regeneration in every walk and sphere of life in the future ! All these menaces in the social life of contemporary England to which I have referred were dangerous to the continuance of a healthy national life. In view of the degeneration observable in Germany within the last thirty years, we ought to take heed and coun- teract these evil influences which tend to undermine our own national health. CHAPTER IV THE CONCEPTION OF THE STATE AND OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Contra- WE have hitherto considered the direct and immediate between causes, national, social, and moral, which have led to the cur- this war. But, as I urged from the beginning of this ceptions book, there are more remote and less manifest causes of the of a more general, though more fundamental, nature State and ' . of inter- which are to be found in the constitution of the relations mora ^ an( ^ social life, not only of the Germans, but of and of the Western civilised peoples throughout the world . moral" 6 Though these causes are of such a general and remote con- character, they are none the less the factors which SC1OU.S" ness of have directly contributed to this catastrophic climax modern m the international relations of all civilised peoples. man. r . r They concern the general ideas and ideals which at once express and regulate the national and inter- national conscience of civilised peoples. Though definitely formulated and effectively fixed, so as to regulate and determine the political life of the several nations, they are in reality in direct contradiction to the true consciousness, political and moral, of the several peoples upon whom they are imposed. Such contradiction applies, in the first instance, to the con- ceptions of the State, and the international relations between the States. In spite of the firm foundation and the wide diffusion of democratic principles throughout the civilised world ; in spite of Lincoln's epigrammatic 86 THE GERMAN CONCEPTION 87 summary of the object and ultimate aim of govern- The posi- ment, as " Government of the people, by the people, thTstlte and for the people," in the mind of the Germans and at vari- of more autocratically governed nations, the State our C true h is still regarded as an entity apart from and above cpncep- the people ; its authority is conceived as being absolute and autocratic and, in some of its aspects, opposed to its citizens who are to bow down before its authority. Even with ourselves, in some aspects of our political life, especially those that develop patriotic Chauvinism, this idea of the State some- times shows itself. In this conception there is a distinct line drawn between the rulers and the ruled. Even when the governed revolt against their rulers, or harbour the spirit of revolt, they thereby affirm this difference, until they look upon the State and government as criminals look upon the police, not as representatives and guardians of the people's laws laws made by the people and guardians appointed by them to watch over these laws but as the inimical representative of an outside interest opposed to their own. In all these cases, in any event, the State is conceived of as an entity in itself, independent of the people whose unity derived from whatever causes, geographical, ethnological, legislative, social, or moral constitutes the essence of the State. This concep- tion of the State as " a thing in itself," confirmed in the life and history of early peoples and consciously and intellectually by the Greek .writers on history, politics, and philosophy, has survived, in spite of all the huge developments of political thought and liberty, and of the democratic spirit manifested in the writings of publicists and philosophers from the Renaissance onwards and notably in the eighteenth century and since the French Revolution. In the writings of many modern historians, especially Ger- man, accentuated in those of a militaristic turn 88 STATE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS of mind, to whom we have to such a great degree traced the responsibility for this war, the autocratic and theocratic view of the State survives in a more or less manifest form. With these later historians and constitutional historians, however, an intermediate stage has been developed between the ancient concep- tion of the absolute unity of the State and the demo- Xhe era tic principles of government. This intermediate national conception or compromise is found in the term " national " (Nazional), or rather " racial " (Rassen- staaf), which, as we have seen, to a great extent accounts for the chauvinistic spirit dominating the German world. Whether this modern idea of Nationality, as the chief justification for the existence of the State and as an effective ideal in political life, national and international, is to be traced back to Napoleon or Mazzini, or to a confluence of many historical and political currents in the nineteenth century, the fact remains, that it has been, and is, the most powerful factor in political life and in the formation of political theory. Its influence in modern times can be traced in numerous international movements and crises. In the Balkans it has been both modified and intensified by the fusion of racial with religious differences, and has thus been the cause of continuous international complications and diffi- culties, the final solution of which is remote in the future and threatens the world's peace for some time to come. The modern German development of Nationality found full expression since the days of Bismarck, and its development is not only to be seen in such historians as Treitschke, who was taken up by the publicists and the teachers of constitutional history throughout Germany, but has been, and is, the current German conception in modern times. I well remember how it formed the central idea in the lectures of the late Professor Bluntschli of Heidel- National- ism. RACIAL NATIONALISM 89 berg, who, though a native of Switzerland, still re- sponded directly to the exactions of Bismarckian policy. The justification for the German Empire The was that it directly responded to, and expressed, the Jo i racial unity of the German people ; and this racial tion of unity drew a fixed and marked line, as regards the i interests and the very existence of the State, between it and other States of different racial origin. Wher- ever among the inhabitants this racial unity was not clearly expressed, in fact was made doubtful or weak- ened, it naturally led to internal antagonism ; and thus grew up within the people the anti-Semitic party, while the Poles and Danes and any other element that could assert itself, or could at all be recognised in its supposed solidarity, was persecuted and suppressed. If this suppression was not com- pletely successful, it naturally led to disquieting elements of disruption and of party contest. It thus favoured antagonism, leading through dislike to hatred without and within. In any case the unity of the State and the close ties Racial of affinity and of national affection which give vitality ^not b to its national life give a soul to the nation are claimed very much endangered when they rest upon such British ethnological grounds. For when we ask the question, Empire, ' Which one of the civilised states of modern times f or Eng- can claim, and truly realise its claim to, racial unity ? " land - the answer must be, " Not one of them." While this is being written, there are appearing a series of letters in the Times, grouping round a controversy waged by eminent men, as to the position which the Anglo- Saxons held in the formation and development of the English nation and of the British Empire. Such discussions appear to me futile and childish, especi- ally when their result is to have a direct bearing upon the inner social and political life, and upon the actual foreign relations of our State. Subdivide as you will go STATE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS the subjects of the King of England into the original and aboriginal predecessors of modern Englishmen, of palaeolithic and neolithic inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland, the Celts and their varied ramifi- cations, Bretons, Picts and Scots, Saxons, Danes and Norsemen, Normans and other races ; add to these, in more clearly historical times, the more peaceful incursions of other immigrants, who, from their leadership in thought and in trade and in all forms of industry, or by highly educated social groups or by individual men, have left their mark upon English history subdivide as much as you will, you cannot thereby destroy the unity of the British Empire, the soul of the nation, welded together by its past history, its political constitution, its spirit of liberty, its customs and traditions, and its ideals of living. Not only the ethnological groups of its inhabitants in the remote past, but these more recent accessions to British nationality have had the most powerful influence in giving definite character and in directing the development of English national life. These comprise the Jews, who no doubt in the Middle Ages in the time of Isaac of York and the other " bankers " of those days, before their expulsion, exercised a most powerful civilising influence on the develop- ment of English life. But since their return in the time of Cromwell, they have produced leading indi- viduals in every walk of life, culminating in the per- sonality of Disraeli, who, whether admired or con- demned by the partisan, certainly left his imprint on the history and political character of his age as perhaps no other individual has done since the days of Pitt. We have also to consider the immigration into England both from the Low Countries and from France, of the weavers and skilled artisans, Dutch, Flemish, or Huguenot, who undoubtedly gave a favour- able turn to the character of British trade and industry. THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 91 These immigrants also furnish us with individual men and families who have duly risen to eminence and who have added most perceptibly to the formation of our national character in our own days. It is puerile, as well as absolutely inept and ineffectual, to endeavour to apportion the good or the potently effective in our national life and character among the several ethno- logical sources from which the truly formative elements in national history are supposed to be derived. Burke, Wellington, and Palmerston may or may not have been of pure Celtic origin, but they were practically of Irish descent, though they had their full share in the making of England, as much as did Cromwell, Pitt, Fox, and Gladstone. Were one to adopt experimental and observational methods, such as the field-geologist is capable of applying in rapid observation to the theoretical study of geology, one would be absolutely confused and puzzled were one to try to segregate into the various ethnological strata any given number of people in any one of our towns not to speak of London at all and even in our country villages, according to the ethnological types which they are supposed to represent. The whole structure of such generalisation in theoretical study, still more in the practical application of such distinctions to the differ- ent problems of the social and political life of the country nay, the very basis of the existence of the State as a unity would at once topple to the ground. And this is not only true of Great Britain, it is Equally true of every single nation of Western Europe, per- ? n ~ , , haps of even Slav Russia. Germany and France are in Ger- in their ethnological constitution as mixed and F r ^ e o r disparate as any nation claiming national unity can any one well be. There may be more difference of physique European and character, of habits of life, of emotionality, of states, intellectual predisposition, of temperament and taste, constituting what we call personality, between the 92 STATE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS South Germans of Bavaria and Wiirtemberg and Baden and the East Prussian, between them again and the Holsteiner and the Westphalian and those from the Rhine provinces, than between any one of these and citizens of Denmark and Poland, Switzer- land or Holland. And their different dialects, though all form part of the German language, their pro- nunciation and intonation of this same language, are so different that I, though a foreigner, have had to act as an interpreter between the dwellers of the chalets in the Bavarian highlands and the Tyrol and the North German tourists who vainly endeavoured to make themselves understood. I do not in any way maintain that the inhabitants who thus differ from one another should not collec- tively form a State, as little as I maintain that, be- cause in language, and perhaps in race, there may be great affinity between sections of the German people and the Swiss, or between other sections and the Flemings and Dutch, they are necessarily to form one State : that Switzerland, Belgium, and Holland should therefore be deprived of their inde- pendence and be incorporated into the German Empire. It is amusing to note how, when would-be scientific and philological principles suit the purposes of German Weltpolitik, they can at once be made subservient to national greed. In an article which has recently appeared, the criminal breach of Belgian neutrality and the prospective annexation of Belgium by the German Empire is supported on the grounds of such philology and ethnology. Does anybody in his senses honestly believe that such unsound, pretentious, and pedantic efforts of the ethnologist establish a moral and practical ground for the claims of any State to absolute power, to the commands of which every individual citizen, all classes of the population, all groups and interests of DEMENTED IMPERIALISM 93 economic and social life, are to bow down in un- questioning obedience ? Are the rights of the people dependent upon this flimsy and fantastic structure of pedantic schoolmasters aspiring to be master- builders of States ? And when we turn from the State in itself to the relations of the several States to one another, how can any one of these, on the ground of an utterly false ethnological generalisation, claim ascendancy over all the others ? What is the conception in the mind of such thinkers and politicians of the relation of the State to the whole inhabited globe with its millions upon millions of human beings, each claim- ing their own right to live and to think and to act in freedom ? On these shadowy figments of narrow and destructive brains they claim the supreme moral right to subjugate other peoples and nations to the interests and desires of one small group of people calling themselves a State, with unrestrained ambi- tion to bend the whole world to their own desires I Why should a relatively small section of land, a district in Europe marked on the map as Germany, with its sixty or seventy millions of people among the untold millions of human beings, become the absorbing centre of the world's collective life, so that all the world should minister to its desires and swear allegiance to its national exactions, to become, not so much the guiding brain and the sentient heart, but the absorbing stomach to which all life is to be subordinated ? It is Imperialism gone mad I N 0r does The German may answer that his justification for superi- world-power lies in his Kultur, and that the civilisa- civilisa- tion represented by the German people has the tio j?. e , s ~ , . , , . tablish a comparatively highest claim among civilised nations, claim for and ought therefore to dominate the world. Quite n to" apart from the fact that we should absolutely deny absorb this primacy of German civilisation, which, as we 94 STATE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS have seen before, even their own philosophers deny, how can they diffuse and advance their own Kultur by the barbarous and degrading methods of war ? But even if, arguments causa, we were to admit that they were thus fitted to lead, then let them lead onwards and upwards ; but not push and drive with brutal as well as deceitful and utterly demoralising force their peaceful neighbours and distant peoples back into the fold of their own selfishness, to serve their own interests, increase their wealth and power, to satisfy the lust of dominance, nay, the vanity of this sixty or seventy millions of people in that small portion of the globe. I may be allowed to repeat what in substance I have already written with refer- ence to the Jews : * " If there is anything good in you you who may, with more or less doubtful accuracy, be supposed to be the direct descendants of one of the greatest races of the past show it and let the world benefit by the spirit which moves you and has moved you in the past ; hold on high the torch of your ancestors and let it illumine the world for the good of the world ! But you are most likely to accomplish this, not by segregating yourselves into separate social or political groups in the States of which you are citizens, still less by endeavouring to become a separate nation with all the pretentions, the actual or potential antagonisms to other States which such corporateness implies ; but by being perfectly deve- loped and high-minded individuals, affectionate and helpful members of your family, devotedly attached to its prosperity and its good name, beneficent dwellers in any community where you may happen to live, and loyal citizens of the State in which, whether for many centuries or even for a few years, you have been active national units, contributing as such units to the free development of the laws and 1 See the chapter (II, pp. 54-99) on the Mission of the Jews in my book The Jewish Question and the Mission of the Jews. JEWISH NATIONAL PRETENSIONS 95 the national life of such a State. Let your poetic imagination and your pride of descent, and the duty which you owe to the good fame of your ancestors, beautify and strengthen your lives, as the works of art or the beauties of literature in due proportion add their refining element to your life of leisure. Sentiment is all, because it groups round the idea, the ideal essence, of material things. If any natural evolution of the human kind and any sequence of historical events (though, in your case, generally sad) have made you what you are, and what you are is good, let this good permeate into the life about you as individual factors in a complex State, and let all together ultimately lead to the advance of the human race and the diffusion of happiness through- out it ! " Deutsche Kultur if you like, whatever be best in it ! But not the Kultur of the Prussian Junker, or bureaucrat, the grasping Alldeutscher pauper who wants more money, the beer-heavy stump speaker in a frowsy inn who, indolent in all but his unassuaged rapacity, fans his sentimental Gemuthlichkeit of old into hysterical passion, until it at last bursts forth into a Hymn of Hate ! Such, however, is the con- tagion of the chauvinistic idea, of the so-called Nazional-Staat, to which I have before referred, that the Jews themselves have been affected, and a small section of them must needs strive for a Jewish Empire in the conception of the Zionist movement. The objection may be made, that all that I have The just said and urged against the vicious spirit of All- Briti deutschland is also directed against all Imperialism, and the including British Imperialism. But I would except the British Empire, because it has, in pursuing its own national destiny as a great colonising State, gone as far as, under the dominant condition of national and racial ideas of our days, it could go towards the realisation of our true ideals of politics. It aims in 9 96 STATE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS every case at establishing freedom and self-govern- ment for each colony, of giving of the best to each one of these which in the course of history have come under its influence and dominion, and, fulfilling its mission as long as Free Trade and the " Open Door " rule its policy of ignoring the selfish call of the immediate interests in the Mother Country. What always remains in welding the numerous and varied peoples of the British Empire together is the national sentiment, the feeling of a common past, of a common origin, of common traditions, and of a united struggle for the realisation of definite ideas and ideals in government and social life. Just as the members and descendants of one family are bound together, but are thereby in no way excluded from their vigorous endeavours to be good citizens of their country and of the world at large, to realise the tasks in the life set before them, and to contribute as individuals to the advancement and betterment of the whole world, so are all the citizens of the British Empire bound together ; and this war to the un- doing of German Chauvinists has proved the reality and strength of these bonds more forcibly than ever before. I repeat : sentiment is a great power and has its direct practical uses and effectiveness, especi- ally in larger collective bodies. It is more real and more effective, and less likely to lead to discord and the clashing of interests, than the manifestly prac- tical aims and allurements of colonial preference or of protective tariffs. German But why should Germany, after driving like a iS? erial " we dge its commercial penetration into Asia Minor, or one of the South American Republics, and naturally and organically affecting the life of these countries, until the good that may thus arise will of its own force survive, why should force and brutal com- pulsion destroy the national life of the people in- NATIONAL TYRANNY 97 habiting these countries, and artificially engraft the conditions which prevail in Germany so as mechani- cally to supersede by force (not by persuasion and evolution) the living civilisation which has grown up out of the soil and out of the history of Asia Minor or South America, arising from legitimate traditions and national sentiments ? Above all, finally, why (should the Germans succeed in establishing such colonies) should these become merely the means to develop the commerce and wealth, to swell the pockets and paunches of the German officials and manufacturers and merchants, all ending in discord and endless war and bloodshed within and without and over the whole world ? But this is the real picture which those who have made, and those who are carrying on, this criminal war, have drawn for the edification of the German people. The spirit of German culture is not the aim in itself, and never was, even if they were convinced of its absolute superiority over all other forms of civilisation. The accumulation of irrefutable evidence from every quarter of the globe, the definite statements and docu- ments revealed since the war began, and the more recent pronouncements of the King of Bavaria con- cerning Belgium, leave no doubt of the aggressive plans of annexation and land-grabbing of the domi- nant leaders of Germany which have matured for years past. Moreover, it has been shown by their own official statements that there is no real pressing need for colonisation and " the place in the sun " to ind employment for the surplus population of Ger- lany. Emigration has decreased, not increased, /ithin recent years in fact labour has been con- tinually imported into Germany from other countries. 1 1 See Helfferich in Soziale Kultur und Volkswohlfahrt wdhrend der rsten 25 Regierungsjahre Wilhelms II, p. 17 ; also G. L. Beer, in the 7 orum, May 1915, p. 550 ; and /' Accuse (German edition), pp. 41 seq. 98 STATE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS If German Kultur is the best of all existing forms of civilisation, it will assert itself by its intrinsic worth, weight, and power. If the German language is the best means of conveying human thought, it will assert itself and supersede all other languages. But we shall not adopt them at the command of the German Junker or the German drill-sergeant, or stand by to see them forced upon weaker States, who themselves may possess even an older and nobler civilisation of their own, in order to satisfy the school- boy vanity of German thinkers of second, third, or fourth-rate capacity, devoid of all genius, whose only merit and use, great though it be, consists in tabu- lating and making handy for the world the achieve- ments of the great geniuses, most of them not German, who marked an epoch in the world of thought and art and invention ; nor shall we head the vociferous band of intellectual followers, drunken with the A II- Deutsche ideals of a Treitschke, a Bernhardi, or a Nietzsche. Why, to satisfy German national and racial vanity, should Holland, and Belgium, and Switzerland ultimately Denmark, and Norway, and Sweden as well be expunged from the political map of Europe ? Why should Northern France disappear as the courageous and imaginative leader of modern thought and taste ? Why should German ambitions be unchecked as regards South America, Asia Minor, China, and Japan, and their envious rapacity push on to grasp the colonies and dependencies of Great Britain, happy in their political kinship with their political and social parent land, loyal to its dominion and leadership, and ready as the present war has proved to fight her battles and to assert her might ! The British Empire has, up to the present moment, recognised and acted upon the principle of the Open Door with regard to its colonies and dependencies, THE OPEN DOOR 99 and it would be nothing short of a political crime, as well as economic folly, to abandon this broadest principle of Free Trade, upon which morally as well as materially the prosperity of the British Empire has hitherto rested. CHAPTER V THE HUMANITARIAN CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE MODERN MAN The in- THIS principle of the Open Door has formed the very tionai essence of the policy of the United States, when it had principle been drawn into the vortex of international struggle open 6 m the case f China, and was clearly expressed in the Door. lasting and classic pronouncement of that great and wise political leader, the late John Hay. It has been, and will ever remain, the dominant principle of the government of the United States in its relation to the expansion of Western civilisation. With the recog- nition of this principle and the absence of all those international intrigues and smouldering, or flaming, antagonisms for which in the past Germany has been chiefly responsible (though Russia and ourselves and all other States are not free from guilt in the methods and work of their Foreign Offices), there is no reason why the commercial penetration of Asia Minor and all that the building of the Bagdad Railway meant might not ultimately have provided Germany with a vast field for enterprise, for commercial expansion at home, and for the employment abroad of men with energy and talent from the Mother Country. Of course they would in justice be bound to consider and to respect the well-established claims established through many years of fruitful activity which Great Britain pos- sessed on the Persian Gulf and in the adjacent centres bordering it, such as Koweit and Busra. In spite of 100 THE OPEN DOOR 101 the Monroe Doctrine, why should not Germany have continued the commercial penetration of more than one of the South American republics with large groups of German settlers forming, de facto, German colonies ; until, again de facto, by the exercise of free and peace- ful activity these colonists would have gained actual control in directing the course of life and in setting its tone in such countries ? Moreover, if their own Kultur, the civilisation which they collectively repre- sent, was actually superior to the civilisation which they found and which had before been dominant, it would of itself have changed, and ultimately have superseded, the lower forms ; and we might in due course have seen the actual transplantation of German Kultur into distant parts of the globe. History has repeatedly shown how the superior civilisation will prevail over the lower forms which it meets in any given country. Ultimately, however, it is possible, nay probable, that such an off-shoot from the parent stock in peaceful colonial development will sever itself from the parent stem and establish an indepen- dent existence and growth of its own ; but the civili- sation remains the same in its original essence and in the blessings of superiority which the parent nation has conferred upon its off-shoot. Was not the United States a direct off-shoot of the English parent stem, and may not in the future the British colonies more and more assert their political and social independence and develop their own local and peculiar characters, enriching the world by a distinct and new form of civilisation or an equality of height with the parent culture, until they may even react upon the old world and modify it in many forms ? So the civilisation of the Greek colonies in Magna Grsecia and Sicily reacted upon the Mother Country ; while, in great part through these Greek colonies, the Latin civilisa- tion of the Italic Peninsula was infused with Hellenism. 102 HUMANITARIAN CONSCIOUSNESS OF MAN Then, through the vast Roman Empire, nearly every part of the world was modified to the very depths of social and political existence in the spirit of Hellenism, as it passed through, and was modified and enlarged by, Rome. Finally, after the Italian Renaissance, the submerged classic spirit again arose in a new, yet pristine, glory ; and the classical spirit of humanity has ever since dominated and been the most potent factor in modern European civilisation, both in Europe itself and in America, and will ultimately penetrate into the farthest East and West and North and South of this earth of ours. Patriot- But here the cloven foot of Chauvinism in a seem- nationai m gly noble and more justifiable form shows itself vanity, again ; and now it is in the spirit of " national patriotism," as it may be called, or of national vanity as it might more properly be termed. The members of a living modern State do not wish to lose one particle of the credit and the glory which comes from seeing themselves and what they consider their own Kultur carried away from them by their migrating sons. Whatever prosperity may come to these colonising sons, whatever the good which may flow from them and their efforts into the new home of their adoption, however marked the step in advance which through the new community may thus be made in the civilisation of the whole world through its infusion into distant parts, that of itself is not enough. It must immediately and in every case reflect the glory of those at home ; it must contribute directly to the prosperity or the fame of the parent hearth, nay of the parent himself. The unwise father thus is tempted to play the part of Providence and to project his will far into the future ; as the " dead hand " in the will of a self-assertive testator endea- vours in every detail of life to bind the beneficiaries of his testament and to direct and to modify the NATIONAL VANITY 103 will, the reason, and the actions even the sense of justice of those who succeed him. Consider it as you may, the fact remains, that fun- damentally this so-called national patriotism, which insists upon definite and distinct national expansion, is but the outcome of supreme national vanity, nar- rowed down by a selfish and petty sphere of vision, if it be not the grosser form of clear-sighted selfish- ness, which only aims at its own immediate material aggrandisement, increase of wealth and comfort, to be derived, not only from the colony as such, but from every individual sent out supposedly for his own good and whose activity it is desired to limit and to hamper to the sole good of the Mother Country. As it has been this antiquated and false conception of the State in its relation to its citizens which is in great part accountable for the growth and develop- ment of Chauvinism in Germany, and has led to this catastrophic war, so it is especially this distorted view of colonial expansion, mistaking national vanity for patriotism, which is even more directly responsible for German aggression throughout the world ; and, when fanned into the raging heat of passion through the characteristic vice of envy, has produced the spirit of hatred against the British Empire and its inhabit- ants which has thrown the modern German nation back to the savagery of the primitive Hun. And what will every right-minded German citizen say when, without even considering the injustice and savagery shown to his fellow-men of other countries, nor the initial injustice of German aggres- sion in this war, he realises through untold suffering the misery and financial ruin of his own country, the torture and suffering ending in the death of millions of his own kith and kin, and the sadness which will come to every German home, not one of which will be free from intense anguish 1 What will these right- 104 HUMANITARIAN CONSCIOUSNESS OF MAN minded and clear-thinking Germans say when the scales have fallen from their eyes and they fully realise for what imaginary, what trivial and inanely stupid motives this huge sacrifice of life, wealth, and happiness a greater sacrifice than has ever been, made in the world's history has been made, this criminal war has been waged ! Remember, moreover, that the German workman k ac * continuously and for many years been gaining the conviction (and the determination to act upon it) that by nature, interest, and morality he was not severed from his fellow-workmen living in other countries and belonging to other nations, that so far from regarding them as his natural enemies he actually felt them to be his brothers, his friends in arms. Within recent times, day by day and year by year, he became conscious of his power to act in accordance with these true feelings guiding the labouring man all over the world. The International Socialistic Brotherhood was not a mere name without substance or without power. What this power meant and how it could effectually be used against the action of his militarist tyrants became clearly manifest from the moment that in Russia in 1905 the first attempt was made on a large scale to organise a general strike. Though on that occasion the general strike was not completely successful, still it did produce a consider- able effect in Russia itself, and was one of the most important events in modern history. It proved to the world what might in the future be done by the united action of the labouring men in any country who knew their own minds, were clear in their purpose, and well organised in carrying out their plans. Moreover, as the years rolled on, the international aspect of the union of labouring men, leading to con- certed action in the interests of the whole body, grew more clearly pronounced and promised more definite GENERAL STRIKES 105 international action. The so-called sympathetic strikes spreading from one country to the other grew in frequency. It thus became clear to a great many thinkers, and to many of the leaders of the Labour Party themselves, that the so-called pacifist tenden- cies and aims of these powerful bodies all over the world might in the near future effectually prevent any great European war in fact any war between civilised and well-organised modern States. I have referred above (p. 6) to the opinion held by one of the greatest living authorities on the labour question and the international character which strikes were assuming. These facts were a confirmation of my own opinion, shared by a leading German states- man, that in the near future wars between civilised nations might thus become impossible. There can be no doubt that the true consciousness of the mass of the labouring men in Europe at all events the most intelligent and most influential amongst them was utterly opposed to any great war between civilised nations and had no feeling of opposition, animosity, or violent hatred to the population of any other country on the grounds of national, racial, or imperial differences. On the contrary, they were distinctly anti-Chauvinistic and were cultivating feelings and actions of international comity among all workers in all civilised States. More and more they were preparing themselves to check and to counteract in every way international aggression and internecine war. At the same time the action of capital as such and intema- of the capitalistic class, in spite of the potent and charac- overwhelming interests of those concerned in arma- ter of ments, was working in the same direction to make capltal - war in future between civilised nations impossible, almost inconceivable. Mr. Norman Angell and many other writers have forcibly impressed upon the world io6 HUMANITARIAN CONSCIOUSNESS OF MAN the constraining influence of international capital and industry in its opposition to war and the disas- trous effects which war would have not only upon the nations concerned, but upon neutrals as well. They have also shown how even the victorious nation cannot in modern times gain the fruits of its victory. No doubt in bygone ages the greed of possession and acquisition were generally the motives which led to warlike aggression and immediately rewarded the victor by the increase of his own wealth and of all other amenities of life. But with the modern appli- cation of capital and its penetration from one com- mercial centre into all foreign parts and distant nations, the sensitiveness and interdependence of financial, commercial, and industrial bodies in every nation offered no such inducements to the aggressor and made it the universal interest of every nation to prevent a war. Apparently all the prophecies of these pacifist writers have been belied by the course of recent events. But this is only apparent, and not actually true. The truth is that, perhaps, on the one side the materialistic interests were too strongly backed by that section of the economic world directly inter- ested in armaments ; and that, on the other side, the contingency to which I have just referred namely, that in the race for time the militaristic competitor literally " stole a march," and that this war was thus brought about. It may perhaps only have been a question of a few years that the hoplite runner would have been completely outdistanced and beaten by the unarmed, yet fleet and sure-footed, toiler in the fields and in the factory. I must here reproduce the exposition of this ques- tion as published by me twenty-one years ago (The Jewish Question and the Mission of the Jews, 6th ed. London and New York, 1894, p. 82 seq.}. INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL AND LABOUR 107 "The present foreign policy of European States shows a disastrous confusion which marks a transition. It is the death-struggle of nationalism, and the tran- sition to a more active and real form of general inter- national federation. In this death-struggle we have the swan-song of the past dynastic traditions in monarchy giving form, and often heat and intensity, to the contest upheld in certain customs of diplomatic machinery, with, on the other hand, the birth-struggle towards the organisation of international life, the needs of which are at present only felt practically in the sphere of commerce. This birth-struggle at present manifests itself chiefly in narrow and undig- nified jealousy and envy for commercial advantages ; and this, unfortunately, is growing the supreme ulti- mate aim of all international emulation. We can trace nearly all the diplomatic rivalry ultimately to the interests of commerce and the greed for money. One often hears it said that Jewish bankers make and unmake wars. This is not true. Money makes and unmakes wars ; and if there were not this greed of money among the contending people the bankers would not be called upon at all. There are, of course, further complications favouring the older spirit of national envy, which is dying, though far from being dead. Such are the influences of the huge military organisations, definite wounds unhealed (such as the feeling of reprisal on the part of France), and, finally, the last phases of the artificial bolstering up of the idea of the National-Staat in Germany and Italy. But the whole of this conception of nationalism, in so far as it implies an initial hatred and enmity towards other national bodies, is doomed. A few generations, perhaps, of disaster and misery accompanying this death-struggle will see the new era. " Now, there are several practical factors which are paving the way indirectly towards the broader national life of this coming era. They are, strange to say, the two main opposite forces of the economical life of the day : Capital and Labour. Each of these, separately following the inherent impulse of its great forces, which constantly run counter to one another, io8 HUMANITARIAN CONSCIOUSNESS OF MAN tends towards the .same goal, especially in its pro- nounced forms. Capital does this in the great inter- national houses and in the Stock Exchanges ; Labour, since the first International Convention of 1867, in its great labour organisations. The highly developed system of modern banking business and of the Stock Exchange, favoured by the rapid and easy means of intercommunication without regard to distance, has made all countries, however far apart, sensitive to the fate which befalls each ; and this tends more and more to make Capital an international unit, which can be, and is being, used, whatever its origin, in all the different quarters where there seems a promising demand for it. " On the other hand, the growth of organisation among the representatives of labour is fast stepping beyond the narrow limits of national boundaries, and the common interests tend to increase the direct- ness of this wider institution. I am not adducing these facts in order to suggest any solution of the numerous problems which they involve, nor to direct the attention to the interesting historical, economical, and political questions to which they may give rise ; but simply to draw attention to the one fact that in this respect both capital and labour are effectively paving the way, perhaps unknown to the extreme representatives of either interest, towards the increase of a strong and active cosmopolitan spirit of humani- tarianism. And this spirit, at least as an ideal, is certainly dominant in the minds of the best and wisest people of our generation." 1 Such is the united tendency and action of the two main factors in modern economic life which are 1 But let no man from the camp of the capitalist (as some anti- Semitic German politicians have endeavoured to do) charge the Jews with being the instigators to Socialism, nor let a Socialist urge his fellow-partisans to an anti-Jewish" riot ; for the leading spirits of both these antagonistic forces were Jews : the bankers, such as the Roths- childs ; and the economists, such as Lassalle and Karl Marx. The capitalists cannot curse the Jews, and the Socialists cannot dynamite the Jews without disowning their very leaders. DECLINE OF NATIONAL ANTAGONISM 109 supposed to be, and usually are, directly opposed as inimical forces in the minds of the extreme repre- sentatives of each factor namely, capital and labour. But in this great issue, following out their separate and, at times, divergent courses and interests, they definitely tend to unite in one common goal of inter- national federation and of opposition to war. More important still, however, than these two The forces in economic modern life has been the growing consciousness of the whole population of the world stious- ness of as represented by all people of right feelings and of human normal and clear thought. The sense of a common humanity, moved by the same feelings, aspirations, and ideals and with essentially the same goals and interests to work for, has been growing in extent and in intensity throughout the whole world, irrespective of local, racial, or national differences. Without any Utopian pretensions, this fundamental conviction is so strong and real among even the least thoughtful, that, unless they are blinded by momentary passions and relapses into bygone savagery, it is the leading attitude of mind in which all people consider their fellow -beings in every part of the world. More- over the actual facilities of intercommunication and of travel have grown to such an extent in every civilised country, for even the larger mass of the people, that they have established affinities and direct relations, numerous actual points de rattachement, with the dwellers beyond the boundaries of their own country or nationality, and these bonds of affinity and of moral or material contact have become so real that they actually count for more than mere propin- quity or even consanguinity within the one country and nation where no such affinity or contact exists. Passionate antagonism and hatred may be more intense between two neighbouring villages, between two families, and sometimes even between the members no HUMANITARIAN CONSCIOUSNESS OF MAN of one family than between the inhabitants of distant countries. I should like to anticipate here what will be dealt with farther on, and to add that such individuals and villages would at once enforce their enmity by violence were it not for the power of the law backed by the police. Of course this feeling of human solidarity exists especially among those who have attained a higher degree of moral and intellectual development through the channels of higher educa- tion in literature, science, or art, and it exists still more between those who in their habits and their tastes are guided by the same leading principles, and have assimilated into their very moral system the same rules and preferences of conduct in every detail of living. It is here that the formal side of modern national life is antiquated, in fact directly at variance with the inner substance of the life itself as it exists in the consciousness of modern people. 1 1 Since the above was written I find that the author of J' Accuse (p. 316, German edition) has expressed the same idea, even including the terms " perpendicular and horizontal division of humanity." But such agreement ought not to astonish, considering that it is the conception of truth which we chose and that not only two people but all right-minded people ought to agree. CHAPTER VI PATRIOTISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM THE PERPEN- DICULAR AND HORIZONTAL DIVISIONS OF HUMAN SOCIETY To put it into a crude geographical formula : the subdivisions in the grouping of people have hitherto been on the perpendicular principle ; to correspond to what actually exists, they ought to be, and cer- tainly will in the future be, on the horizontal prin- ciple. Human beings can no longer be subdivided by lines cutting into the earth and delimiting the fron- tiers of nations, still less by imaginary and inaccurate lines of established or hypothetical racial origin. The Modern communications have, as a matter of fact, erased these lines, and military frontiers can only Division, artificially restore them to importance for a short time . Even the sea no longer separates . As a matter of fact, the sea as a means of intercommunication and of commercial transportation binds together more than it divides. It is often cheaper to send goods to distant countries thousands of miles by sea than scores of miles by rail in the same country. Nor can human hearts and human minds, human tastes and habits of living, be united or kept asunder by a geo- graphical line. On the other hand, the horizontal line, which The Hori- marks the moral and intellectual phases regulating the lives of human beings all over the world, does really provide us with the principle of grouping 10 I" H2 PATRIOTISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM corresponding to actuality. To put it grossly : an Englishman of the criminal classes has as little in common with an honourable, noble, and high-minded Englishman, as a German, Frenchman, or Italian of the same low standards has with that of the higher representatives of those nations. On the other hand, the criminals in each country can readily form a brotherhood with harmonious aims of life and habits, as the high-minded gentlemen of each nation will at once find a common ground for living, for free, profitable, and pleasant intercourse, and, above all, for the higher aspirations of life and living among those of the same type in other countries. These are extreme cases ; but the principle applies to all the finer shadings in the scale of population, of the living, and thinking, and feeling of the nations all over the world. if true of It is thus in direct contradiction to the actual duais'a consc iousness of the peoples of Europe and America fortiori to feel enmity towards those in other countries with states, whom, on the contrary, there exist the strongest links Antagon- o f mutual regard and of brotherhood ; and certainly isms be- . . tween so-called national differences cannot justify an actual^ 6 anta g n i sm which goes to the length of bloodthirsty not based attempts to destroy their very lives. the'geo- ^ tms i s true f tne individual men and women graphical composing the several States and nations, it also n- applies to the collective unity of population in the stitution State. In spite of the German conception of the of GcLCfl so-called Nazional-Staat, of the difference in origin and race upon which the separateness of the several States is to be based, the States thus belie their very principles of union if they base antagonism which leads to war upon ethnological grounds. For, as Germany is now constituted, the inhabitants of Holstein, shoulder to shoulder with Slav Prussians, might have to fight the Dutchmen and the Saxon NEITHER ETHNOLOGICAL NOR GEOGRAPHICAL 113 * Englishmen with whom they claim a common racial origin an origin which they might also claim with the Flemings and the inhabitants of Northern France. Perhaps even many Lombards in Northern Italy might thus have to meet in battle their racial brothers from Germany, who have joined the Prussian Slav. Nor can these antagonisms be based upon geo- graphical grounds, and the political boundaries thus marked, for then Canada and Australasia could on these grounds not make common cause with Great Britain and Ireland. Nor even in the present con- dition of military powers can the coalition of States as units be based upon identity or similarity in the essential conception of what a State is and what its aims are. For the alliances and ententes belie any such principle of selection in their formation. The alliance between Germany, the Nazional-Staat, and the German section of the Hapsburg Empire would be perfectly intelligible and logical. But when we come to the Magyar and Slav and Rumanian con- stituents of that Empire, the logical ground for such an alliance entirely vanishes, and may even in itself constitute antagonism rather than unity or harmony of national aspirations. On the other hand, when we consider the essential nature of the State and of government and find the Republic of France, with its vigorous aspirations towards political progress and reform, allied with the Russian autocracy, hitherto of all European States most clearly identified with political reaction ; when we realise that but a short time ago the Republic of France manifested a most acute phase of political antagonism to Eng- land ; when we consider the natural antagonism between Western Liberalism and Eastern Autocracy, and the affinity of principles and aspirations between the German democratic section and those of France H4 PATRIOTISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM and England, we meet with a confusion so complex and dense that, at least, one fact rises clearly before our mind : namely, that in the political grouping of the several States there is the same paradoxical dis- crepancy between the professed political conscience, the essence of political life, and the direct resultant activities of each State in realising its would-be pro- fessions of national existence and of national aspira- tions. 1 We actually do not know where we are and on what principle our national alliances are based : and still less why we should fight each other, except- ing that the so-called State or rather a section of its rulers has commanded us to do so. The manifest net result of these convincing and constraining political conclusions, both as regards the position of individual citizens and of the State as a whole, is that our fundamental conception of what a State is and ought to be is wrong, and that we must bring it into harmony with the clear and well-founded conception of modern man as in his sane moments and with the courage of his convictions he must formulate it. 1 Since the above was written Italy has left the Triple Alliance and has joined the Entente Powers, while Bulgaria has actually joined with Turkey and the Central Powers to fight the Serbians and the Russians. CHAPTER VII RECONSIDERATION OF THE TRUE MODERN MEANING OF STATE AND OF PATRIOTISM IT thus becomes quite evident that all our ideas con- cerning the State, and our consequent duties to the State, must be reconsidered in the light of the entirety of our modern life and our moral and social consciousness. This consideration of our duties raises the whole question of patriotism, no doubt one of the cardinal virtues of civilised man. No term has been used to stimulate man to higher and nobler deeds, and at the same time been abused to cover, under the specious garb of enthusiasm and of unsel- fishness, the narrow and even unprincipled passions of designing self-seekers. The term " patriot " readily recalls to mind the words of Dr. Johnson : " the last resort of a scoundrel." 1 Though we may feel that when nations are at war Patriot- the time is not suited to a critical consideration of^ patriotic duties, we do feel that in more normal man's times, and when we are able dispassionately to ex- ] amine political ethics and our own attitude with 1 In an excellent article on Patriotism by Dr. Inge, Dean of St. Paul's (Quarterly Review, July 1915), with which I am in hearty agreement, the writer quotes some moralists " who have condemned patriotism " as pure egoism magnified and disguised. " Patriotism," says Ruskin, " is an absurd prejudice founded on an extended selfish- ness." Mr. Grant Allen calls it a vulgar vice the national or col- lective form of the monopolist instinct. Mr. Havelock Ellis allows it to be " a virtue among barbarians." For Herbert Spencer it is " reflex egoism extended selfishness." "5 n6 MEANING OF STATE AND PATRIOTISM regard to patriotism and our obligation to the State, it is our bounden duty seriously to reconsider these fundamental conceptions and to modify public opinion in accordance with our feeling for right and wrong as produced by the development of modern civilised life. I would premise two general principles, which ought really to be axiomatic, in dealing with our political duties : (i) Our first duty to the State is, individually as citizens, to keep it up to the essential purposes of its existence. As the State is based upon community of past history, of present laws and customs, political and social, and of future aspira- tions, political, social, ethical, and cultural, we must contribute our share individually to keep these essential aims before the Government, as the " soul " of the nation or State. We must take heed that they are not submerged into lifeless formalism by the established powers of the State, or that the State does not become actually subversive of its moral principles, its national soul. (2) That each group of human duties must always be kept in harmony with the higher and more fundamental because universal duties. Our patriotism need never clash with our duties to humanity and re- ligion, provided we keep the State up to its essential purpose and ideals. Origin of When once man has risen above the animal stage ancTpo- m which he is entirely guided by unconscious in- nticai stinct, by the need for self-preservation, which is lcs * extended, through the course of his instincts for propagation, to the support and advance of his off- spring, until the family is evolved as a distinct social entity, and through the family, the clan, the tribe, the community, and the nation ; when once he has risen above this purely selfish instinct to the establishment of social laws, in which the interests ORIGIN OF SOCIAL ETHICS 117 of the individual are co-ordinated and the common interests of wider and even less tangible and mani- fest groups of individuals assert themselves, and lead to the establishment of social and moral laws, which all tend to check the powerful and unimpeded course of selfishness, then begins the higher phase of civilisation. This is marked, above all, not only by the recognition of ethical codes, in which reason- able altruism supersedes unreasoning egoism, but such moral codes transfuse the consciousness of men through the earliest phases of their infantile educa- tion, through every stage of their growth and life down to old age, until the civilised being develops, as an essential feature of his whole moral nature, the recognition of such an ethical code, and this con- verts the pure animal into what Aristotle called the social animal (%