11 ! OF DOCILITY A STUDY OF GERMAN CHARACTER EDMOND HOLMES lii ili III 'i llii Hill i THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY A STUDT OF GERMAN CHARACTER BY EDMOND HOLMES " Your enemy becomes a mystery that must be solved, even though it takes ages ; for man must be understood." , Light on the Path, by M. C. "What shall it profit n"r,latl, if lie shall gain the whole world, and lose his -ovm soul?" ST. MARK viii. 36. NEW YORK E-P-DUTTON & COMPANY PUBLISHERS 5*5 PRINTE'O .' ijtt .GB^AJ -BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY & SONS.. LIMITED, (OK dT., SjTAVi.FORD'.5T., S.E., FOREWORD THE word docility is not quite strong enough for the purpose of this book. But servility, which seems to be the only alternative to it, if not too strong, has too narrow a range of meaning. Let me, then, explain that by docility I mean readiness to obey for the sake of obeying, avidity for commands and instructions, reluctance to accept responsibility or exercise initiative, inability to react against the pressure of autocratic authority. Docility, in this sense of the word, when it is a national char- acteristic, may become a destructive force of extreme violence. For a docile majority implies a dogmatic and domineering minority; and the docile majority may carry docility so far as to become dogmatic and domineering, in imitation of their masters, whom they naturally make their model. Thus it is possible for a people to be as clay in the hands of ambitious and unscrupulous rulers, and yet to be arrogant, aggressive, and self- centred in their bearing towards the rest of the world. When this happens, the materials have been laid for a great conflagration, and only a spark is needed to set them ablaze. 360622 CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I THE GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY . . I II A DOCILE ARMY ...... 32 III A DOCILE PEOPLE ..... 52 IV THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD ... 78 V DEADENED BY DOCILITY . . . . IIO VI BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY .... 140 VII BETRAYED BY DOCILITY . . . 173 VIII THE MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY . . 198 IX OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY . . . 2l8 X OUR DEEPEST DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY . 247 vii THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY CHAPTER I THE GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY THE Germans are the most obedient people on the face of the earth. To say that they obey orders unhesitatingly, ungrudgingly, and punctil- iously is to do them less than justice. They do more than obey orders. They wait for them, look out for them, are lost without them. The old legalist formula " Is it so commanded? " and the complementary formula " Is it so permitted? " are ever rising to their lips. At every turn in life they are met by the warning word Verboten, and they are glad that this should be so. But their spirit of obedience carries them further than this. They not only do what they are told to do and leave undone what they are forbidden to do ; they also think what they are told to think, believe what they are told to believe, say what they are told to say. And this is not all. So docile are they that they even feel what they are told to feel. They are told to feel patriotic; and they sing with enthusiasm Deutschland ueber alles. They are told to desire war; and they straightway burn with martial ardour. They are told to be 2 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY world-ambit ; .o.;is; and they duly toast " the Day." They are told to hate France Russia Japan; and they hate each of those countries with a right good will. Finally they are told that England is their arch-enemy; and their outraged feelings find relief in rancorous hymns. This is a singular phenomenon. How are we to account for it ? The explanation, whatever it may be, is almost certainly historical, not racial. In the days of Tacitus the Germans were famous above all peoples for their love of freedom. They jealously guarded their liberties, not only against foreign domination but also against domestic tyranny. When the political organization of a people is tribal, as that of Germany was in those days, there is a danger lest the chief, the symbol and centre of tribal unity, should become an autocrat, and the tribesmen should become his subjects, and at last degenerate into his slaves. Against this danger the Germans seem to have taken ample precautions. The power of their kings was " neither unrestricted nor arbitrary." They " chose their commanders for valour," expected them to fight in the forefront of the battle, and followed their lead rather than obeyed their orders. Their gods alone had the right to punish them, a right which they were supposed to delegate to the priests, but to no one else. Nor did the Germans, as individuals, allow their freedom to be crushed by the undue ascendancy of the State. On all matters of public importance the final decision rested with the assembly of the freemen, who came armed to the place of meeting, listened to the pro- posals of their chiefs (who owed their authority to GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 3 their power of persuading rather than to any right to command), rejected by loud outcries what dis- pleased them, and signified approval by clashing their spears. The chiefs were allowed to settle matters of minor importance, and to prepare more important matters for discussion ; but the ultimate source of authority was the will of the people, not of an irresponsible overlord. Besides discussing affairs of state in their assemblies, the freemen elected the chiefs who were to administer justice in the cantons and villages, and assigned to each of these a hundred assessors " both to give advice and to add authority." But though they allowed no one to encroach on their freedom, there was one thing which the Germans gave in generous measure to the chiefs whom they had chosen to lead them in battle the devotion of brave and loyal hearts. "It is a cause of infamy," says Tacitus, " and taunts for life that a follower shall have survived his chief and returned (alive) ; to defend their chief, to guard him, to attribute even their own exploits to his name, is their most sacred oath of loyalty; the chief fights for victory, the followers for their chief." The devotion of a free people to the leaders whom they have voluntarily sworn to follow is worthy of the sacred name of loyalty. But if such a people were to lose their freedom, their loyalty might well degenerate into blind obedience, and fear and the force of habit might take the place of worthier motives to self-sacrifice. How did this freest of all free peoples lose its freedom ? Since the days of Tacitus it has mixed 4 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY its blood, 1 especially in the regions east of the Elbe, with that of other races, but not to an extent which could account for the change from the ex- treme of independence to the counter-extreme of servility. It is probable that here, as elsewhere, heredity counts for very little, whereas tradition, as determining environment, counts for a great deal. How, then, did the tradition grow up which made so radical a change in the German character ? Before we attempt to answer this question let us ask ourselves what freedom means. Speaking generally, we may say that freedom means release or exemption from constraint. But this definition does not carry us far. If freedom is prized, as it usually is, by those who enjoy it, the inference is clear that the corresponding constraint is hurtful, if not actually harmful. Now the hurtful constraint which presses on a whole people, and the release from which constitutes political freedom, is of two kinds, foreign domination, and domestic tyranny. Corresponding to this distinction we have two kinds of freedom; and these are not always perhaps not often conjoined. Again and again a people has had to surrender domestic freedom in order to purchase freedom from foreign domination. In the days of Ancient Rome, when the Republic was in danger of invasion, a dictator was appointed who was an irresponsible autocrat as long as his term of office lasted; just as in our 1 Even in those days its blood was by no means pure. It may be doubted if there has ever been such a thing as a German " race." The German peoples belong, and, so far as we know, have always belonged, to two great " races," the " Teutonic " and the " Alpine," of which the latter is, in point of numbers, the preponderant race. GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 5 own day, when the safety of the State is imperilled, martial law is proclaimed and the rights of citizen- ship are temporarily suspended. Nor was the dictatorship an exclusively Roman institution. Other countries have had dictators, under other names; and some of these have been conquerors of their neighbours' territories as well as defenders of their own. In such cases the loss of its own domestic freedom is the price which the conquering people has had to pay for the suppression of freedom (in both senses of the word) in the con- quered lands. Domestic freedom is of many kinds. Freedom from arbitrary and irresponsible tyranny, exer- cised in defiance of law, or beyond the limits of law, is one kind. Freedom from unfair adminis- tration of the law is another kind. Freedom from the positive pressure of unjust law is a third kind. Freedom from the negative pressure of inadequate law is a fourth. Freedom from the burden of a meticulous and inquisitorial system of law is a fifth. As a rule, domestic tyranny is exercised by a small minority, an autocrat in some cases, an oligarchy in others. If freedom from such tyranny is to be secured, those who administer the affairs of state and those who make and amend laws must be responsible to the people. In other words, we must have a government which is demo- cratic, in the sense of having behind it the popular will. But even in a democracy there may be much domestic tyranny. For, apart from the fact that popular government readily lends itself to manipulation by cliques and coteries, majorities are sometimes as unjust and oppressive as autocrats 6 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY and oligarchies; and in any case it is impossible to devise a system of government in which the rights of individuals or even of minorities shall be fully safeguarded. This, however, does not alter the fact that only by progress in the direction of popular government can domestic freedom be extended and secured. There is another and a more inward kind of freedom which is closely connected with domestic freedom, but admits in exceptional cases of being almost entirely divorced from it, freedom from the tyrannical pressure of opinion, of convention, of fashion, and the like. This pressure is usually exercised by unorganized majorities; but it is sometimes deliberately organized by a despotic State, through its control of education, religion, the Press, and other forces that direct and influence opinion. Behind this more inward freedom is the freedom of the spirit, freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of imagination, freedom of desire. This freedom is the most vital of all. A man is not really free unless his soul, his self, his desire, his will is behind his action. This is the ideal, by reference to which the degree of his freedom is to' be measured. It is the same, mutatis mutandis, with a people. And it is for the sake of this ideal, however remote it may be from conscious thought, that freedom has been glorified and that men have fought and died under its banner. If I may not live my own life, if I am to be the mere instrument of another's will, I am not truly alive. This is what the lover of freedom has ever said to himself in some silent, secret recess of his soul. GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 7 There is hope for a people which has lost its freedom, so long as it refuses to bow its soul to the yoke. But it sometimes happens that a people resigns itself to its loss, and even ends by becoming proud of its bonds. When this happens, independence has transformed itself into servility, and the loss of freedom is complete. This is what has happened in Germany. The Germans cheerfully submit to a domestic tyranny which is oppressive and inquisitorial in the highest conceivable degree, and then allow their professors to tell them that they are the freest people in the world. What has brought them to this pass? There is another question which must take pre- cedence of this. In the oriental Empires, and in all parts of the Roman Empire, freedom, when Tacitus wrote, was dead. How had the Germans managed to keep it alive for so long? By remaining un- conquered and uncivilized, is the obvious answer to this question. In the days of Tacitus the Germans were still in the tribal stage of develop- ment ; and it was long before they outgrew that stage. While they remained in it, it was possible to hold assemblies of the freemen, in spite of the absence of roads and bridges and the difficulty of travelling through a country of forests and marshes, for the area of each self-governing state was comparatively small. For the same reason, or rather because the population was correspond- ingly small besides being largely homogeneous, a simple form of government was sufficient for the needs of the people. So long as the Germans were contained by the frontiers which the Roman Legions had defined 8 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY for them, they kept their primitive political con- stitution with but little change. But when, under pressure from the east, they began to move south and west, and when the ramparts of the Roman Empire could no longer sustain the weight of their arms, they passed into another world. They passed into a world far more highly civilized (in the conventional sense of the word) than their own, more centralized, more fully organized, in a more advanced stage of social and political development. Above all, they passed into a world in which authority descended from the apex instead of ascending from the base of the body politic, its ultimate source being the will of an autocrat rather than the collective will of a free people. When the conquering Germans entered this new world, they discovered sooner or later that they had left their own social and political life behind them. The organization of the Roman Empire, even in its decadence, was too strong for them. It was only by making use of the existing machinery of government, rusty and half worn out though this was, that the leaders of the in- vading Germans could administer the affairs of the Roman provinces that they conquered. This meant that they must rule the provinces as kings, and that among the subjects of their realms they must count the German warriors who had hitherto regarded them as little more than " first among their peers." The idea of ruling the new kingdoms by means of assemblies of the victorious warriors was as impracticable as that of allowing the subject peoples to govern themselves. Diets of the " notables " might take the place of the assemblies GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 9 of the freemen; but the voice of the people, the echoes of which had so deeply impressed Tacitus, grew gradually dumb. The loss, partial if not total, of their own domestic freedom was the price which the invading Germans had to pay for their victories over peoples more highly civilized but less vigorous than themselves. A change so revolutionary as this could not fail to make its influence felt in Germany proper. If on one side of the Rhine or the Meuse the German warriors had become the subjects of a more or less autocratic ruler, could they long remain free on the other side? Apart from the more occult and subtle forms of reaction which worked by diffusing influence rather than by exerting direct pressure, the wave of conquest which had sub- merged the Roman provinces adjacent to Germany was bound, sooner or later, to sweep back over the land of the conquerors. For the conquering Germans had learnt lessons from the conquered peoples, which they would be able, if occasion required, to turn to account against their own kinsmen. The German kings who ruled over what had once been provinces of the Roman Empire, and who in part at least had adopted and utilized the systems of administration which they found in the lands that their arms had won, would in course of time be the masters of more highly organized and therefore stronger armies than any which the Germans beyond the Rhine could put in the field. It was from the west that the first great wave of counter-conquest came. Towards the close of the fifth century A. D. the Salian Franks, who 10 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY dwelt in what is now called Flanders, under the leadership of Chlodwig, or Clovis, entered Gaul, which was perhaps the most highly civilized of all the Roman Provinces, overcame its earlier Germanic invaders, and made themselves masters, first of Northern Gaul and then of Western Gaul or Aquitania. Before they embarked on their career of conquest, the Salian Franks, whose probable ancestors, the Sicambri, were settled by Tiberius near the mouths of the Rhine, had been nominally subject to Roman rule and had been accustomed to serve in the Roman armies. They thus carried with them on their expeditions the Roman tradition of discipline and order. Also, by accepting, in the person of King Clovis, Catholic as opposed to Arian Christianity, they entered into an alliance with, and so came under the civilizing influence of, the Church, which, on the downfall of the Empire, had become the chief centre and agency of organization in Western Europe. Having conquered the greater part of Gaul, Clovis turned his arms against his eastern neighbours, subdued the Alemanni one of the great leagues of German tribes and colonized the part of their territory between the Neckar and the Main. His sons and grandsons completed the conquest of the Alemanni, established a suzerainty over Bavaria, and conquered Burgundy and Southern Gaul. Under the degenerate Merovingian kings the tide of Frankish conquest was arrested ; but in the latter part of the eighth century, Charlemagne, King of the Franks (whom we may now regard as " Romanized Teutons "), following in the foot- GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 11 steps of his martial forefathers, Peppin of Heristal and Charles Martel, conquered and christianized the Saxons (who occupied the greater part of North Germany, east of the Rhine), conquered the Lombards in Northern Italy and put an end to their dynasty, turned the Frankish suzerainty over Bavaria (a large country which stretched to the confines of modern Hungary) into effective sovereignty, made many minor conquests of German tribes, and pushed the frontiers of Germany, at the expense of her Sclavonic neighbours, far to the east. Half-a-century later the greater part of what is now called France separated from Germany, the debatable land of Lotharingia a future battle-ground of the nations dividing the two countries, or rather being divided between them in ever- varying proportions. 1 The union of France and Germany under one government was short-lived; but in one respect it produced important results. The origin and rise of feudalism in Germany are involved in obscurity; but as " feudalism was an especially Frank system and was carried out more definitely in France than elsewhere," 2 we may safely con- jecture that in the days of Charlemagne and his successors the feudalizing of Germany, under the influence of Frank ascendancy, made rapid progress. ' In theory," says Stubbs, " the feudal system originates in the conquest of a kingdom, which is parted out by the king or general among his followers, who hold their shares of him by military 1 Except, indeed, so far as it passed under other owner- ship or won independence for itself. 2 Stubbs. 12 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY service, and subdivide that share to their followers in turn on similar or lower services." The actual origin of feudalism was widely different from this. The Roman custom of making grants of land (beneficia) on condition of military service, was no doubt a factor in the evolution of feudal ideas. But in the main those ideas were distilled from a widespread practice which grew up under the stress of social necessity. In times of social and political chaos, such as those which preceded and followed the downfall of the Western Empire, when govern- ments were too weak to discharge their normal functions, and when desultory warfare was inces- sant, the smaller and weaker landowners would seek protection against foreign aggression and domestic oppression from a powerful neighbour "a strong man armed" who would give them what they sought if they were willing to pay his price. The price which they had to pay was the surrender of their land, which they would hence- forth hold as vassal tenants, giving military and other services in lieu of rent. In this way private obligation would gradually take the place of public duty, the feudal lord giving to his tenants the protection which they had a right to look for from the State, and receiving from them the military service which the State alone had the right to demand. But the protecting lord might himself stand in need of protection ; and in that case he would go to a more powerful magnate and make arrangements with him similar to those which his own tenants had made with himself. In this way the feudal system would gradually spread upwards though also to some extent GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 13 downwards, for, under the influence of the ideas which were emerging from feudal practice, con- quering chiefs, following the example of the Merovingian kings who had adopted the Roman practice of granting beneficia, would parcel out conquered lands among their followers, to be held on feudal terms till at last even the wiser kings, who, foreseeing its political consequences, had hitherto resisted the movement, would find it expedient, as they could not otherwise raise armies for their projected expeditions, to accept it and place themselves at its head. When the system had been firmly established and had been generally, if not universally, adopted, the practice would grow up of conferring governorships and important magistracies on powerful feudal lords, and so delegating to them powers and duties judicial and financial as well as military which properly belonged to the State. At first these offices would be held at the King's pleasure ; but as they carried with them the temporary ownership of vast territorial possessions, and as the ownership of land had been transmitted from father to son before the days, and also in the earlier days, of feudalism, they would naturally tend to become hereditary, and the authority which had been delegated would tend to become inherent. When this point had been reached, the feudal lord duke or count, as the case might be would have become to all intents and purposes a sovereign in his own duchy or county, and the tie of allegiance that bound him to his overlord would be ready to snap. When the feudal system was fully developed, 14 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY the theory of feudalism, as set forth by Stubbs, became operative. Political power was supposed to be inherent in the ownership of land. The ultimate owner of all land, and therefore the ulti- mate source of all authority, was the king. Next to the king came the great vassals, to whom he apportioned the lands of his kingdom and delegated much of his authority. The great vassals in their turn apportioned lands and delegated authority to the lesser vassals. Where the ownership of land ceased, political power, and therefore political freedom, ceased with it. The introduction of feudalism may be said to have turned the political constitution of the German states upside down. " In Germany," says the writer of the article on " Feudalism " in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, " before the feudal system came in, the chief func- tions of government, military, judicial, financial, legislative, were carried on by the freemen of the nation, because they were members of the body politic, and were performed as duties owing to the community for its defence and sustenance." In Germany, after the feudal system had established itself, all the functions of government were vested in the king and were delegated by him to his vassals in their several degrees, while the bulk of the freemen, having become landless, had ceased to be free. By substituting the will of an autocrat for the will of the people, and service of a vassal to his lord for service of a citizen to the State, and by investing every landholder with political power over his tenants, the feudal system extinguished domestic freedom. But not in Germany only. Feudalism came into Germany GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 15 later than into France, was less systematically developed, and never wholly supplanted the allodial tenure of land. Also the dukes and the counts continued to be nominated by the German king long after the dukedoms and counties had become hereditary in France. It is not in having lost her domestic freedom through being feudalized that Germany differs from other Western countries, but in having failed to recover it. Why did Germany fail to recover her lost free- dom ? W T hy has the spirit of freedom never revived in her except fitfully and locally? x Why does the dead hand of feudalism still hold her in its grip ? Chiefly, I think, because in the course of her strange and unhappy history, Germany broke up into a multitude of independent states, and because it was easier for the ruler of a small princi- pality to retain the despotic power which feudalism had bequeathed to him than for the ruler of a large country, in which there would be many grades and classes of people, many influential interests industrial, commercial, professional, as well as rural a public opinion which carried real weight, and a population sufficiently large for combined action in defence of its liberties to become a formidable movement. But why did Germany, alone among European 1 In the Netherlands freedom found an asylum on the shores of the North Sea, in Switzerland in the valleys of the high mountains. Cherishing freedom as they did, the Netherlanders, or " Dutch," and the Swiss gradually separated themselves from the rest of Germany, and after the Thirty Years' War their independence of the Empire was formally acknowledged. 16 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY countries, break up into a multitude of independent states ? For many reasons. Disruptive forces were at work in her from the earliest days. She had scarcely begun to emerge from tribalism, when Charlemagne united her under his sway. The tribes had indeed agglomerated, rather than amalgamated, into five great " nations." But not only did those nations cling tenaciously to their respective nationalities, as against the supernationality of Germany, but also, under the surviving influence of tribalism, they were ready to break up into smaller states whenever the centripetal forces which Charlemagne had brought into play in the eighth century, and Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great in the tenth, were appreciably weakened. And these forces were seriously and persistently weakened, first by the disruptive influence of feudalism, and then the latter cause reacting on and aggravating the former by the connection between the German crown and the Holy Roman Empire. Here we come to what differentiates mediaeval Germany from other Western countries. She was still tribal at heart while she was being feudalized, so that two streams of tendency, each of which was hostile to national unity, were able to reinforce and interpenetrate one another. And, to make matters worse, the germs of disintegration which were latent in feudalism were roused to abnormal activity by the growing weakness of the German crown, distracted as its holders were between Germany and Italy, and drained as they were of their resources by their invasions of Lombardy and quarrels with the Popes. GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 17 It was indeed an evil day for Germany when Charlemagne allowed himself to be crowned Emperor of the West. And it was a still more evil day when Otto the Great, who, like his father Henry the Fowler, had done much to civilize and unify Germany, succumbed to the same temptation. Charlemagne had made himself master of the Kingdom of Italy (i. e. of Lombardy and Tuscany) before he was crowned Emperor. Otto the Great had made himself overlord of the same territory. Thenceforth the German Kings, as Roman Em- perors, claimed sovereignty over Northern Italy a claim which the powerful Lombard and Tuscan cities were slow to acknowledge as well as the right to keep order at Rome, 1 and exercise a general supervision over the Papacy. Thus began, or rather was renewed, that connec- tion between Germany and Italy Northern Italy and Papal Rome which was destined to bring centuries of woe to both countries. " Never," says Stubbs, " since the time of Charles the Great, and of course never before, had there been sufficient union and consistence in the mass of the kindred nations of Germany to make it safe for a moment to withdraw the ordering ruling hand, or to distract the ruling head with foreign cares. The annexation of Italy meant the disruption of Germany." From 1 In order to establish the principle that, as German King, he had the right of sovereignty over Rome, Henry II (1002-1024) took tne title of "King of the Romans"; and this became the recognized title of the German kings before their coronation as Emperors. Henry VI (1190- 1197) was the first to take the title during the lifetime of the Emperor. Thenceforth, any one elected and crowned during an Emperor's lifetime, took the title as a matter of course. C 18 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY the time of Otto the Great onward for nearly three centuries the kings of Germany, as Emperors of the West, absented themselves for long periods from their German dominions, and dissipated in warfare in Northern Italy and in constant struggles with the Papacy (which was always able to stir up rebellion against them in both countries) the energies and resources which were needed for the effective control of their unruly vassals. Writing of the unhappy epoch in the middle of the thirteenth century, when the great Hohen- stauf en dynasty had come to an end, when the Papacy had triumphed over the Empire, when Italy, both Northern and Southern, had been lost to the Emperors, the author of The Holy Roman Empire asks why the Emperors should not still have been strong in Germany, just as the English kings were strong in England even when they had lost their extensive dominions in France. "So it might once have been," he answers, " but now it was too late. The German Kingdom broke down beneath the weight of the Roman Empire. To be universal sovereign Germany had sacrificed her own political unity and the vigour of her national monarchy. The necessity under which projects in Italy and disputes with the Pope laid each Emperor of pur- chasing by concessions the support of his own princes, the ease with which in his absence the magnates could usurp, the difficulty which the monarch found in resuming the privileges of the crown, the temptation to revolt and set up pre- tenders to the throne which the Holy See held out these were the causes whose steady action laid the foundation of that territorial independence which GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 19 rose into a stable fabric at the era of the Great Interregnum." But these were not the only causes. As Stubbs has well said, " the fact that Germany could so easily and so generally break up, shows that the annexation of Italy was not the cause but the occasion of disruption." The centrifugal tendencies of German tribalism were, as we have seen, an abiding cause of disunion, without which the causes that Lord Bryce enumerates might have failed of their effect. The very measures which the Emperors took to restrict the growing power of the feudal lords made things worse instead of better. At the head of the hierarchy of vassal nobles came the dukes, or military governors of the great sub- kingdoms, to whom quasi-regal powers were delegated by the kings who appointed them. Then came the counts, who were supposed to administer justice and other- wise keep order in their own gaus or " shires." Then came the knights. Thinking, no doubt, that the lesser vassals would be more tractable than the greater, the Emperors set to work to break up the German duchies into smaller political units. In this policy they were fatally successful, partly because the " five nations/' which had been trans- formed into five feudal duchies, were agglomerations rather than amalgamations of tribes, and were therefore ready to disintegrate; partly because of the traditional loyalty of the Germans to their more immediate chiefs ; partly because of the grow- ing power of the counts. How the power of the counts had grown at the expense of that of the dukes has been explained by Stubbs. ' The hereditary succession," he tells us, " appears first among the counts, many of whom no doubt owed 20 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY their position as counts to the possession of allodial " (and therefore hereditary) " estates. Once become hereditary, the position of count was more perma- nent than that of beneficial duke, and placed its owner in a relation of rivalry to his superior." But when the dukedoms became hereditary, the ascen- dancy of the duke over the count might have been expected to revive. But this it failed to do, " for," to quote Stubbs again " the Emperors hesitated to commit to dukes, when they became de facto if not de jure hereditary, the same extensive rights as representatives of the sovereign which they had held as beneficiaries . . . and the diminution of the jurisdiction of the dukes as imperial officers opened the way for the aggrandizement of the lower orders of nobility. . . . With the extinction of the dukedoms (and in the thirteenth century they became extinct either by death or subdivision) great numbers of the inferior counts became im- mediately dependent on the Emperor, and petty kings whenever the empire was vacant or the Emperor weak." Thus the final result of the dismemberment of the duchies was an immense increase in the number of vassals who held directly from the crown; and as the growing weakness of the crown made effective control of the vassals more and more difficult, the Emperors achieved nothing by their disruptive policy but the substitution of a multitude of petty despots for a few sub-kings. But what of the people? Why did not the Emperors in their need summon the !< Third Estate" to their aid ? " Whenever," says Lord Bryce, " an aristocracy presses on both, the crown becomes the tacit ally of the people." In Germany the GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 21 aristocracy, or rather the feudal nobility, pressed heavily on both the crown and the people. Why, then, did the tacit alliance between the victims of that pressure never become effective? In other countries, notably in England, while the inevitable struggle between the crown and the nobility was in progress, the people, being intermittently courted by each of the contending parties, began to recover some of their lost liberties, and the spirit of freedom began to revive among them. In Germany things took a different course. When feudalism was at its height, the power of the people was a mere possibility. Authority, in its descent from the apex of the social pyramid, became more and more oppressive as it neared the base. Many of the German freemen had become serfs. Others were in a condition of dependence not much in advance of serfdom. The remainder had migrated to the towns. If the tacit alliance of which Lord Bryce speaks was to materialize, it was essential that the crown should be strong enough to play its part with effect. When the German crown had need of the support of the people, it was too weak to rally them down- trodden and dispirited as they were round its banner. In little more than half a century the empire had fallen from the zenith of its power (under Frederic Barbarossa) to its nadir (after the death of Frederic II). When it was at the zenith of its power, it seemed to have no need of popular support. When it had fallen to its nadir, it was too weak to command it. Yet even if it had not fallen so low, two great obstacles would have had to be overcome before an alliance between the crown and the people could be cemented. The 22 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY loyalty of the Germans to their immediate chiefs would have made them slow to respond to an appeal from any overlord. And had the Emperor appealed to them for support and had they been willing to respond to his appeal, concerted action on their part in a country which had resolved itself into a multitude of semi-independent states would have been well-nigh impossible. There was another quarter from which help might have come to both crown and people. Or rather there was a stronghold of the people in which freedom had begun to find a home, from which help might have come to the community at large, the towns. The wiser kings, such as Henry the Fowler and Frederic Barbarossa, had founded and fostered the growth of towns partly as refuges for the landless freemen, partly as fortresses to resist invasion, partly as centres of trade and industry and had endowed them with liberal charters which enabled them to go far along the path of self-government : and these " Free Cities " might have been expected to do something, as the boroughs did in England, to promote unity in the nation and freedom among the people. But though the spirit of freedom made vigorous growth in the Free Cities, it did not spread from them to rural Germany. In this, as in other matters, the disruptive tendencies which were inherent in the tradition, if not in the character, of the German people, were too strong to be resisted. The Free Cities never merged their life in that of the nation; and when they were at the height of their power in the days of the Hanseatic confederacy and the Swabian and Rhine- GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 28 land leagues they cared more for their own com- mercial interests than for the welfare of the German world. It is true that the wars between the cities and the princes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries gave openings to the crown, which strong sovereigns might have turned to account by allying themselves with the cities and so promoting the cause of German unity and freedom. But the Emperors in those centuries were either poor and weak, or were so busy with the affairs of their non-German dominions that they were content to leave Germany to her own devices and her own civil wars. Let us go back to the thirteenth century. The anarchy of the " Interregnum " and the remon- strances of the Pope, who found that his revenues were beginning to suffer from the prevailing dis- order, convinced the German princes that it was convenient to say the least that the nation should have a figurehead. They accordingly made the empire elective in practice as well as in theory, and took advantage of this arrangement to win complete, or almost complete, independence for themselves. " The two Pragmatic Sanctions of Frederic II," says Lord Bryce, " had conferred rights that made the feudal aristocracy almost indepen- dent " ; and during the century that followed his death various " circumstances tended more and more to narrow the influence of the crown and complete the emancipation of the turbulent nobles. They now became virtually supreme in their own dominions, enjoying full jurisdiction (certain appeals excepted), the right of legislation, privileges of coining money, of levying tolls and taxes; some 24 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY had scarcely even a feudal bond to remind them of their allegiance. The numbers of the nobility who held directly of the crown had increased pro- digiously by the extinction of the dukedoms of Franconia and Swabia, and the reduction in area of that of Saxony : along the Rhine the lord of a single tower was often almost an independent prince. The petty tyrants whose boast it was that they owed fealty only to God and the Emperor showed themselves in practice equally regardless of both powers." The Golden Bull of Charles IV (A.D. 1356), which Stubbs calls " the first written exposition of the Constitution of Germany," " legalized the independence of the electors and the powerlessness of the crown." And though the Golden Bull concerns itself with the rights, privileges, and immunities of the Seven Electors only, it is tolerably certain that by that time the imperial jurisdiction (except by way of appeal) had been eliminated, not from the dominions of the electoral princes only, but also from the dominions of the non-electoral nobles and from the Free Cities. Eighty years later, having been taught by ex- perience that a poverty-stricken Emperor, who was apt to become a puppet in their hands, was a source of weakness to Germany and might easily prove an exciting cause of anarchy and civil strife, the electors allowed the empire to become hereditary de facto, though of course not de jure in the House of Habsburg, which by a series of fortunate marriages had built up a large non-German empire and had thus made itself rich and strong. With the rise of the Habsburgs to imperial power, the dream of a united Germany may be said to have passed away. GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 25 The ruler who drew the greater part of his wealth and strength from hereditary dominions beyond the confines of Germany was no true German king. Indeed, it was in reliance on the resources which his foreign dominions provided that Charles V was able to browbeat the German princes, that Ferdinand II came within a little of making himself autocrat of Germany, and that he and his successor were able to wage war for thirty years against the Protestant States. When the Thirty Years' War was over, when religious strife, which introduced another disruptive influence into an already disunited country, had done its deadly work, Germany lay in fragments. Three hundred petty states, ranging in size from 30,000 square miles to 30,000 acres, held loosely together by an ineffective national diet, were ruled by despots of various titles who gave account of none of their ways either to their overlord or to their subjects'. The Treaty of Westphalia had secured to the princes, both Catholic and Protestant, almost entire immunity from imperial control. The empire continued to be an appanage of the House of Habsburg, but it was now the thinnest possible shadow of its former self. Henceforth those who wore the imperial crown were neither sovereigns of Germany nor Emperors of the West, but rulers of Austria, a heterogeneous empire, only fractionally German, the administration and defence of which taxed to the uttermost their energies and resources. In Germany, apart from the Free Cities, which had greatly decreased both in number and im- portance, political freedom was extinct. The local 26 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY diets which had flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which had done something to check petty tyranny and keep up an intimate relation between the princes and their subjects, and which might have developed into really repre- sentative parliaments, had either been suppressed or had degenerated into servile assemblies, fit only to register the decrees of the ruling despots. Many of the princes made Louis XIV, the most absolute of all monarchs, their model, turned their courts into feeble imitations of Versailles, became alienated from their subjects in sympathies and habits, chose their ministers from a servile entourage of flatterers and parasites, wasted money on unnecessary armies and crowds of household officials, and wrung dis- proportionately large revenues from their exhausted states. And all this was borne with scarcely a murmur. The one violent protest which the lower orders had made against injustice and oppression the Peasants' War of 1522-1526 had been suppressed with ruthless cruelty, and had been succeeded by a state of apathy which was probably near of kin to despair. The fatal habit of unquestioning obedience, which had been growing on the German people ever since the rise of feudalism, had now become one of the central features of the German character. The loyalty which the warriors in the time of Tacitus had given freely to their elected chiefs had degenerated into a soulless servility, rooted in the force of habit the corpse of a once vital tradition and in helplessness and fear. In the eighteenth century some of the German princes sold their subjects to Frederic the Great and to our Hanoverian kings as recruits for their armies, GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 27 at so much a head, as if they were sheep or cattle. People who could submit to such treatment as that might be trusted to submit to anything. As Lord Bryce has aptly said, Germany was now " forced to drink to its very dregs the cup of feudalism, feudalism from which all the sentiment that once ennobled it had departed." Yet it was out of an even more abject serfdom that the people of France arose and overthrew the tyranny that oppressed them, in that mighty revolution which shook to its foundations the whole Western world. Might not a similar move- ment have been possible in Germany? No; for Germany was in bondage to a widely different past. In France the crown had overcome the nobility. In Germany the nobility had overcome the crown. In France there was one master, one country, one people. In Germany three hundred masters had divided the country and the people amongst them. In France, where the flood of popular indignation had a single wide channel open before it, a national movement against the tyranny of the crown was possible, especially as the crown, by reducing the nobility to a state of political impotence, had fatally weakened what might have been its own first line of defence. In Germany such a national movement was impossible, for the river which flows in three hundred channels is not open to the scouring action of any descending flood. In France the crown, though its wearer had once boasted " I'etat c'est moi," was powerless to resist the will of an awakened people. In Germany the dismemberment of the nation showed that the people had not yet awakened and had no collective will. 28 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY But is the extinction of freedom an unmixed evil? Not necessarily. Epictetus was a slave; and in India and other Eastern countries a high degree of spiritual development has been reached by men for whom the words " political freedom " would have had no meaning. Much depends on the degree and kind of pressure to which the people are subjected by their rulers. For those who are so lightly governed that the State does not encroach on their inner life, the loss of political freedom may have great compensating advantages. But when people are heavily governed, when their lives are compulsorily regulated in minute detail, when commands and prohibitions meet them at every turn, and when the State, in order to facilitate the work of administration, tries to get control of the organs of opinion and the springs of social and moral action, then indeed the loss of public freedom may mean the loss of inward freedom, and the loss of inward freedom may mean spiritual death. The history of modern Germany between 1650 and 1870 A.D. gives us examples of both kinds of government. In Southern and Western Germany many of the princes governed their subjects lightly, though despotically. And here and there was a prince who, besides allowing his subjects to live their own lives within reasonable limits, was himself genuinely interested in the things of the spirit, and sincerely anxious to patronize (in the best sense of the word) learning and culture, letters and art. The subjects of such a prince, reconciled to the loss of political freedom, detached from public affairs and from the sordid interests with which such affairs are too often mixed up, poor but content GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 29 with their poverty, might some of them find in freedom of thought and imagination a compensa- tion for the outward freedom which had been denied them, and in cosmopolitan sympathy a compensa- tion for the absence of patriotic pride. In such a state, under such patronage, great men might arise and flourish, not soldiers nor statesmen, but thinkers, poets, musicians, scholars, and the like. Such men did arise in the small states of Southern and Western Germany. During the century which began with the publication of Lessing's first drama, Germany, outside the frontiers of Prussia, was as spiritually great as she was politically weak. This is one side of the shield. The other is darker and more sinister. An ambitious ruler, autocratic and irresponsible, with military gifts and aspirations, would find in the inhabitants of his state poor and hardy and slavishly obedient ideal subjects for strict military discipline, and therefore the raw material, at any rate from the drill-sergeant's point of view, of a strong and efficient army. Such a prince, the master of such a state, would rule his army through the medium of a military caste, and his people through the medium of a well-disciplined bureaucracy. In other words, there would be three estates of the realm, the people, who would be in a state of political serfdom, and the lowest stratum of whom would probably be serfs, in the legal sense of the word; the castes of officers and officials, the higher grades of whom would be drawn from the feudal nobility and gentry ; and the crown. The function of the crown would be to command; of the people to obey ; of the officers and officials, in their various 30 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY grades, to command and to obey. Master of a well-drilled army and an obedient civilian popula- tion, the prince of this state might be expected to turn his arms against his neighbours and embark on a career of conquest. Such a prince was the Great Frederic, and such a state was and (in all essentials) is Prussia. The history of Germany for the past two centuries has been the history of the gradual aggrandizement of Prussia. When the war of 1866 was over, she had conquered the greater part of Germany. Since then she has Prussianized the rest. All this was predestined. Of the two types of ruler it was inevitable that the Prussian, not the Weimarian, type should dominate Germany. For, whether by conquest or by the establishment of a hegemony, military absolutism could give to Germany what the princely patronage of culture could not give, the political unity and the material strength which would enable her to hold her own against the possibly hostile nations that surrounded her. It is idle to speculate on what might have happened if Germany had allowed herself to be Weimarized instead of Prussianized. In point of fact she has been Prussianized; and the unity which she has attained has been forced upon her, and is therefore artificial, material, military, not spontaneous, not spiritual, not genuinely political. But I am anticipating unduly. It is with the genesis of German docility that I am at present concerned. And the conclusion which I have reached is that the slavish docility which charac- terizes the modern German is of hybrid origin, being the product of an unhappy cross between GENESIS OF GERMAN DOCILITY 31 tribalism and feudalism. In their tribal days the Germans were the freest of free peoples. Under the dark shadow of feudalism they lost their domes- tic freedom, as did every people that bowed its neck to the feudal yoke. Had they become and remained a united nation, they might have won back what they had lost. But the disruptive influences of tribalism, from which they have never fully emerged, co-operating with the disrup- tive influences of feudalism, in the absence owing to the crown being weakened by the burden of the Empire of strong central control, broke up Germany into a multitude of petty states : and each of these was ruled for many generations by a prince who combined in his own person the traditions of a feudal lord who had no overlord, and of a tribal chief, claiming autocratic authority in the former capacity, and expecting unstinted loyalty in the latter. CHAPTER II A DOCILE ARMY THE German army of to-day is dominated by a tradition which it has inherited from the Prussian army of Frederic the Great. In the eighteenth century the peasantry of Prussia were serfs; and their serfdom, unlike that of the Russian peasantry, was economic in origin and of old standing. Economic serfdom, which reduces a man to a state of complete and almost bestial dependence on his master, must needs tend to dull his wits and weaken his will. In the Prussian serf German docility manifested itself as abject slavishness, as blind and stupid obedience to orders, differing but little from that which a cart-horse yields to the carter. Lower than this it could not well sink. Yet it is to the Prussian serf that Germany owes her military greatness and therefore her political power. A nation of serfs, drilled and disciplined by their hereditary landlords, under the control and direction of a strong and able autocrat, would provide that autocrat with a formidable army ; and it was as the master of such an army that Frederic the Great conquered and held Silesia, beat off the onslaughts of his many enemies in the Seven Years' War, and raised Prussia to the rank of a great 32 A DOCILE ARMY 33 European Power, ready, when the time came, to subdue and Prussianize Germany, to array her in " shining armour," and make her a menace to the world. '' The tradition which the German army has in- herited from the army of Frederic the Greats that of " iron discipline." What do we mean by "discipline"? With the possible exception of the word " character," there is no word which has been the occasion of so much cant, of so much insincerity, both intellectual and sentimental. Disciplined troops advance steadily under a heavy fire of shrapnel. Undisciplined troops, exposed to the same fire, break and give way. " See what discipline does for a man," says the armchair critic. " What an excellent thing is discipline ! Let us have compulsory military service so that our man- hood may enjoy this priceless boon, and (but this he says sotto voce) so that the ' lower orders ' may learn to obey ' their betters,' so that labour may cease to be a menace to capital, so that my divi- dends may not be affected by strikes." Discipline is indeed an excellent thing. On this point we are all agreed. But what is discipline ? And for what purpose or purposes is it excellent? In Belgium and France, during the present war, the highly disciplined German troops are said to have drunk to excess, outraged women, murdered peaceful citizens, looted property, and so forth. Are these among the fruits of " iron discipline " ? Whatever else their training might have done for the soldiers who did those things, it had not taught them to control their own lusts and passions, it had not taught them to discipline themselves. D 34 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY The plain truth is that military discipline is not necessarily a moralizing influence in a man's life. It has its own function to fulfil; but its function is not that of helping a man to discipline himself. Yet self-discipline, issuing in self-control in the mastery of lower habits and instincts through the outgrowth of higher is the truest type of discipline, and the only type which is of lasting moral value. The function of military discipline, of the discipline which is based on systematic drill, is to enable many men to obey, promptly, accurately, and at whatever cost, the orders of one man. This it does by substituting the blind force of habit for other and more genuinely human motives. Sustained by the force of habit, which has perhaps come within a little of making him an automaton, the well-drilled soldier will both execute complicated manoeuvres with speed and precision and advance steadily, in obedience to orders, into a zone of fire. As long as we have wars we must have trained armies; and as long as we have trained armies we must have discipline of this type. But let us not delude ourselves with the belief that the discipline of drill, because it is good to make soldiers, is therefore good to make men. The more machine-like it makes the soldier, the more successful it is from its own point of view; and though, when combined with other and more vitalizing influences, it may give a hardening alloy to a man's character, and help him to pull himself together, and strengthen him to subdue self-will, if over-emphasized, if regarded as an end in itself, it will tend (as we shall presently see) to atrophy will and conscience, and will thus become the most A DOCILE ARMY 35 demoralizing influence to which a man's life can be exposed. In the Prussian army there has always been a marked tendency to regard discipline as an end in itself. In this respect Prussia has but carried to excess a tendency which has been characteristic of all trained armies, and has only recently begun to be relaxed. " Until comparatively recently," says the author of Drill and Field Training (one of our Imperial Army Series), " discipline was de- veloped by methods which aimed at producing a blind, mechanical obedience to orders through habits formed by a monotonous drill coupled with severe and even cruel punishments." These are the methods by which discipline has always been and is still developed in the Prussian army ; and though there may be less rigidity and more humanity in the non-Prussian armies of Germany, the fact remains that three-fourths of the armed forces of the empire are under Prussian control and disci- pline, and that during the past forty years the non-Prussian armies have made the Prussian army their model. In other countries concessions may have been made, even in military circles, to the democratic spirit of the age. At any rate there has been in many of them a growing tendency to make the officer less of a drill sergeant, to make the soldier less of an automaton, to relax the rigour and mitigate the severity of discipline, and to do away with unnecessary drill. In Germany, where the democratic spirit is regarded as the arch enemy of discipline and efficiency, the tendency has been in the opposite direction. No one can read the German stories of military life which have been 36 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY translated into English, without realizing that drill for the sake of drill is still a prominent feature in the training of the soldier. The author of Jena or Sedan speaks of " the greatest torment of a soldier's life . . . that monotonous drilling under which all groaned, and the object of which no one could even pretend to understand." And one of his characters, speaking of the recruits from the indus- trial districts, " with their highly developed intel- ligence," says that the military authorities, " in- stead of turning this highly developed intelligence to good account . . . bound it hand and foot on the rack of an everlasting drill, which could not have been more soullessly mechanical in the time of Frederic the Great. And they expected this purely mechanical drill to hold together men from whom all joyful spontaneity was taken by the stiff wooden formalism of their duty. . . . Drill was to maintain discipline among them? It held them together as an iron hoop holds together a cask, the dry staves of which would fall asunder at the first kick ! " And this " monotonous drill " is " coupled with severe and even cruel punishment." It is probable that there is less cruelty in the army to-day than there was in the time of Frederic the Great; but there is still enough to call forth frequent and violent protests in the Reichstag. Mr. W. H. Dawson, the author of What is Wrong with Ger- many ? speaks of the " lamentable prevalence of cruelty and persecution by non-commissioned officers as disclosed in the Reichstag with mono- tonous regularity in every debate on the Army estimates " ; and he tells of a sergeant named A DOCILE ARMY 37 Thann who was accused of misconduct and mal- treatment in over 600 cases, and whose persistent cruelty drove a gunner called Knobbe to commit suicide, and of another non-commissioned officer " who had committed 1500 cases of serious and 300 of lighter ill-treatment of soldiers." And it is a significant fact that in each of three German military novels which I have read the brutality of a non-commissioned officer to his men is a central incident in the development of the story. But if, in the infliction of cruelty on the soldier, the non-commissioned officer is usually the execu- tioner, responsibility for his conduct must be shared by the commissioned officer and the whole military caste. The captain under whom the non- commissioned officer mentioned above had ill- treated 1800 soldiers " was punished," said Deputy Erzberger in the Reichstag, " because he allowed these acts to occur. And now this man has sud- denly been advanced to the rank of major and divisional adjutant over the heads of a whole series of seniors." This does not look as if the military authorities regarded systematic cruelty to soldiers with serious disfavour, though, owing to the pub- licity which the protests of the members of the Reichstag give to specially scandalous cases, they may find it convenient to visit it with formal dis- pleasure. 1 Mr. Dawson, who knows Germany inti- 1 " Vicious as the system of persecution still is," says Mr. Dawson, " it would have been infinitely worse but for the relentless revelations made in the Reichstag by the Socialist party." Since the war began the discipline of the German Army, brutal at all times, seems to have reached an abnormally high level of brutality. In the summer session of the Reichstag, June 1915, during a 38 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY mately, regards the prevalence of cruelty and per- secution by non-commissioned officers " as the expression of an inherent grossness and brutality which have marked Prussian military rule at all times"; and he tells us that "even the normal spirit of discipline in the army is unduly severe, and the sentences often passed by court-martials for light offences savour of cruelty and vindictive- ness. ... It was stated in the Reichstag several years ago that during a period of five years 180,000 soldiers had been sentenced to an aggregate period of 2,300 years of penal servitude and 1,600 years of imprisonment." That being so, it is obviously unfair to the non-commissioned officer to hold him alone responsible for the outrages of which the sitting of the Budget Committee, five Social Democratic members of the Committee raised a discussion on the brutality of German officers to their men. These deputies produced hundreds of letters from soldiers which went to show that they were constantly ill-treated while in barracks, and even still worse treated when they got to the front. A correspondent of the Morning Post says that " what is most remarkable is that representatives of all parties declared that they had received from soldiers at the front hundreds and hundreds of complaints and ap- peals for protection." The Minister of War, who had already issued three or four general orders instructing officers to treat their men with humanity, admitted that there had been many proved instances of gross cruelty, but tried to palliate the excesses of the officers by alleging that they must have been nervous, or had insufficient experience and training. He appealed to the Deputies to refrain from discussing the scandals in question at the plenary sitting of the Reichstag, because to do so would create an impression abroad " as if the German Army leaders had to resort to cruelty and force to drive their troops to battle." He promised that another general order should be issued, and his request that the matter should not be publicly discussed was agreed to by a majority of the House. A DOCILE ARMY 39 deputies in the Reichstag complain. When authority is autocratic and descends by a process of devolution from grade to grade, each grade in turn looks up to the one above it for example and guidance, and instinctively tends to imitate it ; and the non-commissioned officer may well plead that if brutality were not in the atmosphere the upper aether as well as the lower air of the German army, he would not be tempted, as he now is, to become a brutal martinet. He may also plead that, when the commissioned officer does come into direct contact with the rank and file, he is apt to treat them with very scant courtesy. It was a com- missioned officer who, at the General Headquarters in Brussels, in the presence of Mr. Alexander Powell, the American correspondent, publicly slashed a sentinel again and again across the face with his riding-whip for being slow to salute him. During the present war our soldiers have often noted with astonishment that, instead of leading their men to the attack, the German officers march behind them and drive them forward at the point of the sword or the muzzle of the revolver ; and they have come to the conclusion that the men " fear their officers more than they fear death." And as it is in the Army, so it is in the Navy. When the Russians captured the cruiser Magdeburg they found that a cat-o'-nine-tails was part of the equipment of every officer. And some of our Royal Naval Reserve men who had been serving on a German liner when the war broke out, and had thence been forcibly transferred to the cruiser Mainz, having been rescued by our own destroyers during the Heligo- land fight, complained that aboard the German 40 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY warship " everything was done at the point of the revolver," a weapon which officers alone are, I believe, privileged to carry. Why is the German soldier still subjected to " incessant and monotonous drill " ? And why is he still treated with a severity which sometimes amounts to sheer brutality? In order that a " blind mechanical obedience to orders " may become the central feature of his character. " The day is past," says the author of Drill and Field Training, " when the soldier was more or less of an automaton, with his mind entirely subordinated to the will of his officer." So far as the German army is concerned that day is not past. Now, as in the time of Frederic the Great, and now more than ever, it seems to be the fixed purpose of the General Staff to turn the soldier into " an auto- maton with his mind entirely subordinated to the will of his officer." The author of the German Army from Within says that " one important defect in the training of the army is that no chance is given to men to display initiative. The German character is at no time quick in this direction, and the little that a man may possess is studiously squeezed out of him. On no account may he think and act for himself. He is simply there to do as he is told; whether he understands the motive of this or that operation is of no consequence." This attitude of the military " powers that be " towards the rank and file of the army is, I think, the resultant of two distinct currents of tendency. The first is traditional; the second is strategic and tactical. In the stream of historical tradition the German A DOCILE ARMY 41 officer of to-day is the lineal descendant of the Prussian Junker-officer of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as the German soldier of to-day is the lineal descendant of the Prussian serf-soldier of the same era. Out of the bearing of the Junker-officer towards his serf-soldier has developed the bearing of the German officer of to-day towards the German soldier, of the German State towards the German citizen, of Germany towards the rest of the world. Now, the bearing of the Junker-officer towards his serf-soldier did not materially differ from that of a human being towards a beast of burden. Economic serfdom naturally tended to lower the mental and moral vitality of its victims; and the Prussian officer therefore took for granted that the men whom he had to train were stupid and spiritless, and dealt with them accordingly. Hence the monotonous drill to which he subjected them in season and out of season. Hence the excessive severity by which he roused them to effort and made them the creatures of his will. If he could not turn them into efficient human beings intelligent, resource- ful, self-reliant, high-spirited he could at least turn them into efficient machines. And this he succeeded in doing. Now, as it happens, the tradition which the Prussian Junker originated is in harmony with the dominant tendency of military thought in modern Germany, the tendency to regard the army as a vast and highly complicated machine, to think more of its mechanical efficiency than of its moral, more of the skill and forethought with which the machine has been designed, the care with which it has been 42 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY constructed, and the smoothness with which it works, than of the spirit and intelligence of the soldiers, who from this point of view are but the raw material of which it has been made. The improvement in the means of transport, the exten- sion of the railway system of Germany, the con- struction of strategic lines, the development of mechanical road-traction, the invention of the telephone and wireless telegraphy, have all made for excessive centralization in the control of the army, and have generated a tendency in the mili- tary mind to think in terms of millions of men, manoeuvring over battlefields which cover tens of thousands of square miles; and the result of this is that a whole army corps has come to be regarded as a mere pawn on the giant chess-board, while the men who compose it are looked at from a point of view which is largely, though of course not wholly, arithmetical. Then, again, the predominance of machinery, in the literal sense of the word, in modern war, and the extent to which it is displacing human labour and skill and even (it might almost seem) the more distinctively human qualities of courage, endurance, and self-reliance, must needs tend to emphasize the mechanical at the expense of the human view of warfare and warring armies, and therefore to exalt mechanical obedience the most non-human of all virtues to the highest place among the virtues of the soldier. At the present moment this bastard virtue counts for more in the German army than it did in the war of 1870. The " open " and " extended " order, in which, out of deference to the murderous properties of the newly introduced breech-loader, A DOCILE ARMY 43 the German soldiers were allowed to fight in that war, especially in the concluding period of it, 1 has been abandoned, and the close order, in spite of its terrible wastefulness of human life, has been reverted to. One reason for this change is that the introduction of the open order led, at any rate in the earlier stages of the war, to a most inordinate amount of skulking. Von Meckel, the military teacher of the Japanese and the stern critic of the open order, declares that at his first battle in France, on reaching the scene late in the day, " the field was literally strewed with men who had left the ranks and were doing nothing. Whole battalions could have been formed from them. From where we stood you could count hundreds. Some were lying down, their rifles pointing to the front as if they were still in the firing line and were expecting the enemy to attack them at any moment. These had evidently remained behind, lying down when the more courageous had ad- vanced. Whenever a bush or ditch gave shelter there were men to be seen, who in some cases had made themselves very comfortable." With this experience as his text, Von Meckel sums up the case against the open order in the following significant 1 " As the war of 1870 proceeded there was a tendency to abandon the closer order of battle and to fight in more extended formation. How far this was due to the general nature of the operations, how far to the diminished capacity of the French troops, how far to the growing experience and confidence of the Germans themselves cannot be dis- cussed here. But there is no doubt that in the concluding period of the war the German infantrymen had learnt to fight effectively and with far less loss to themselves in comparatively open order." Times History of the War, Chap. XIV. 44 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY sentence significant in the light that it throws on the psychology of the German soldier and the effect of iron discipline on character : " In disper- sion it is difficult to be steadfast, in close order it is difficult to be weak. Under the leader's influence the example of the strong impels the whole. Among the leaderless the example of the confused and the cowards has the upper hand." 1 What adds to the significance of this criticism is that the German is almost the only army of which it now holds good. In nearly every other European army the open order has been adopted; and it is found that the " example of the confused and the cowards " does not have " the upper hand." The fundamental reason why the open order has been abandoned in Germany apart from its being out of keeping with the conception of an army as a machine is that iron discipline, when pushed to excess, is found to be fatal to initiative, resource- fulness, and self-reliance, and to the kind of courage which is generated by the outgrowth of those qualities. And the only remedy which the General Staff has been able to discover for the shortcomings of the German soldiers which the war of 1870 revealed, is the complete eradication of the qualities in which they were found to be wanting. The incessant drilling which distressed Captain Giintz in Jena or Sedan, the extreme severity with which discipline is enforced, are due to something more then the lingering influence of a once powerful tradition. They have behind them the mature reflection and the deliberate purpose of the General Staff, which seems to have convinced itself that if 1 Times History of the War. A DOCILE ARMY 45 the vast and complicated machinery of the German army is to work effectively, the life of the individual soldier must be so entirely dominated by the force of habit, that he will become a mere automaton, without a will and almost without a mind of his own. And it is on this conception of the place and function of the soldier that the strategy and tactics of the German army may be said to hinge. So intimate, indeed, is the relation between the mechanical conception of the soldier and the mechanical conception of the army, that it is diffi- cult to say which is cause and which effect. But one thing is clear. In the pre-steam days of our Royal Navy, the extinction of initiative by dis- cipline would have been calamitous, for accidents were bound to occur which, unless promptly dealt with by the nearest bluejacket, might result in irretrievable disaster. In the German army things must be so planned and provided for that unfore- seen accidents shall not occur ; for, if initiative is to be suppressed in order that the army-machine may work with perfect smoothness, it is obviously essen- tial that the need for initiative shall never arise. We can now see that the two currents of tendency which account for the predominance in the German army of to-day of the Prussian ideal of rigid drill- discipline, readily merge into one. For in that army, as the inheritor of the Prussian ideal, tradi- tion and military science, discipline and organiza- tion, are ever tending to act and re-act on one another, the serf-like qualities of the soldier neces- sitating an abnormally high degree of forethought and calculation in the organization of the army so that all contingencies may be provided for and 46 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY nothing left to individual initiative, while the consequent excessive elaboration of the adminis- trative machinery necessitates the suppression of initiative in the soldier and therefore the perpetua- tion of his serf-like qualities. Let us now consider the effect of the ultra- docility of the soldier on the professional character and general bearing of the officer. The officers, in their various grades, have, of course, to obey as well as to command. But for the moment let us think of them as commanding, as drilling and directing the rank and file. " The officer," said Captain Giintz in Jena or Sedan, " was separated by a veritable abyss from the sensations and thoughts of the common soldier." How could it be otherwise ? Docility implies and evokes dogma- tism, just as dogmatism implies and evokes docility; and between the docile and the dogmatic, between the serf and his master, between the soldier and his officer there must needs be a " veritable abyss." The soldier is there to be drilled. The officer is there to drill him. Much of the actual routine work of drilling is done by the non-commissioned officer; but the commissioned officer is the super- drill-sergeant, and, as we have already seen, when he comes into direct contact with the soldier, he is ready, on occasion, to hold intercourse with him by means of the scourge, the sword, and the revolver. In any case, since qui facit per alium facit per se, the rigidity and brutality of the drill-discipline of the German army are defects (or virtues, if we are to take the German point of view) for which the officer must ultimately be held responsible. A DOCILE ARMY 47 Nor would he think of shirking that responsi- bility. Wherever he may be, or whatever troops he may have to command, he is still the Junker- officer of the eighteenth century, and his soldiers are still the serfs of his hereditary domains. Lord Cromer in a letter to The Times tells the following instructive story : " The German Government at one time expressed a wish to recruit some Sudanese in Egypt for service in their East African posses- sions. Permission to do so was accorded. A few hundred men were enlisted. Some two or three years later the British East Africa Company, which was then in existence, made a similar request. A highly qualified British official, who had mixed much with the Sudanese, was sent to the district in which most of them were located with a view, so far as was possible, to ascertain how the proposal would be regarded by the men themselves. On his return he reported that, if it was clearly under- stood that the troops would be under British officers, there would be no difficulty in obtaining recruits, but that not a single man would on any account enter the service of Germany. The reason given was that many of those who had been pre- viously enlisted by the Germans had returned to Egypt and had recounted their experiences. They had been well paid and well fed, but they com- plained bitterly of the harshness and rigidity of the German discipline, and especially of the brutal treatment which they had received at the hands of the German officers and non-commissioned officers." The Sudanese are said to love being drilled; but even for them the German officer was too harsh and too rigid a taskmaster. 48 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY Between the super-drill-sergeant and his men what sympathy can there be, what human inter- course? When ultra-dogmatism is on one side and ultra-docility on the other, when the landowner and serf-master is on one side and the landbound serf (or his lineal descendant) on the other, the abyss between the two, of which Captain Giintz spoke, must needs yawn wide and deep. Before the war of 1870 the officers of the Prussian army belonged for the most part to the Junker class, and were therefore a social as well as a professional caste. Since then, with the outgrowth of indus- trialism and commercialism in Germany, the pro- portion of " well-born " (not to speak of " high and well-born ") officers even in the Prussian army has become considerably smaller than it used to be ; but those who are not " well born " are despised by those who are ; l and the influence of the latter in determining the standard of social, or rather of human, worth a standard which reacts quickly and decisively on character is, of course, over- whelmingly strong. The typical German officer the officer whose position and influence dominate the military caste and give it its prevailing tone- still belongs to a social stratum which feels itself at liberty to look down on all the strata below it ; and that being so, one cannot wonder if the average German officer, whether " well born " or bourgeois, tends to regard the common soldiers, the majority of whom are drawn from the lowest social strata, as belonging to an entirely different order of beings from himself. The soldiers of the German army 1 See Life in a Crack Cavalry Regiment, by Baron von Schlicht (Count von Baudessin), passim. A DOCILE ARMY 49 are the mechanical instruments of the officer's will; marionettes who move in response to the strings which he manipulates; huddled masses to be driven to battle, like sheep to the shambles, at the point of his sword or the muzzle of his revolver ; " cannon-fodder " to be used up by him, if need be, with reckless prodigality; anything, in fine, except his fellow-men. Of the comradeship be- tween officers and men which is so marked a feature in the French army and is so stimulating an in- fluence on the battlefield, there is not a trace. Nor is there that feeling of brotherhood in a sacred cause which unites all ranks in the Russian army. Nor that spirit of mutual devotion which lifts the relations between officers and men in our army high above the level of ordinary discipline. An English physician who has visited many hospitals for the wounded says that " while a French officer will refuse to be treated in a room apart from his men, you cannot inflict a greater punishment on a German officer than to place him in a ward with his wounded." Men who instinctively adopt this anti-human attitude towards those among their fellow-men with whom they are in daily contact can scarcely be expected to bear themselves with courtesy and humanity towards the world at large. Ultra-docility on the part of the many tends to generate inordinate self-esteem on the part of the dogmatic few. Taken seriously by the men who obey and defer to him, men whose well-being he can make or mar, the officer is sorely tempted to take himself seriously, and to this temptation he too often succumbs. But the man who takes himself quite seriously. 50 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY the man who has settled down complacently into a high estimate of his own value and importance, will almost certainly try to impress on others the favourable opinion which he has formed of him- self. Even in ecclesiastical and scholastic circles those who are in authority are sometimes attacked by the microbe of pomposity. The military equiva- lent of pomposity is swagger. The German officer swaggers through life, exacting the extreme of deference, which seems to be regulated by a meticulous ritual, 1 from his subordinates, and expecting civilians of all ranks to give way to him. Captain Giintz in Jena or Sedan complains of the officer's " hidebound narrow-mindedness, too often degenerating into overweening self-conceit." No doubt in some cases the swagger of the officer is 1 One of the characters in Jena or Sedan a smart artilleryman, " the best soldier in the whole battery " was sent to prison for five months for failing to straighten his knees when addressing an officer. He had done a piece of good work in a certain emergency, and ran breathless to tell his officer of it, expecting a word of recognition. But instead of hearing a word of recognition, " he heard the sharp high voice of Senior-Lieutenant Brettschneider. ' ' Please stand in a more respectful attitude, Bombardier Vogt, when you have something to say to me/ the voice snapped out. " Vogt pulled himself up and repeated his announce- ment. " But now the Senior-Lieutenant began to correct him and find fault with him, he was to put his right shoulder higher, his cap was not straight, he must place the tip of his little finger on his trouser seam, and put his feet wider apart. " ' Straighten your knees,' commanded he at last. " Vogt felt how his legs were trembling. He might have been able to obey, but he was now at the end of his patience ... he would not obey this idiot at any price." And so he was placed under arrest, court-martialled, and sent to prison. A DOCILE ARMY 51 the harmless swagger of exuberant youth. More often it is the swagger of arrogance; and when arrogance, or aggressive egoism, has become the dominant characteristic of what is at once the highest caste in the army and the highest class in society, we naturally begin to wonder how far the malady will spread and what forms it will take. This speculation widens the field of our inquiry. We have seen that the ultra-docility of the German people has divided the army into two great sec- tions, between which yawns an unfathomable abyss, a serf -like rank-and-file, and an arrogant, overbearing caste of officers. To yield mechanical obedience is the function of the former. To ad- minister coercive discipline is the function of the latter. What effect this state of things might be expected to have on the moral of the army and the morals and manners of the officers and men is a question which I reserve for future consideration; my more immediate concern is to ask how the violent antithesis, within the limits of the army the great school of the nation of dogmatism to docility, of arrogance to servility, of brutal severity to cringing fear, is likely to affect the government of the country and the social and political life of the people. CHAPTER III A DOCILE PEOPLE IT was because the German people in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries were obedient to the verge of slavishness, it was because the German princes in general and the King of Prussia in par- ticular were irresponsible autocrats, that first the Prussian and then the Prusso-German army ac- quired the features which are to-day distinctive of the latter. The iron discipline of Frederic the Great's army was but an exaggeration of the iron discipline to which a strong king was able to sub- ject his people. Under the absolute rulers who then sat on the Prussian throne, the civil adminis- tration of the country was carried on by a hierarchy of officials who were controlled by the king through his chancellor. The higher grades of the bureau- cracy were recruited from the Junker class, and many of the officials were ex-army officers. In the lower grades places were found for non-commis- sioned officers on their retirement. Authority descended from the crown, and had no other source. The ministers of the crown were responsible to the king, and to him alone. The " State," incarnate in the reigning family, was everything. The people counted for nothing. There was no national assembly. Political opinion was non-existent. The 52 A DOCILE PEOPLE 53 " will of the people " was a phrase which had no meaning. The function of the king was to protect and govern his people. The function of the people was to pay taxes, serve in the army, and obey orders. On the fatal day of Jena and Auerstadt this system crumbled to pieces. Prussia lay prostrate at the feet of the conqueror; and the officials who had drilled and disciplined the people were as help- less in the face of the catastrophe as the officers who had drilled and disciplined the army. The Junkers had been tried in the balance and found wanting. The men who resuscitated Prussia and delivered Germany from bondage to Napoleon were all non-Prussians. Stein was a Nassauer. Hardenberg and Scharnhorst were Hanoverians. Fichte was a Saxon of Swedish descent. The war of liberation was a national uprising, for which the policy and administrative work of Stein, Har- denberg, and Scharnhorst, and the impassioned addresses of Fichte had prepared the way. A short-service national army had taken the place of the long-service professional army which had failed so disastrously in 1806. It was not to absolutism or militarism that Prussia owed its deliverance, but to the spontaneous patriotism of a newly awakened people. How were the people rewarded for their self- devotion? "During the war/' says Mr. W. H. Dawson, " the king solemnly promised the nation, in recognition of its unparalleled sacrifices, direct participation in State affairs; it was bidden to keep before its eyes the pledge of freedom at home as well as the hope of release from a foreign yoke." 54 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY That promise was not kept. It has not been kept. And if the Hohenzollerns and Junkers can have their way, it never will be kept. With a perfidia plus quam Prussica, Frederic William III, who had played an ignoble part in the hour of disaster, broke faith with his people when the crisis was over, withholding the constitution which he had promised them, and persecuting the high-minded " Liberals " who had done so much to inspire the nation in the day of its weakness and humiliation; and all his successors on the throne have made themselves partners with him in his dishonour. 1 Since the downfall of Prussia in 1806 two great changes have taken place. In the first place, a short-service citizen army has permanently taken the place of the long-service professional army of the eighteenth century. In the second place, Prussia, still absolutist and unreformed, preserving her national identity and refusing to merge her life in that of Germany, has forcibly unified the German states and imposed her will and stamped her character on the whole German world. Had Frederic William III kept faith with his people, the cause of freedom would have had as little to fear from the citizen army of Prussia as it has to-day from the citizen militia of Switzerland. But under the absolutist regime which recrudesced 1 In 1849, under the pressure of the revolutionary movement of 1848, Frederic William IV gave Prussia a constitution. But he would have annulled it had he dared to do so ; and he left behind him a sealed document in which his successors were solemnly adjured to annul it. From 1862 to 1866 William I, acting on the advice of Bismarck, violated the constitution by governing without a budget. Since then the machinery of government has been captured by the anti-constitutionalists. A DOCILE PEOPLE 55 after the Napoleonic wars, and even outlived, in spirit if not in outward form, the revolution of 1848, the institution of a citizen army could scarcely fail to perpetuate that regime, to fasten more firmly than ever the yoke of feudal despotism on the neck of the people. For of the millions who passed through the army and were subjected for two years to its severe and rigid discipline, many perhaps a large majority would carry back to civil life the habit of mechanical obedience which they had acquired on the drill-ground; and the temptation to mould this plastic clay to its will, to hem in with commands and prohibitions the daily life of the people, would be one which the autocratic " State," with its trained and organized bureaucracy, would find it hard to resist. As, in the eighteenth century, the iron discipline of the army did but reflect the iron discipline to which the State subjected the people, so at the present day the military life of the citizen must needs react on his civil life, and the submissiveness which he learns in the army must needs predispose him to defer to officialdom, whatever form it may assume, and to look to authority for direction and supervision even in " the trivial round " and " the common task." What is true of Prussia is largely true, and is becoming increasingly true, of modern Germany. In Germany, as in Prussia, from the army to the nation there is but a single step. The Germans themselves have a saying, which proves how thoroughly they are now Prussianized, that such and such a country possesses an army, but that Germany is an army which possesses a country. They have another saying that the army made 56 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY Prussia and that Prussia made Germany. They have yet another saying that the army is the nation and the nation is the army. These sayings point to a fact of vital importance, namely, that beyond all other countries Germany is military, in the fullest sense of the word, military in that its slavishly obedient people are pre-eminently amenable to the discipline of drill, military in that its ruling classes are all drill-sergeants at heart. Other nations may be as warlike in temperament as Germany ; but in no other nation has the iron of military discipline entered into the inmost soul of the people ; in no other nation is the king, or emperor, or whatever his title may be, primarily the head of an army, and only secondarily the ruler of a people. How does the " State," which is another name for the Crown and the royal camarilla, contrive to control and discipline its subjects? Let us first study the political organization of Germany. In 1849 tne ghost of a constitution was given to Prussia. In 1871 the ghost of a constitution was given to united Germany. In neither case has the ghost materialized ; and it seems to be the fixed purpose of the Government that it never shall. Germany is a federation of twenty-five states, which vary greatly in size and population. Nearly two-thirds of the area of the country and more than three-fifths of the inhabitants belong to Prussia. Under the German constitution there are two legislative assemblies the Reichstag or Imperial Diet, and the Bundesrat or Federal Council. The members of the Reichstag are elected by universal suffrage for a term of five years; voting is by ballot; and there is approximately A DOCILE PEOPLE 57 one member for every 170,000 inhabitants. This sounds very democratic, and has led Professor Karl Lamprecht to say that the Germans are the freest people on the face of the earth. In point of fact the Reichstag is nothing better than a national debating society. The Crown and the Bundesrat between them deprive it of all effective power. All the imperial ministers are directly responsible to the Reichskanzler, or Chancellor, who is also the Prussian plenipotentiary to the Bundesrat and president of the assembly; and the Chancellor is responsible to the Emperor, not to the Legislative Houses. As regards its functions, the empire has supreme and independent control in matters re- lating to the army and navy, to the imperial finances, to German commerce, to posts and telegraphs (except in Bavaria and Wuertemberg) and to rail- ways so far as these affect the common defence of the country. " The legislative power of the country also takes precedence of that of the separate states in the regulation of matters affect- ing freedom of migration, domicile, settlement and the rights of German subjects generally, as well as in all that relates to banking, patents, protection of intellectual property, navigation of rivers and canals, civil and criminal legislation, judicial pro- cedure, sanitary police, and control of the press and of associations. The executive power is in the Emperor's hands. He represents the empire inter- nationally, and can declare war, if defensive (and what war is not defensive?) and make peace, as well as enter into treaties with other nations; he also appoints and receives ambassadors." 1 1 Encyclopedia Britannica, gth Ed., Vol. XI, p. 817. 58 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY The Bundesrat, the members of which are nomi- nated by the various states, is a supreme adminis- trative and consultative council. Of its fifty-eight members only seventeen are Prussian; but the influence of Prussia in the council is much greater than these figures suggest. The Chancellor, who is President of the Bundesrat, is a Prussian, the nominee of the King of Prussia qua German Em- peror, the head of the Imperial Government, and usually also the head of the Prussian ministry. The chairman of each of the standing committees (with one exception) must by law be one of the Prussian members. Above all, the Prussian group has the right of vetoing any proposed change in laws or taxation, however great may be the majority in its favour in the Reichstag, as well as in the Bundesrat. " Thus it is plain," says Professor Ramsay Muir, " that the Bundesrat, while nominally a means for maintaining the rights of the separate states, is really a very ingenious device for securing the control of the King of Prussia and his Govern- ment over the whole of Germany." Sitting as it does in secret, the Bundesrat is not so much in the eye of the people as the Reichstag ; but its powers are far wider and far more real. The relation between the two Houses is set forth by Dr. Friedrich Naumann, a prominent member of the Reichstag, in the following passage : * " The German Empire has two political forces the Bun- desrat and the Reichstag but of those forces the one is infinitely stronger than the other, for the Bundesrat can dissolve the Reichstag, but the Reichstag cannot dissolve the Bundesrat. The 1 Quoted by Dr. Sarolea in The Anglo-German Problem. A DOCILE PEOPLE 59 Bundesrat can play catchball with the Reichstag. Somewhere in their palace their delegates sit together in secret and throw our resolutions into the waste-paper basket. But they demand of us that we shall accept their proposals. If the Reichstag does not do what the Bundesrat de- mands, there comes a smash. There is an appeal to national feeling, and the sinners must do penance. But when the Bundesrat does not do what the majority of the Reichstag has resolved, then nothing happens absolutely nothing ! Such is the condition of things which we in Germany call ' Parliamentary Government/ . . . " Poor honest Reichstag ! I have pity upon thee, although I myself belong to thee. Ministers are forced upon thee, and thou canst say nothing against it ! When on a particular day a Cabinet Secretary or an Imperial Chancellor falls into dis- favour, the fact is hardly mentioned to us. The Reichstag is informed of it through the newspapers. . . . Poor honest Reichstag ! what principles or measures of contemporary German politics really have originated from thee? Every essential law has emanated from the Federal Government, whether those laws have been good or bad. Cus- toms laws, insurance laws, Liberal politics, increase of the navy, finance politics all those measures came into being after the Silent Chamber of the Bundesrat had taken them in hand. The Reich- stag has the right of initiative just as much as the Federal Government, but it lies in its composition that it can do nothing with this right. . . . Bis- marck is still laughing in his grave for having combined it all so ingeniously. No achievement of 60 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY his reveals his statecraft to better advantage than his disposition of the Bundesrat and the Reich- stag, for those dispositions are the greatest obstacle to parliamentary government in Germany. He granted popular rights, but he took every pre- caution that the popular will should not be carried out. He created an indissoluble secret college and a dissoluble public parliament. He knew perfectly well which of the two would prove the stronger, and we experience every day how completely he has tied the democracy while seeming to favour it." What power does the Reichstag possess ? Chiefly that of debating and ventilating grievances. It is true that its approval is necessary for all new laws. " But in practice," says Professor Ramsay Muir, " new laws of importance are always proposed by the Government, which usually gets them through by making bargains with some of the numerous party groups into which the Reichstag is divided. If it fails to do this, the Government can at any time dissolve the Reichstag and get a new one elected, which has nearly always proved to be more amen- able especially if the electoral Press campaign has been managed with the skill usually displayed by the German Government. The Reichstag also has in theory control over taxation. But as most of the revenue laws are permanent, and cannot be altered without the consent of the Emperor, and as most of the items of expenditure (above all that of the army) are practically fixed and must be met, the control of the Reichstag over finance is really very ineffective." Such is " Constitutional Government," as the phrase is understood in Germany. All the reality A DOCILE PEOPLE 61 of power is in the hands of the Emperor and of an " indissoluble Secret College " nominated by the Emperor as King of Prussia and the rest of the German princes. This college is under the control of Prussia, which, as we shall see, is politically the most reactionary of all the German States. If Constitutional Government were anything but a sham, the "dissoluble public parliament " the only branch of the government which pretends to be popular would have at least some measure of political power. In point of fact it has none. Nor will it have any until the ministers of the Crown are responsible to it as well as to the Em- peror. In the early part of last year (1914) the Imperial Chancellor told the members of the Reichstag that he regarded an adverse vote passed by their assembly as merely the expression of a difference of opinion between them and him. Bismarck is said to have called one of his dogs " Reichstag." His estimate of the power and im- portance of the assembly which he called into being seems to be shared by the latest of his successors. From Germany let us return to Prussia. In doing so we shall leave a delusive twilight behind us, and plunge at a single step into mediaeval dark- ness. In Prussia, as in Germany, there are two " Houses of Parliament," a House of Lords, partly hereditary and partly nominated by the King, and an elected assembly called the Landtag. Voting for the Landtag is public, not (as. for the Reichstag) by ballot. It is also indirect. In each electoral district the voters are divided, according 62 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY to the amount that they pay in taxes, into three classes, which have equal voting power. If a par- ticular district pays 6000 marks in taxes, each of the three subdivisions pays 2000 marks. If in the district there was one man who paid 2000 marks, he would form a class by himself. If there were twenty men who paid 100 marks each, they would form another class. All the rest of the voters would belong to the third class. Each of the classes chooses the same number of electors (as distinguished from mere voters) ; and the electors choose the members of the Landtag. Dr. Sarolea tells us that in a certain electoral district in Berlin there is a wealthy family called Botzow. One Mr. Botzow forms the first class by himself. Another Mr. Botzow forms the second class by himself. The remaining voters, 571 in all, belong to the third class. In the election for the Landtag in 1903, out of about 7,700,000 voters 239,000 be- longed to the first class in their respective districts, 857,000 to the second class, and 6,600,000 to the third class. In other words, a vote in the first class is worth nearly twenty-eight votes in the third class. As the voting is public, and as all power is concentrated in the hands of a minority of landlords and plutocrats who can bring both administrative and economic pressure to bear on their political opponents, the voters who belong to the " Opposition " are naturally reluctant to vote according to their convictions. But even if they did, they would not, under the three-class system, effect much. In a recent general election the Socialists, who had an actual majority of the voters in the kingdom, returned seven members only A DOCILE PEOPLE 63 out of the 400 or so who constitute the Landtag. These figures need no comment. So scandalous is the existing electoral law that its repeal has been repeatedly promised by Prussian statesmen and even in speeches from the throne. But the influence of the Junkers of Eastern Prussia and of the capital- ists of the Rhineland and Silesia is too strong to allow these promises to be kept. The Junkers and the capitalists may not see eye to eye on all questions; but it is to the interest of both parties that the " lower orders " should be ruled with a rod of iron. With both the Legislative Houses pledged to support despotic government and excessive cen- tralization, "it is not to be wondered at/' says Dr. Sarolea, " that the influence of reaction should make itself felt in every department of public life. The reality of local self-government in Prussia exists only in the big municipalities. The ordinary local government authorities, who possess all the substance of political power the Governor or Over-president, the Landrat, and the police are the direct representatives of the Central Govern- ment, and through them the Prussian Government make their power felt in every village. Nor must we forget that the higher administrative authorities almost exclusively belong to the nobility, and they defend the interests of their caste all the more thoroughly because they are invested with powers which far exceed the powers of any local govern- ment in the United Kingdom." The aim of the Prussian Government is to drill and discipline the people till they become as wax in its hands. With this end in view it does not 64 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY trust to direct pressure only. Besides controlling the legislature and all the administrative depart- ments, it also controls the judiciary, the Univer- sities, the schools, the Lutheran Church, and the Press. ' The judiciary," says Dr. Sarolea, " is for all practical purposes a branch of the Civil Service. "Safe men" men who support the existing political regime are appointed as judges. Dis- tinction at the Bar and legal learning and acumen are matters of minor importance. University professors are also appointed by the Government; and here, too, "safe men" are in request. 1 "In no country," says Professor J. H. Morgan, " is the control of the Government over the Universities so strong ; nowhere is it so vigilant. Political favour may make or mar an academic career; the complaisant professor is decorated, the contumacious is cashiered." 2 The consequence is that the Universities, which still exercise great influence, even in the sphere of political thought, have become strongholds of reaction. The schools, of all grades, are under the control 1 Mr. Dawson tells of a Professor of Jurisprudence at Breslau, who was denounced in a Conservative newspaper for having said in the course of a lecture that " he would pass over the doctrine of monarchy by God's grace as being a non- juristic question," and who was then warned by the Government that his services might no longer be required ; and of a political pamphleteer who, having championed the Government's repressive treatment of the Poles, was made a Professor of Berlin University, against the protest of his own faculty and over the heads of the University authorities. 2 Or, if he is not cashiered, a rival professor is appointed by the Government, who gradually robs him of his pupils, with the result that he is ultimately starved into either submission or resignation. A DOCILE PEOPLE 65 of the Government ; and in them a narrow patriotism which glorifies the existing regime and centres in the cult of the House of Hohenzollern is assiduously taught. " By means of regulation, instruction and apologetic justification," says a writer in the Neue Rundschau, quoted by Mr. Dawson, " patriotism is to-day taught by zealots like a common school lesson with a merciless rigid catechism. Love to the fatherland is made mechanical, it is drilled into pupils like a dead, disbelieved religion, and the few pure heroisms of the past are misused in the service of one-sided politics, or even of dynastic purposes." In Prussia, as in other countries, the Lutheran Church has always been subordinate to the State and subject to royal regulation and control. " The king," says Mr. Dawson, " is the summus episcopus, the Church is rigidly governed by a Consistorium appointed by him, and the clergy are regarded as much State officers as the administrative bureau- cracy, and the same compliance and obedience are expected of them." Can we wonder that the late Dr. Ludwig Bamberger should have spoken of the Prussian State Church as " one of the institutions retained by the Prussian nobility and gentry as the inalienable appanage of their class," or that Dr. Paul Rohrbach should have complained that " in the name of no other Christian Church has religion been so entirely subordinated to the service of the principle of authority in the interest of the ruling classes " ? So tightly does the State hold the reins of Church government that the more liberal-minded clergy find their position increasingly difficult. Some of them, like Dr. Stocker, formerly 66 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY Court Chaplain, have been disgraced and driven into retirement. Others, like Dr. Friedrich Nau- mann and Herr Gustav Frenson, have found it desirable to renounce their orders and take up secular pursuits. When a clergy becomes a bureaucracy, its spiritual influence begins to wane; and the com- plete subordination of Church to State is no doubt partly responsible for the growing secularization of Protestantism in Prussia. One result of this is that the influence of the Church on opinion is to-day far weaker than that of the Press. But the Press, too, is in the grip of the octopus-like State. It might be thought that in some at least of the lead- ing newspapers there would be a free expression of opinion. But, apart from two honourable excep- tions, this is not the case. Taken as a whole, the Press is either directly or indirectly under the con- trol of the Government, which, besides having its own inspired organs and its own Press Bureau and either the monopoly or the indirect control of all news agencies, and besides being in a position to starve provincial papers into submission by with- holding official advertisements, can at its will warn or even suspend offending journals. The Zukunft, the organ of Herr Maximilian Harden, is an independent political paper. 1 So are the Vorwdrts and the other organs of the Socialist party. The former is tolerated, I imagine, on account of its Pan-German proclivities. The latter are constantly getting themselves into trouble. In no other 1 Towards the close of 1915 the Zukunft was suppressed till the end of the war. It is, I believe, now published in Switzerland. A DOCILE PEOPLE 67 country in Europe is the Press so much an instru- ment of State despotism as in Prussia. In no other country are such phrases as " the freedom of the Press " or " the force of public opinion " so entirely devoid of meaning. Thus from every conceivable quarter the Prussian autocracy brings pressure to bear on the life of the average citizen. And, not content with depriving him, directly or indirectly, outwardly or inwardly, of political freedom, it does its best to deprive him of social freedom, of economic freedom, of domestic freedom, of freedom of thought and conscience. In other words, besides being despotic, in the fullest sense of the word, it is also inquisitorial in the highest degree. This makes its despotism the harder to bear, and the more harmful to those who have to bear it. I have elsewhere suggested that the harm done to character by the loss of political freedom varies directly with the degree of inten- siveness with which the people in question is governed. In Russia and China, for example, though the central government is largely, if not wholly, despotic, the people are so lightly governed by the State that they are actually freer, in the more inward and vital sense of the word, than are the citizens of some of our Western democracies. In Prussia the people are more heavily governed than in any other country. Even the minor details of their daily life are subjected to bureaucratic control. "I do not doubt," says Herr Schiffer, the National Liberal Deputy, " that the laws, decrees, ordinances and regulations in currency would fill whole libraries. The institution of the police may be excellent for our nation, but we are 68 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY in danger of being suffocated by all the love and care bestowed on us. Who can be sure as he lays himself down to sleep at night that he is not trans- gressing some police regulation or other? From the cradle to the grave, law, justice and the police accompany us at every step ; nay, they look after us both for a few weeks before our birth and a few weeks after our death." l " One of every twelve persons now living in Germany," says the writer of an instructive article in the Round Table, " has been convicted of some offence. This is not that the Germans are a criminal 2 or disorderly people far from it ; it is merely that they are surrounded by regulations from their first walk outside a perambulator, or in one, to their grave." And Mr. Dawson, in his work, The Evolution of Modern Germany, says that " control and regulation at every turn are the lot of all Germans, at least of all North Germans . . . with the result that initiative is crippled and men come to regard order and instruction as a necessary part of life." It is true that in all civilized countries the sphere of governmental activity is tending to widen. The facilities for centralization, and therefore for efficient organization, which we owe to steam, electricity, and petrol; the various developments of applied science; the advances made in sanitation and medicine ; the increased attention given to economic problems; the growing sense of the intimate con- 1 Quoted by Mr. W. H. Dawson in What is Wrong with Germany ? 2 The writer had not studied the criminal statistics of Germany, or he would have omitted the word " criminal." The Germans are not a " disorderly " people, but they are " criminal " in a very high degree. See Chap. VI. pp. 142-6. A DOCILE PEOPLE 69 nection between the welfare of the individual and the welfare of the community, have combined in recent years to make government, both national and local, more paternal than it used to be, and are preparing our minds for further progress in the same direction. But the more heavily a people is governed, the more essential it is that it should learn to govern itself. Otherwise the nations which boast of their higher civilization may sink at last into the state of helplessness and irresponsi- bility to which the over-paternal rule of the Incas reduced the people of Peru. What distinguishes Germany in general and Prussia in particular from all other countries is that in its government the highest known degree of paternalism is combined with the highest known degree of despotism. No other govern- ment is so autocratic. No other administration is so highly organized or so thoroughly centralized. If I have devoted a seemingly disproportionate amount of space to the Government of Prussia as distinguished from that of Germany, my reason for doing so is that Prussia can no longer be distin- guished from Germany, which is now either incor- porated in Prussia or in course of being Prussian- ized. The influence of Prussia as a strong and conquering state which led the rest of Germany to victory in 1870, has grown steadily since that year, and is now all-powerful. So is the influence of the empire on the smaller states, partly through its control of the army and navy, of commerce, of national finance and other important matters, partly through its position and prestige. And the empire thanks to the impotence of the Reichstag, to the power of the Prussianized Bundesrat, and to 70 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY the imperial authority being vested in the House of Hohenzollern is wholly dominated by Prussia. It is doubtless true that some of the South German Diets are genuinely popular assemblies, and that in those assemblies the people are learning to govern themselves. But so long as local govern- ment in Prussia is mediaeval in character, the re- action of South German liberalism on the political life of Germany will be but small. The Prussian Landtag, with its open voting and its three-class electoral system, counts for more in the life of Germany than the Imperial Reichstag, with its Manhood Suffrage, voting by ballot, and equal electoral districts; and it counts for far more than all the other local diets put together. For the Landtag, as an instrument of State despotism, enables Prussia to retain and emphasize her charac- teristic features of militarism, officialism, coercive discipline, and mechanical obedience; and the ascendancy of Prussia in Germany means that the German character is gradually acquiring those features. Slow, patient, resolute, painstaking, methodical, materialistic, unimaginative, the Prus- sian is making himself master of the soul as well as the outward life of the German people; and the Prussian is at heart a drill-sergeant and a serf. Far from resenting the inquisitorial despotism of the State, far from deploring their loss of domestic freedom, the German people, with some honourable exceptions, are proud of their chains. Having been detached for centuries from the practical side of public life, they have developed a capacity for abstract theorizing in which they easily surpass all A DOCILE PEOPLE 71 other nations. Their theorists are as a rule University professors. Graeculus esuriens in coelum, jusseris, ibit. Brief a German professor, and he will speak to his brief with astonishing learning and ingenuity. " I begin by taking," said Frederic the Great in a moment of cynical candour, " I can always find pedants to prove my right afterwards." Reduced by an autocratic State to a condition of political serfdom, the German people have looked to their professors to extricate them from a situation which they must feel in their hearts to be humiliating, and to restore their self-respect. And they have not looked in vain. Accepting the omnipotence of the State and the political impotence of the average citizen as facts which cannot be denied or evaded, Professor Treitschke and the school which he has founded have distilled from these facts a theory of the State which proves conclusively that meek, unquestioning obedience is the first of civic duties and the highest form of patriotism, and that therefore all is well in the best of all possible countries. According to this theory, the State is not the whole body politic acting through a common centre, as the human body acts through the brain. It is not the organ of the national mind and will and conscience. It is not what international law presumes it to be " the external personality or outward agency of an independent community." " The State," says Treitschke, "is in the first instance power. It is not the totality of the people itself, as Hegel assumed. On principle it does not 72 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY ask how the people is disposed : it demands obedi- ence." Where, then, does the State come from, and by what right, other than that of might, does it demand obedience? If it is not an organ nor an aspect of the people, if it is not the totality of the people, if it does not deign to consult its sub- jects, if it merely demands their obedience, the inference is plain that it centres in the person of an absolute ruler and that the source of its authority is the same as his. If this is not so, if the source of the State's authority is its power, then, in the event of its being overthrown by a stronger power, as, for example, by a popular uprising, it would lose its authority and even its identity, and a new State a democracy, perhaps, or even an ochlocracy would take its place. A theory which leads logically to such a conclusion is one which Treitschke could never have entertained. And we must there- fore conclude that the State, as he conceives it, owes its authority to the absolute ruler in whose person it centres. He has told us that " Prussia alone has still a real monarch who is entirely in- dependent of any higher power/' By " higher power " he means, I presume, higher in the order of nature ; for even the Prussian king would recog- nize the God of supernatural religion " the good old German God " as his feudal superior. Indeed, if the sayings of the present King-Emperor may be regarded as typical, the kings of Prussia have always claimed that they rule by divine right, and that all authority emanates from them because they are " the Lord's Anointed." The State, then, for which Treitschke demands implicit obedience, is something above the people, A DOCILE PEOPLE 73 something which has descended upon the people from a supernatural source, like the nimbus of divine grace which is supposed to rest on the head of each Prussian king. In this it resembles the Jewish Law ; and, like the Law, instead of summing up and expressing the moral aims and conceptions of the people whose life it rules, it dominates their morals from without and arbitrarily determines their standards of right and wrong. For the auto- cratic State, autocratic as the king who is its highest symbol, " giveth no account of any of its ways." " The State is power," and the end of the State is more power. With this end before it, its business is to organize and discipline the people so that they may become efficient instruments of its will. To promote the welfare of its subjects, except so far as their welfare will react on its own (in the sense of augmenting its power), is not the reason of its existence. If, by taking thought for them, it can increase their efficiency as instruments of its own will, it will take thought for them, but not otherwise. ' The State is power." What power is we are never told. But it is evident, from the general tenour of Treitschke's writings and the general trend of political thought in Germany, that the ultimate proof of power is dominion over others. It is in order to rivet the yoke of his own State on other States and other peoples that the German soldier becomes an automaton and the German citizen surrenders his individuality. And not his individuality only, but also his vision of an ideal. ' The State is no academy of arts," says Treitschke ; "if it neglects its power in favour of the ideal 74 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY strivings of mankind it renounces its nature and goes to ruin." Nor does it merely hold aloof from the " ideal strivings of mankind." Its claims on the devotion of its subjects are so exacting that it cannot suffer any moral ideal to compete with itself. Its own ascendancy in the councils of the world is the final end of the patriotic citizen's aspiration and effort. And in the pursuit of this end he must throw all moral considerations to the winds. For the State, " in whose will is his peace," is supposed to live and move and have its being " beyond good and evil." Between State and State, in this view of things, there is no moral or even legal obligation. " International laws are agreements which at once become illusory in war time." * International treaties are binding only so long as it is found convenient to respect them. International morality is a meaningless phrase. Justice is the rule of the stronger. " Between States there is only one principle that has any validity the right of the stronger." 2 What cannot be enforced is in no respect obligatory. The end the State's advance in power justifies any and every means. What room is there for a moral ideal in the heart of one who has to give the best of himself to so non-moral a master? And will not the loss of a moral ideal tend, sooner or later, to demoralize one's own life? These are questions which Treitschke and his followers compel one to ask. But there is another question which must take precedence even of 1 Herr Karl Schiffler in a recent number of the Vossische Zeitung. 2 Professor Lassen, in War and the Ideal Aim of Culture. A DOCILE PEOPLE 75 these. Is the State of which Treitschke dreams non-moral or immoral? Is it content to ignore morality, or does it, in the pride of its " power," set morality at open defiance? " It must suffice us to know/' says Herr Karl Scruffier, " that in our national dealings we have a higher morality, namely, the ethics of force and of national expan- sion. An action shall not be justified morally, but politically." Herr Karl Schiffier is not a clear thinker. If the political justification of an action supersedes the moral, why does he speak of the ethics of force and national expansion as a " higher morality " ? Because he cannot help himself. Because the inherent tendencies of things are too strong for him. Because he who thinks paradoxi- cally has no choice but to think confusedly. The truth is that even in the region " beyond good and evil " moral considerations must needs obtrude themselves on our thought. There, as elsewhere, the human point of view will insist on taking pre- cedence of the political. In their attempt to prove the moral self-sufficiency of the State (as they conceive it), the Treitschke school unwittingly place it on trial at the bar of morality. As to the verdict in which that trial will issue there can be no doubt. The indifference of the State to moral considerations, when followed out into its practical consequences, is found to be immoral and even anti-moral in the highest degree. For the supreme end of the State's existence reveals itself as supreme egoism; and subservience to what is morally evil to national rapacity, perfidy, and inhumanity - becomes for the patriotic citizen the highest form of moral good. 76 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY A strange paradox this. But the genesis of the paradox is even more paradoxical. The theory of an autocratic and irresponsible State dogmatic and domineering at home, high-handed and preda- tory abroad, anti-human in the face of Humanity, a standing menace to the peace of the world has been invented by an ultra-docile people in order to justify to itself its own ultra-docility, in order that it may say in its heart : " He who is good enough to lord it over me is good enough to lord it over the world." It has been said of old that " the meek shall inherit the earth." The Germans, who are the meekest of the meek, at any rate in the presence of authority, seem to have grown impatient at the delay in the fulfilment of this prophecy, and to have resolved to fulfil it for them- selves. For they have evolved a theory of the State which justifies and even glorifies their meek- ness, and also makes due provision for the forcible seizure of their inheritance. Let us go back for a moment from political theory to historical fact. Since the days of Frederic the Great the Western world has moved slowly, but "with an ascent and progress in the main" towards democracy. 1 Prussia alone has stood stock still. Now, as then, the king and the Junker 1 I mean by " democracy," not the exploitation of the " lower orders " by selfish and unscrupulous demagogues, but the government of the people by the people and for the people ; and I mean by the people, not the " lower orders " only, but the community as a whole. A DOCILE PEOPLE 77 oligarchy 1 are the irresponsible masters of a serf- like army and an almost serf-like people, an army which is ready to die in millions at their bidding, and a people which bows down to their despotism as to the gracious rule of a divinely instituted " State." If there has been any change, it has been towards reaction. The Government, while remaining unswervingly autocratic, has become more and more inquisitorial and more and more bureaucratic. Meanwhile Prussia, which in the middle of the eighteenth century was a small kingdom, has either absorbed into herself or sub- ordinated to herself the whole of Germany. Will that achievement content her? Thanks to the traditional docility and quasi-tribal loyalty of her people, the " will to power " of her rulers has moved for many generations along a path of almost unbroken success. But success, unless it pro- gressively widens its sphere, is apt to pall on those who achieve it. Alexander the Great, at the height of his glory, is said to have sighed for new worlds to conquer. And one may well wonder if there are any limits to the ambition of the Prussian State. 1 The oligarchy, even in Prussia, is no longer exclusively " Junker." With the growth of industrialism in the Rhine- land and Silesia, the lords of commerce and finance have taken their places by the side of the territorial magnates, whom they are beginning to rival in power and influence, and even in favour with the crown. CHAPTER IV THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD THE docility of the German people is equalled only by their dogmatism. This may sound like a paradox, but it is really the statement of an obvious truth. Docility and dogmatism are the face and obverse of the same tendency of human nature. Each quality presupposes the other. If there is a docile majority in a community, there must also be a dogmatic minority. If there is a dogmatic minority, there must also be a docile majority. The function of docility is to bow down to dogma- tism, to take it seriously, to accept its teaching, to do its bidding. The function of dogmatism is to lord it over docility, to impose itself on it, to instruct it, to drill it. If the minority ceased to dogmatize, the majority would necessarily cease to be docile. If the majority ceased to be docile, the minority would dogmatize in vain. Nor is it only in the life of a community that docility and dogmatism call each other into being. They also do so in the life of each individual man. When I say that the docility of the Germans is equalled only by their dogmatism, I do not merely mean that in Germany the docile are ultra-docile, and the dogmatic ultra-dogmatic. I also mean that the average German is as dogmatic as he is 7 8 THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 79 docile. That this should be so is but natural. The docile pupil, besides sitting at the feet of his master, instinctively makes him his model. His attitude is imitative as well as deferential; or rather it is imitative because it is deferential. The docile pupil looks to the dogmatist to tell him what he ought to know and what he ought to do. He also looks to him to tell him what he ought to be and how he ought to bear himself. But if he is to imitate the dogmatist, he must imitate him, first and foremost, in being dogmatic. When the big boys at our public schools were brutally treated by their masters, they treated the small boys with equal brutality. It was their way of imitating those who were set in authority over them. They did not try to reproduce the more estimable qualities of their masters. These were turned away from them, so to speak. The brutality with which discipline was maintained was turned towards them. Feeling its pressure, and having it always before their eyes, they regarded it as of the essence of authority, and instinctively tried to imitate it. The attitude of the dogmatist, be he schoolmaster or army officer or State official, towards those who come under his control, an attitude of superiority in power, in position, in knowledge is one which his victims naturally admire and envy, and which, if they were given the chance, they would try to reproduce. And because the dogmatic role has for the docile the further charm of novelty, they will throw themselves into it, if they are allowed to play it, with remarkable zest and energy. Set a beggar on horseback, and he will ride to the devil. Give the docile pupil the chance of dogmatizing, 80 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY and he will outdogmatize his master. If he is in a position to lay down the law, he will do so with complete assurance. If he is in a position to administer discipline, he will be more than a mar- tinet. If he is in a position to bully, he will make his victim repay with compound interest what he himself has had to endure. How readily the German underling who is in- vested with authority passes and repasses between the extremes of docility and dogmatism, of cringing and bullying, is aptly illustrated in the following dialogue by the witty satirist who calls herself " Elizabeth." (An English artist called Ingram is travelling from Eastern Prussia to Italy. Enter the conductor of the train.) " ' You do not change,' said the conductor, with Prussian determination that his passengers should not, even if they wanted to and liked it, go astray. " ' No,' said Ingram. " ' Not until Basel,' said the conductor mena- cingly, almost as if he wanted to pick a quarrel. " ' No,' said Ingram. " ' At Basel you change,' said the conductor, eyeing him, ready to leap on opposition. " ' Yes,' said Ingram. " ' You will arrive at Basel at 11.40 to-night,' said the conductor in tones behind which hung, * Do you hear? You've just got to.' " ' Yes,' said Ingram. " ' At Basel- " ' Oh, go to hell,' said Ingram suddenly, violently, and in his own tongue. " The conductor immediately put his heels together and saluted. From the extreme want of THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 81 control of the gentleman's manner he knew him at once for an officer of high rank disguised, for travel- ling purposes, in civilian garments, and silently and deferentially withdrew." The conductor whom " Elizabeth " has immor- talized is typical of a large and important class. We have seen that of all countries Germany is both the most autocratically and the most heavily governed. Under an autocratic regime, the more heavily a country is governed, the more docile will its people become and the more dogmatic. The Russians and the Chinese, though duly submissive to autocratic authority, are neither over-docile nor over-dogmatic; for authority presses lightly on them, and officialdom seldom intrudes on their daily life. As regards most of the affairs of life they are self-governing; and in the atmosphere of self-government neither docility nor dogmatism finds it easy to thrive. It is otherwise with the Germans. Hemmed in as they are with regula- tions and prohibitions, they are in constant contact with officialdom ; and patterns of dogmatic bearing are ever before their eyes. On these they insen- sibly model their own deportment. And as the number of officials in their over-governed country is very great, and as the grades of them are in- numerable, the proportion of citizens who, as servants of the State, have to command as well as to obey, and who are therefore licensed to dogma- tize and to swagger, is very large, and the tone of the whole community is profoundly affected by their influence and example. Prince Biilow, who tells us that Prussia " is still in all essentials a State of soldiers and officials," speaks elsewhere of " the 82 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY dogmatic trait so characteristic of the German people." Mr. Dawson, speaking of the innumerable prohibitions with which the State fences in the German citizen, says that " when the public authority ceases to prohibit, private persons take up the tale, and everybody finds his highest delight in prohibiting somebody else." And Mr. Austin Harrison, who, like Mr. Dawson, knows Germany intimately, gives many instances of the rudeness and violence which Germans display in their deal- ings with one another. ;< The wrangling, quarrel- ling, shouting, fuming, bickering that goes on in Germany is," he tells us, " proverbial. One cannot get away from it." Anschnautzen (to scold and shout at a man) seems to be a favourite verb. " It is a phrase and habit recognized in all classes." Mr. Harrison holds the present Emperor responsible by his bad example for the aggressive egoism of his subjects. This is, I think, scarcely fair to a man who in any case has to shoulder a heavy load of responsibility. The influence of the Emperor counts for much with his subjects, but not for everything. The Prussian officer swaggered and bullied, to the envy and admiration of the citizens whom he jostled and occasionally sabred, long before the present Emperor came to the throne. And so far as the example of the Emperor has made for arrogance and rudeness in the rank- and-file of the people, it has been transmitted to them by a whole hierarchy of officers and officials. The truth is that the tendency of docility to imitate and in its way out-rival dogmatism is deeply rooted in human nature. He who is in a position to lay down the law and to demand submission and THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 83 deference, and who enters into the spirit of his allotted part, may almost be said to invite imita- tion; and the overbearing temper and manners which began by being the prerogative of a ruling caste will end by permeating all social grades and classes. How completely the Prussian oligarchy which calls itself " the State " has succeeded in dominating Germany, is proved by the fact that its own spirit of arrogance is gradually leavening the whole nation. The dogmatism that feeds on docility and is then imitated by the docile has two main aspects. Excessive self-assertion, a readiness to impose oneself (sich imponieren] on others, is one aspect. Coupled with this is the tendency to bully and browbeat all who are willing to submit, or who must perforce submit, to such treatment. Exces- sive self-conceit, an inordinately high opinion of oneself and one's own belongings, is the other aspect. Coupled with this is the tendency to despise and belittle all other persons and all things which are not one's own. These two aspects have much in common and readily merge into one. When the dogmatic spirit pervades a whole nation, one thing is sure to happen. A strongly militant type of patriotism will be generated, a sentiment compounded of three elements, of a national self-esteem which knows no limits, of a contempt for other nations which also knows no limits, and of a readiness to translate that con- tempt into aggressive action. For foremost among a man's belongings is his country; and he who makes a practice of exalting whatever is his and 84 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY belittling whatever is not his, will champion his own country against all others with a zeal which is nearer of kin to jealous self-assertion than to the self-surrender of disinterested love. In Germany, where the whole nation is saturated with dogmatism, patriotism of this aggressive and exclusive type may be expected to flourish; and its growth will be fostered, both directly and in- directly, by the action of the State. Directly, because the State will, for purposes of its own, teach patriotism in all the schools in the land and by all the agencies under its control; and because it is difficult to teach patriotism formally and systematically without exalting one's own country at the expense of others. Indirectly, because the State, by making its own material welfare the supreme end of the citizen's aim and effort, will deprive patriotism of that strain of idealism and cosmopolitanism which alone can hold its base, rancorous, egoistic elements in check. ' We were ordered to be patriots," said Heine, " and we were patriots, for we do all that our rulers bid us. But this patriotism must not be con- founded with the feelings which bear the same name in France. To a Frenchman patriotism means that his heart is warmed, that this warmth extends and diffuses itself, that his love embraces not only his immediate belongings, but the whole of France, the whole of the civilized world. A German's patriotism, on the contrary, means that his heart contracts, that it shrinks like leather in the cold, that he hates all that is foreign, that he is no more a citizen of the world, no more a European, but only a narrow German. . . . Thus THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 85 began that mean, coarse, uncultured opposition to a sentiment the highest and noblest that Germany has begotten, I mean to that humanity, that uni- versal brotherhood, that cosmopolitanism . . . that our great writers l have always maintained." This high and noble sentiment has its roots in the latent idealism of man's heart. Few men are avowedly or even consciously idealistic. But every healthy-minded man keeps open his communica- tions with the ideal. So does every healthy-minded people. Even in the days of feudalism men looked beyond their own immediate rulers, to the Pope in this direction, to the king or Emperor in that; while beyond both Pope and Emperor they looked to God. The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were as a rule civil wars. They tore each state asunder. This, while it added to the horror of them, was their one redeeming feature. For it meant that the combatants were fighting for ideals, which, however much they might have been misconceived or misinterpreted, had at least the merit of transcending the horizon of the State. It was in the name of a higher Potentate than prince or Emperor that Catholic or Protestant took up arms against his lawful sovereign. In modern Germany idealism is at a discount ; or rather it has been deliberately mate- rialized and pressed into the service of the State. The higher Potentate, in whose name the Germans of the seventeenth century slew one another, has become a kind of State Official a cross between a super-Chancellor of the Empire and a super-Chief 1 i. e. the great writers who flourished before the days of Prussian ascendancy. 86 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY of the Staff. The State itself, despotic and in- quisitorial, confronts the citizen at every turn. He cannot look above it, for it completely over- shadows his sky. Whenever he tries to lead a larger and freer life, he feels its relentless counter- pressure. Unable to escape from its control or to transcend the ever-widening horizon of its influence, he is driven at last to do what it intends him to do he is driven to idealize the State. If the Deity, as he is now told, has placed his omnipotence at the service of Germany, and has thereby shrunk to the dimensions of a tribal God, the German citizen cannot well Be expected to look at things from a cosmopolitan point of view. He belongs to a Chosen People; and it is but right that he should bear himself accordingly. It is in some such way as this that Germany has become her own ideal, a fact which she now pro- claims to the world, with shrill blasts of exultation and defiance. At no time have the Germans been wanting in a good opinion of themselves. In the days of their political disunion, when even the smallest of duchies counted for more in the eyes of its citizens than the Fatherland, they were proud of their lack of patriotism, and boasted, with patriotic ardour, that in this respect they were in advance of all other nations. " If you sink," said Fichte more than a hundred years ago to his fellow-countrymen, " Humanity sinks with you, without hope of future restoration." . Could national self-esteem go further than this ? Perhaps not, but it might be, and has been, more offensively and less tersely expressed. ' The proud conviction," says General Bernhardi, " forces itself upon us with THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 87 irresistible power that a high, if not the highest, importance for the entire development of the human race is ascribable to the German people." " No nation on the face of the globe," says the same writer, "is so able to grasp and appropriate all the elements of culture, to add to them from the stores of its own spiritual endowment, and to give back to mankind richer gifts than it received." " Germany," said Treitschke, " has enriched the store of traditional European culture with new and independent ideas and ideals, and won a position in the great community of civilized nations which none else could fill. ... Depth of conviction, idealism, universality, the power to look beyond all the limits of a finite existence, to sympathize with all that is human, to traverse the realm of ideas in companionship with the noblest of all nations and ages this has at all times been the German characteristic ; this has been extolled as the prerogative of German culture." Having quoted these choice extracts from the works of his favourite author, General Bernhardi goes on to say : "To no nation, except the German, has it been given to enjoy in its inner self that which is given to mankind as a whole. We often see in other nations a greater intensity of specialized ability, but never the same capacity for general- ization and absorption. It is this quality which specially fits us for the leadership in the intellectual world, and imposes on us the obligation to maintain that position." Professor Wilhelm Ostwald says that " Germany has reached a higher type of civil- ization than other peoples, and the result of the (present) war will be the organization of Europe 88 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY under German leadership." Another authority says : " We are the most intelligent nation there is, and the most advanced in science and art." Professor Karl Lamprecht, greatly daring, boasts that " we are the freest people on earth." Other writers, coming down to more mundane matters, assure us that " we (Germans) are the best sailors, the best colonists, and even the best merchants." But all these trumpet-blowers are easily out- trumpeted by Professor Adolf Lassen, who, in a letter to a Dutch correspondent, has recently de- livered himself of the following propositions : " We are morally and intellectually superior to all men. We are peerless. So, too, are our organizations and institutions. . . . We threaten no one so long as he does not attack us. We do good to every- body. . . . We are truthful; our characteristics are humanity, gentleness, conscience, the virtues of Christ. In a world of wickedness we represent love, and God is with us." The nation which can allow its writers to talk in this strain, however richly it may be endowed in other ways, is sadly deficient in one of the most precious of all spiritual possessions the sense of humour. This, indeed, is one of the senses which the docile-dogmatic diathesis is predestined to destroy. The sense of humour, which keeps alive in a man the power of laughing at himself as well as at others, has the sense of proportion as its other self. But the man who is perpetually obeyed and deferred to by a number of lesser men is tempted to take himself so seriously that his sense of pro- portion becomes gradually atrophied, his standard of values becomes gradually debased, and at last THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 89 he becomes incapable of laughing at himself. Meanwhile, the lesser men who obey and defer to him, being compelled to take him very seriously, lose their power of laughing at him or at any one else, and share with him the loss of the sense of proportion and the debasement of the standard of values which inevitably follow when laughter dies out of a man's life. When a nation loses its sense of humour, when it becomes its own ideal, when the standard by which it measures human worth is determined by its own achievements, its contempt for other nations will know no limits. Whatever diverges from its own way of living it will condemn, without a further hearing, as bad; and the greater the angle of divergence, the lower in the scale of civilization will it place the defaulting nation. Dogmatism and imaginative sympathy are mutually exclusive qualities; and without imaginative sympathy, as no man can enter into the life of another man, so .no nation can enter into the life of another nation, can understand its way of living, can feel the force of its ideals, can realize what it stands for, can discover the secret sources of its strength. The isolation of which Germany sometimes complains is spiritual rather than political. No nation is so lonely; but the loneliness is of her own seeking; for what shuts her off from the lives of other nations is the Chinese Wall of her colossal self-esteem. She examines the ways and works of each nation in turn, weighs them in the scales of her " Kultur," and duly records their shortcomings. The highest compliment that she can pay to another nation is to assume that it is a poor imitation of herself. 90 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY Because, as a ruling power, she is hated by the Poles, the Alsatians, and the Danes, she takes for granted that England, as a ruling Power, is hated by the Egyptians and the Hindoos. She cannot realize that our way of dealing with subject peoples is entirely different from hers. She assumes that it is the same in principle for she is too unimagin- ative and self-centred to conceive of any other way but feebler, less thorough, and less effective. Still, the fact that she expected Egypt and India to rise against us must be taken as a compliment, for it shows that she credited us with a repressive brutality which differed in degree, but not in kind, from her own. The nations whose scheme of life is wholly incommensurate with hers she regards as barbarians and makes no attempt to understand. What she thinks of us and our Allies we know, for she has told us frankly both before the war began and since. England, having built up a large empire by fraud and violence while other European nations were quarrelling, at her instigation, among them- selves, is now immersed in money-making, is allow- ing luxury and self-indulgence to sap her energy, is in favour of peace at any price, and is waiting for the sceptre of world-dominion to be wrested from her nerveless grasp. ' With the English/' said Treitschke forty years ago, " love of money has killed every sentiment of honour and every distinction between right and wrong, though they hide their poltroonery and materialism under the unctuous phrases of religion." France is a decadent and even a dying nation. Nothing but a liberal infusion of German blood an operation which pre- supposes a war of conquest can save her from THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 91 extinction. 1 Russia is undeveloped and therefore semi-barbarous, yet lacks the vigour and sanity of healthy growth. The ignorance and superstition of her masses is equalled only by the corruption and dishonesty of' her classes. Like a fruit which rots before it ripens, she combines the defects of immaturity with those of premature decay. Pro- fessor Harnack thinks that to call her semi-Asiatic is to pronounce her condemnation and to give judgment against this country for having allied itself with her. Japan is wholly Asiatic. This fact needs no comment. As for the smaller nations, their continued existence as independent States is a crime against German culture which is to be expiated only by their incorporation in the German Empire, if they belong to Northern Europe, or, if they are Balkan Powers, by their acceptance, directly of Austrian, indirectly of German, hegemony. Such being the attitude of the German people towards themselves and the rest of the world, an agitation in favour of a scheme of national expan- sion was bound, sooner or later, to be set on foot. 1 When the German army was approaching Paris just before the Battle of the Marne, a German general, sitting by the side of Madame Delbet (mother of Professor Delbet, the well-known doctor), while his army corps was defiling over a bridge in her grounds, spoke of the French as "a degenerate race, whose stamina has disappeared," and added, " I will tell you what we shall do with them. It will be our ultimatum. We shall keep the best among the men, those who are the least degenerate, and marry them to sturdy German women. The rest we shall send over to America. As for the Russians," said the same authority, " they simply do not know what an army is." Before nightfall the general and his army corps were in full retreat. 92 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY To formulate such a scheme has been the work of the Pan-German League, which was founded in 1891, and which, with its daughter and sister societies, now counts its adherents by millions. 1 Long before the League was founded, its policy was de- nned by a German historian in the following pro- phetic sentence : " Domination belongs to Germany because she is a nation d' elite, a noble nation, and as a consequence entitled to act towards her neigh- bours as every man endowed with superior brains or superior strength has a right to act towards those individuals with inferior brains or inferior strength by whom he is surrounded." 2 It is this conception of the manifest destiny of their country which has inspired the Pan-Germans, and deter- mined their " plan of campaign." In the first sentence of the League's manifesto we read that " The Pan-German federation has for object . . . the welding into a compact whole of Germans everywhere." This is a somewhat vague programme; but under cover of it it is possible to advocate the absorption into the German Empire of the German inhabitants of Austria, Switzerland, and the Baltic Provinces of Russia, the Dutch, the Flemish population of Belgium, much of the population of Eastern France, not to speak of the dwellers in these islands of Anglo-Saxon de- scent. It is possible to advocate more than this. Many millions of Germans have migrated to other lands, especially to the United States, and if 1 Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher says that the League itself is now believed to number something like half a million of the " intellectuals " of Germany. 2 History of the German Empire, by Friedrich Wilhelm von Gieschalt. THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 93 " Germans everywhere " are to be welded into a " compact whole," the German settlers in other countries, even if they have become naturalized citizens of those countries, are to regard themselves as still belonging to the greater Germany of which the League dreams, and are to bear themselves accordingly. In other words, if occasion require, they are to act as spies and traitors in the lands of their adoption and to make German world- supremacy their highest end and aim. But the Pan-German vision of empire has a wider range even than this. Germany needs outlets for her teeming population, outlets in which, however remote they may be, the colonies will be able to diffuse the culture and extend the commerce of the Fatherland, under the German flag. As nearly all the regions which are suitable for settlement by whites have by this time been colonized by other European Powers, the Pan-German demand for colonies in the Temperate Zone cannot be gratified except by the forcible annexation of some of the foreign possessions of those Powers. With this end in view, campaigns of calumny and hatred against France and England have been carried on in the Pan-German Press, and the dismemberment of their empires has been more than hinted at. Nor is it only of colonial possessions in the Temperate Zone that the Pan-Germans dream. Treitschke, who in the world of ideas was the founder of Pan-Germanism, openly advocated the annexation of Holland by Germany, and the con- sequent capture of a ready-made colonial empire in the Tropics. Large as is this programme of expansion, Pan- 94 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY German ambition transcends even its far-off horizon. " Germany," says Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher, " actually and in the near future aspires to the dominion of the world, and to nothing short of that dominion." Mr. Fletcher adds that " the German people as a whole have never avowed their intentions; still less has the German Govern- ment put them forward as a programme. . . . Nevertheless, these intentions have been publicly avowed in newspapers and speeches for the last twenty-three years, and each year they have gained more acceptance in all ranks of the nation." Nor have they been advocated in newspapers and speeches only. Books, such as Herr Daniel's Geographical Manual (in which the boundaries of European Germany are so defined as to double the area and nearly double the population of the empire), Herr Class's West Morocco for Germany (in which the annexation of Eastern France from the mouth of the Somme to Toulon is openly advocated), Herr Frymann's // / were Emperor (in which it is proposed inter alia that France, when conquered, shall cede a large tract of territory " which will be evacuated by all its inhabitants," and in which Austria is warned, at her peril, not to make any concessions to her Slav subjects), Herr Paul Rohrbach's The German Idea in the World (in which the little nationalities are told that they " must fall into line with the world-power of Ger- many "), General Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War (one chapter of which is headed " World- Power or Downfall "), Colonel H. Froebenius's The German Empire s Hour of Destiny, Germany as a World Power (one of the books couronnes by THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 95 the League), the Pan-German Catechism, and scores of other works are all inspired in varying degrees by the same megalomaniacal dream. In this, as in other matters, Treitschke has been the forerunner and spiritual founder of the League. " When the German flag flies over and protects this vast Empire, to whom," he asks, " will belong the sceptre of the Universe? What nation will impose its wishes on the other enfeebled and de- cadent peoples? Will it not be Germany that will have the mission to ensure the peace of the world ? " These words, which were written by a historian who died twenty years ago, might have been spoken yesterday at a meeting of the Pan-Germans. The " mission " which Treitschke assigns to Ger- many is one which the League, with ever-growing insistence, has long been urging her to undertake. It is to the generous ardour of youth that the vision of Germany wielding " the sceptre of the Universe " appeals most strongly. The diary of a German second-lieutenant who was captured in August 1914 by our troops contains the following significant entries : July 20 (note the date !). "At last the Day ! To have lived to see it ! We are ready : let him come who may. The world-race is destined to be German." August u. "To-night Wilhelm the Greater has given us a beautiful address : * You think each day of your Emperor ; do not forget God/ His Majesty should remember that in thinking of him we think of God, for is he not the Almighty's instrument in this glorious fight for Right ? " Sancta simplicitas ! If there are many members of the rising generation who share this officer's pious zeal for the gospel of 96 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY national brigandage, the Pan-Germans have good cause to congratulate themselves on the success of their propaganda. ' The world-race is to be German." This, in a brief sentence, is the real programme of the Pan- German League. What the sentence means I do not fully understand. Nor do I see clearly how the ideal which it formulates is to be realized. Herr Frymann advocates the wholesale expulsion of the French from Eastern France so as to make room for immigrating Germans. Is it in this way that the world-race is to become German? If it is, to what remote and undesirable lands are the expelled peoples to be deported? " Solitudinem faciunt. Pacem appellant." Is it proposed that Germany shall impose peace on her enemies by exterminating them? There is, I believe, another and more humane way of providing for the realiza- tion of Pan-German ambition, which is based on what is known as the Dungervolk theory of race. According to this theory, the function of the inferior, or non-German, races is to manure the soil of the world and so prepare it for the reception of the seed of the super-race the German. How this quasi-agricultural operation is to be carried out I cannot pretend to say. I suppose the inferior races are to be reduced to a state of political and economic serfdom, so that they may do for German culture what the slave population of Attica did for Athenian culture in the fifth and fourth cen- turies B.C. Herr K. F. Wolff's proposal that the conquered peoples shall be " annihilated " (as nationalities) by being deprived of all political and civic rights, including the right to be educated THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 97 and to use their own language, seems to point in this direction. So does the action of the League in conducting a violent agitation against the Austrian Government in 1897, for having proposed certain concessions to the Czech population of Bohemia (including the free use of their mother tongue) an agitation which, though discoun- tenanced by the German State, was so successful that the laws in favour of the Czechs were repealed and the Minister who had proposed them was dis- missed. If the Austrian Government did not know how Dungervolk ought to be treated, the League did; and even in that early period of its existence it was strong enough to have its way. But what- ever may be the precise procedure by which the ends of Pan-German ambition are to be compassed, as to the ends themselves there can be no doubt. ' The Sceptre of the Universe " is to be wielded by Germany; and " the world-race is to be German." These are the sovereign dogmas of the Pan-German creed. On these two ideals hang all the Law and the Prophets. Does Pan-Germanism propose to carry out its programme by pacific methods or by war? By war. No other method is contemplated. Diplo- macy may do something ; but it must resolve itself sooner or later into the menace of war. The humiliation of France in 1905, of Russia in 1909, were triumphs of sabre-rattling, not of diplomacy. ' What we now wish to attain," says General Bernhardi (who devotes a whole chapter to the glorification of war), " must be fought for and won." " War," said the prophet of Pan-German- ism, " is the mightiest and most efficient moulder H 98 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY of nations. Only by war does a nation become a nation, and the expansion of existing states pro- ceeds in most cases by way of conquest." Speak- ing of the Pan-German Catechism, one of the pub- lications of the League, Mr. Fletcher says that every line of it " expresses the doctrine of aggres- sive war as the highest duty of German men." The growth of Chauvinism in Germany during the past ten or twelve years is a phenomenon which Germans who, like Professor O. Nippold, have not been carried off their feet by the rising tide of Pan-Germanism have noted with surprise and alarm. Mr. Dawson says that " a chance list which lies before me as I write of thirty-two Ger- man war-pamphlets published during the three years 1911-13 shows six to have contemplated a war with England, seven a war with France, and nine a European conflagration." Writing of this flood of Chauvinistic literature, Professor Nippold says : " Hand in hand with this outspoken hostility to foreign countries are conjoined a one-sided exaltation of war and a war-mania which would have been regarded as impossible a few years ago. ... It cannot be doubted that this agitation is part of a deliberate scheme, the object of which is gradually to win the population, and if possible the Government, by any means whatever even by the distortion of fact and malicious slander for the programme of the Chauvinists. These people not only incite the nation to war, but systematically stimulate the desire for war. War is pictured not as a possibility that may come, but as a necessity that must come, and the sooner the better ... a necessity at which we should, in the THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 99 interests of the German nation, rejoice. From this dogma it is only a small step to the next maxim of the Chauvinists . . . the maxim of the * war of attack/ or the so-called preventive war. If war has to come, then let it come at the moment most favourable for us. In other words, do not let us wait until a formal cause for war occurs, but let us strike when it best suits us, and above all let us do it soon ! . . . From the idea of a defensive war for urgent reasons the Chauvinists have ad- vanced to the idea of an offensive war for no reason at all, and they flatter themselves that the German nation has undergone the same trans- formation." 1 The " Chauvinists " whose policy Professor Nippold exposes are the members of the Pan-German League and the associated societies; and their policy, as he expounds it, is to procure the territorial and political aggrandizement of Germany by means of a wantonly aggressive war. In Pan-Germanism we have German dogmatism in its most arrogant, most egoistic, most aggressive mood, a mood so arrogant, so egoistic, and so aggressive that these epithets do less than justice to it. In Pan-Germanism to speak more plainly the egomania, the self-centred madness, of a great nation has become the religion of her sons. Not of all her sons not of more than a minority of them; but of a powerful minority which knows its own mind and is well able to give a lead to the rest of the nation. For the Pan-German is nothing if not super-patriotic ; and as patriotism is authori- tatively taught in all the German schools and by 1 Quoted by Mr. W. H. Dawson in What is Wrong with Germany ? 100 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY all the agencies at the disposal of the State, the super-patriot will find no difficulty in rallying the people round his banner and leading them forth, when " the Day " comes, on the great adventure which he has so long premeditated. Meanwhile new societies of Pan-German tendency spring up from year to year, and the old societies enrol new members from day to day. Also the programme of national expansion by means of unprovoked war becomes more and more violent, and is more and more openly advocated. These facts prove con- clusively that the leaven of Pan-Germanism is at work in all parts of the German world. 1 So much for the world-hunger and war-lust of the German people. What of the State? The State has drilled and dragooned the people and made it subservient to its will. For what pur- pose? What is the will of the German State? ' The State," says Treitschke, " is power." If so, its will must be to more and still more power. And what is power, in Treitschke's sense of the word, but dominion over others? The Prussian 1 I am told that Pan-Germanism has made greater headway in Southern Germany and even in Austrian Germany than in Prussia. This I can well believe. If a Pan-German movement were to be inaugurated, the Prussian people, docile and unimaginative, would naturally look to the State to give them a lead ; and though the State might patronize such a movement, it could not well initiate it or even direct its development. Among the South Germans, on the other hand, who have always had more imagination and more initiative than the Prussians qualities which they are losing under Prussian influence, but have not yet lost, when once they had been inoculated with Prussian arrogance and aggressiveness, the idee mere of Pan-Germanism might be expected to find a suitable seed-bed and to evolve itself by means of a more or less spontaneous movement. THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 101 oligarchy has extended its sway over the 65,000,000 inhabitants of Germany. Does it regard this achievement as an end itself? Can we expect it to do so? This docile and well-disciplined nation is an instrument in the hands of its rulers; and an instrument is a thing to use, not to lay on a shelf for the rest of time. Besides, the oligarchy has another instrument at its command, the pur- pose of which is even more obvious a mighty citizen army, which, in respect of discipline, organ- ization, and equipment, is supposed to surpass all others. The rulers of the nation are also the chiefs of the army. They think in terms of war. They speak of their nation as "an army which possesses a country." They say that Prussia, the power which dominates Germany, is " a state of soldiers and officials." The nation and the army have so much in common that, from the point of view of the end for which they have been drilled and organized, they may be regarded as one. What is that end? Given a nation which has been late in taking its place among the great Powers of the world, and is therefore apt to regard its rivals with the envy, jealousy, and self-assertion of a parvenu ; which has waked up to world-ambition only to find that the best parts of the world had already been appropriated; which has an enormous belief in itself and its own scheme of life, regarding itself as immeasurably greater, more gifted, more culti- vated, more learned than any other nation; which possesses (or is possessed by) the strongest army that the world has ever seen ; which yields implicit obedience to its rulers and has absolute confidence 102 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY in their ability, foresight, and wisdom; given these things, and given that the rulers of that nation are all drill-sergeants at heart; that their chief func- tion is that of imposing their will on others; that the attitude which they instinctively adopt towards all who come under their sway, towards all, one might almost add, with whom they have any deal- ings, is that of the Junker-officer of the eighteenth century forceful, imperious, dictatorial, domineer- ing towards the serf-soldiers who marched to death at his commands : given all these things, what may be expected to happen? If the statesmen of Germany have been in any doubt as to the answer to this question, the people, as we have seen, have not. The logic of the situa- tion has been too strong for them. A group of interrelated facts and tendencies, historical, politi- cal, psychological, has long hung, like the sword of Damocles, over the peace of the world. The rise of Pan-Germanism meant that the thread by which the sword was suspended had begun to wear thin. Opinions differ as to which of the three estates of the German realm the Emperor, the State (that is, the Prussian oligarchy) and the People has the greatest share of responsibility for the present war. Mr. Austin Harrison has given his latest book the suggestive title of The Kaiser s War. Other writers hold that the real cause of the war is the traditional militarism of the State. But Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher seems to think that the Pan-German movement, which he regards as a spontaneous outburst of national Chauvinism, has forced the hand of the State and so precipitated the conflict. THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 103 It is probable that all three explanations are correct. The Emperor may not have desired or even looked forward to a world- wide conflagration; but he has undoubtedly allowed his subjects to walk in a path which led to the present war, and to no other goal. The German Navy, which has always been his pet nursling, is a standing menace to our ocean-empire and even to our existence as an inde- pendent state; and its continual expansion was bound, sooner or later, to provoke a rupture with this country. Some of his public utterances, such as : "In future nothing must be settled without the intervention of Germany and her Emperor.' 1 " The trident belongs to our hand." " Our future lies on the water." " I shall not rest till I have brought my navy up to the same standard as my army " (that is, made it the strongest in the world) , could scarcely fail to encourage dreams of world-dominion based on supreme sea-power. His constant glorification of the military spirit, his sabre-rattling, his allusions to " mailed fists " and " shining armour," his famous toast to the army : " My glass is raised to the nation in arms. Let our powder be dry, our swords sharpened, our goal fixed, our forces strained," would tend to keep alive in the minds of his people the idea of impending war. And by his sic volo, sic jubeo attitude towards all who have crossed his path, by his exaltation of his own office, by his deification of his Hohenzollern ancestors, remote and near, by his patronage of " the good old German God," he has set his loyal subjects an example of self-assertion and tribal egoism which they might be pardoned for trying 104 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY to follow, even at the risk of setting the world ablaze. The State had many reasons for desiring war. Accustomed, as it has been, to control and organize an ever-widening empire, it has been led by the impetus of its own achievements to covet, perhaps subconsciously, a wider sphere for its activities than even the German Empire could afford. Its own power had been built up and consolidated by a series of successful wars. The military element in it has always been strong, and soldiers have pro- fessional reasons for disliking a protracted peace. It may have hoped that victory on a large scale would complete the work which the overthrow of France in 1870 began, the work of reconciling the lesser German states to Prussian domination, and so providing for the final absorption of Germany into Prussia. But, strong as these reasons are, the State had another and stronger reason for opening up to the nation a vista of world-dominion to be won by war. Having played the drill- sergeant towards the German people, and played it so effectively that at last it could play no other part, it is no matter for wonder that the State, in the pride of its power and authority, should have begun to dream of playing the drill-sergeant towards the whole inhabited world, or that, having enter- tained this fantastic dream, it should have asso- ciated the people with itself in its attempt to fulfil it, partly because it needed their help, chiefly so that it might reconcile them to their loss of domestic freedom. For indeed it was through this dream, more than through any other aim or ambition, that the two great sections of the German THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 105 people might be expected to come together and realize their national unity. To the minority who spend their lives in dominating and disciplining their fellow-citizens, the prospect of being able to dominate and discipline all their fellow-men could scarcely fail to make a strong appeal; while for the submissive majority the vision of world-empire would have the supreme attraction of reconciling them to, and even compensating them for, their own hard and ignoble lot. To be drilled into help- lessness and passivity is a fate which is not intrin- sically attractive; but it may be worth submitting to if by doing so one can take a share in drilling into helplessness and passivity the rest of the human race. A self-governing people can, if it pleases, direct its energies towards an inward ideal such as social reform ; but a people which is despotic- ally ruled must either seek to recover its freedom, as the first condition of vital progress, or must allow its energies to be directed towards an outward ideal, such as the hegemony of the world. Under the leadership of the Pan-German League, the German people has chosen the latter course. The dreams and aspirations of 1848 have faded far away. The struggle for freedom has been abandoned. The despotic and inquisitorial rule of the State has been accepted as inevitable; and the forces which might have fought under the banner of political reform have been marshalled under the black flag of piracy and plunder. Mr. Dawson contends that if the German Government in general and the Emperor in particular had disapproved of Pan-German activities, they could easily have repressed them. In the earlier stages of the Pan- 106 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY German movement they might no doubt have done so. But it was to the interest of the Government to foster a Chauvinistic spirit in the people, partly in order to prepare them for a war which was felt to be inevitable and even desirable, partly in order to distract their thoughts from domestic affairs; and it would therefore have been impolitic to dis- courage the trumpet-blowing and drum-beating of the Pan-Germans. Besides, as dogmatism tends to beget dogmatism in the docile, the Pan-German spirit must be held to have been evoked by the example and influence of the domineering, dicta- torial, sabre-rattling " State " ; and it is unfor- tunately easier to evoke an evil spirit than to " lay "it. Mr. Fletcher is probably right in think- ing that the League and the associated societies have in recent years become too strong for the Government to control or even restrain, and that their persistent advocacy of a war of conquest and spoliation has been largely responsible for the out- break of hostilities. It is certainly a significant fact that Herr Frymann, in his book, // / was Kaiser, which appeared in 1911, should have dared to write the following words : ' The disastrous activity of William II and the failure of his coun- cillors (to get the better of France in the crisis of 1911) have rendered the present form of govern- ment insupportable. The absurd poltroonery of the most highly placed persons, and the complete setback they have given to German ambition, have at length raised the question whether it is not urgent for us to establish a system of parliamentary government." The spectacle of a people which has never enjoyed domestic freedom demanding THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 107 parliamentary government for no other purpose than that of levying war on its neighbours is as strange as it is disquieting. And not less strange and not less disquieting is the spectacle of an auto- cratic State allowing parliamentary government to be openly demanded by its subjects, not on political but on Chauvinistic grounds. The truth is that in inoculating an over-docile people with its own arrogant dogmatism, the Ger- man State has made the most dangerous of all experiments, that of calling into play mighty and mysterious forces which may perhaps prove un- amenable to control. The State knows something about diplomacy, something about the etiquette, the courtesies, the possibilities of international politics. The German people know nothing. Writers like Prince Buelow and General Bernhardi reproach their compatriots for their lack of political sagacity. They seem to think that the political sense is wanting in the German character. If it is, the cause is not far to seek. The germ of the political sense is not wanting. This, I think, we may take for granted. But the sense has never been developed; for the people have neither been allowed to act nor encouraged to think politically; and without appropriate exercise no sense can grow. But be the explanation what it may, the fact that the Germans are " political asses " (to quote the words of Ministerial Director Althoff) is indisputable, and its consequences are disastrous. For when the political sense is wanting in a people, there is nothing to keep its ultra-patriotic ardour and its spirit of aggressive ambition in check. It is because the Germans, owing to centuries of 108 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY State-oppression, are the most docile of all peoples and therefore the least conversant with public affairs, that the megalomania which now afflicts them knows no limit, and that the greater part of the civilized world has been plunged, at their bidding, into a calamitous war. Let us pause for a moment and see to what conclusions our studies and reflections have led us. In the course of a strange and unhappy history, the Germans, who were once the freest of all peoples, lost their domestic freedom and broke up into a multitude of petty states, ruled by irrespon- sible despots whose will was law to their subjects. Unable to achieve national unity for themselves, they were at last forcibly unified by the state in which authority was most autocratic and oppressive, and the loss of freedom most complete. As the result of this, they were (and are) systematically subjected in the citizen army, to a discipline which has never been rivalled for strictness and severity, in civil life, to a bureaucratic rule which was (and is) rigid and inquisitorial in the highest degree. Having resigned themselves to this state of things, and having ceased to kick against the pricks, they began to look outside them for an outlet, first for the militant energies which other nations spend in domestic politics, and then for the aggressive dogmatism which is the counterpart of ultra-docility, and which the example of their arrogant masters had called into activity; and, having been forcibly Prussianized themselves, they began to dream of forcibly Prussianizing a greater Germany which would expand at last into a world- THE DREAM OF A DOCILE WORLD 109 wide empire. Docile and even servile in the face of the officers and officials who drilled and dis- ciplined them, they began to bear themselves proudly in theory, if not in practice towards other countries ; and, with the outgrowth of the sentiment of national unity, which, owing to their having been unified by force of arms, had been slow to awake, they began to transfer to themselves, as a nation, the prerogatives of their own ruling caste, and to think of themselves as an autocratic " State," drilling and disciplining, and dispensing the blessings of a superior " Kultur " to, a docile world. Hence these tears. CHAPTER V DEADENED BY DOCILITY THE aggressive egoism of an over-docile people is the torch which has set the world ablaze. In what spirit might such a people be expected to carry on war? And what success might it be expected to achieve? Before we can attempt to answer these questions, we must consider the effect of ultra-docility on character. The docile- dogmatic diathesis has behind it a philosophy of life which is vitiated by one fundamental fallacy distrust of human nature. For trust in human nature the ultra-docile substitute trust in authority as embodied in a particular person, such as an autocrat, a teacher, or an officer, or in a particular institution, such as a State, a Church, or a code of law. The reason 1 why they do this is that the ideal and the universal elements in human nature make demands on them which they are not pre- pared to meet. And so, in their terror of these infinities, they betake themselves to some concrete " authority " and ask it for direction and promise it implicit obedience. I do not wish to suggest that faith in authority is never justified. On the contrary, I see clearly that authority plays, and must play, a large part in human life. But I contend that the supreme 1 The psychological, not the historical reason, no DEADENED BY DOCILITY 111 authority is that of human nature, and that the overlordship of this supreme authority should never be lost sight of. I do not say that autocrats, teachers, officers, States, Churches, and codes are never to be obeyed. What I do say is that he who obeys them must be ready must at least have it in him to ask them for their credentials. But the essence of docility is that, in its recoil from what is ultimate, it accepts authority on its own valuation, and does not dream of asking it for its credentials; that it allows the authoritativeness of authority, the imperiousness of its demand for submission, to guarantee its authenticity. How- ever much an imperious formula, such as " Thus saith the Lord " or " Streng verboten " may en- croach on their freedom, the docile will no more think of asking it for its warrant than a child in arms would think of questioning the validity of parental rule. Authority, when it takes itself quite seriously, when it regards itself as final and supreme, is called dogmatic. The dogmatist is one who says to all who come under his control and in his heart he wishes all men to come under his control " The truth of things is in my keeping; therefore you must obey me and let your life be regulated by my will." Aristotle has told us that " what seems to all men is." Dogmatism, be it embodied in a person or in an institution, seeks to concentrate in itself the authority which really belongs to the All. For " What seems to all men is " it sub- stitutes " What seems to me is" \ and to this proposition docility answers with alacrity " Amen/' Does dogmatism generate docility, or does 112 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY docility generate dogmatism? Who can answer this question ? We are apt to think of dogmatism as active and originative, of docility as passive and helpless. But that is a mistake. Responsibility for the reciprocal relation between docility and dogmatism rests with the former quite as much as with the latter. 1 And with the latter quite as much as with the former. For dogmatism is no mere response to the demand of docility for instruction and guidance. The terror of the unexplored and the illimitable, the desire for premature certitude and repose of mind, which generate docility also generate dogmatism. The idea of the Super- natural, for example, on which dogmatism, with the full consent of docility, ultimately bases its demand for obedience, obviously originates in despair of Nature; and despair of Nature is but another name for reluctance to explore a vast and unknown land. But whatever may be obscure as to the relation between docility and dogmatism, one thing is certain. The two tendencies are ever acting and reacting on one another. In other words, the antithesis, as so often happens, is con- tained within a fundamental unity; and when we look at human nature as a whole, we see that the unity counts for more than the antithesis, and that the two opposing tendencies are really one. The dogmatic demand for docility, if carried far, 1 So far as the education of the young is concerned, this statement needs to be qualified. The dogmatism of parents and teachers is largely active and oppressive (if not origina- tive), and the docility of children is largely passive and helpless. Indeed, it is possible that education is respon- sible in no small measure for the prominence of the docile- dogmatic diathesis in human nature. DEADENED BY DOCILITY 113 tends to arrest growth and therefore to stunt and deaden life. Whatever is vital, be it limb, organ, sense, or faculty, must be exercised if it is to make healthy growth. When it has grown to maturity, if maturity is attainable, it must continue to be exercised if it is to keep in health. And if maturity is unattainable, as it always is on the higher planes of man's being, the need for continuous exercise is even more urgent, as without it the vital sense or faculty may attain to a false and wholly premature maturity, and so begin to decay before it has begun to open out. Now, the function of dogmatism is to do for the docile what they ought to try to do for themselves, to relieve them of the task of thinking, valuing, desiring, purposing, planning, devising ways and means, and to sub- stitute for these activities obedience to orders and the carrying out of minutely precise directions. That such a regime must tend to atrophy through disuse the higher senses and faculties of those who have to submit to it, is an almost self-evident truth. There is one aspect of the injurious effect of undue dogmatic pressure to which I must call special attention. Just as we steer our way through the material things that surround us by means of our bodily senses, so to speak generally we steer our way through the difficulties and perplexities of our highly complex life by means of appropriate senses, faculties of immediate perception which have executive faculties in close alliance with them. These senses enable us to see at a glance, so to speak, how the land lies and how it behoves us to act. Instead of having to rely on the conscious exercise of our reasoning powers or the conscious application 114 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY of rules and directions, for the solution of our problems, we are able, by the use of these intuitive faculties to feel instinctively what the problems involve and to hold subconscious intercourse with the laws and principles that are behind them. These faculties operate on all the planes of our being; and the higher the plane and therefore the more complex the environment, the greater is the need for them. We are not endowed with them at birth, as we are endowed with eyes and ears and the sense of touch. What we are endowed with is a general capacity for evolving appropriate senses in response to the stimulus of an ever- varying environment. The driver of a motor- omnibus evolves a sense for velocities and distances, which enables him to steer his bulky vehicle in safety through the crowded streets of our large towns. As each practical problem presents itself for solution, his " eye " makes the necessary calcu- lations in less than an instant, and he acts accord- ingly. He evolves this sense by constant practice. In some cases much practice is needed, in others comparatively little. For driver differs from driver in his natural aptitude for estimating velocities and distances. It is the same with all our non- corporeal senses. Whatever may be our environ- ment, be it narrow or wide, special or general, material or spiritual, if we are to adapt ourselves to it and react on it successfully, a sense for its laws and properties must be developed by practice. Some of us are able to evolve such senses more quickly and easily than others. But in no case can practice be dispensed with. And in no case will practice be wasted. DEADENED BY DOCILITY 115 As examples of senses which operate on the higher planes of life, we may instance political sagacity, social tact, " commonsense ", conscience, the sense of proportion, the sense of humour, the sense of honour, the sense of value, imagination, sympathy, insight into character, the artistic sense with its many sub-senses, the " illative sense," and the " intuition of totality." Then there are the gifts for languages, for literary form, for mathematics, for scientific research, and others, each of which centres in a special sense, which again has an almost limitless capacity for evolving sub -senses. When I say that we solve the problems of life by means of appropriate senses, I do not wish to imply that we are to rely wholly, or even largely, on the intuitions of genius, on sudden inspirations, or on occult powers of divination, and that therefore study and forethought can be dispensed with. Far from it. I have said that our senses are evolved by constant practice. I need scarcely add that in many cases the practice must be based on systematic study. But though study, with the knowledge to which it gives access and the prepara- tion fo'r action which it makes possible, may be indispensable, it will as a rule serve us best, not by providing us with rules and directions which we can consciously follow, but by adding strength, elasticity, and subtlety to the particular sense or senses. In many cases study itself must be a more or less subconscious process, scarcely to be dis- tinguished from careful practice. In other cases, though it may be consciously pursued, it must not be consciously directed towards practical ends. 116 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY In few cases can we deliberately make use of it when the time for action approaches. When the graver problems of life have to be solved, the fruits of our studies must have passed into our spiritual nerves, to be transmitted, when the need arises, to our desire, our conscience, and our will, just as the experiences of the practised motor-bus driver have passed into his physical nerves, to be trans- mitted, when the need arises, to his eyes and his hands. If the driver of a motor-bus tried to steer his way through the crowded streets by following the directions of an elaborate handbook drawn up for him by some over-paternal civic authority, instead of trusting to his trained sense for velocities and distances, he and his passengers would speedily come to grief. For, in the first place, no handbook, however elaborate, could even begin to solve his problems for him. And, in the second place, he could not consciously follow detailed directions in the moment of action. Yet the problems which he has to solve are simple and straightforward compared with those which confront us in the fields of moral, social, and economic activity, or when we are dealing with the larger issues of life as they present themselves to us in the fields of art, or letters, or religion, or philosophy. But the objection to reliance on rules and direc- tions in the conduct of life is not merely that they seldom give us effective guidance, but also and more especially that reliance on them necessarily tends to atrophy the senses which Nature places at our disposal, potentially if not actually, for the solution of our more complex problems. When everything is done by rule or in obedience to DEADENED BY DOCILITY 117 detailed directions, our intuitive faculties, both moral and mental, become superfluous, and, being no longer exercised, naturally cease to grow. Let me illustrate my meaning by reference to a remarkable experiment which was made thousands of years ago, and the consequences of which, for good or evil, are with us still. The attempt to regulate " conduct " in all its details by rules and directions, as, for example, by a code of law or by priestly guidance, has often been made. Of such attempts the most thorough and systematic, and therefore the most instructive, is that of Jewish legalism. Never before or since has the apparently hopeless enterprise of finding a mechanical sub- stitute for conscience and its associated senses been so boldly conceived or so successfully undertaken. If we are in any doubt as to the effect of undue dogmatic pressure on the higher life of man, we cannot do better than study the history of Phari- saism. We shall learn from that history that when the relations between man and man, as man, come under the control of an external authority, which, of inner necessity, is ever extending and elaborating its machinery of supervision, certain tendencies are sure to manifest themselves. Con- science, the supreme moral faculty which co- ordinates and concentrates in itself all others, will become rigid, scrupulous, casuistical, losing on the one hand breadth of view, sense of propor- tion, regard for the larger issues of life, and on the other hand adaptiveness to changing conditions and sensitiveness to moral influences and con- siderations. Meticulous regard for the letter of a code of law will take the place of devotion to the 118 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY spirit of a scheme of life. Correctness of outward action will take the place of conformity to vital truth. Outward standards, outward measures, outward values will take the place of those which are inward and spiritual. Censorious and inquisi- torial interference with the private affairs of one's neighbour will take the place of sympathetic insight into his inner life. The beautiful saying, " Tout savoir, c'est tout pardonner " will have no meaning for the legalist ; and the uncharitableness which his zeal for the law engenders will progressively widen its sphere. Imaginative sympathy and the sense of justice, without which conscience loses touch with the actualities of the moral world, will cease to operate. Intent on achieving his own salvation by correct outward action, the legalist will become by degrees de-spiritualized and de-humanized, and will at last be in danger of being sucked down into the ever-narrowing vortex of his own petty, self- regarding, self-centred life. And, with the loss of the inward standard of right and wrong, the con- ception of virtue as the health of the soul will be perforce abandoned. A man will entertain evil desires and passions in his heart, and yet, because he lives correctly, in the sense of observing certain rules and conventions, will pass as virtuous, first in the eyes of those whose judgment he has been taught to value, and then in his own eyes. Such a man will be no hypocrite ; but he will have sunk to an even lower level of self-deception. Hypocrisy has been defined as the homage which vice pays to virtue. When vice is mistaken for virtue, the need for hypocrisy ceases; but the loss of it under such conditions is a loss to morality, not a gain; DEADENED BY DOCILITY 119 for it means that the process of demoralization is complete. If Pharisaism has done nothing else for mankind, it has taught them that dogmatic pressure, when systematically applied to a plastic material which cannot easily react against it, tends to deaden the in- stinctive and intuitive faculties by means of which men get into touch with the deeper tendencies of Nature, adapt themselves to a complex and mobile environment, and regulate their conduct ; and that in doing so it goes far towards mechanicalizing life and devitalizing the human spirit. And what makes this lesson the more instructive is that it is possible to conceive of a worse bondage than that of the Law. If dogmatic pressure, when applied by the dead hand of a code, can do so much to demoralize its victims, what might it not do when exerted by the living will of a despotic and inquisi- torial State, and passively submitted to by an ultra- docile people? For an answer to this question we must turn to modern Germany. The German citizen comes under the dogmatic pressure of the State, first in the army and then in civil life. In the army he is subjected to the strictest, most mechanical, and most brutal dis- cipline that the world has ever known. As a civilian he comes under the control of an ultra-paternal government which regulates his life for him to an extent which no other people would tolerate, and fences him in with an immense and ever-growing number of commands and prohibitions (especially the latter). The tendency of dogmatic pressure is, as has 120 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY been said, to deaden sensibility. By " sensibility " I mean the general capacity for evolving " senses " in response to the ever-varying stimulus of ex- perience. When dogmatism has things all its own way, the moulding pressure of authority on the clay of docility takes the place of that interplay between the stimulus of the environment and the reaction of the organism, which is of the essence of life. If dogmatic pressure tends to deaden sensibility in general, it tends more particularly to deaden two master senses, on the healthy develop- ment of which depends the well-being of human nature as a whole, the sense of individuality and the feeling for the ideal. These two senses are closely allied ; and if either is deadened or otherwise injured, the loss to it is sure, sooner or later, to be felt by the other. Deep down in the heart of each of us is the feeling that beyond our best there is still a better; that beyond all ends of action, beyond the whole hierarchy of ends and motives, there is a supreme end which we can discover only by trying to realize it while it is yet undiscovered; that beyond all visible authority there is an in- visible authority which has the first and last call on our allegiance; that beyond the various com- munities, narrow and wide, which claim our de- votion there is a larger community the Kingdom of Man, widening out into the Kingdom of God which, when it claims our devotion, takes precedence of all others. This is the feeling for the ideal. Closely connected with it is the sense of individuality, the feeling that each of us must pursue the ideal by a pathway of his own; that in himself, in his own individual existence, he is a starting-point DEADENED BY DOCILITY 121 for the great quest, a starting-point which differs appreciably from all other starting-points and which therefore necessitates a different line of approach to the common goal; that in the sur- render of his individuality, the merging of it in the ideal or universal life, he must exercise his individuality and so make the surrender of it a genuine act of self-sacrifice, a vital, not a merely mechanical process. In other and fewer words, we feel instinctively that salvation is to be achieved only by transcending all known horizons, and that in this great adventure each of us must fare forth by himself. By some of us this twofold feeling is more or less consciously realized. For others it expresses itself in certain axiomata media. In others, again, it hides from thought in the remoter recesses of the soul, and announces itself only in moments of supreme crisis, and then as an inspiring and transforming influence rather than as a distinct conception of life. Now, if dogmatic pressure as such tends to kill idealism and crush out individuality, it is easy to see that, when the source of dogmatic pressure is an autocratic and inquisitorial State, this tendency may well become irresistibly strong. For in any case the State is entitled to claim a large measure of our allegiance and devotion ; and the self which responds to this claim the communal self, as I have elsewhere called it is therefore at all times a formidable rival to the ideal and the individual selves. But if the ascendancy of the State should become so pronounced that at last a claim to the whole of our allegiance and devotion would be openly advanced and tacitly admitted, the doom 122 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY of idealism and of individuality would have been pronounced. For on the one hand the welfare- real or imagined of the State would have become for the citizen the final end of moral action; and on the other hand he would serve the State best so he and it would argue by placing himself unreservedly in its hands and allowing it to order all the details of his life. This is what has happened, or is in course of happening, in Germany. The theory of the State which Treitschke was one of the first to formulate has won general acceptance. According to this theory, the State has the right to demand unques- tioning obedience from the people, its right being either inherent in its might or (more probably) derived from a supernatural source. The State is also exempt from moral obligation; or rather, it has a higher morality of its own, " the ethics of force and natural expansion." This theory goes far towards making an end of morality. It is true that General Bernhardi and other followers of Treitschke contend that moral considerations bind individuals though they do not bind States. But it is useless to tell the individual that he is to obey the laws of morality, if at the same time you tell him that, in the event of a conflict between the demands of the moral law and the demands of the State, the former must yield to the latter. When the Germans invaded Belgium, a German professor might well have argued that the devastating of the invaded country and the slaughtering and ter- rorizing of its inhabitants served the interests of the Fatherland, and that therefore, since the welfare of his country was for the German citizen the DEADENED BY DOCILITY 123 supreme end of moral action, it was morally right for the invaders to break every established moral law. Such a conclusion would have been a legiti- mate inference from the Treitschkean theory of the State. But if a nation allowed itself to be convinced by this hypothetical argument, its stream of moral motive force would begin to be poisoned at its fountain-head, and it would become possible for its soldiers and citizens to perpetrate nameless atrocities, and yet believe in all seriousness that they were doing right. We see from this example that when the State idealizes itself and imposes its self-idealization on its subjects, the divine ideal the rightful overlord of all moral motives is dethroned in the heart and conscience of the people, and a non-moral or immoral usurper takes its place and determines henceforth the nation's standards of right and wrong. Under such a regime the morals of a nation might sink at last to the level of those of a well- disciplined pirate crew, who served their captain with such zeal and devotion that they were ready to rob and ravish and murder at his bidding. The Jesuits are said to have taught that the end justifies the means; and men have felt instinctively that this is a dangerous and demoralizing doctrine. The doctrine is not necessarily false ; but men have done well to distrust it. If the end is to justify the means it mus,t be an ideal- end infinite and unattainable, a "something evermore about to be"; for then the means will move forward with the ever-receding ideal, and in doing so will pr ogres- 124 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY sively transform and purify themselves by the force of their own inevitable expansion. Self- realization, for example, is an end which justifies whatever means may be taken to achieve it, so long but only so long as the infinitude of the self is kept steadily in view. But to say that a finite end, such as the ascendancy of Germany over other nations, or the triumph of the Catholic Church over other churches, justifies any and every means, is to subordinate the whole to the part, the interests of Humanity to the supposed interests of a nation or a church ; and to do this is to give authoritative sanction to every anti-human lust and passion, and to open the door to every form of immorality. The tendency of dogmatic pressure a pressure which reaches its maximum when it emanates from an autocratic State is to crush individuality and pervert idealism. In crushing individuality, with all that individuality implies initiative, self- reliance, independence of thought, responsibility to conscience, force of character dogmatic pressure strangles spiritual life at its outflow from each individual source. In perverting idealism it poisons the subterranean reservoirs which are the ultimate fountain-head of spiritual life. But the deadening of moral sensibility means more than this. In- dividuality and idealism may be regarded as the poles of moral sensibility. Between these poles come the moral faculties, by means of which ordinary men regulate their conduct in the ordinary affairs of life. These faculties are either sympa- thetic or intuitive, or both. The sympathetic faculties enable a man to enter into the lives of others and look at things, when differences arise between DEADENED BY DOCILITY 125 him and them, from their point of view as well as from his own. The intuitive faculties, which are ever evolving themselves in response to the stimulus of experience, enable a man to discern the moral fitness of any proposed action or course of action. Whatever tends to deaden these faculties, to dull the sensitiveness of the moral finger-tips, deprives a man to that extent of the guidance of those subtle influences which the collective life of Humanity has stored up in his spiritual nerves and muscles, and predisposes him to follow the direc- tion of any self-appointed guide who can bring pressure to bear on him, predisposes him, in other words, to substitute responsibility to external authority for responsibility to his own inward light. This externalization of life is a goal on which other roads converge. Whenever dogmatic pressure is strong and steady, there is a tendency for the verdict of authority external, visible, embodied authority to take the place of the verdict of experience, of life, of nature. For the docile instinctively defer to the dogmatist, accept his ruling, make him their model. If he is an officer or a teacher, his estimate of worth is regarded as final and decisive. If he is an examiner, his certificate determines a man's " station and degree." Under such a regime the sense of intrinsic reality is gradually lost. Class lists, orders of merit, prizes, medals, titles, and the like interpose themselves between the soul and the ultimate realities of existence. What he is reputed to be is a man's chief concern, not what he really is. Now, the intrinsically real has another name the ideal. It is because we feel in our hearts that things are what they are, 126 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY not what they seem to be or are said to be, that we embark on that quest of the ideal of which I have already spoken. And because the ideal, the thing in itself, is unattainable, the quest of it keeps us in touch with the infinite, and so keeps us always immature, always on the ascending curve of life, and therefore truly alive. When external authority takes the place of the real and the ideal, life shrinks within finite limits. Reality is regarded as measur- able and ponderable; scales of value which are outward, finite, and mechanically adjustable take the place of those which are inward, infinite, and self-adjusting. The consequences of this compul- sory narrowing of one's spiritual horizon are far- reaching. He who lives for a self which can be weighed in outward scales and measured by out- ward standards, lives for a finite self; but to live for a finite self is egoism ; and egoism is the beginning and end of immorality. The externalizing tendencies of dogmatic pressure will be raised to their highest power when the source of pressure is the central authority of the community to which one belongs. On this point the evidence of those who know Germany is con- clusive. In no other country is the externalization of life so complete. In no other country is caste feeling so intense or so all-controlling. In no other country is the cult of the uniform carried to such extraordinary lengths. " The German nation," said Bismarck, " is a race of non-commissioned officers; every one is eager to get the stripes. On an average every man in public life has only that degree of self-reliance which corresponds to his official hall-mark, to the conditions of his official DEADENED BY DOCILITY 127 life and to his orders. Exceptions to this are praiseworthy but rare." So deep is the average German's veneration for hall-marks, so much does he care for what he is reputed to be, so little does he care for what he really is, that if you wish to conciliate him you give him a title higher than that which is actually his. " If a German wants the waiter," said Mr. Austin Harrison, " he calls out ' Herr Ober ' (head waiter) , or the waiter, feeling himself insulted, refuses to come and rolls his eyes." " This curious vanity," says the same writer, " is characteristic of all classes. If you want to please a German you address him as ' Von ' when you know he is a plebeian. You call a youth an ' assessor ' when you are perfectly aware he has not yet passed his examinations ... if you want to get anything out of a German by far the quickest and most practical way is to introduce into the conversation such a phrase as ' My dear Count/ ' These are childish follies, of which Germany, though she has more than her share, has no mono- poly ; but the excessive regard for external authority, with its labels and hall-marks, which they indicate, has a darker side to it. The distrust of human nature which is at the heart of the German ideal of life, and which has generated the cult of the label and the hall-mark, is ever tending to reproduce and intensify itself. The more thoroughly a man's life is ordered for him, the less capable does he become of ordering it for himself. The standards by which his conduct is regulated the standards of social, moral, and even spiritual worth pass under the control of the central authority and influence him from without instead of from within. 128 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY If I am to do this thing, if I am not to do that thing, the State, which fences me in with commands and prohibitions, must have reasons of its own for issuing the directions which I have to obey; and those reasons must be determined by standards which are in the keeping of the State, and which have therefore the validity of might, if not of right. And the more the State encroaches on my freedom, the more jealously will it guard its moral weights and measures, and, since willing obedience is worth more to it than enforced submission, the more strenuously will it endeavour to impose those standards on my reason and my conscience, and to regulate my views of life and my consequent aims and ambitions as well as the details of my conduct. Hence it is that in Germany the State takes care (as we have seen) to control the Church, the Press, the Universities, and the schools, and, through the medium of these moulds and organs of opinion, to suggest to the people what they are to think, to believe, and to say. And the pity of it is that he whose thoughts, beliefs, and words are habitually suggested not to say dictated to him, comes at last to regard those thoughts, beliefs, and words as his own. When this point has been reached, when a man honestly believes that what has been virtually forced upon him from without has come to him from within, the triumph of authority over the inner life of the soul is complete. The pressure of the drill-sergeant is not brought to bear on the German citizen in civil life. But it is possible that the brutal discipline which makes the German soldier an automaton is less harmful (in the deeper sense of the word) than the insidious pressure on DEADENED BY DOCILITY 129 the civilian which enables the State to take posses- sion of his moral and spiritual springs of action. In the act of deadening sensibility and exter- nalizing life, autocratic authority weakens the will. The truth of this proposition is self-evident. The pressure which makes a man dependent on others for rules and directions necessarily weakens his will. So does the pressure which makes a man dependent on others for his ideals and standards. The former deprives him of the power of choice at the partings of the byways of life. The latter, at the partings of the highways. And it stands to reason that the man who is not allowed to exercise his power of choice will lose his force of will. It stands to reason, in other words, that the man who is over-disciplined by authority whether directly or indirectly matters little wiU lose the power of disciplining himself. For the restraining and directing forces which come from within will natur- ally cease to operate when life is regulated, both as a whole and in all its details, by systematic pressure from without. Thus, from many quarters demoralizing influences are brought to bear on the docile German. His individuality is crushed by the inquisitorial despot- ism of the State and by the excessive centralization which is of the essence of its administration. His ideals are perverted, not only by the imperious demands on his devotion which the State is always making, but also and more particularly by the control which it has secured, through many agencies, of his inward springs of action. The general deaden- ing of sensibility which is produced by dogmatic pressure weakens his sympathies and blunts his K 130 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY moral intuitions. The externalization of life, which is an effect of the same cause, materializes his aims, corrupts his motives, and debases his scale of values. And the rigid discipline which orders his goings for him and so deprives him of freedom of choice, fatally weakens his will. A general lowering of moral vitality is the natural resultant of these converging forces. This is the malady from which one would expect the over-docile German to suffer. Does he suffer from it, and, if so, by what symptoms does it reveal its presence ? That his moral vitality has been seriously lowered is suggested, to say the least, by two significant symptoms, abnormal criminality at home, abnormal savagery in the field. This is a provisional answer to my question. A fuller answer will be given in the next chapter. The ubiquitous pressure exercised by a despotic State may be expected to produce an effect on the mentality of the people analogous to that which it produces on their morals. 1 In the one sphere, as in the other, the tendency of strong dogmatic pressure is to deaden sensibility. In the mental sphere sensibility shows itself as initiative, as resourcefulness, as alertness, as adaptability to new conditions, as responsiveness to new impres- sions and appeals, as imaginativeness, as originality, as genius. The man whose mental sensibility is 1 I do not forget that the mental and moral spheres overlap and even interpenetrate one another; that a moral judgment, for example, is the outcome of a process which is largely mental. The distinction between the two spheres is, however, a real one ; and it will be con- venient to keep it in mind. DEADENED BY DOCILITY 131 unimpaired, when he finds himself in a tight place, will make a rapid survey of the whole situation, and adjust his plans and adapt his resources to the unexpected difficulties that confront him. The man whose sensibility has been deadened by dogmatic pressure will ask himself what rules or what prohibitions meet the case. For it is only by multiplying rules and prohibitions, that the despotic State can control the life of the citizen; and the more it multiplies rules and prohibitions, the more dependent on State-control will the citizen become. The man whose goings are habitually ordered for him will be lost, unless guidance is quickly forth- coming, when he is confronted by a sudden emer- gency or even by an unexpected conjunction of circumstances. That guidance should always be forthcoming is of course the dream of the dogmatist, as we have seen in the typical case of the Jewish Law; but it is a dream which cannot be fulfilled. Neither the ingenuity of the casuist in morals nor the forethought of the General Staff in warfare can cope with the complexity and subtlety of Nature. But this difficulty, instead of acting as a deterrent to dog- matism, does but incite it to renewed effort. The deadening of mentality is a contingency which it would welcome rather than deprecate. For it is to the interest of despotic authority, whether military or civil, that intelligence and initiative should be concentrated in a small circle of " experts/' inde- pendence of thought and action being the last thing that it can tolerate in its subjects. In the German army this circle of experts small at the best seems to grow smaller from year to year. That the army is a wonderfully planned 132 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY and highly efficient machine goes without saying : and machinery is the expression of intelligence in terms of what is outward and material. It follows that of the intelligence which plans and pro- vides there is an abundance in the German army, and that much of that intelligence is of a high order. But it is confined for the most part to the General Staff, to the officers of higher rank, and to the great firms which manufacture the munitions of war guns, shells, Zeppelins, poison- ous gases, and the like. 1 In the officers of lower grade, intelligence, with its practical counterpart- initiative, is not encouraged. In the rank-and-file it is ruthlessly repressed. In this respect there has been in recent years reaction rather than pro- gress. In the war of 1870 an attempt was made to encourage initiative, not only among the officers, but even to some extent among the rank-and-file. The experiment has not been repeated. The freedom which had been given to the officers has been in large measure taken away from them. The open formation in which the soldiers frequently fought in 1870 a formation which tends to throw the individual on his own resources has been entirely abandoned. The officers are said to have abused their freedom. Finding that they were expected to exercise initiative, they exercised it, with true Prussian docility, in season and out of season, and the result was that they made many rash and foolish moves. The truth is that the exercise of initiative is foreign to the Prussian character and is not in keeping with the Prussian 1 Strictly speaking, these firms do not belong to the army ; but in point of fact they are a vital part of it. DEADENED BY DOCILITY 133 tradition. The typical Prussian officer, as Bismarck himself admitted, " goes to meet certain death in the service with the simple words ' at your orders/ but if he has to act on his own responsibility, dreads the criticism of his superior officer or of the world more than death, even to the extent of allowing his energy and correct judgment to be impaired by the fear of blame and reproof." The reason why the open formation was abolished has already been set forth. 1 Meckel was allowed to undo the work of the great Moltke, partly because the open formation had undoubtedly led to much skulking, partly and perhaps chiefly because its retention would have made it difficult for the army to be thoroughly mechanicalized. " On no account may f he (the soldier) act and think for himself. He is simply there to do as he is told." But where the open formation is adopted, the soldier must occa- sionally act and think for himself. And he cannot always do as he is told, for the obvious reason that the necessary orders are not always forthcoming. It is only as the master of a smoothly working machine that a central authority can fully satisfy its " lust of sway " ; and if an army or any other corporate body is to become such a machine, it is essential that its component parts should as far as possible move automatically, that they should not be allowed to have minds or wills of their own. If the pressure of dogmatic authority makes for automatism on the lower levels of mentality, it makes for pedantry for excessive deference to rules, precedents, and established conclusions on the higher. In no army is the conduct of war so 1 Chap. II. pp. 42-4. 134 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY pedantic as in the German ; and in the atmosphere of pedantry genius withers and high ability makes but meagre growth. Such originality as the German War Lords have shown during the present war has taken the form of making guns and mortars of unprecedented type and calibre, of using vitriol, " liquid fire " and poisonous gas as weapons of attack, and of contriving various mechanical devices in which the industry and ingenuity of the scientific expert have been turned to profitable account. And the successes which Germany has achieved have been for the most part triumphs of military technique, of administrative machinery, and of applied science, and may be regarded as the reward of years of methodical preparation for war. Of such successes there have been many. But the larger plans of the General Staff have nearly all miscarried; and no general of superlative ability has yet come to the front. As it is in the army, so it is in civil life. State supervision, when carried to excess, makes for automatism on the lower levels of mentality and for pedantry on the higher. "It is natural," says Mr. W. H. Dawson, " to compare the German with the English workman ; and the first difference which such a comparison brings to light is the German's lack of independence. He both submits to an endless amount of direction, and he needs it." Like the soldier, the workman is " there to do as he is told." And his loss of initiative is accompanied by the loss of intelligence, the active, originative intelligence which strikes out new paths for itself, not the passive intelligence which merely takes in what is explained to it. In the fields of learning DEADENED BY DOCILITY 135 and research, of pure science, of applied science, of industry and commerce, German patience, accuracy, and thoroughness are proverbial, and the German capacity for organization has produced remarkable results. But even the leaders in those fields of activity are wanting in originality. The great explorers of unknown lands have nearly all been non-German. So have the great pioneers in science, and the great inventors in the various departments of applied science. The plodding German follows in the wake of these pathfinders, and secures, in his own interest, the ground that they have won; just as in the field of industrial activity he appropriates the brilliant ideas of foreign inventors, and turns them to profitable account. In criticism a word which covers many spheres of intellectual effort he combines enormous erudition with poverty, or at best mediocrity, of thought. In France the critical spirit always burns with a clear flame; in Germany the fire is in danger of being put out by its own excess of fuel. In recent years I have read three important works by German critics of very high repute; and in each case I felt that the writer was at heart a pedant and that he could not see the wood for the trees. But we need not compare Germany with other countries. If we would estimate the respective effects of rigid State control and reasonable freedom on mental development, we have but to compare Prussia with non-Prussian Germany during the period of Germany's intellectual ascendancy (1750- 1870), and the Prussianized 'Germany of the past forty-five years with her former non-Prussianized 136 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY self. Between the years 1750 and 1870 Germany produced four great men of letters. Not one was a Prussian. She produced many great musicians. Not one was a Prussian. She produced three great historians. Not one was a Prussian. She produced many great thinkers. Two were Prussians Kant and Schopenhauer but Kant was half Scotch, and Schopenhauer was the least Prussian of Prus- sians and had no honour in his own country. If we except statesmen and soldiers, we shall find that Saxony has produced a far larger number of great men than Prussia. And even in statesmen and soldiers Prussia has not much to boast of. She has one great soldier Frederic II and one great statesman Bismarck to her credit. The other great German soldier Moltke was a Meck- lenburger by birth and a Dane by education. And we have seen that the statesmen who resuscitated Prussia after her downfall in 1806 were all non- Prussians. After the war of 1870 Germany, as a whole, came under the influence of the Prussian drill-sergeant; and as his deadening pressure began to make itself felt, her activities in the fields of literature, music, and thought began to die away, and her energies to be diverted into other and more material channels. In music, in which she once reigned without a rival, the sceptre has been wrested from her by Russia. In the fields of literature and speculative thought she has few names of distinction and none of the first order. Her greatest men of letters no more belong to the royal line of Goethe and Heine than do her greatest thinkers to the royal line of Kant and Hegel. Taken as a whole, the forty-five years DEADENED BY DOCILITY 187 since 1870 have been singularly barren of achieve- ment except in the spheres of industrial and commercial activity. From this fact, and from the barrenness of Prussia during the period of Germany's spiritual fertility, one may surely argue that the pressure of a rigid State-despotism on the life of a nation is injurious to its mental development; that it robs the soul of the people of that elasticity of fibre which accompanies healthy growth; that, while it stifles initiative and intelligence in the rank and file, on the upper levels it makes for mediocrity of talent and mechanical efficiency rather than for those higher developments, intellectual and spiritual, through which a people keeps open its intercourse with the ideal and keeps alive the flame of its own inner life. But the mischievous results of the pressure of State-dogmatism are not wholly negative. If the spontaneous energies of human nature are held back by over-rigid discipline or by excess of bureau- cratic control, or by any other form of dogmatic pressure, if all legitimate outlets are denied to them, there is a danger that they will seek other outlets for themselves, and at last, after many subterranean activities, break forth with explosive violence. And this anarchic upheaval, the ulterior conse- quences of which it is impossible to foresee, will be mental as well as moral. The orgies of immorality in which Berlin indulges, the outbursts of depraved criminality which from time to time furnish the readers of the German newspapers with a morbid excitement, the more wanton and purposeless of the atrocities which have disgraced the German army in the present war, are doubtless the results 138 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY of such a reaction. But the mental results will be even more serious, partly because the range of their activity will be wider, partly because the perversion of a nation's ideas and ideals must needs have far-reaching moral consequences. Dr. Fried- rich Paulsen, an eminent German critic, when considering Nietzsche's popularity with the rising generation in Germany, asks himself what is the par- ticular mood or frame of mind to which Nietzsche's tumultuous ideas respond. " I think," he answers, "it is just that from which Nietzsche suffers intellectual anarchism ; and the cause of this mood or depression (for it is a pathological condition) I deem to be the excess of pressure and compulsion to correctness to which everybody is exposed from youth to age. Intellectual anarchism is a re- action against the long-continued subjection imposed in the school, the Church, society and the State. The effect of this ceaseless discipline is that correct ideas upon all matters, historical and political, religious and moral, literary and philological, to which we are trained by long schooling and many examinations, by public opinion and private admo- nition, by patriotic festivals with their eternally reiterated eloquence, by seduction and threat, at last appear to us so stale, insipid and intolerable that we tear up and throw from us everything, the correct opinions with the old truths, the conventional standards with the worn-out relics, and eventually logic and morality with them, give ourselves over to saturnalia of paradox, and celebrate a very feast of intellectual topsy-turveydom." And this violence, as the same writer reminds us, is a proof of weakness, not of strength. " It is the dulled, DEADENED BY DOCILITY 139 anaemic, starved body which yearns for warmth and stupefaction in strong drink." l The Nemesis of docility takes many forms. This is one of them. The spirit of submissiveness which makes us prone to walk, in obedience to orders, in familiar and well-worn paths, may lead us at last by doing violence to our nature and so pro- voking a fierce reaction into paths of lawlessness and revolution " of which we know neither the dangers nor the end." 1 Quoted by Mr. W. H. Dawson in What is Wrong with Germany ? CHAPTER VI BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY WE have seen that the undue pressure which the over-paternal German State brings to bear on the over-docile German citizen is a demoralizing influence which takes many forms. But what proof can I give that the German citizen has been demoralized by that pressure? Many proofs might be given. I will content myself with two, the savagery of the German armies in the field and the criminality of the German people at home. The former phenomenon has startled the whole civilized world, and set it wondering what is the meaning and value of its vaunted civilization. There is ample and conclusive evidence that, since the war began, the Germans have massacred large numbers of unarmed and innocent civilians men, women, and children; that they have violated thousands of women of all ages, including many nuns; that they have carried. away to forced labour numbers of men and boys from the districts in their occupation ; that they have bombarded defenceless towns and villages from the land, the sea, and the air ; that they have wantonly destroyed many towns and villages, with their cathedrals, churches, town- halls, and other monuments of antiquity ; that they have polluted and desecrated innumerable churches ; 140 BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 141 that they have systematically looted shops, ware- houses, factories, and private houses ; that in battle they have massacred the wounded as they lay on the ground ; that they have murdered, starved, and otherwise maltreated prisoners; that they have tortured captured scouts in order to extract in- formation from them; that they have deliberately fired on Red Cross ambulances and hospitals, and have even tried to sink a Red Cross ship; that they have used civilians, including women and children, as screens to protect their advancing troops; that they have made a treacherous use of the Red Cross and the white flag; that they have employed vitriol, burning liquids and gases, poison- ous gases, explosive and doctored bullets as weapons of war ; that they have poisoned wells with arsenic and disease germs ; that they have sunk passenger- and merchant-ships and fishing-boats without warn- ing, and left the crews and passengers to drown. This is a long list, and it could easily be length- ened. 1 As it stands, it constitutes a damning indictment of a great nation. And the evidence in support of it is, as I have said, ample and con- clusive. For, apart from the testimony of victims and eye-witnesses, 2 which already fills many volumes and will fill many more, we have the de- tailed records of atrocities in the notebooks of German prisoners 3 records which in some cases were made with compunction and even horror, in 1 The systematic extermination of the Armenian people by the Turks is a national crime for which Germany, owing to her influence with the rulers of Turkey being paramount, must be held responsible. 2 3 These footnotes are filed at the end of the chapter as Appendices A, B. 142 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY others with callous indifference, in others with malignant glee; we have the admissions, conscious or unconscious, of German newspapers ; l we have the general orders issued by commanding officers ; 2 we have the German War Book, with its sinister doctrine of the " necessity of war " ; 3 we have the Emperor's injunction to his soldiers in China to bear themselves like Huns, and his more recent order to his invading armies in Belgium to terrorize the inhabitants by acts of " frightfulness." When every allowance has been made for exaggeration on the part of eye-witnesses and other local re- porters, we shall find that their testimony, sup- ported by that of the German witnesses whom I have cited, proves to demonstration that Germany has waged this war with a studied disregard of humanity, chivalry, and honour. But could we have expected her to do otherwise ? Does not the a priori evidence fall into line with the collateral and the positive evidence ? We have heard much of late of German savagery in the field. We hear but little of German criminality at home. Yet the latter, besides serving to throw light on the former, is the graver and more significant phenome- non. Also, it is vouched for by Germany herself, in her statistics of crime, whereas the savagery of her soldiers, however well attested, is easily denied. There are two classes of crime, in particular, in which Germany, on her own showing, defies com- petition, brutal " crimes of malice " and brutal " crimes of shame." More than twenty years ago, Treitschke, the German historian, in his great 123 These footnotes are filed at the end of the chapter as Appendices C, D, E. BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 143 work, Die Politik, wrote as follows : " There are epidemics of crime which are a very serious danger to a nation. Up to the early 'sixties it used to appear true that crimes of violence decreased, and that only crimes of fraud increased, in war time. Since then the stabbing custom has sprung up. All at once the working classes began to carry non-shutting knives, and the crimes of brutality, so prevalent in our time, have continually increased. The manner in which this blood-licking spreads like an epidemic is truly awful, and the State must take precautionary measures against it. The same is true of the terrible increase in crimes of shame." 1 Since Treitschke wrote, the epidemics of crime to which he called attention seem to have become endemic. The following figures are significant. During the five years, 1907-11 inclusive, there were in Germany 600,000 cases 2 of felonious and malici- ous wounding in which " severe " injuries were inflicted. This gives a yearly average of 120,000. During the same period the yearly average of cases of " felonious wounding " in England and Wales was 126. Under the heading of " malicious wound- ing (misdemeanours) " the yearly average of cases was 636. But this is a very comprehensive head- ing, having ten sub-headings, in only three of which is the actual causing of bodily harm (whether " light " or " severe ") part of the offence. How many cases occurred under each of the sub-headings I do not know. But it would probably be an over- 1 Quoted by Dr. T. F. A. Smith in his book The Soul of Germany. 2 By " cases " I mean cases sent for trial to the courts which are competent to deal with such offences, not " cases reported to the police." 144 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY estimate to say that in England and Wales, during the period in question, the yearly average of cases of felonious and malicious wounding in which severe injuries were inflicted was 600. The population of Germany is nearly double that of England and Wales; but 600 goes into 120,000 not twice, but two hundred times. 1 The " terrible increase in crimes of shame " which Treitschke deplored seems also to have been fully maintained since he wrote. During the ten years, 1897-1906 inclusive, the yearly average of cases of rape in Germany was 9,381, in England and Wales 152. In other words, in proportion to its population, cases of rape are thirty-five times as numerous in Germany as in England and Wales. These figures are bad enough; but there are worse to come. Among the boys of Germany below the age of eighteen there were, during the year 1912, eleven times as many cases of malicious wounding as among all the inhabitants of this country, and nearly nine times as many cases of rape. There were also more than a hundred cases of murder or manslaughter. Comparison between the youths of the two countries is rendered difficult by the fact that the basis of classification according to age is different in England and Wales from what it is in Germany, and that in classifying criminals according to age our Home Office deals with con- victions, not with cases. I find, however, that whereas in Germany, in 1912, nearly 9000 boys below the age of eighteen were tried for inflicting bodily 1 If we compare convictions in the two countries, we shall find that the figures are still more unfavourable to Germany. See also end of chapter, Appendix F. BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 145 injuries, in this country only four young persons below the age of twenty-one were convicted of " felonious wounding," and only twenty-seven of " malicious wounding (misdemeanours) "; and that whereas in Germany 952 boys below the age of eighteen were tried for rape, in this country only four youths below the age of twenty-one were convicted of that crime. 1 Since the war began crime in this country has decreased to a remarkable extent. In Oldham, for example, a populous industrial centre, there was not a single case for trial at the first Quarter Sessions of the current year (January 1916). In Germany, on the contrary, there has been a serious increase in crime, at any rate among the young. The following paragraph appeared in a recent issue of the " official " Cologne Gazette : " Crime has increased among young people in the industrial districts particularly to a really alarming extent. In the case of a single local tribunal the number of sentences passed on young men, as well as young women, rose from 58 in 1913 to 183 in 1914 and to 254 during the first ten months of 1915. Among the offences, fraud, robbery with violence, attempts at murder and actual manslaughter, figure very largely, the youngest offenders being from sixteen to twenty years, while none of them was older than twenty-six. It is a truly terrifying picture which casts a deep stain on German Kultur." 1 My authorities for the figures which I have quoted are: (i) The publications of the "Imperial Statistical Office " in Berlin, which have been studied and digested by Dr. T. F. A. Smith in his book, The Soul of Germany ; and (2) the " Criminal Statistics" issued by our own Home Office. 146 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY The Taegliche Rundschau says that, although ordinary crime has decreased in Prussia, juvenile crime has increased alarmingly, the figures for 1915 being " even more alarming than those for 1914." It is interesting to note that this paper attributes the "growing savagery of youth, both male and female" to the high wages earned by the young in factories and to the want of supervision at home and in school, in other words to the breakdown of the discipline of repression and prohibition. 1 These facts and figures prove, with an eloquence which I need not try to heighten, that demoralizing influences are at work in Germany. These influences are no doubt many and various; but foremost among them, one may safely conjecture, are the influences for evil which we have seen to be inherent in the unwritten constitution of Germany, with its suppression of freedom and individuality, and its substitution of machinery for life, such influences as the tendency to deaden sensibility, to pervert ideals, to externalize standards and motives, to weaken the will. The criminal statistics of Germany show that these influences are potent for evil in civil life. May we not expect them to be more potent in the 1 Precocious in crime, the German boys are also pre- cocious in the matter of taking their own lives. Germany has long been notorious for the number of suicides com- mitted by boys below the age of eighteen. Since the war began there has been a marked increase in these cases. According to a recent Exchange telegram from Amsterdam : " The German Home Secretary is about to issue a circular to provincial authorities, drawing attention to the constant increase in the number of suicides of boys. According to the statistics boy suicides have more than doubled since the war broke out, the average age of the suicides being sixteen." BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 147 army, where the pressure which generates them is by many degrees stronger? And more potent still when the army is on active service, and new kinds of temptation and the stress of a new excitement assail the soldier? When there is a high degree of criminality at home and in time of peace, and when the criminal instincts of the people find their chief outlets in brutal crimes, whether of " malice " or of " shame," one would naturally expect to find in the absence of restraining forces a high degree of savagery in war, especially in a war which took the form of the invasion by a citizen army of a foreign land. In the German army the restraining forces at the dis- posal of authority are, as it happens, abnormally strong. The discipline to which the soldiers are subjected is so strict and severe that, had the General Staff willed there should be no atrocities, there would have been none, or at any rate very few. But the General Staff willed that there should be many atrocities, and their will was duly obeyed. The atrocities which have been recorded may be divided into two chief classes, those which were ordered by authority, and those for which, whether they were permitted or discountenanced by authority, the soldiers themselves were primarily responsible. To the former class belong the whole- sale massacring of unarmed citizens and the whole- sale burning of towns and villages in order to punish the offences of individual franc-tireurs ; the deliberate destruction of cathedrals, town-halls, and other public monuments; the deportation of able-bodied men and their employment at forced labour; the use of helpless civilians of both sexes 148 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY and all ages as screens for advancing troops; the use of poisonous gas and burning and corrosive liquids as weapons of offence; and the poisoning of wells and streams. The object of the General Staff in ordering such atrocities to be perpetrated was to gain military advantage of one kind or another. Whether they were justified in giving such orders with such ends in view, and whether they acted wisely, even in their own interests, in giving them, are questions which will presently be considered. My immediate concern is to ask what effect the enforced execution of barbarously cruel orders would be likely to have on the moral of those who were compelled to execute them. If dogmatic pressure, as such, tends to deaden moral responsibility; if dogmatic pressure, when exerted by an autocratic State, tends to produce the same effect in a high degree, what limits will there be to the deadening influence on morals of the pres- sure which emanates from an autocratic State, acting through its military representatives, and which takes the form, not of mere prohibitions (mostly non-moral), as in civil life, but of positive commands and of commands to do deeds which so flagrantly transgress the moral law of the civilized world that ordinary men, whose moral intuitions were sound without being in any degree over-sensitive, would instinctively shrink from them with shame and horror? Under such a regime and in such an atmosphere a general con- fusion of moral landmarks could scarcely fail to take place; and the German soldier, who had already suffered in civil life from a constraint which unduly restricted his freedom and responsi- BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 149 bility, might well be pardoned for falling a victim to this demoralizing confusion. And this confusion would inevitably be heightened by the perversion of ideals which, as we have seen, has resulted from the self-idealization of the Ger- man State. The German theory of the State, a theory which is the distilled essence of practice, supplies an explanation, and from its own point of view a justification, of most of the horrors of the present war. For it is open to the exponents of that theory to plead that every atrocity which the Germans have perpetrated, from the destruction of Louvain and the slaughter of its inhabitants to the torpedoing of the Lusitania, was done in order to give victory to Germany in the present struggle, and was therefore since the salus reipublicce determines the moral horizon of the citizen a blameless and even a virtuous act. And this argument would appeal with special force to one who had been taught as are most Germans now- a-days from his earliest years, in school and out of school, to hate and despise all the nations that could be regarded as rivals of his own. The soldier who had been ordered by one whose will was law, and resistance to whose will was death, to murder an innocent citizen (let us say) might well begin to wonder by what moral standards he ought to regulate his conduct so far as this was under his own control. But the soldier who seriously believed that to murder an innocent citizen at the bidding of his officer was a virtuous act because it served, or was supposed to serve, the. interests of his country, would be the victim of something worse than a mere confusion of moral 150 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY landmarks. It is one thing to be in doubt as to what is good and what is evil. It is another thing to be able to say with a clear conscience : " Evil, thou art my good." When the latter stage has been reached, the sphere of moral depravity is apt to widen with terrible rapidity. If what is mani- festly evil is to be accounted good because the State enjoins it, it is clear that nothing is intrinsic- ally evil; and if moral laws, even those which are most authoritative, can be set aside at the bidding of the State, it is clear that no moral law has any inherent obligation. There are men who can stand the shock of this discovery by falling back on the great principles which are behind our axiomata media ; just as there are men whose moral intui- tions will continue to work even when the axiomata media of morality have been discredited. But for the average German, who is no moral philosopher and whose intuitions have been deadened by undue reliance on rules and directions, the axiomata media are the beginning and end of moral obligation ; and if they should be discredited, he would be left without guidance in the conduct of life, except so far as his goings might be ordered for him by the drill-sergeant or the policeman. Of such guidance he has always had far too much. Fenced in as he is with innumerable prohibitions, he is at all times apt to assume that whatever is not authoritatively forbidden is lawful and right. And, oppressed as he is by his duty to the State, he is at all times apt to assume that his duty to God and his duty to man are matters of secondary importance. But when he discovers, as a soldier, that the moral laws which are supposed to regulate his conduct BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 151 (beyond the limits of disciplinary control), by determining his duty to God and to man, have no inherent authority, he is scarcely to be blamed if he decides that when he has " rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," whether in the army or in civil life, he has done all that is required of him; in other words, if he holds himself entirely absolved from all purely moral obligations. And he will do this instinctively and sub- consciously, not because he has thought the matter out, but because he has actually sunk to a lower moral level. For other influences have been help- ing to depress his spiritual vitality. The deaden- ing of his moral sensibility, the perversion of his moral ideals, are influences to which he is exposed in civil life as well as in the army, though in the latter, especially in war time, their effect, as we have seen, is raised to a higher power. But the discipline of the German army is a repressive and coercive force, to which the life of the civilian, strictly disciplined though it is, affords no parallel; and, like all the other coercive forces to which the docile German is exposed, it reaches its maximum of intensity in time of war. I have elsewhere spoken of the discipline of the German army, which is a heritage from the days when serfdom was the complement of Junkerdom in Prussia. If the general tendency of dogmatic pressure is to deaden our intuitions and sym- pathies, in the Prussianized German army this pres- sure is so violent and so persistent that brutalizing is the only word which will adequately describe its effect. For in that army, if in no other, " discipline is developed by methods which aim at producing 152 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY a blind mechanical obedience to orders through habits formed by a monotonous routine of drill, coupled with severe and even cruel punishment." And the drill is monotonous, the punishments are cruel beyond words. The German soldiers, accord- ing to the testimony of their adversaries, " fear their officers more than they fear death." Men who are subjected to such a regime cannot be ex- pected to retain the finer feelings of humanity. He who lives to obey orders, he who is taught to regard obedience as an end in itself, becomes dead sooner or later to all genuinely moral considera- tions. So does he who has to 'enforce obedience of such a type, in such an atmosphere. And when obedience is enforced by cruel punishments, with blows and curses as their normal background- enforced by the free use of the whip, the sword, the revolver, the machine-gun, and even of forms of torture, such as the suspension of men by their wrists from trees with their toes barely touching the ground the iron of brutality can scarcely fail to enter into the souls both of the executioner and of his victims. The officer who publicly slashed a sentry across the face for having been slow to salute him was a cowardly brute. So was the officer who ordered a soldier to be flogged with a cat-o'-nine- tails for having relaxed for a moment his attitude of rigid attention while he (the officer) was smoking a cigarette. These officers had been brutalized by too much despotic authority. Their victims may well have been brutalized by too much punishment and too much drill. The officer who is cruel to his soldiers is not likely to be considerate to his enemies, armed or unarmed. No more is the BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 158 soldier who is cruelly treated by his officers. The force of habit will be too strong for the former. The instinctive desire to find a vent for outraged feelings will be too strong for the latter. The sentry who was publicly slashed across the face " stood rigidly at attention and never quivered " ; but the fierce resentment which must have surged up in him was doubtless waiting for an outlet; and one could scarcely expect the victim of such an 'outrage to be a model of chivalry and courtesy in his dealings with helpless citizens. That particular outrage was witnessed by Mr. Alexander Powell, the American newspaper correspondent ; and when his narrative of it reached this country, a journalist who had hitherto received with incredulity the stories of German atrocities in Belgium ceased to be incredulous, for he realized that the army in which such an incident was possible was capable of almost any crime. The discipline that tends to deaden the moral sensibility of the soldier tends also to weaken his will. As he looks to authority instead of to his conscience for his ultimate standard of right and wrong, so he looks to authority instead of to his own will for the driving power, the moral force, which will enable him to do right and resist the temptation to do wrong. Accustomed as he is to be controlled by others, he gradually loses the power of controlling himself. That loss of self- control l tends to aggravate brutality goes without 1 To those who have read with admiration of the German soldier's steadiness in battle, it may seem strange that I should hint at his being deficient in self-control. But in this, as in other matters, military discipline, when carried too far, produces a bastard virtue which is readily mis- taken for the genuine article that it counterfeits. It is 154 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY saying. A strong will is sometimes combined with a brutal nature; and when this happens, brutality will be kept in check just so far as it is found politic or convenient to do so. But the human brute who has lost self-control is at the mercy of his own lusts and passions; and in proportion as his will weakens, his brutality may be expected to break bounds and run riot. 1 I have spoken of the atrocities which have been perpetrated by the German soldiery, in obedience to official orders. For these the General Staff must be held responsible. We can now see that it would have been a miracle if there had not been a second class of atrocities atrocities for which the soldiers themselves were primarily responsible. To not self-control that makes the German soldier stand steady under a devastating fire. It is the force of habit combined with the force of fear. The discipline of drill makes a man an automaton such at least is its tendency and an automaton can do many things that a man does, and do them up to a certain point with greater certainty and precision ; but when the demand comes for vital activity, for the display of qualities which are too human to be counterfeited, the automaton will be unable to respond to it. Automatic steadiness in battle is no more a proof of force of will on the part of the German soldier than is the automatic repetition of hymns of hate a proof of iron resolution on the part of the German people. Where valour is compulsory, the praise that rewards it loses its meaning and its value, so that while the coward gets more than his due, the hero gets less. 1 A private in the German army, who in civil life is (or was) a professor of Latin at a gymnasium, in his diary, which fell into the hands of the enemy, sums up the effect of Prussian discipline on character in the following words : " The German soldier has no personality, he is a machine, and that is what he is trained to be ; as soon as he is left to himself he is idle, stupid and a blockhead. He has only one idea, eating and sleeping, and his brutishness is only limited by barbarous punishment." BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 155 this class belong the wholesale violation of women, the wholesale looting of private property, the un- authorized murder of helpless citizens, including women and children, the unauthorized cruelties inflicted on the wounded and on prisoners, and a variety of wantonly brutal crimes which are difficult to account for except on the assumption that a spirit of mischief and evil had been unloosed by drink. Having regard to the strict discipline of the German army, one must suppose that these atroci- ties, though unauthorized, were in many cases tacitly sanctioned by those in command. 1 Why was this done? Why were these horrors permitted, instead of being put down with a strong hand? Partly, I think, because they served to terrorize the enemy, an end which the General Staff seem to have regarded as intrinsically desir- able. Partly, perhaps chiefly, because they afforded an outlet to explosive forces which the iron discipline of the German army rigorously represses, but for which safety-valves of some kind or other are im- peratively needed. For if, by the systematic re- pression of freedom and initiative, a man's healthy energies are kept under lock and key, they will accumulate in their hiding-places, gathering force as they become more and more compressed, but gradually transferring their force to the man's baser lusts and passions; and when the day of liberation will come, as come it will for sooner or later the repressed energies will either explode into open rebellion or force new outlets for themselves, it is the latter, not the former, the baser lusts, not 1 In many cases, but certainly not in all. See end of chapter, Appendix G. 156 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY the healthy energies, that will break forth and work their will. This means that the lower desires will have repudiated the authority of the higher, weak- ened as these are by constant repression, in other words, that the man will have lost self-control. But in the eyes of the strict disciplinarian loss of self-control is preferable to loss of the habit of mechanical obedience. As in civil life the German Government is well content that reaction against the prevailing " compulsion to correctness " should take the form of " intellectual anarchism," cul- minating in the cult of Nietzsche, rather than of open resistance to the insidious despotism of the State, so in the army the General Staff seem to be well content that reaction against disciplinary constraint should take the form, at any rate in war time, of indulgence in crime rather than of disobedience to orders. In sanctioning the use of these dangerous safety-valves the ruling powers are no doubt wise in their own generation, but their wisdom is not that of the children of light. It would have been a miracle, I repeat, if, in the excitement and confusion of war, the German soldier had been able to keep his lust and greed and anger under strict control. With his con- science drugged and his principles corrupted by a false and narrow patriotism which makes the sup- posed interests of the State his first and last con- cern, and which makes the cult of national hatred a vital part of his education, with his character brutalized and his will weakened by the relentless pressure of an over-rigid discipline, with his moral landmarks swept away by the enforced commission of inhuman crimes in obedience to the authority BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 157 which furnishes him with his ideals as well as with his rules and commands, the German soldier could scarcely be expected to wage war with clemency or even with common humanity; and the wonder is not that his misdeeds have been so many, but that they have been so few. If I have devoted a disproportionate amount of space to what I have called the a priori evidence for the atrocities which the German armies are said to have perpetrated, the reason is that it is a type of evidence which deserves to be carefully studied, especially as it has been freely invoked by the apologists, English as well as German, for Germany's conduct of the present war. To investi- gate the positive evidence for the alleged atrocities would carry me beyond the scope of this book. The official reports issued by the Belgian, French, British, and Russian Governments tell their own tale. So do the German War Book, the public utterances of the German Kaiser, the proclama- tions issued by German commanding officers, and the notebooks of German prisoners. So do such incontestable facts as the massacres at Louvain, Dinant, Aerschot, Ardenne, Rouvres, Sentis, Lebbeke, etc., the systematic use of poisonous and burning gases, and the sinking of the Lusitania and other ships. The confluence of these three currents provides a volume of evidence which to most minds carries absolute conviction. But the inhumanity which Germany has displayed in this war was so unexpected and withal so unexampled that some of us, especially in the early stages of the war, have been disposed to dismiss the stories of it on a priori grounds. " No disciplined army 158 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY could have done such things." " No civilized country could have allowed such things to be done." Such words as these have risen almost spontaneously to our lips. They prove nothing except that we do not understand the soul of Ger- many. Having studied the a priori evidence for the alleged atrocities with some care, I find that, far from being favourable to Germany, it tells against her w r ith overwhelming force. But in doing so it lessens- in some degree the criminality of her crimes. For it suggests that in this, as in so many other matters, she is the victim of her own unhappy past. The responsibility for the crimes which have been committed rests on the nation not less than on the army. The German saying that the army is the nation may not be literally true; but it is literally true that from the army to the nation there is but a single step. If, as a soldier, the German citizen is the victim of the iron discipline on which the army has always prided itself, as a civilian he is subjected to a less severe but more insidious pressure. For whatever harm this pres- sure may have done to his character, he is in part to blame. As I have already pointed out, he has allowed the State, through its control of the various moulds and organs of opinion, to suggest to him what he is to think, to believe, and to say; and to do this so effectually that he has come at last to regard those thoughts, beliefs, and words as his own. In other words, he has allowed the State to take pos- session of his moral and spiritual springs of action, and so usurp the functions of his own higher self. Under the influence of this insidious pressure, BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 159 changes of vital importance may be expected to take place in his inner being. The stern, direct, dogmatic pressure of military discipline, which tends to deaden the moral sensibility of the soldier, affects the citizen for two years of his early life; then its influence lessens and begins to wear off. But if his moral sensibility should survive or recover from that experience, it would be exposed in civil life to a new danger, the danger of under- going a morbid transformation in two distinct directions. The man who allows the State to take the place of his higher self surrenders his judgment, his power and his right to think out and solve his moral problems for himself; and he loses his sense of responsibility to his own conscience. These changes come upon him so stealthily that he may never become aware of either of them. He may flatter himself that he is exercising his judgment, when all the time he is really thinking, desiring, and purposing whatever the State wishes him to think, to desire, and to purpose. And he may hold him- self responsible to his conscience, when all the time the State has usurped that seat of authority, and is whispering from it suggestions to him which he mistakes for the dictates of his own higher self. And while these changes are going on in him, the uniform pressure of State control is crushing his individuality on all the planes of his being, and the dominant theory of the State is perverting the latent idealism of his heart. With all these in- sidious influences brought to bear on him by the ubiquitous State, can we wonder that the ethics of Humanity cease to appeal to him, and that, as the soldier looks at things from a point of view which 160 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY is exclusively military, so he gets at last to look at things from a point of view which is exclusively national, and therefore anti-human and profoundly immoral. If he has not been actually brutalized, like the over-disciplined soldier, he has at least, as his sayings and doings abundantly testify, become callous to human suffering and indifferent to ordinary moral considerations. If he has not actually robbed and ravaged and raped and mur- dered, he has tacitly consented to these and other such atrocities, and has thus taken on himself the burden of the soldier's guilt. It was not the Ger- man army only that devastated Belgium, Poland and Northern France, that burned and plundered defenceless towns and villages, and outraged and massacred their inhabitants. It was not the German navy only that sank the Lusitania, Falaba, and Arabic, and other unarmed ships without warn- ing, and left their crews and passengers to perish. It was the German people, hypnotized by the German State. There is, however, an excuse which must be made for the people as well as for the army; and I make it the more readily because it throws light on one of the fundamental defects of a State-controlled or a law-controlled morality. He who is moralized by means of prohibitions is in danger of becoming demoralized whenever the negative pressure to which he has been subjected is withdrawn or even appreciably relaxed. For he is apt to assume that whatever is not prohibited is right; and as his natural capacity for distinguishing right from wrong has been atrophied by forced inaction, when there is no one to prohibit him, or when the neces- BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 161 sary prohibitions have not been formulated, he becomes like a ship which has lost its rudder, and is therefore at the mercy of the winds and currents. As it is with the individual, so it is with a people. When the present war began, a new situation arose, involving many new sub-situations, with which the soul of Germany, owing to its lack of moral sensibility and moral initiative, was not prepared to cope. A machine-made morality is ill-fitted to stand the strain of a sudden crisis; and the greater the crisis, the more likely it is to break down. And when the machine-made morality hap- pens to be controlled and directed by a megalo- maniacal ruler who is the centre of a Chauvinistic ruling caste, it may well be that in the general confusion of aims, motives, principles, and senti- ments which a great crisis is apt to produce, the only principle of order will be the insatiable ambi- tion of that ruler and of that caste, which will gradually dominate the moral chaos by inoculating the people with its own vices and uniting them under its own piratical flag. APPENDIX A I have read hundreds of well-authenticated stories of German inhumanity. The following letter to The Times is less sensational than most of those stories; but the eloquence of its simple pathos should carry conviction to the mind of even the most stalwart of our pro-German apologists. " As one of a party of three representatives of the British Red Cross returning from Serbia by 162 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY way of Russia to England, I have, by the courtesy of the Russian and especially of the Swedish authorities, had an opportunity of seeing an exchange of wounded German and Russian prisoners. I can only deeply regret that representatives of all the neutral peoples did not see what I have seen. ' The exchange took place at the Russo-Swedish frontier between Tornea and Haparanda at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia. The Russian prisoners returned from Germany are sent by water to Stockholm. There they are loaded on barges, about 200 to a barge, and, under care of the Swedish Red Cross, are transported to Tornea. The Ger- mans being returned from Russia are brought by train to Tornea and handed over to the Swedish authorities at Harapanda. I watched the dis- embarkation of four barge-loads of returning Rus- sians, between 700 and 800 prisoners in all, and spoke to many of them. I went through a train of returning Germans and again spoke to many of the men. In both cases every possible facility was given me to assure myself of the condition of the prisoners. "It is difficult to find words to describe the dreadfulness of the scene at Tornea. Everything possible had been done to invest the home-coming of the poor Russians with an air of festivity. The pier at which the barges discharged was lined with Russian troops. A distinguished committee was there to receive the prisoners. Flags fluttered. A military band played the Russian National Anthem. Crowds had assembled to cheer their compatriots as they landed. And then they came; and I shall never forget the sight. " I may claim, from my hospital experience, to BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 163 know something of the symptoms of health and sickness. These people who crept off the barges hardly had the semblance of human beings. Any- thing more pathetic it is impossible to conceive. They came bent, dazed and limping. Every man was in rags. There was nothing approaching a complete uniform on any one. Few had coats. Some had no shirts. Many had no socks. There was not, I believe, one sound pair of boots among them. Their hair was untrimmed. Some of the crippled supported themselves on crutches carved from the lids of packing-cases and the like. The less feeble helped the others to walk. Every man was emaciated to the last degree. Some had lost their wits and memory. " They advanced slowly, weakly, with their eyes upon the ground, without a smile, without a hand waved or a voice raised in response to the cheers with which they were greeted; and, as the waiting people saw what they were like, the cheers them- selves died away, and the awful procession went on in silence. I say, unhesitatingly, knowing where- of I speak, that nothing but continual and long- sustained neglect and malnutrition could possibly have reduced those men to the condition in which I saw them. Out of one party of 250 over sixty had developed tuberculosis. ' The Swedish authorities, as I have said, then invited my two companions and myself to see the other side of the picture, and we mingled and chatted with the Germans on their train. The contrast with the condition of the Russians was almost indescribable. There was not one German prisoner who was not in his full uniform, which had 164 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY been taken away from him on his arrival in hospital and carefully kept and returned to him clean on his discharge. All had good boots. The lame were without exception furnished with proper crutches. " But most striking of all were the physical well- being and good spirits of the whole party. They were well nourished. They laughed and joked with us and among themselves. It was evident that they had been treated with care, and, as convales- cents, were being sent home as physically fit as they could be made. I say with certainty that it would take weeks of good nourishment and. proper care to bring the Russians whom I had seen to the same condition of well-being as the Germans were in. " I do not know what, if anything, can be done about it, or how the facts can be spread about so that the peoples of the world may understand. For my part, I know that, if the Germans had hitherto, throughout this conflict, borne them- selves, so far as the world knew, with moderation and decency, the sights which I saw at Tornea alone would convince me that they are waging this war as only a brutal and half-civilized people can wage it. Only the German authorities will prob- ably ever know how many thousands of the enemy wounded in their hands died from the treatment which produced the human wreckage which I saw." APPENDIX B Those who wish to study the evidence furnished by the diaries and letters of German soldiers cannot do better than read Germany's Violation of the Laws of War, a book which has been published under the BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 165 auspices of the French Foreign Office and translated into English by Mr. J. O. P. Bland (Heinemann) . Some choice extracts from this book appeared in a recent review of it in the Sunday Times. Here are a few of these " Mutilation of the wounded is the order of the day. " Every day we take so many, many prisoners. Now they are shot at once, for we have taken so many we don't know where to put them. " The captain called us round and said : ' In the fort we are going to take there will very probably be English soldiers. But I don't wish to see any English prisoners with my company.' A general ' Bravo ! ' of approval was the answer. " They (the French) lay in heaps of eight or ten wounded or dead. Those who were severely wounded and could not get up received another bullet which put an end to them. These were our orders. . . . " The King (of Belgium) having directed the people to defend the country by all possible means, we have received orders to shoot the entire male population. At Leffe nineteen civilians shot. At Dinant, 100 or more huddled together and shot. A horrible Sunday ! ' Through Cail. The iron bridge had been blown up ; for this whole streets were burned and civilians shot. " Marched down into the burning village. A terrific spectacle of ghastly beauty. At the entrance to the village lay about fifty dead civilians, shot for having fired upon our troops from ambush. In the course of the night many others were shot, so 166 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY that we counted over 200. Women and children, lamp in hand, were forced to look on at the horrible scene. We ate our rice in the midst of corpses. " A horrible bath of blood. The whole village (of Sommepy) burnt. The French thrown into the blazing houses, civilians burnt with the rest. " The inhabitants (of a village near Blamont) have fled. It was horrible. There was clotted blood on all the beards, and what faces one saw terrible to behold. The dead, sixty in all, were at once buried. Among them many old women, some old men, and a half-delivered woman, awful to see ; three children had clasped each other and died thus. " The village (of Saint Maurice) was surrounded, men posted about a yard from one another, so that no one could get out. Then the Uhlans set fire to it, house by house. Neither man, woman nor child could escape. All the inhabitants left in the village were burnt with the houses." APPENDIX C The Neueste Nachrichten, a Munich journal, pub- lishes the following story " A Bavarian sharpshooter who was picking off French soldiers built up a wall of corpses to act as cover, and then found that it was so high that he could not fire over it. He at once summoned a French prisoner and compelled him to act as a * living step.' The Frenchman protested that he was wounded. * That is very likely/ the Bavarian replied. ' But we are your masters now, and if you don't lie down I'll crush you into the bargain ! ' The writer of the paragraph goes into ecstasies over the " ingenuity " of the sharpshooter. BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 167 APPENDIX D The following are extracts from Proclamations issued by German commanding officers (To the inhabitants of Hasselt, August 17, 1914.) " In case the inhabitants fire upon the soldiers of the German Army a third of the male population will be shot." (To the Authorities of the Commune of the town of Liege, August 22, 1914.) " The inhabitants of the town of Ardenne . . . made a treacherous surprise attack upon our troops. 1 With my consent the General commanding has burnt the whole neighbourhood, and about 100 people have been shot." (Posted at Namur, August 25, 1914.) " Belgian or French soldiers must be handed over as prisoners of war before 4 o'clock, in front of the prison. Citizens who fail to obey this order will be sentenced to penal servitude for life in Germany. A rigorous inspection of houses will begin at 4 o'clock. Every soldier found will be shot at once. Arms, powder, dynamite, must be handed over at 4 o'clock. Penalty to be shot. Citizens who know of any place where arms or ammunition were deposited must inform the Burgomaster under a penalty of penal servitude for life." 1 This assertion was vehemently denied by the witnesses from Ardenne who gave evidence before the Bryce Com- mission. 168 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY (Posted at Reims, September 12, 1914.) " Nothing must be attempted which can be in any way injurious to the German Army. In order adequately to assure the safety of the troops, and to guarantee a calm attitude on the part of the population of Reims, the persons named below (80 in all) have been taken as hostages by the German High Command. These hostages will be hanged if the least attempt is made to create a disturbance ; and if any infraction of what has been laid down above is committed the town will be wholly or partially burnt and the inhabitants hanged." APPENDIX E The following extract is indicative of the real spirit of the War Book " A war conducted with energy cannot be directed merely against the combatants of the enemy State and the positions they occupy, but it will, and must in like manner seek to, destroy the total intellectual and material resources of the latter. Humanitarian claims, such as the .protection of men and their goods, can only be taken into consideration in so far as the nature and object of the war permit." The word ' intellectual ' in this passage does not adequately render the German word ' Geistig.' ' What the passage amounts to/ says Prof. J. H. Morgan, ' is that the belligerent shall seek to break the spirit of the civil population, terrorize them, humiliate them, and reduce them to despair.' The War Book insists that private property should always be respected. To loot the possessions of an absent man is ' downright burglary/ But if the ' necessity of war ' makes it advisable, ' every BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 169 sequestration, every appropriation, temporary or permanent, every use, every injury, and all destruc- tion are permissible.' ' APPENDIX F Crimes of violence escape with light punish- ment in Germany; and the country has long been notorious, not only for the number of its cases of malicious wounding, but also for wholesale murders and for murders of a peculiarly revolting type. " I write dispassionately," says Mr. F. W. Wile (late Berlin correspondent of the Daily Mail), " as well as advisedly, when I say that in no other country in the world with pretensions to civilization is crime so common, diabolical and meaningless as among the Germans. This does not mean that they are a race of murderers all. What it means is that cal- lousness towards brutality, rapine and life-taking reaches a point among the rank-and-file of German people which is as incredible as it is revolting. . . . " Without once straining for sensational effect, there was hardly a day during my eight years of service as Daily Mail correspondent in Berlin that I could not have pandered to criminal instincts by cabling news of horrifying German crime. Often I used to mark in red in the evening edition of my Lokal-Anzeiger ' stories ' dealing with crime. Quite commonly two-thirds of the local news in that salacious Government-controlled organ would con- sist of reports of murder, usually accompanied by suicide, or attempted murder and successful or attempted suicide. Murders of women and children are commonest of all in Cultureland. In nine cases out of ten they are so-called ' lust-murders.' More 170 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY often than not they are executed with a degree of fiendish brutality which, if newspapers were not reporting them on the day of their occurrence, would make you think you were reading of deeds committed in the wilds of the savage jungle. Double, triple, quadruple even quintuple and sextuple murders are commoner in Germany than murders of one person only. You will often read in newspaper accounts of German crime that such- and-such a detail is ' unfit for reproduction/ In almost every murder trial the public is excluded at intervals because of ' danger of offence to public morals.' When German editors have to hold their noses and German courts to be cleared for fear of violating German taste, the facts in question may safely be regarded as the zenith of horror and iniquity, for Germans are not a squeamish folk, and no one gets the Iron Cross for excessive morality." Since the war began, there has been an increase, rather than a decrease, in serious crime in Germany. A newspaper correspondent, in a letter from Amster- dam dated July 29, 1915, writes as follows ' The German who still has a thought to spare for the social well-being of his country, apart from the war, is beginning to be alarmed at the increase of crime of the worst order reported from different parts of the Empire. From July 20 to 24 intel- ligence of no fewer than twenty-three murders is given. . . . The list of twenty-three murders does not represent the number of victims, as I have included, for instance, the wholesale slaughter of his family by a Landwehr trooper, recently returned from Belgium, of his father, mother, two sisters and a nephew." BRUTALIZED BY DOCILITY 171 And this increase in serious crime seems to be symptomatic of widespread demoralization. A student of German newspapers, writing in the Daily Express of Feb. 4, 1916, says : " It is almost impos- sible to open a Berlin newspaper in these days without coming across a bitter denunciation of the immorality of the people, the criminal activities of the ' lower orders/ the astounding depravity of the juvenile population, the indecency of theatrical productions, or the gross character of the literature which is offered for sale all over the city." APPENDIX G The following stories, which are told in the Report of the French Commission of Inquiry on German Atrocities, bear witness to the ingrained barbarity of some at least of the German soldiers: " In a suburb of Nomeny, a little town in the Meurthe and Moselle Department, a man named Vasse and his friends who were hidden in his cellar were driven out by the Germans, who set fire to the house, and who waited for the wretched refugees to come out like rats from a burning building. The first man, named Mentre, was shot on the doorstep, whilst his son Leon, carrying an eight-year-old sister, not being shot outright, a German soldier put the barrel of his gun to his head and blew out his brains. The Keiffer family then tried to escape the flames. The mother was wounded in the arm and shoulder. The father, a little boy of ten, and a little girl of three, were shot down. Their butchers continued firing as they lay on the ground. M. Keiffer received a second bullet in the forehead, 172 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY and his son had his head blown off. A man named Striffert and one of M. Vasse's sons were then massacred, while Mme. Mentre received three bullet wounds. A working man, M. Guillaume, was dragged into the street and shot. Last of all, a seventeen-year-old girl, Mile. Simonin, came out of the cellar with her three-year-old sister Jeanne in her arms. The baby's elbow was shot away by a bullet. The elder sister threw herself on the ground and pretended death. A soldier kicked her. Finally an officer put an end to this butchery and ordered the woman, still alive, to go to the French lines." " A man named Adnot, with his wife and four children, aged eleven, five, four and eighteen months, sought refuge in a cellar with a neighbour, Mme. X. Some days later the corpses of these unfortunate people were discovered lying in the middle of a pool of blood. M. Adnot was shot, and Mme. X. had a breast and right arm cut off. The little girl of eleven had her foot cut off. The boy of five had his throat cut. Mme. X. and the eleven-year-old child had been outraged before death." Many of the atrocious acts which have disgraced the German army were done in obedience to authoritative orders; and there were others which, though neither ordered nor formally sanctioned by authority, seem to have been tacitly permitted. But I cannot believe that such acts of wanton and purposeless cruelty as these stories record could have been either ordered or permitted by the officers in command. CHAPTER VII BETRAYED BY DOCILITY IN the summer of 1914 Germany made a sudden but long-premeditated spring at the throat of the civilized world. Her intention was to deal first with France and Russia, and, having " knocked these out/' to settle accounts with Britain and the British Empire. The turn of the United States and Latin America would come next. During her brief struggle with France, either Belgium or Swit- zerland would be absorbed, possibly both. During her struggle with the British Empire, the Balkan Kingdoms and Turkey would become her vassals. When the war was over, Austro-Hungary would have been placed in a position of economic serfdom to her ally, and therefore, though nominally inde- pendent, would have ceased to be an autonomous State. So would the small nations of Northern Europe Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The same or a worse fate would have befallen Italy. Mistress of Europe, America, and the British Empire, and enriched by the enormous indemnities which she would have exacted from her conquered enemies, Germany would then turn her arms against Japan and China, and would thus complete the conquest of the world. That the war which was to achieve these vast 173 174 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY results had been long premeditated is known to all who had studied the copious literature of Pan- Germanism, and followed the naval and military preparations of Germany, during the twenty years or so that preceded the outbreak of hostilities. That Germany chose her own time for beginning the war, that she made the assassination of the Austrian Archduke and Archduchess the pretext for action which had already been decided upon, and the date for which had already been fixed, is known to all who, like the German author of /' Accuse and the English author of The Twelve Days, have studied and collated the State Papers, Red, Blue, Yellow, Orange, White and Grey, issued by the various belligerent countries, and to all the readers of those two convincing digests. It is true that, in order to impose on his credulous subjects and persuade them that they were fighting for their hearths and homes, the German Emperor has always protested that the war was forced upon Germany by her aggressive neighbours, under the leadership of her jealous commercial rival England ; and it is even true that more than once he has called Heaven to witness that his hands were clean in this grave matter, that he had always laboured for peace while his malignant enemies were making them ready for battle, and that the responsibility for this terrible catastrophe rested on any shoulders but his. But these solemn disclaimers are meant for home consumption only. The obedient German will believe whatever he is told to believe. But in neutral countries, where men are free to look facts in the face and draw the necessary inferences from them, the plain fact that Germany was fully pre- BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 175 pared for the struggle, and that her enemies were so ill-prepared that even now, after eighteen months of fighting, they have scarcely got into their respec- tive strides, is accepted as a conclusive answer to the Kaiser's laboured attempts at self-exculpation. It is a relief to turn from his hypocritical whinings to the manly avowal of Germany's one honest journalist, Herr Maximilian Harden. On October 17, 1914, this enfant terrible of the German Press uttered and was allowed to utter the following memor- able words : " Let us drop our miserable attempts to excuse Germany's action. Let us have done with paltry abuse of the enemy. Not against our will, as a nation taken by surprise, did we hurl ourselves into this gigantic venture. We willed it, we had to will it. We do not stand before the judgment seat of Europe; we acknowledge no such jurisdiction. Our might shall create a new law in Europe. It is Germany that strikes. When she has conquered new dominions for her genius, then the priesthoods of all the Gods will praise the good War." i On the battlefield of the Marne Germany's tiger- spring miscarried. With the failure of her attempt to deal France a knock-out blow, it became pos- sible for the Entente Powers to summon a mighty ally to their aid Time. As the relief which Time brought, however slowly, to their arms 1 While the negotiations which preceded the war were in progress, Herr Maximilian Harden had said with character- istic candour : " Why not admit what is and must be true, namely, that between Vienna and Berlin everything was jointly prepared ? " A naive admission, this, of a vital truth which the Chancelleries of Vienna and Berlin had assiduously laboured to conceal ! 176 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY began to take effect, Germany realized that her dream of universal dominion was shattered, and that thenceforth she was fighting either for a Pyrrhic victory or for a barren draw. The verdict of history will almost certainly be that in losing the battle of the Marne Germany lost the war, lost it, not perhaps in the sense that thereafter she was doomed to look forward to final defeat, but in the sense of having failed, for good and all, to attain the end for which she drew the sword. Yet even before the battle of the Marne began, victory for Germany had been imperilled by England's entry into the war. What the battle of the Marne did, among other things, was to frus- trate Germany's attempt to separate England from her Allies by crushing her near neighbour, France. In the words of Mr. A. H. Pollen, the distinguished naval expert : " From the first their (the Germans) very great superiority on land was, at every point, manifest. Their object was to use this superiority to get an immediate decision against France, be- cause, as soon as Great Britain was in the war, France was the only one of the two Allies with which Great Britain could co-operate effectually. If France were crushed Germany would be dealing with two isolated enemies. Russia could not long have held out once the united Austro-German forces, undisturbed by a war in the west, could be concentrated against her." The battle of the Marne, then, was a decisive defeat for Germany, not only because it saved France, once and for all, from being overwhelmed by German arms, not only because it compelfed Germany to fight at full strength on two fronts BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 177 instead of, as she had hoped to do, after a brief cam- paign, on one only, but also, and more especially, because it made it possible for England, as the ally of France and enemy of Germany, to put forth her full strength by land as well as by sea. In other words, besides being in itself a decisive factor in Germany's provisional failure, the battle of the Marne gave full effect to another and equally decisive factor the entry of England into the war. It follows that, in order to understand why Ger- many, in spite of the overwhelming advantages which she possessed at the outbreak of hostilities, has so far failed to win the victory on which she had confidently reckoned, and which had to be won quickly if it was to be complete, we must ask our- selves two questions, why did England come into the war, and why did Germany lose the battle of the Marne? Before we attempt to answer these questions, let us ask ourselves a third. I have postulated the superior strength of Germany at the outbreak of hostilities. Is this postulate justified? If it is, why and how and in what degree was Germany stronger than her adversaries? That the odds were on her side when, in alliance with Austria, she challenged Russia and France to mortal combat, that she knew them to be on her side, and therefore expected an early decision in her favour, is proved by the spirit of assurance in which she " hurled " herself " into the gigantic venture/' England, France, and Russia went into the war reluctantly and with heavy hearts. Germany went into it with shouts of exultant joy. " It is a joy to live," said one of the leading Pan-German organs on N 178 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY August 3, 1914; "we have called for this hour with our most ardent prayers. At last the holy hour has struck ! The Russians, false and per- fidious up to the last; the French, flabby and sud- denly forgetful of their thirst for the revanche ; and England, coldly calculating and hesitating, whilst the German people is shrieking with delight." The German people had good ground for their confidence. All the winning cards seemed to be in their hands. ' The first phase of the war," says Mr. Pollen, " saw the German Allies enormously superior in numbers, and with a ratio of field guns, of siege guns, and, above all, of machine guns, far higher than that possessed by their opponents. They had the advantage of a long-considered plan and they chose their own moment for striking." They had the further advantage, Mr. Pollen might have added, of undivided counsels, of a central position, of a complete system of strategic rail- ways, and of immense and highly centralized manufacturing resources which could easily and immediately be made available for the equipment of their forces. In fine and in brief, Germany was ready for war. The Entente Powers were not. The German Allies " had the advantage of a long-considered plan, and they chose their own moment for striking." Of all the advantages with which they began the war, this was the greatest; for all their other advantages may be said to have been determined by this, and to have been under its full control. Superiority in numbers, in guns, in strategic railways, and in manufacturing resources was part of Germany's " long-considered plan " ; and the plan had been, long considered, and was BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 179 therefore fully thought out both in principle and in detail, because Germany had determined to strike at a moment of her own choosing. The words which I have emphasized deserve our closest attention. It is only by choosing its own time for beginning a war that a nation can be fully prepared for it. If a nation foresees that sooner or later a war with certain other nations will prob- ably come, and if it has determined that such a war shall come, the only way to be fully prepared for it is to resolve beforehand to begin it on a certain date. Otherwise the cost of preparing for it would be prohibitive. For not only would the cost of being always completely equipped for war, even if equipment never became obsolete, put an intolerable strain on the finances of any country, but also, owing to the rapid development of military science on its mechanical and industrial side, what was complete equipment at a given date would be incomplete equipment a year later, so that supple- mentary estimates on a large scale would be con- stantly called for. " No peaceful nations," says Mr. Belloc, " no nations not designing war at their own hour, lock up in armaments which may be rendered obsolete, or in equipment more extensive than the reasonable chances of a campaign may demand, the public resources which they can use on what they regard as more useful things. Such nations, to use a just metaphor, ' insure ' against war at what they think a reasonable rate. But if some one Government in Europe is anarchic in its morals, and purposes, while professing peace, to declare war at an hour and a day chosen by itself, it will obviously have an overwhelming advantage 180 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY in this respect. The energy and the money which it devotes to the single object of preparation cannot possibly be wasted, and, if the sudden aggression is not fixed too far ahead, will not run the risk of being sunk in obsolete weapons." In the summer of 1911, Germany, finding that there were strong financial objections to her allow- ing her quarrel with France over Morocco to develop into an open rupture, decided to wait till the summer of 1914 before beginning the " preven- tive war " against France and Russia to which she had so long looked forward. She accordingly spent those three years in what Mr. Belloc calls " determined and largely secret preparation." But the work of those three years did but crown and complete the work of the forty years that preceded them. As soon as she had crushed France in 1871, Germany began to prepare for the war which her humiliation and dismemberment of France had made probable, if not inevitable. When that war would come was doubtful, but that, sooner or later, it would come was practically certain. For, apart from the fact that France could scarcely be expected to acquiesce in the loss of her ravished provinces, Germany might plead that a war of conquest would some day or other be forced upon her by pressure from within, on the one hand, by the need for using the mighty instrument which she had fashioned and was ever perfecting, and which tended more and more to acquire an aggressive personality of its own, on the other hand, by the need for providing an outlet for the defiant dogma- tism of her over-docile people, and for distract- ing their minds from domestic politics and social BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 181 and political discontents. For all these reasons she looked forward to war to war on a great scale and against powerful enemies as an end for which she must make the fullest possible prepara- tion, and which she must begin at an hour of her own choosing if the labour of those years of peace was to be made effective and fruitful. During the years of preparation and pre-prepara- tion forty-three in all Germany meditated war, thought war, studied war, planned war in all its details. It is said that her output of books on the science and art of war is greater, and has long been greater, than that of all other nations put together. Not without reason did she regard herself as a pro- fessional in the art of war, and all other nations as amateurs. Having an autocratic Government and a State-controlled Press, she could make her pre- parations with a fixity of purpose, a secrecy, and a thoroughness which would be impossible in coun- tries where there was responsible Government and a free Press. Taking advantage of her central position, she constructed a complete system of strategic railways which would enable her to mobilize her army with baffling speed, to advance far into hostile territory before her enemies were ready to meet her, and, in the event of her having to fight simultaneously on two fronts, to throw her forces rapidly from side to side as well as from place to place, and so be in superior strength at every critical point in her battle line. With the same end in view, she gave great attention to the development of road traction. Unknown to her neighbours, she constructed mortars of unprece- dented calibre, and amassed immense quantities 182 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY of machine guns, both of which weapons, as she rightly divined, would play decisive parts in the coming war. Cannon, shells, rifles, cartridges, clothing, boots, and equipment of every kind she stored up in quantities which it would take many months of fighting on a vast scale to exhaust; and as her manufacturing industries were highly cen- tralized, and as their captains the inner ring of capitalists and manufacturers were in close touch with the Government, she had made full provision for replenishing her stores as they became ex- hausted. Nothing that forethought, ingenuity, and industry could provide had been forgotten or omitted. The docility of her rank-and-file had enabled the ruling minority to develop a capacity for mechanical organization which has never been equalled; and to the organization of her army and her military resources she had given the best of her brain-power, her energy, and her labour. Her central position and her alliance with Austria were assets of which she made full use. The two empires contain nearly half a million of square miles in the very heart of Europe. Their coasts are washed by three seas. Their material resources, especially in food-stuffs and minerals, are very great. With a population of 120,000,000, they can easily put 12,000,000 men of fighting age in the field. When the war broke out, they did not merely dispose of these vast numbers. They were able to train, arm, and equip them, and send them into the fighting line with a rapidity which, if they chose their own time for beginning the war, would enable them to overwhelm their enemies, first on one front and then on the other. The alliance BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 183 between the two countries was, in the nature of things, closer and more effective than that which united the three Entente Powers. Germany and Austria are adjoining countries. The ruling classes in Austria 1 are Germans. The two countries have many interests in common, especially in the face of a hostile Russia. But in material strength, in administrative capacity, and in military organiza- tion Austria is far inferior to Germany; and she has what I may call a much weaker personality. Hence it was certain that, when the two countries were fighting against a common enemy, Austria would be dominated by Germany, and that the joint resources of the two countries would therefore be controlled by a single will. With the Entente Powers it was different. Separated as they are from one another by hostile territory or by the " estranging sea," it was inevitable that each of the three countries should have independent con- trol of its own resources, and carry out its own plan of campaign. Co-operation between them was, of course, possible, but co-ordination of their aims and efforts was rendered very difficult, not only by the partial divergence of their respective in- terests, but also by the remoteness of Russia from the Western Powers and the difficulty of communi- cating with her, especially after Germany had dragged Turkey into the quarrel. So many win- ning cards were in the hands of the Central Powers that, even if they had drifted into war or been forced into it, they would have opened the 1 In Austria, not in Hungary. But in their hostility to Russia and to Slav pretensions generally, the Magyars are more German than the Germans themselves. 184 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY campaign with nearly everything in their favour. By striking at the precise moment which they had selected beforehand and carefully prepared for, they more than doubled their advantages. Why, then, did Germany fail to win the speedy victory on which she had reckoned with confidence, and not without good reason? Chiefly, I think, because, owing to certain defects in the national character, she made miscalculations at the outset, the consequences of which are with her still. Of the nature and origin of those defects of character I have already spoken. An ultra-docile people will be ruled, of inner necessity, by an arrogant and dogmatic minority ; and the arrogance and dogma- tism of that minority will gradually filter down through all social strata, spreading laterally as they descend, till the whole nation has become infected with their poison. The Nietzschean ethical philo- sophy, which recognizes one morality for masters and another for slaves, is based on ignorance of human nature. It is for their own sakes, even more than for the sake of the oppressed and afflicted, that men become compassionate and merciful. And the slave is so far from asking for a new morality to be framed in his interests, that he will go out of his way to make the morality of his master his model. Invest him with brief and partial authority, and he will bully his underlings worse than he has been bullied himself. Invite him to lay down the law, and he will out-dogmatize the dogmatist whose word is his law and at whose voice he trembles. The explanation of this pheno- menon is simple. If imitativeness were not of the BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 185 essence of docility, the docile would be drilled and disciplined in vain. For their function is to defer to authority ; and to imitate an example is an even surer proof of deference than to obey a command. The division of a people into masters and slaves is to be deprecated for many reasons; but chiefly because the vices the magisterial vices of the masters will, sooner or later, determine the moral ideals of the whole community. This is what is happening in Germany. Taken very seriously by the ultra-docile multitude, the ruling castes and classes have got into the way of taking themselves very seriously, of making them- selves their own ideal, of looking at things exclu- sively from their own point of view. Hence their inordinate self-esteem; hence their utter lack of imaginative sympathy, defects which, owing to the ascendancy of " the State " and its officers and officials over the nation, have become central features of the national character. These defects are the rocks on which Germany's scheme of self- aggrandisement has split and foundered. For, on the one hand, owing to her lack of imaginative sympathy, she gravely miscalculated the probable action of her enemies ; and on the other hand, owing to her inordinate self-esteem, she gravely under- estimated their patriotic spirit and moral resources. For the moment I have separated the two sources of Germany's miscalculation. In reality they readily coalesce into one. The self-esteem which makes a man's thoughts and interests centre in himself, and prevents him from looking at things from any other point of view, has lack of imagina- tive sympathy as its necessary counterpart. If 186 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY Germany, as " The Day " drew near, misinterpreted the motives and miscalculated the policy of the Entente Powers, the chief reason was that she had persistently under-valued their respective charac- ters. Even the children in her schools had been taught to despise her future enemies as well as to hate them. It is said that on the morning of the day of Waterloo, Napoleon, when he saw Welling- ton's army drawn up before him, told the generals on his staff that an easy victory awaited him; and that when the generals, who had learnt to know and respect the British soldiers, warned him against under-rating them, he angrily reiterated his con- viction that they were bad soldiers led by a bad general, and that the coming battle would be an "affaire d'un dejeuner." The arrogance of Ger- many, on the eve of the Titan\ic struggle which she had willed and provoked, outdid that of Napo- leon. And what adds to its significance is that it was the outcome of genuine, heartfelt contempt. There was no pose about it, no idle bluster. The Entente nations were not German; and their ways were not the ways of Germany. What more need be said? Had they been her friends, it would not have been necessary for her to take their respective measures. As they had crossed her path, she measured them, one and all measured them by the standard of her own strength and greatness and pronounced them to be unworthy of her steel. And she accepted this verdict as final. The infe- riority of her rivals was to her a self-evident truth. In the insanity of her self-idealization, she seriously believed that any divergence from the path of her " Kultur " was a declension from human worth. BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 187 We have seen that the Pan-German movement was mainly supported by the " intellectuals " of Germany and German Austria. In the literature of Pan-Germanism contempt of the Entente Powers knows no limits. "It is difficult to say," writes Mr. E. B. Osborn of the " German patriot/' " which of the Allied nations seems most contemptible in his spectacled eyes. To him the English are a stupid and unstable mob, having no thought for anything save the panem et circenses (the cheap breakfast-table and professional football), which are paid for out of wealth procured by the easy conquest of uncivilized races in every part of the world. He looks upon the French as a used-up and neurotic crowd, a feminine people, moreover, who are manifestly incapable of doing anything more for the world's civilization. And Russia, he believes, is occupied by a horde of mere animals ' apes,' according to Treitschke whose bestiality is concealed under a thin veneering of man-like manners." The military strength of the Allies was on a par, when Pan-Germanism estimated it, with their moral worth. " The French," said the Berliner Post of April 21, 1913, " have sunk to so low a level in all the virtues of a strong and proud nation that from the military standpoint it must be regarded as a doubtful pleasure to have to fight them." " The English," said a German general, on the eve of the battle of the Marne, to a French lady who was his unwilling hostess, " are without the least importance on land; and as for the Russians, they simply do not know what an army is." 1 1 Compare footnote to p. 91. 188 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY It was in this spirit of unbounded self-confidence that Germany awaited the fateful " Day." In her choice of " the Day " she had been guided, in the main, by the state of her naval and military pre- parations; but so far as the domestic affairs of her enemies were concerned, she could not possibly have made a happier choice. It looked as if For- tune, according to her wont, had resolved to favour the bold. France was in the throes of social and political convulsions. The internal peace of Russia was threatened by an organized strike on a vast scale. Ireland seemed to be on the brink of a civil war, the mere possibility of which was tearing Great Britain asunder. When Germany sent her ultimatum to Russia, the patriotism of each of the three countries was put to a severe and sudden test. How did it stand the test? That Germany expected it to fail can scarcely be doubted. For Germany believed it was one of the illusions of her egoism that she, alone among the nations, knew what patriotism really meant. From her own point of view she was right, as she usually is. In Germany patriotism is compulsory rather than spontaneous, and is largely compounded of national selfishness, national self-satisfaction, and ill-will towards the rest of the world. In the Entente countries the people are not drilled and disciplined into patriotism. Nor are they taught, in school and out of school, to magnify themselves and belittle their neighbours. In the German sense of the word, then, they are not patriotic. But they have a spontaneous patriotism of their own, which may at times burn low and even seem to die down into cinders and ashes, but which is ready, on all BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 189 great occasions, to break into a blaze. While the shadow of war was approaching, the fire of patriot- ism, choked by party strife, was burning low in each of the three countries. When Germany drew her sword, it leaped up, unbidden, in an ardent flame. Germany had reckoned that Russia would either yield to her peremptory demand for de- mobilization, and so give her a bloodless triumph, or, if she elected to fight, would be paralysed by inward strife. She had reckoned that France, if drawn into the quarrel, would come into it a dis- tracted and disunited country. Above all, she had reckoned that England, reluctant to risk her material prosperity, and demoralized by the menace of civil war, would either keep outside the arena of battle, or not enter it until it was too late. All these miscalculations miscarried. The moment Germany laid her hand on the sword-hilt, Russia became a united country, animated by a single will. So did France. The moment Germany, in violation of a solemn treaty, invaded Belgium, England, to her undisguised astonishment, declared war against her. The entry of England into the war was a bitter disappointment to Germany. A heavy counter- weight was at once thrown into the scales. A great empire, with the strongest navy in the world and with vast financial and industrial resources, became her enemy. The seas of the world, which she had intended to close against France and Russia, were closed against herself. Her great navy, on which she had spent untold sums of money, was shut up in its canals and harbours. Her sea-borne commerce was strangled. It became 190 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY possible for the armies of France to be reinforced and for Russia to be equipped and financed. What made the blow the heavier was that it was wholly unexpected. Germany had reckoned with absolute confidence on England's neutrality, and had made her plans accordingly. She had not even sent her cruisers to haunt the great trade-routes of our com- merce and waylay our ships. In the blindness of her contemptuous arrogance, she had misread the character and miscalculated the action of a great people, and she had to pay the penalty of her errors. She had, of course, foreseen that some day or other she would cross swords with England. In- deed, it was her fixed intention, in the fulness of time, to force a quarrel on this country, which she hated above all other countries hated with the rancorous hatred of envy. And she reckoned that, when the day came, the British Empire, at the first blast of the war-trumpet, would fall to pieces. For, judging things according to her wont by her own standard, and being unable to conceive of any bond of political union but that of force, she took for granted that the British Empire was forcibly held together; and as the military strength of England was obviously " contemptible," she con- cluded that the force which held the empire together was too weak to stand the strain of a great war. But here again her calculations miscarried. Far from falling to pieces, the empire, apart from a weak rising in South Africa, which was speedily suppressed, rallied, like a single people, round the mother country, and made her cause its own. Thus the first result of Germany's invasion of BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 191 Belgium was that she arrayed against herself the strength and latent resources, not of England only, but of the whole British Empire. In the early days of the war a German newspaper called Der Tag cried, in unison with the general chorus of national exultation : " O Lord God, how delightful are these days ! " A few months later it wrote as follows : " So many of our calculations have deceived us. We expected that British India would rise when the first shot was fired in Europe, but in reality thousands of Indians came to fight with the British against us. We anticipated that the whole British Empire would be torn to pieces, but the colonies appear to be closer united than ever with the mother country. We expected a triumphant rebellion in South Africa, yet it turned out nothing but a failure. We expected trouble in Ireland, but instead she sent her best soldiers against us. We anticipated that the party of ' peace at any price ' would be dominant in England, but it melted away in the ardour to fight against Germany. We reckoned that England was de- generate and incapable of placing any weight in the scale, yet she seems to be our principal enemy. The same has been the case with France and Russia. We thought that France was depraved and divided, and we find that they are formidable opponents. We believed that the Russian people were far too discontented to fight for their Government, and we made our plans on the supposition of a rapid collapse of Russia, but instead she mobilized her millions quickly and well, and her people are full of enthusiasm and their power is crushing. Those who led us into all those mistakes and 192 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY miscalculations have laid upon themselves a heavy responsibility." A still heavier responsibility, Der Tag might have added, rests on the people which, in the blindness of its docility, trusted itself and its destinies, wholly and unreservedly, to the ruling caste which it mis- called " the State," and shirked the responsibility of studying facts, thinking out problems, and facing possibilities for itself. I have said that two things came between Ger- many and the early and complete victory on which she counted, the entry of England into the war and the battle of the Marne. The entry of England into the war was deliberately, though, of course, not intentionally, provoked by Germany, who, being fully convinced that the English people were too prosperous, too unad venturous, and, for the moment, too distracted to take up arms, did the one thing which, unless they were wedded to peace at any price, was certain to provoke them to fight. That one thing was to invade Belgium. In plan- ning and in carrying out this invasion, Germany made not one miscalculation, but three. She mis- read the English character. She misread the spirit of the Belgian people. And she misread the temper of all her enemies. We have dealt with the first of her miscalcula- tions. Let us consider the second and the third. Germany misread the spirit of the Belgian people. With France as her objective, she demanded a free passage for her forces through Belgian territory. The weakness of Belgium, as a military Power, was notorious; and Germany felt so sure that her BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 193 demand would be complied with, that she scarcely contemplated the possibility of a refusal. Yet Belgium had the temerity to offer armed resistance to the invading legions. This action, which was totally unexpected, upset Germany's plans. It had been her intention to pass rapidly through Belgian territory a lightly equipped and highly mobile force in order to impede the French mobilization, which she knew would be slower than her own, impede it so effectively that the armies of France would be overwhelmed before they were fully pre- pared to give battle. The resistance which Belgium offered delayed the German advance for a few days only; but those days were precious to France. They gave time for her armies to be fully mobilized, and for a small but highly trained British force to come to her aid. As it was, Germany scored heavily by her treacherous invasion of Belgium; but the advantage that she gained would have been trebled if Belgium had played the coward, as Germany, in her profound ignorance of human nature, expected her to do. In the fury of her disappointment, the hand of Germany fell heavily on Belgium. Having over- whelmed her by force of numbers and weight of metal, she devastated her towns and villages and massacred her people, hoping thereby both to punish her puny adversary and to terrorize all her enemies. This was the third, and not the least, of her miscalculations. Having always terrorized her own subjects into obedience, she took for granted that she could terrorize her enemies into submis- sion. But, instead of terrorizing them, she hardened their hearts against her, and aroused in them a o 194 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY spirit of righteous anger and stern resolution which nothing could shake or abate. At first the invading flood that poured through Belgium swept everything before it. Then came the hour when the Franco-British army stood at bay on the battlefield of the Marne. The history of that great and confused battle has yet to be written ; and it is, I believe, still in dispute whether it was on the right wing or the left wing or in the centre that the German army first gave way. But while we are waiting for the authoritative history of the battle, -we can give a tentative and provisional answer to the question that confronts us : Why did Germany lose the battle which, with her overwhelming superiority in numbers and still greater superiority in heavy artillery and machine-guns, she had every reason to expect to win? She lost it because Belgium unexpectedly resisted her vanguard, and so gave France time to complete the mobilization of her forces ; because England unexpectedly came into the war and sent an army to Belgium, which, though small, played an honourable part both in the great retreat and the great advance; because she had seriously under -rated the fighting qualities of the Allies, thinking, for example, when she made her final effort, that the French armies were demoralized and that the British force had ceased to count ; because her barbarities in Belgium and in France had strengthened, instead of weakening, the resolu- tion of the enemy, had steeled his temper and nerved his arm. In these matters Germany was the victim of her own miscalculations, of her fundamental inability to read other hearts and other minds. BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 195 But these were not the only causes of her failure. In spite of her miscalculations, with all their dis- astrous consequences, she expected to win the decisive battle, and she seemed to be justified in doing so. That she failed was due to defects which were military even more than national the defects of her military qualities the over-perfection of her organization, which made her army a machine and paralysed initiative by trying to provide beforehand for every possible contingency; the over-perfection of her drill, which turned her soldiers into automata; the over-perfection of her discipline, which crushed their spontaneity, weak- ened their self-reliance, and deadened their elan. The inability of her infantry to attack in open formation exposed her armies to needlessly heavy losses, and so neutralized the advantage of their superior numbers. Their " mass courage " was worthy of all praise; but their reluctance to charge home with the bayonet often robbed them of victory when it seemed to be within their grasp. At Le Cateau, for example, where they were three to one in men and five to one in guns, they ought to have enveloped and destroyed the British force that faced them in sheer desperation; and had they done so, they might well have " turned " and crushed the left wing of the Allies. I say these things under correction; but I am challenged by facts which seem to be inexplicable on other grounds. Superior in fighting strength in the ratio of eight to five, incalculably superior in the machinery of warfare, convinced of its own in- vincibility, flushed with a series of successes which seemed to justify its proud self-confidence, with a 196 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY victory in sight which, if achieved, would be final, the flower of the Germany army met in open battle the forces which it had driven before it night and day for nearly a fortnight, and which had at last perforce turned to bay, and, after a week of desper- ate fighting, fell back before its despised adver- saries, baulked of the victory to which there was to be no to-morrow, out-generalled, out-manoeuvred, and above all outfought. Faced by these facts, the historian of the future will, I think, conclude that the inferior moral of an over-disciplined army was the ultimately decisive factor in the defeat which shattered Germany's dream of worldwide empire. And I think he will assign the same cause to her subsequent failure in Flanders, when, less ambitious, but with even greater odds in her favour, she strove in vain to break the thin, un- fortified line of the Allies which stretched from the Yser mouth to Arras, blocking the roads to Dunkirk and Calais, and baffling her scheme of driving in a wedge between England and France. I have not attempted to forecast the issue of the present struggle. I have contented myself with trying to account for one indisputable fact, the failure of Germany to overwhelm France in the earlier stages of the war, a failure which robbed her, for good and all, of the supreme prize for which she had unsheathed her sword. And I have sug- gested that the causes of her failure were those defects of character which have both expressed themselves in and been intensified by the ultra- docility of her people, the arrogance, not of her rulers only, but of the nation as a whole, which has made her overrate her own strength and resolu- BETRAYED BY DOCILITY 197 tion and underrate the strength and resolution of her enemies; the want of imaginative sympathy which, by sealing to her the deeper springs of human action, has led her to make many miscalculations and false moves; and the relatively low moral of her soldiers, devitalized and mechanicalized by too much organization, too much discipline, and too much drill. CHAPTER VIII THE MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY IN the war which is now being waged twelve sove- reign powers are taking part. Some of these powers have great colonial empires. The aggregate area of the belligerent countries is nearly 30,000,000 square miles, and the aggregate population is not less than 900,000,000 men. In other words, more than half the land area and more than half the population of the world are involved in the war. The 900,000,000 men belong to five out of the six inhabited continents and to all the great races of mankind white, yellow, red, brown, black. They speak at least fifty languages. Their armies are reckoned by millions rather than by thousands. Their navies comprise nine-tenths of the fighting ships of the world. They are spending money at the rate of more than 100,000,000 a week. And their losses in killed, wounded, missing, and disabled by sickness are estimated by competent authorities at not less than 30,000 men per day. This is a Titanic struggle, by many degrees the greatest that the world has yet known. In less than a year more money has been spent and more lives have been lost than in the whole of the Napoleonic wars. What is at stake? That great material interests greater than have ever been fought for are at stake is indisputable. But, 198 MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY 199 great as they are, I doubt if they are of primary importance. There are writers who contend that Germany embarked on the war with the full in- tention of enriching herself by plundering the world. It is possible that she had that end in view. It is possible that she presented it to herself as one of the ends which war was to help her to attain. But I do not think it was the real object of her heart's desire. The supreme end for which she is fighting is one which she has perhaps only dimly realized, but which is not the less real on that account. She is fighting in order to force herself and her ideal of life on a reluctant world. The plunder of the reluctant world is a matter of secondary importance. By enriching herself at the expense of other nations, by making them tributary to herself in commerce and finance, she will be the better able to make them tributary to her " Kultur " and her " lust of sway." But the tribute which she wishes to exact from them is, first and foremost, a quasi-spiritual tribute recognition of the supre- macy of her ideal of life. And that ideal is in itself a demand for submission, a " will to power." It is the ideal of dogmatism lording it over docility, of authority descending from an autocracy, through a military caste and a bureaucracy, to the rank and file of the nation, and, through the rank and file of the nation, to an ever- widening circle of subject peoples, till the whole human race should at last come under its control. It is the ideal of the egoist who seeks to affirm himself by trampling on others, of the vampire who seeks to vitalize himself by exhausting the life-blood of others. It is an ideal which, being anti-human and in open conflict with 200 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY man's instinct to live, must be fought for with fire and sword and can propagate itself in no other way. For to recognize the supremacy of the German ideal of life is to recognize the supremacy of Germany herself. According to Mommsen, it was commercial jeal- ousy that moved Rome to destroy Carthage. But I think that the formula " delenda est Carthago " had a deeper and obscurer origin than that. Com- mercial jealousy counted for something, no doubt. Our motives to action are always subtle and complex, and motives which we would consciously repudiate often interweave themselves with those by which we profess, and perhaps honestly believe ourselves, to be actuated. I do not know what reasons Cato gave for advocating the destruction of Carthage; but I feel sure that he and many of his followers were influenced by the secret conviction that there was not room in the Mediterranean world for the Roman and the Carthaginian ideals of life. In like manner I cannot but think that, though Germany may have been jealous of our world-empire and commercial and financial prosperity, and may have been " out for plunder," as the saying is, the root of her antipathy to this country is her secret con- viction that there is not room in the world for her and our ideals of life. It is certainly a significant fact that from the beginning of the war Germany has singled out England as her arch-enemy, and has poured out on her a five-fold portion of the national hatred with which her " fangs o'er flow." Why has she done this? Chiefly, I think, because she has felt, intuitively and subconsciously, that the English ideal of life is, of inner necessity, at war with her own. It is true that her ideal of life does MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY 201 not admit of any rival, that if it is to have its way it must, as it were, monopolize the world. But if it cannot tolerate a rival ideal, still less can it tolerate one which is an abiding protest itself. The " delenda est Britannia " of the Pan-German Catos is the expression of a deep-seated feeling that there is an even deadlier feud between their country and ours in the world of ideas and ideals, than in the world of commerce and finance. The German ideal of life may be set forth in the homely words, " Do what I tell you/' The nation as a whole has accepted this as its ideal, the few who command and also the many who obey. " Do what I tell you " is what the German teacher says to the pupil, what the German officer says to the soldier, what the German official says to the citizen, what the German Government says to the people, what the German people would like to say to the rest of the world. To repeat the formula is the pride and joy of German dogmatism, the cherished dream of German docility. This attitude is the secret of Germany's strength; for an obedient people, swayed by a single will, is in command of all the sources of strength except those which are purely spiritual. It is also the secret of Germany's weakness; for the supreme sources of strength are purely spiritual, and the path to them is therefore hidden from egoism. And " Do what I tell you " is the watchword of the egoist, the watchword of him who lives in order to impose himself and his ways and works on his fellow-men, who regards divergence from his adopted path as heresy, and resistance to his will as crime. If the German ideal is "Do what I tell you," 202 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY the English ideal is " Live and let live." This is a familiar and well-worn maxim, but it embodies a profound philosophy of life. We are not a nation of thinkers. Theorizing about great matters is not in our line. I mean by this that we do not find it easy to work our way, by the conscious exercise of thought, to large conceptions of life and destiny, and that we have not much inclination to do so. But in our own blind, blundering, instinctive, sub- conscious way we do sometimes, under the stress and guidance of practical experience, arrive at truth. And when we made " Live and let live " our motto, we arrived at a great and vital truth. How did we feel our way to it ? The typical Englishman is, as we all know, a man of inde- pendent character. He rebels against dictation, resents interference, and claims, almost as a right, to be free to order his own goings. How he acquired these characteristics I will not turn aside to inquire. That he possesses them and that they reflect his philosophy of life is, I think, undeniable. Now the man of independent character discovers, sooner or later, that, if he is to retain his independence, he must observe one condition : he must respect the independence of others. He must live and let live. If he will not do this, if he msists on being intolerant as well as independent, he will have to fight unceasingly for his own hand ; and then there will be social chaos. The lesson is not easy to learn, and it took us some time to learn it. Our Pro- testants, who rebelled against the dogmatism of Rome, became intolerant dogmatists when they got the upper hand. So did the Independents, who rebelled against the despotic authority of the MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY 203 Church of England. The tyranny of the Long Parliament became more oppressive than that of Charles I. We lost the thirteen American colonies because, in defiance of one of our cherished principles, we levied taxes on them instead of waiting for them to tax themselves. For many generations we systematically coerced Ireland instead of trying to conciliate her. But we learned the lesson at last ; and it is now standing us in good stead. For, because we are willing to let live and do not insist on monopolizing life for ourselves, we have entered into alliance with the greatest of all world-powers the instinct to live. " I want to live my own life," says each of us in his heart of hearts, if and so far as he is truly alive. " I want to live my own life," says each nation in its heart of hearts, if and so far as it is truly alive. This desire may easily be misinterpreted by those who feel it, and, when misinterpreted, may give rise to undue regard for one's rights and interests and disregard of the rights and interests of others. But when we get to the bottom of the desire we find that it is not really selfish ; that, on the contrary, it is the desire to realize the ideal of " true manhood " in one's own way the only way in which the individual man or the individual nation can hope to realize it ; that it is the desire of the individual to escape from his lower self by the only path which is open to him, to develop his higher self along the only lines which Nature has marked out for him. To say No to this desire is the self-imposed mission of Germany. " You shall not live youj own life," says the German Military Staff to the individual soldier. " You shall not live your own life," says 204 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY the German State to the individual citizen. ' You shall live the life that I prescribe for you. You shall surrender your individuality. You shall become the creature of my will." Will not Germany say the same to each individual people when, if ever, she wields " the sceptre of the Universe " ? We need not discuss this question on a priori grounds. History has answered it. For more than a hundred years Prussia, the paramount power in Germany, has ruled the Poles of West Prussia and Posen. For nearly fifty years she has ruled the Danes of North Schleswig. For more than forty years she has ruled de facto, if not de jure, the people of Alsace- Lorraine. In each case she has tried by coercive measures to discipline and Prussianize the subject peoples. In each case she has failed in her attempt, and has earned the deep and undying resentment of the people whose desire for self-realization she has thwarted and done her best to suppress. To say Yes to the desire for self-realization, whether in the individual or in a people, is the mission of England. I will not call it a self-imposed mission, for England does not readily impose missions on herself. Of all nations she is perhaps the least conscious and the most instinctive, 1 and 1 " A celebrated Frenchman," says a reviewer in the Westminster Gazette, " contrasting the English with the Latin races, said once to the present writer : ' The super- ficial ideas of the English are plain and common ; their latent ideas are profound and subtle/ He proceeded to illustrate from English law and history . . . from their (the English people's) instinctive grasp of the paradox, at the base of their Empire, that power was gained by re- jecting dominion ; from their understanding of the spiritual value of tolerance, their instinctive perception of the general interest when it conflicted with the particular." MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY 205 in this, as in other matters, she has allowed her instincts, evolving themselves in response to the pressure and stimulus of experience, to control her policy and her practice. It is to this tendency to rely on instinct rather than on theory, that England owes her position among the nations; for when religious, moral, social, and political considerations come into play, the environment becomes so com- plex, and the forces at work in it so occult and subtle, that theory, with its schemes, systems, and rules, proves unequal to the task that confronts it, and only the instinctive, intuitive side of one can deal with the problems that present themselves for solution. He who is guided by his instincts is always learning from experience ; for, even if he should consciously rebel against its teaching, its steady, relentless pressure would insensibly influence his inner life, so that in following his instincts he would, unknown to himself, have received and laid to heart the lessons which his reason, or perhaps his prejudice, had rejected. The theorist, on the other hand, entrenched behind his systems, is proof against the pressure of experience; and if the facts and laws of Nature refuse to fit into his scheme of life, instead of modifying the latter to meet their criticism, he tries " to hack a way through " them for it, in defiance of their silent protest. I have said that a profound philosophy of life underlies the well-worn maxim " Live and let live." Tolerance of the ways and wishes of others may seem a small and simple thing ; but it involves a triumph over self which means much and goes far. For he who has achieved that triumph has entered, sympathetically and imaginatively, into 206 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY the lives of others ; he has adopted a human instead of an individual standpoint ; he has learnt to trust Nature even when her current flows in unfamiliar channels; he has realized that " God fulfils Himself in many ways " and that the " blue sky bends over all " ; and he has done all these things with- out knowing that he was doing any of them. And the consequences of tolerance are as far- reaching as its underlying principle is deep and sound. It provides for the diffusion of freedom; and it is only in the atmosphere of freedom that the self- development which is of the essence of life is pos- sible. While dogmatism is striving after a barren uniformity, tolerance makes for unity in diversity, and therefore for vital progress. It prepares the way for the outgrowth of comradeship, of good-fellow- ship, of co-operation, of international law and morality, of " the enthusiasm of humanity," of peace and good-will among the peoples of the earth. The trust in Nature which is at the heart of it keeps us in touch with the infinite and the ideal, and throws open to us all the resources and possibilities of the Universe. And if it cannot provide us off-hand with the true criterion of reality and the true standard of value, it can at least tell us where these are to be found. Above all, the tolerance which lets others live reacts on him who practises it, and at once quickens and widens his life. If we would live, in the true sense of the word, we must let live. Otherwise our own life will be strangled in the coils of an ever-narrow- ing self. He who wantonly encroaches on freedom imprisons himself behind the walls which he has built for others. He who lets live widens the scope MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY 207 of his own life by going out by himself into the lives of others. Even in the sphere of world-politics the ideal of " Live and let live " is an inexhaustible source of strength. This could not well be otherwise, for the head-springs of strength, as of life, are spiritual. Our bitter enemy, Treitschke, who hated us for many reasons, hated us first and foremost because we had a great empire, but had not, as far as he could see, the power to maintain it. By power Treitschke meant, I imagine, military power trained soldiers and munitions of war. In power of that kind, we are, it must be admitted, far inferior to Germany. But we have power of another kind which Treitschke, who looked at things from the standpoint of German militarism, was unable to discern. We had, and have, an unfailing source of power in our homely ideal of " Live and let live." To this ideal we owe many things. We owe to it our great Empire, which would have fallen to pieces long ago if "Do what I tell you " had been our motto. We owe to it that when the war broke out, our Empire rallied round us as if it were a single people. We owe to it what is best and most helpful in our social and political life, the readiness to compromise which makes political progress possible, the underlying tolerance which sooner or later heals all quarrels and effaces all scars, the spirit of comradeship which can on occasion unite all classes and parties in bonds of brotherhood, in defiance of the caste feeling which is part of our inheritance from feudalism. How our ideal serves us in the region of imperial politics, and how difficult it is for a German to 208 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY appreciate or even understand it, the following extract from an interesting book l which has recently appeared makes sufficiently clear. " About five years after the end of the Boer War," says the writer, " a German lady who was dining at Court drew me aside after dinner. ' To-day/ she said, ' I have been talking to a German gentleman who has been living in your Orange Free State, or whatever you call it; and he tells me that the Boers are quite content now to be under your Government they do not want to change back again.' " ' Are they? ' I said. ' Is he quite sure? ' ' Oh quite, quite certain. He knows. He is a German. They know he is a German. They tell him the truth. He says they are absolutely satisfied. Now tell me : how do you manage it ? And with so few soldiers, I am told hardly any at all. How do you do it ? In five years ! And look at us in Elsass-Lothringen. We don't know how to satisfy them. They will never be satisfied. We are always in fear of war. Tell us your secret . ' She laid her hand on my arm and looked at me intently, as though she could surprise the secret out of me. " ' Oh, I don't know/ I said lamely. ' You see, we've had a lot of practice at governing, and made an awful lot of mistakes; I suppose that is one reason. So we know what are the kind of things that people won't stand. And we let them a good deal alone afterwards, and play cricket and foot- ball with them, and things of that kind; and we let them vote the same as the rest of us and er well, we don't treat them any different from the rest, as far as I can make out just let them alone 1 Memoirs of the Kaiser's Court, by Mrs. Anne Topham. MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY 209 to conspire or do as they like and then if they know that they can they don't want to. Then our Tommies our soldiers are very good too ; they're not brought up to be so patriotic as yours so, of course, it's less galling : they'd just as soon chum up with the enemy afterwards as not. . . . Well, I don't know, I'm sure. . . .' " ' Cricket and football,' the lady murmured, ' and not too patriotic, and a vote, and let them conspire if they want to, and the soldiers are chummy. Ach ! we cannot do that. It is a matter of national temperament, I suppose; but it is sad, very sad. Here in five years you pacify your enemy, and in forty years we have not begun to pacify ours : it is a constant fear a constant terror one expects every day to hear that war has broken out. And you will not tell us your secret. How do you learn to govern like this ? No, it's impossible ! It must be, as I said, national temperament ! ' " She sighed and cast her eyes upward and walked away looking troubled." Our authoress might have explained things more briefly by saying to the German lady : " You coerce : We let live." In her own way, however, she told the desired secret; but the German lady could not take it in. Even if you could convince a German that by letting live he would conciliate his enemies, whereas by coercing them he would harden their hearts and stiffen their backs, you would not shake his faith in the policy of coercion. The teaching of experience is lost on the dogmatist. " Ach, we cannot do that," is his answer to every criticism and every suggestion. To admit that he has made a mistake is abhorrent to his nature. If p 210 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY he loses faith in himself he is lost and helpless ; for the stars of heaven are hidden from him by the blindness of his self-esteem, and there is no magnetic pole for his compass to obey but that of his own self-will. What is significant in the dialogue that I have quoted is the admission on the part of a German that England knows how to conciliate the peoples that she governs. The war has already proved that in " letting live " lies the secret which the German lady could neither guess nor understand. Why did our Empire, instead of falling to pieces on the outbreak of war, as Germany had expected, rush to our aid with almost unanimous enthusiasm ? Because we had allowed the various peoples that belonged to it to live their own lives and realize their own ideals ; because in each case we had gone as far in the direction of giving freedom as seemed to be compatible with the maintenance of order. 1 Our colonies and dependencies might have grievances of their own against us; but when it came to a choice between our King and the German Kaiser, they did not hesitate for a moment; they rallied like one nation to our and their flag. In this crisis our ideal is worth much to us. It might be possible to estimate its value in terms of millions of pounds and thousands of men. But it is through its control of what Bismarck called 1 These are general statements to which exception may well be taken. In some cases, in our desire to maintain order, we have undoubtedly miscalculated the margin of safety. But these are errors of judgment which time may be trusted to correct, if it has not already done so. In any case, our rule, even when it is most oppressive, is humane and sympathetic, compared with that of Prussia over her subject peoples. MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY 211 the imponderabilia that it helps us most. Thanks to it, all the tendencies of human nature which centre in the instinct to live have ranged themselves on our side. To this instinct, which animates and sustains all our Allies and all parts of our Empire as well as ourselves, Germany opposes the instinct to dominate, the " will to power." ' The will to power. ' ' It was through this formula that Nietzsche, the brilliant but erratic poet-thinker, who disliked the Prussianized Germany of his later years and despised her culture, was fated to become her evil genius. As we all know, however little else we may know about him, Nietzsche denned life as the " will to power." But he omitted to define power. What did he mean by the word? Words have associations, the outcome of centuries of usage, which cling to them and of which they cannot easily rid themselves; and the word power, in Nietzsche's formula, when interpreted in the light of some of his other sayings, suggests to most minds, as it has certainly done to the German, dominion over others. It is true, as has been already suggested, that there is a higher kind of power which is to be gained by rejecting dominion, by letting live. It is true that sympathy, tolerance, and self-effacement are mightier forces, that they get their way more readily, that they disarm op- position more effectively, than harshness, intolerance, and self-assertion. It is true that " love hath readier will than fear." But these ideas are foreign to the German way of thinking, and they do not seem to have risen above the horizon even of Nietzsche's imaginative thought. For him the " will to power " meant, for the German nation it 212 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY still means, the will to dominate others. But the exercise of dominion over others, when regarded as an end in itself, tends, as we have seen, to arrest growth and in the last resort to strangle life. Are we, then, to define life as the will to strangle life ? Surely not : if we are to define life in terms of will and life, will it not be nearer the truth to say that life is the will to ampler life, in other words that growth is of its essence? The instinct to live, then, is the instinct to grow, to live more fully and really, to expand and deepen life. To this instinct, which is on our side, Germany opposes the will to dominate others, the will to strangle life. This, then, is the inner meaning of the Titanic struggle that is now convulsing the world. The instinct to live is confronted by the instinct to dominate, the will to expand life by the will to strangle life. Sixty years ago, Dr. Russell, the famous war-correspondent, described the typical Bulgarian in the following words : " He is a short, well-made and handsome man with finely shaped features, and large dark eyes, but for all that there is a dull, dejected look about him which rivets the attention. There is no speculation in the orbs which gaze on you, half in dread and half in wonder, and if there be a cavass or armed Turk with you the poor wretch dare not take his look away for a moment, lest he should meet the ready lash or provoke some arbitrary act of violence. . . . From whatever race he springs the Bulgarian peasant hereabouts is the veriest slave that ever tyranny created, and as he walks slowly away with downcast eyes and stooping head, by the side of his cart, the MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY 213 hardest heart must be touched with pity at his mute dejection, and hate the people and the rule that have ground him to the dust." Here we see "the " will to power " engaged in the congenial task of strangling the life of a people by grinding them to the dust. This state of things lasted till 1879. Then the Bulgarians were liberated from the Turkish yoke. Thirty-three years later the Bulgarians met their former oppressors on the battlefields of Kirk Kilisse and Lule Burgas and utterly defeated them. In the atmosphere of freedom the instinct to live had reasserted itself and begun to undo the work of five centuries of oppression. If Germany could have her way, she would reduce us all to the state of lowered vitality in which Dr. Russell found the Bulgarians in 1854. It is in order to avert this fate that we and our Allies are now fighting. We are fighting for the right to live. Wherever there is life there is growth ; and to cease to grow is to cease to live. But if a man is to make healthy growth one thing is essential : he must be given freedom; he must be allowed to do the business of growing for himself. For no one else, not even the German Kaiser, can do that business for him. It is the same with a nation. Germany wishes to conquer us in order that she may give us the inestimable benefit of her " Kultur." She for- gets that when her political power was at its nadir, her culture 1 in the spiritual sense of the word was at its zenith, and that in those days she diffused culture by force of radiation, not by force of arms. The dream of imposing culture, in any sense but 1 The German word for what we call " culture " is, I believe, Bildung, not Kultur. 214 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY that of material organization, on another nation is of all dreams the idlest. A nation must develop itself in its own way, or its growth will be stunted, inharmonious, misshapen. The culture on which it was forcibly dieted would prove to be poison, not food. But if there is an idler dream than that of forcibly imposing culture on another nation, it is that of imposing a particular type of culture on all the nations of the world. Unity in variety, not uniformity, is what Nature aims at. As a distinguished scientist * has well said, " even if we were to accept the German view that German ' Kultur ' leads to the highest ideal of civilization, submission to it would be ... a crime against the human race. We require variety, different ideals among which to choose, and freedom to make our choice." " For God fulfils Himself in many ways Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." We are fighting for the right to live ; and in doing so we are fighting in the most sacred of all causes. To live, to be really alive, is to expand life; and the expansion of life is a process to which there are no conceivable limits. Life, as we men know it, is in its essence a movement towards the ideal, the infinite, the universal, towards the ideal if we think of life as the evolution of a type, towards the infinite if we think of it as the pursuit of an end, towards the universal if we think of it as that which makes Nature " not an aggregate but a whole." We sometimes ask ourselves if there is any meaning in our life on earth. The answer to 1 Evolution and the War, by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell. MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY 215 this question is that life itself is its own meaning. The function of life is to evolve and expand life, to find new depths in it, new possibilities, new purposes. We live in order to expand life. This is the final end of our being, and as such determines the fundamental distinction so far as it is funda- mental between good and evil. Life must either expand or contract. Whatever makes for the permanent expansion of life is good. Whatever makes for the permanent contraction of life is evil. The man who so lives as to foster his own growth and expand his own life, lives well. The man who so lives as to arrest his own growth and contract his own life, lives ill. We call the latter an egoist. Of egoism there are many kinds and sub-kinds; but there is no form of immorality which is not ultimately resolvable into some kind or sub-kind of egoism. The refusal to grow, the attempt to find lasting satisfaction within the limits of a narrow and ever-narrowing self, is the sin of sins, the fountain-head of all moral evil. If it is a sin to strangle life in oneself, is it less of a sin to strangle life in others ? I need scarcely ask this question. It is impossible to do the one without doing the other. The man who lives, or tries to live, for himself alone is the enemy of his kind. The man who tries to impose himself on others, to aggrandize himself at their expense, to make them the creatures of his will, is a self-centred egoist who suffers at his own hands a worse fate than that which he inflicts. It is in order to exalt himself, to heighten his own vitality, that he tries to lower the vitality of those whom he is in a position to dominate. He. does not know that in the act 216 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY of raising his vital temperature by self-seeking and self-assertion, he is lowering the whole plane of his life. A heightened pulse is not always a proof of heightened vitality. Sometimes it indicates a state of fever which is the prelude to a fatal collapse. The forces that expand life and the forces that contract life meet and struggle in the soul of each of us. They meet and struggle in the soul of each nation. They meet and struggle in the soul of Humanity. Wherever there is growth there is this intestine strife. And whatever ground has been won, whether by an individual, by a nation, or by Humanity, is the outcome of a victory over self, in which the expansive forces have overcome the resistance of the contractive, in which the forces of light have triumphed over the forces of darkness. The war which is now being waged, though an international war from one point of view, is a civil war from another. We and our Allies are fighting for the right to live our own lives, first as nations and then as individuals. But in fighting for our own freedom we are also fighting for the freedom of the human spirit, for its right to live its own life, for its right to evolve itself, to expand, to grow. Germany, in her present mood of aggressive egoism, is trying to subordinate the well-being of Humanity to her own material interests. She is trying to expand her territory, her wealth, her power. She is not trying to expand her soul. If she were, she would, of inner necessity, have to share her gains with her neighbours. As it is, she is trying to make herself great and rich and strong at their expense. And in order to do this she is trying to strangle their MENACE OF GERMAN DOCILITY 217 freedom, and therefore to crush their souls. Their resistance to her " will to power " is the resistance, in the soul of Humanity, of the forces that expand to the forces that contract, the forces that make for life to the forces that make for death. Yet it is possible that both sets of forces are serving the purpose of the living whole. Death has its meaning as well as life. Darkness has its meaning as well as light. If it is only by over- coming resistance that the soul of man progresses, the forces that resist its progress must be regarded as in some sort the instruments of its will. If the forces that make for the expansion of life met with no resistance, their too facile victory would have neither meaning nor result. The contractive tendencies of Nature are therefore their allies as well as their enemies. The egoistic nation, the egoistic individual works the will of universal nature in the very act of trying to thwart it. " For the universal nature converts and fixes in its pre- destined place everything which stands in the way and opposes it, and makes such things a part of itself." 1 The egoist is there in order to resist the expansion of life. That is his function and his meaning. It is well that we, who are fighting for life and freedom, should be able to take this view of our enemies. It is well that we should be able to regard this terrible war as in a sense predestined and even salutary. We shall not fight the less strenuously for this momentary lapse into fatalism. If the forces that resist expansion are there in order to resist it, they are also there in order that their resistance may be overcome. 1 Marcus Aurelius. CHAPTER IX OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY THE dogmatic pressure to which Germany, in the excess of her docility, so cheerfully submits is fatal to two great qualities initiative and intui- tion. In destroying, or at any rate impairing, those qualities, it fosters the growth of others and so gives a definite bias to the development of German character. Debarred from the free exercise of initiative, the Germans have sought and found consolation in the exercise of a patient industry which enables them to follow in the wake of more adventurous spirits, and secure and consolidate the ground which the latter have won. Their own spirit of adventure, cut off for many generations from practical activities, has run riot in the field of theory; and as, owing to their defective intui- tion, they have no sense of proportion or of the fitness of things to keep their theorizing in check, they are always ready to follow out their theories, with a fearless logic, into all their consequences, both theoretical and practical. These two qualities patient industry and fearless logic combine to form what we may regard as one of the most distinctive features of the German character thoroughness. It is because of her thoroughness, and because 2X8 OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 219 as the defect of her quality she has no sense of humour, that Germany is, in spite of herself in spite of her anti-human sentiment and policy a great benefactor of the human race. Having got hold of an idea or a theory which happens to com- mend itself to her, she proceeds to work it out with patient industry and fearless logic, following it without hesitation into whatever paradox or absurdity, or folly, or criminality it may happen to lead her, and shrinking from none of its conse- quences, however repugnant these may be to right reason or to unsophisticated moral sense. 1 She thus makes herself the victim of a series of interest- ing experiments which enable other nations to realize what certain ideas and theories that have gained or are gaining currency in the world really mean, what possibilities are latent in them, what powers for good or for evil they have it in them to become. One of the theories which Germany is now work- ing out, before our astonished eyes, into conse- quences which could never have been foreseen or even imagined, is the Treitschkean theory of the State. In this theory, the real origin of which is historical and practical, Germany, as we have seen, has idealized her own loss of political freedom, and elevated to the rank of national virtues the ultra- 1 " Our passion for logic," says Prince Biilow, " amounts to fanaticism, and whenever an intellectual formula or system has been found for anything, we insist with obstinate fearlessness on fitting realities into the system." Cardinal Newman has said that " no one will be a martyr to a con- clusion." This statement is too sweeping. In Germany, logic claims its martyrs by the million. Indeed, it may almost be said that in this war the whole nation is suffering (and inflicting) martyrdom for a logical ' conclusion,' " 220 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY docility of her people and the ultra-dogmatism which is its natural counterpart. According to Treitschke and his school, the State is not the nation regarded as an organic whole ; it is not the brain of the nation ; it is not representative of the nation or responsible to it ; it is a source of authority which has some- how or other been superimposed on the nation, and which claims the devotion of the citizen because it is the State, and for no other reason. Whether the right to rule which the State claims is inherent in its might, or whether, as the present Emperor seems to hold, it is inherent in the authority with which he has been invested by God, is a question with which the average German seldom concerns himself. He is content to know that the State is there, in possession of all power and authority, and that he owes it obedience, devotion, service, life, and whatever else it may choose to require of him. The attitude of the German citizen towards the State must be carefully distinguished from the love of one's country which is felt by the citizens of other lands. An Englishman loves England because she is his country, because he is proud of her, be- cause he understands her and she understands him, because she is the home of all who are dear to him, because in one way or another she attracts his love. A German loves Germany because the State has ordered him to do so. A generation ago his love of Germany was a much feebler sentiment than his love of his own particular kingdom or duchy : than the Bavarian's love of Bavaria, for example, or the Badener's love of Baden. He is now told to be a German patriot, and he duly obeys his orders. OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 221 But devotion to the State is the mainspring of his patriotism. Why is he devoted to the State ? Partly because the State claims his devotion, and sends him to prison if he does not give it freely. But chiefly, I think, because the State does so much for him, relieves him of responsibility, gives him security, order, prosperity, educates him, trains him, organizes the material resources of the country and places these at his service, fosters commerce and manu- facturing industry and so helps him to grow rich, leads him to victory and so enables him to hold his head high both at home and abroad. In no other country does the State do so much for the citizen. In no other country does it exact so much from him. There is a tacit bargain between him and it which so far has been faithfully observed by both the contracting parties. What would happen if the State failed to fulfil its side of the bargain, if it led the citizen to defeat, for example, or to financial ruin, or to social chaos ? That remains to be seen. If the State betrayed him and so forfeited its title to his devotion, would his patriotism, his love, of his country for her own sake, survive the shock and sustain him in his trouble? I doubt it. The weakness of the German's devotion to Germany is that it has grown out of the submission of a docile people to its despotic rulers, 1 not out of the love of 1 Patriotism in Germany, as Bismarck has pointed out, is dynastic rather than national. In his Reflections and Reminiscences he says : "In order that German patriot- ism should be active and effective it must, as a rule, hang on the peg of dependence on a dynasty." For the German citizen the " State " is incarnate in the ruling dynasty. If the State were weak in government or unsuccessful in 222 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY a free people for the country whose history, with its record of heroism and suffering, is their own. In Germany, then, devotion to the State takes precedence of love of country. In England the order is reversed. In neither country does patriot- ism find its other self in service to the State. The average German is the devoted servant of the State, and loves his country because he is ordered to do so. The average Englishman loves his country freely and spontaneously, but is not disposed to translate his love of her into service to the State. There was a time when he regarded the State as a necessary evil; and there are many Englishmen who still take this view of it. Of late, however, under the sinister influence of our party system of government, which makes bidding for votes the chief function of the politician, 1 the English work- ing man is learning to regard the State as an organ- ization for making him comfortable at the expense of the wealthier sections of the community. But he has not yet learnt that this obligation (if such it be) on the part of the State to him entails a corre- sponding obligation on his part to the State. In other words, he is beginning to think that, though he owes little or nothing to the State, the State war, the dynasty would be discredited, and the patriotism of the German people would be put to a test which it might possibly fail to stand. 1 Now, as before the introduction of the Ballot, bribery plays a prominent part in our political life. But it is the bribery of classes by parties, not of individual voters by individual candidates. Which is the more demoralizing procedure I will not attempt to determine. It is possible that bribery on a great scale will some day or other work out its own remedy. For the pre-ballot box type of bribery there was, of course, no remedy but abolition. OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 223 owes many things to him. He clamours, for example, for the State to nationalize mines and railways, so that, as a voter, he may control the management of these industries in his own interest ; but he is resolutely opposed to the idea of National Service. 1 Yet all the while his patriotism burns with a clear flame; and his occasional failure to respond to the demands of his country, even in her present hour of need, is due to the confusion of thought which makes it possible for him to keep the ideas of Country and State in separate com- partments of his brain, instead of recognizing that the State ^s the Country, organized for purposes of self-government, self-development, and self-defence. In our attitude towards the State we English have much to learn from Germany, where devotion to the State, though blind and carried to excess, has made it possible for the manhood of the nation and the resources of the land to be organized with a degree of thoroughness and efficiency which seems to be beyond our reach. Where Germany is weak is in the quality of her patriotism. As the German citizen is under orders to love his country, which he presumably does not love of his own accord, his rulers and teachers must take pains to convince him that his country is worthy of his love. This they can do only by exalting her at the expense of other countries, in other words, by giving his patriotism a strong anti-human bias. To give such a bias to the patriotism that he inculcates is 1 Or, if he is not, those who speak in his name are. What proportion of the working men of England are in favour of National Service, a referendum alone could determine. 224 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY the duty of every university professor and every school teacher. " Since 1890," says Mr. F. M. Hueffer, " professors . . . whether in the univer- sities or in primary and upper schools," have been " terrorized by every means at the disposal of the Prussian Ministry of Education into inserting into their lectures passages to the effect that all nations other than the German Nation are decadent and contemptible." And what the German is taught to believe, he does believe. The moral decadence of France, the soulless Mammon-worship of England, the mingled corruption and barbarity of Russia have been so persistently dinned into his ears that he cannot now think otherwise of these nations; and as he has also been taught to regard them as the natural enemies of Germany, we cannot wonder that his normal attitude towards them is one of hatred tempered by contempt. Mr. F. M. Hueffer holds the present Kaiser re- sponsible for this state of things. In justice, how- ever, to that much-abused ruler, it must be pointed out that the anti-human type of patriotism which is now rampant in Germany was not invented by him. I have already quoted the passage from The Romantic School in which Heine, who died in 1856, said that " a German's patriotism means that his heart contracts, that it shrinks like leather in the cold, that he hates all that is foreign, that he is no more a citizen of the world, no more a European, but only a narrow German." The type of patriotism which Heine deplored was a legacy from German tribalism, the tribesman's love of his tribe being largely compounded of hatred of other tribes. What William II has done, in his desire to OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 225 glorify his own dynasty and for its sake the land which it dominates, has been to give a great impetus, through the medium of the Ministry of Education, to the cult of national antipathy. In doing so he has fanned into flame a srr^uldering fire; but the fire was kindled thousands of years ago. As to his success in fanning the fire into a flame there can be no doubt. In The Times Educational Supplement for July a letter is published from a correspondent in Germany who, after describing the Chauvinistic instruction that is now being given in Germany, goes on to say that " doctrines such as these, imposed on the mind of youth, cannot fail to breed a spirit of malice and hatred towards Germany's many enemies of to-day which will not only endure, but will hinder all plans of permanent peace. In no country has the Govern- ment more direct control over education than in Germany. In no country are academic influences so subservient to political programmes. And it would appear to be the distinct aim of the German authorities to create a spirit of blind, uncompro- mising Chauvinism in the heart of the coming generation." Another newspaper correspondent, who had been an assistant master in a higher technical school in the Rhine provinces, tells how war was systematically glorified and hatred of France instilled into the minds of the boys by the teachers. " Our school," he says, " was richly bedecked with pictures of Bismarck and of scenes from the Franco-German War. On the top floor, along the corridor were frescoes illustrative of certain lines in the poet Korner's Aufruf. The Q 226 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY lines ' Thou shalt drive the steel into the foeman's heart ' were illustrated by a bloody picture of French soldiers being skewered on Prussian swords. An elder boy had written a playlet in which one of the characters was a French officer. The action dealt with how the man was discovered in the act of treachery, and how he was slain in a duel with a German student. ... A batch of elder pupils went on a walking tour through Luxemburg and along the Vosges. The master in charge of them told me how the lads had amused themselves on the frontier by standing in Germany and seeing how far they could spit into France." Ten years ago an English resident in Germany sent the following letter to one of our newspapers : " I beg to enclose a little book, given away at one of the best shops in Stettin to the children of pur- chasers (my little boy received one), in which you will see that it tells the story of two English Red Cross soldiers who rob the wounded and boast of the money and jewellery they got, and who, after a time, murder a soldier, a German, to steal his money, etc. By means of such lies the feeling of hatred for the English is kept up." These are the straws which show which way the current is flowing. Still more significant is the fact that quite recently the Bavarian Minister of Education found it necessary to issue a circular discountenancing the cult of hatred which was going on in the schools of all grades, and that Herr Dessauer thought it well to express regret at the inclusion in school anthologies of his notorious Hymn of Hate. Things must have gone far for such steps to be taken. When those who are OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 227 responsible for a movement have to call a halt to it, the inference is plain that their policy has been successful beyond their expectation. Perhaps the Bavarian Minister and Herr Dessauer reminded themselves, too late, that " national hatred," as Goethe remarked to Eckermann, is " most intense among the lowest in the scale of civilization." Such is patriotism, as the word is understood in Germany. A State-enforced virtue, untouched by any sentiment of humanity, compounded in equal degrees of national self-assertion and national hatred, the very apotheosis of collective selfishness, it can scarcely fail to harden the hearts and narrow the minds of those whom it inspires. For the time being thanks to the extraordinary capacity of the German people for feeling what they are told to feel the patriotic ardour of the nation knows no limits. But when one looks back a hundred years, and remembers that then the Germans prided themselves on their lack of patriotism and cared more for their respective states, however petty, than for the nation as a whole, and when one looks forward into an uncertain future, one begins to wonder how long this enthusiasm will last, and whether it will burn as brightly in the hour of ad- versity as now in the hour of success. Meanwhile, we must thank Germany for having taught us that patriotism which is nothing more than patriotism must sooner or later become something less; that, since love is an expansive force which no limits, not even those of one's country, can permanently content, the ultimate destiny of love of country is either to expand into all-embracing sympathy or contract into all-embracing hate. 228 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY Having learnt their lesson with characteristic docility, having learnt to exalt themselves and to hate and despise their neighbours, the Germans are now following out this teaching, with characteristic thoroughness, into all its consequences. The first of these consequences is war. In Germany mili- tarism is, as we have seen, the other self of patriot- ism, the glorification of war and the inculcation of the military spirit being among the foremost duties of the patriotic orator and the patriotic teacher. The patriotism which resolves itself into contempt and hatred of other countries will have as its prac- tical aim the exalting of one's own country at the expense of its neighbours. How is this to be done ? By war, which will give it the power that is based on dominion; and by industrial and commercial activity, which will give it the power that is based on wealth. In and through this twofold aim the German State has consolidated its alliance with the German people. Like the Tempter in the Gospel story, the State has shown the people " the king- doms of the world and the glory of them," and has said to the people, " All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me." And the people has listened to the voice of the Tempter, and has gone forth under the aegis of the State to conquer the kingdoms of the world. Of the spirit in which Germany is waging this war I have already spoken. In the Middle Ages the horrors of war were mitigated in some degree by the spirit of chivalry. In modern times a serious attempt has been made to regulate the conduct of war by various international conventions which have as their object to lessen the suffering which war OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 229 inflicts on the armies in the field, on the inhabitants of invaded districts, and on neutral countries. In the Middle Ages Germany was but little influenced by the spirit of chivalry ; and in the present war she has violated nearly all the conventions which she had undertaken to observe. She has done this so systematically that one must suppose that she sent her representatives to the Hague with the full intention of breaking whatever rules might be formulated, should the " necessity of war " dictate such a course of action, and in the hope that other Powers would be placed at a disadvantage by being more scrupulous than herself. If she has outraged public opinion in neutral as well as in hostile coun- tries, she has no doubt counted the cost of her conduct. " To win anyhow " is the end which she set herself; and if she could but emerge victorious from this world-convulsing struggle, she would be able to impose her own egoistic morality on the world at large. Whatever was expedient from the point of view of German interests was morally right, so far as she was concerned; and if her treachery and inhumanity could enable her to achieve victory, a sponge would be passed over the debit side of her account, for, in the eyes of her conquered enemies and of the neutrals who were beginning to feel that their turn would come next, her conduct would at least have acquired the right that is inherent in might. It is not only the self-centred patriotism of Ger- many which has made her so inhuman a fighter. Her thoroughness and her logic must also be held responsible for her attitude. What is thoroughness in one sphere of action is ruthlessness in another. 230 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY And there is something to be said for the logic which refuses to draw a hard and fast line between explosive and asphyxiating shells, or between the ruses which the Hague Convention has sanctioned and those which it has disallowed. Is not the object of war to secure victory by the infliction of suffering? And if so, why imperil victory by shrinking from the infliction of suffering? And, if Science has placed various means of destruction at man's service, why should he make use of some of these and refuse to make use of others ? It is easy to ask such questions as these; and it is by no means easy to answer them. During one of our Maori wars in New Zealand a troopship went ashore at dusk on a sandbank in the mouth of a river, and could not be got off till the next morning. The Maoris knew that it was there, but made no attempt to attack it, for, as they subse- quently explained, they thought it would not be " playing the game " to do so. These simple people must have argued unconsciously that in war certain qualities, such as courage, endurance, discipline, self-sacrifice, loyalty, physical and mental sanity are on trial, and that therefore they had no right to turn to their own account an accident which gave them a quasi-mechanical advantage over their enemies. Such a conception of the meaning and value of war is wholly foreign to the German temperament. " When nations are at war, the stakes are so high that no consideration of fair play, of sportsmanship, of chivalry, of honour, or even of humanity, ought to be allowed to bind the belligerents. If our enemies think differently, so much the worse for them. They may fetter their OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 231 own action if they please, but they shall not fetter ours. And what is more, we shall judge them by their own standard, and make a violent outcry if they do any of the things which they reproach us for having done." So the German War-lords seem to have argued ; and if we were to ask them where, if anywhere, the relapse of civilization into bar- barism, which their theory of war must bring about, was to be arrested, they would answer that it was impossible to draw a hard and fast line, that each case must be judged on its merits, that moral con- siderations had ceased to apply, and that no arbiter of right and wrong could be recognized except the " necessity of war." We ought to thank Germany for the ruthlessness with which she is fighting. She has made us realize, if we had never done so before, what war means and what it ultimately involves. Having taught us that patriotism, when divorced from love of Humanity, degenerates into national ego-mania of a peculiarly malignant type, she is now teaching us that war is, in the last resort, a brutal, barbarous, and insane method of settling international dis- putes. For centuries we have been trying in various ways to mitigate the horrors of war. Ger- many has opened our eyes to the fact that the real horror of war is war itself. For war is an attempt to settle disputes by an appeal to force instead of to justice ; and in the present stage of our social development the appeal to force, whatever form it may take, is in itself so profoundly immoral, 1 so 1 If there is any valid argument in favour of the appeal to force, it is provided by what I may call the Maori theory of war the theory which sees in war the test, and in the 232 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY gross an outrage on truth and right, that our attempts to refine and humanize it are as futile as would be the attempt of a legislator to secure humanity in the commission of murder or decency in the commission of rape. By taking war quite seriously, by going into it with the full intention of winning at whatever cost and by whatever means, Germany has torn asunder the flimsy veil of respectability with which our conventions had invested it, and has shown us in all its naked hideousness the murderous madness which we had tried to regulate and control. We ought to thank Germany for having done this, but we ought also to execrate her. " It must needs be that offences come, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh." The nation which preparation for war the means of training, certain manly virtues with which human nature can never dispense. There was a time when this theory may have held good ; but since the invention of gunpowder the part that human worth to use a comprehensive term plays in war has gradually decreased in importance ; and to-day, though human worth counts for much, it counts for less, as com- pared with money and mechanical ingenuity, than it has ever done since war began. The Austro-German armies which drove the Russians out of Galicia and Poland were in no way superior to their opponents in courage, endur- ance, and discipline, or even in strategic and tactical skill ; but they were immensely superior to them in heavy artillery and other munitions of war. And as Germany intends to use whatever means of destruction Science may place at her service, and as in self-defence other nations will have to follow her example, one may safely prophesy that, as time goes on, the respective values of human worth and machinery will change with ever-increasing rapidity in favour of the latter. That is another reason why we should begin to dream of the abolition of war. When Mr. H. G. Wells' " atomic bombs " have been invented, even the Bernhardis of that period will eulogize war in vain. OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 233 resists and sets at defiance a general movement in the direction of mercy and humanity is a traitor to the cause of human progress. If Germany has rendered a service to that cause, she has done so unwittingly and in her own despite. It is not in order to disillusionize the world of militarism that Germany has waged war with studied inhumanity (the glorification of militarism is a vital part of her own system of education), but in order to shorten the road to the victory for which she is striving, and to the world-dominion by which victory is to be rewarded. In her conduct of the war, as in her preparation for and inception of it, she has been purely and frankly selfish; and she would have thought it grossly immoral to be anything else. And if there is something to be said for the logic which refuses to draw a line between explosive and asphyxiating shells, there is surely nothing to be said for the logic if logic it be which, on the plea of military necessity, tries to justify such atrocities as the wholesale slaughter of unarmed civilians, the wholesale burning and plundering of defenceless towns and villages, the employment of women and children as screens for advancing troops, the sink- ing of unarmed ships without warning, the torturing of prisoners in order to extract information. The truth is, that in her mode of waging war, as in her general policy and her attitude towards other countries, Germany has relapsed into tribal- ism, a stage in human development which the world is supposed to have outgrown, and in out- growing which it is supposed to have attained to civilization. The essence of tribalism is organized selfishness. Having evolved a kind of collective 234 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY consciousness, the tribe sacrifices to itself without compunction the interests of the individual, whose individuality it mercilessly crushes, and the interests of Humanity, the idea of which has not yet dawned on its thought. Loyalty within the tribe intense, unswerving, self-sacrificing loyalty is balanced by hatred of other tribes; and the one feeling is as strong as the other. Speaking of the political parties into which the German nation is divided, and of their internecine quarrels, Prince Biilow, who recognizes that his country has never fully emerged from the tribal stage of development, says that " immutable loyalty within the party is the cause of their quarrelsomeness. Just because the German party man clings so steadfastly and even lovingly to his party, he is capable of such intense hatred of other parties and has such difficulty in forgetting insults and defeats suffered at their hands. Here ... in modern guise we have the old German character." How terrible a thing is tribal hatred the history of tribal warfare all the world over fully proves. Combining in itself the individuality which properly belonged to each of its members and the social finality which properly belongs to the human race, the tribe acquired a collective personality of its own, which led it to invest with a similar personality the tribe with which it quarrelled, and in the violence of its hatred to regard that tribe as a personal enemy whose utter destruction the destruction of all who be- longed to it men, women and children was no crime against humanity, but a lawful and even meritorious deed. It was in this spirit that Ger- many waged war in ancient days and in the Middle OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 235 Ages; and if in the days of professional armies the spirit of tribal hatred receded into the background, the nationalizing of the armed forces of the empire, combined with the systematic cult by the State of militarism and aggressive patriotism, has again brought it to the front. That Germany is still tribal at heart is proved by the fact that only by cultivating patriotism of the tribal type, with the " immutable loyalty " and " intense hatred " which it involves by cultivating it in season and out of season, through the medium of the Universities, the schools, the Press, and all the other agencies which the State controls has the State been able to make of Germany, so long divided and dis- tracted, a single united nation, whether perma- nently or only temporarily united remains to be seen. It is the revival of the tribal spirit a revival on a scale so vast that the tribesmen are now numbered by millions instead of thousands that is ultimately accountable for the aggressive egoism with which Germany confronts all other countries, and for the deliberate inhumanity with which she is waging this war. The inhumanity of her warfare is the natural outcome of the inhumanity of her self- centred patriotism. Let us thank her for having worked out, with all her thoroughness and all the fanaticism of her logic, the one inhumanity, which so readily counterfeits a virtue, into the other, which is so palpably a crime. From war to commerce, in the eyes of the modern German, the transition is easy and direct. For he regards commerce as a species of warfare; and he 236 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY holds that self-aggrandizement is the final end of war as well as of commerce, and of commerce as well as of war. It is indeed said by men who speak with authority that this war, as waged by Germany, is one of plunder not less than of conquest. It is said that Germany went into it in order to extend her commerce by securing new sources of raw material and gaining full control of important markets for her goods, and in order to enrich herself and so further extend her commerce by exacting heavy indemnities from her conquered enemies. It is even said that she plunged into the war in the spirit of a gambler, hoping, if successful, to restore her financial position, which had become disorganized by over-speculation, by her too great eagerness to get rich. For my own part, I incline to believe that she is fighting for ascendancy even more than for plunder, for ideal (if one may use the word) even more than for material ends. But that she is also fighting for the latter can scarcely be doubted. And perhaps she might plead that, things being what they are, she cannot help doing so. For the modern capitalist is the lineal descen- dant of the mediaeval baron ; and a war of aggression is of inner necessity a war of commercial as well as of territorial aggrandizement. In any case Germany is waging, and has long been waging, a war of commercial rivalry and aggression. For this to become possible she had to change her whole outlook on life. A hundred years ago Wordsworth's ideal of " plain living and high thinking " was more fully realized in Germany than in any other country. Since then she has passed to the opposite extreme. In those days OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 237 she thought in terms of mind and will, of duty and destiny, of the ego and the cosmos. To-day, if she is not thinking in terms of guns and battleships, she is thinking in terms of marks and pfennigs, of bills of lading and bills of exchange, of synthetic indigo and aniline dyes; and, absorbed as she is in the speculative ventures of her manufacturers and merchants, she laughs to scorn the speculative ventures of her old-world thinkers, who from their garret windows looked out at the stars. In those days she lived very plainly, for she was exceeding poor; but she found happiness in her penury. To-day she lives as luxuriously as her means permit and they permit of much luxury but she finds bitterness l rather than happiness in her luxury and her wealth. There was a time, not so very remote, when Germany poured scorn on us English for our Mammon-worship. After the war of 1870, when the gold of the French ransom began to circulate in her veins, she came to the conclusion that Mammon was worthy of her worship; and as she does nothing by halves, she has now become the most devoted and wholehearted of his votaries. In the development of her industrial and com- mercial activities, the State and the people have worked side by side. In order to distract the minds of the people from domestic politics the State 1 " I cannot sufficiently emphasize," says Mr. Hueffer, " to what an extent bitterness is the note of modern German life of that modern German life whose only discoverable arts of importance are the bitter, vigorous and obscene drawings of Simplicissimus, the bitter and terrifying lyrics of the most modern German poets, and the incredibly filthy the absolutely incredibly filthy productions of the German variety stage." 238 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY has encouraged them to throw their energies into the pursuit of wealth. And as they are warned off by the State from all the " great matters " which have any bearing, however remote or indirect, on political problems, they have given to industrialism the zeal, the devotion, the brain-power, the mental application, and even according to Mr. Hueffer the idealism which in a freer country they might have given to nobler ambitions and loftier spheres of work. But it is not only in order to divert the people from dreams of political reform, that the State has gone out of its way to encourage the worship of Mammon. The State needs money for the realization of its own ambitions, for its monster armies and its rapidly expanding fleets. " Make me rich," it says to the people, " and I will do my best to make you rich." The bargain is a fair one, and it has been faithfully observed by both parties. In no other country has the State done so much for the development of trade. " The rapid success of the Germans " (in trade), says Sir William Ramsay, " has been due in part to excellent organiza- tion their ' Kultur ' and in part to the important fact that their individual efforts have been officially subsidized. Their commerce, like their army, has been supported by the State. Thus the plan has been to attack, in a methodical manner, some industry carried on outside of Germany. Heavy import duties are imposed on the article which they desire to manufacture; bounties are given on exports of the article; freights are reduced on its carriage; and the ships which convey it to foreign countries are subsidized. In course of time this tells; it becomes unprofitable for manufacturers in OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 239 a free-trade country to compete with a State-aided manufacture; prices fall, and after a struggle the manufacture is abandoned." Through its control of education the State is able to work for the same end. Numerous technical Real Schulen, and no fewer than eleven technical Universities have been founded in which the youth of Germany are prepared for industrial pursuits. It is true that, by multiplying indefinitely the amount of expert labour in the country, these technical schools and Universities are tending to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. " In these " (Universities and schools), says Mr. Hueffer, " the sons of the manufacturing, the shopkeeping and the working classes receive courses in all sorts of applied sciences, and, excellent though the education is and excellent though these institutions may be in theory, they have yet had the effect of very distinctly lowering the standard of public morals and of commercial virtue. They have enabled the rich manufacturer to grow vastly richer by the means of brains of people in neces- sitous circumstances, and by the workmanship of highly skilled mechanics who have no power to exact a reasonable recompense." Elsewhere the same writer says that the future fate of the German urban child is to " become a miserably sweated applied scientist working day in, day out, in the laboratories of a grossly over-rich manufacturer to find out methods of putting upon the market by-products that shall still more enrich the manu- facturer." But this result of its educational policy may have been premeditated by the State. It is to the interest of the German State to conciliate 240 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY Capital rather than Labour; for Capital is strong and independent, 1 whereas the labour of an over- docile people in an over-peopled country can scarcely fail to prove amenable to State control. If these may be regarded as legitimate methods of aiding industrial development, there are other methods practised in Germany to which the term " illegitimate " may fairly be applied. Sir William Ramsay has described one of these : " Any foreigner who has tried to secure a German patent knows how the Berlin Patent Office, by trivial objec- tions and tiresome delays, has rendered it a heart- breaking task. Many English manufacturers have suffered from a species of organized piracy, con- sisting in the deliberate infringement by Germans 1 In no other country is Capital so effectively organized as in Germany. The author of The Great War, Chap. LXXVL, speaks of " the gigantic German trust system of production which, modelled first upon the American trust system, soon surpassed it in range, closeness of control, general efficiency, and concentrated power." He tells us that the industries of the country are dominated by some three hundred men, about a score of whom form an inner oligarchy which, " linked with the German money trust, connected with the Government, and in many cases in close personal touch with the Kaiser, control all the industrial resources of the empire." In Germany, once she had de- cided to embark on a career of industrial and commercial activity, the ascendancy of Capital and the concentration in a few hands of the power which Capital confers, might have been predicted. For, where ultra-docility is the leading feature of the national character, each sphere of national activity is sure to be dominated by a small minority, and in each of these minorities a will to power and a talent for organization are sure to evolve themselves. There was a time when an oligarchy of landowing officers, clustered round the throne, controlled the destinies of the country. But, with the development of trade and industry, a new oligarchy of capitalists has arisen, and is beginning to rival the old in the enjoyment both of royal favour and of quasi-political power. OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 241 of the patents which they hold; from the difficulty of securing justice in the German courts, or the reappearance of the infringers under a new name, until from sheer weariness, or reluctance to throw good money after bad, the unequal contest has been abandoned." Where such practices are common, the standard of commercial honour is not quixotically high ; and it is clear, from Sir William Ramsay's indictment, that in Germany the State has co-operated with the men of business in lowering it. In the Middle Ages the Hanseatic merchants, having opened their ledgers with a pious invocation of the Holy, Blessed and Glorious Trinity, proceeded to equip themselves with two sets of weights and measures, one of which they could use as buyers, the other as sellers. A similar procedure seems to be followed by some of their descendants. Mr. J. W. Perry, who was for many years an official in the Maritime Customs in China under the late Sir Robert Hart, writes as follows to one of our newspapers : " The German merchants' ideas of business morality are on a par with their Government's regard for treaties. Their attempts to defraud the Customs were constant and systematic, and I make bold to say that in many cases it was only by these disreputable methods they were able to compete successfully with the prices quoted by their British competitors. A favourite German method of swindling is found in having three sets of invoices for goods imported : (i) the invoice showing the price actually paid; (2) an invoice for presentation to the Customs showing a much lower price on which the ad valorem duty is to be levied; and 242 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY (3) an invoice showing a much higher price, which is for the Chinese purchaser. This is only one of many contemptible methods employed. During a period of over two years at one of the largest ports in China I had brought to my notice case after case of underhand and fraudulent action by German firms, and in the same period, I am proud to say, there was not a single instance of such malpractices by any one of the various British firms." The Chinese themselves seem to have formed a similar estimate of the commercial morality of the Germans. An English merchant who had resided for thirty years in China, and who, let me say in passing, had not once in all those years been "let in " by a Chinese merchant, told me that when an English- man is talking business in a way which the Chinese do not regard as perfectly straight, their favourite phrase of reproach is, " Now you are talking German." There is another aspect of German unscrupulous- ness in trade which cannot be ignored. Every German who accepts a situation in a foreign house of business is a possible spy. He is there to learn trade secrets. He is there, it may be, to prove himself worthy of being entrusted with an even higher mission. His spying may savour of treachery. But what of that ? Is not Deutschland ueber Alles ? And if his spying will promote the interests of the Fatherland, is it not morally right of him to spy? The truth is that nothing has done so much to debase commercial morality in Germany as the active intervention of the all-powerful State in trade. For, by making the welfare of the Father- land the supreme end of moral action, and by OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 243 entering into partnership with the business portion of the community in order to further that end, it has fostered the dangerous delusion that there is one moral law for Germans and another for the rest of mankind. It has done the same, as we have seen, in other spheres of action. Indeed, it seems to be the mission of the State to stand, with drawn sword, in the way of every movement that the soul of Germany might conceivably make in the direction of ideal good. And the pity of it is that the German trader will be the more likely to listen to the State's insidious suggestion that, when the motive is patriotic, immorality ceases to be immoral, because, as it happens, his interests as a trader coincide with the supposed interests of his country, which will be enriched so his mentor assures him by the measures which he takes to enrich himself. It has been said that honesty is an excellent virtue if one can afford to practise it. In Germany this cynical aphorism seems to be taken seriously. An Englishman, who has traded with Germany for many years, in a recent letter to a newspaper said that so long as his affairs prospered the German trader was honest enough, but that whenever he got into difficulties he began to turn and twist and wriggle, and do all he could to evade his obliga- tions. And Sir William Ramsay says that " com- mercial agreements are regarded," by Germans, " as binding only so long as some advantage is to be gained by keeping to them, and that dishonesty is excusable if only it leads to German prosperity." " We are slowly and incredulously awakening," says the same writer, " to the knowledge that 244 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY German commercial tricks are on a par with their tricks in war, that the whole nation is infected with the microbe of dishonour and dishonesty. What we have to face is a nation organized for a policy of dishonesty and a nation which, as a nation, approves of that policy." This is perhaps an overstatement ; but, according to the testimony of many competent witnesses, it is the overstatement of a strong case. But could we have expected the substitution of national for human ideals and standards in morals to bear other fruits than these? If Germany is utterly unscrupulous in diplomacy and in war, could we expect her, State-ridden as she is, to be rigidly scrupulous in trade? We have seen that " to win anyhow " is her ideal in war. If the pursuit of wealth for its own sake is a legitimate end of human action, as it seems to be regarded in most Western countries, can we wonder that Germany, with her national thoroughness, has made " Get rich anyhow get rich for your country's sake as well as for your own," her motto in trade? The familiar saying, " Rem, si possis, rede ; si non rede, quocunque modo," makes a twofold appeal to the German trader, an appeal to his patriotism as well as to his love of gain. For more than a century materialism the devo- tion of life to material ends and the regulation of life by material standards has been rampant in the West. Germany was later than other countries in catching the prevailing infection; but since she caught it she has done her best to make up for lost time. For she has given herself heart and soul to the new way of living, given herself to it with a OUR DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 245 strenuousness and a thoroughness which no other nation can pretend to rival. 1 We owe her a debt of gratitude for having done this, just as we owe her a debt of gratitude for the fanaticism of her narrow patriotism and for her systematic ruthlessness in war. Thanks to his dogmatism, which makes the typical German take quite seriously whatever he teaches; thanks to his docility, which makes him take quite seriously whatever he is taught; and thanks to his conse- quent inability to laugh at or even to criticize himself, it is his mission to set the Greek ideal of jurjdsv ayav at defiance and to overdo whatever part he undertakes to play. In this way Germany has become to the other nations what the drunken Helot was to the children of his master a warning 1 Professor Fugmann of Leipzig, in a book which has recently appeared called The Blessing of War, draws the following picture of Germany before the outbreak of the present war : " There was dissension on all sides. The people were engrossed in the pettiest interests of the day. The life lived by the bulk of Germans was indescribable, even though serious men lifted up their voices against the iniquity of it all. Fidelity and faith had disappeared. A man's word had no value. Contracts were made only to be broken. Business in general assumed a shape resembling a huge organized deception. The corruptions of life grew apace in town and country, and there was no prophet, no preacher of morals, no apostle of nature, no seer capable of stemming the overwhelming stream of sexual and com- mercial immorality, decay and degeneration. Every man who professed an ideal was ridiculed. Such was Germany before the war." Professor Fugmann believes that the war will excise this moral cancer. But operations for cancer are seldom permanently successful ; and the stories of German cruelty and treachery in the field and of German criminality at home (see Chapter VI) incline one to believe that the moral taint which has produced the " decay and degeneration " of which Professor Fugmann complains is still in the " blood " of the German people. 246 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY against folly and vice. While we are loitering in a dangerous path, she presses on with " pecca fortiter " as her motto to its predestined goal. She has taught us that patriotism, when uninspired by any larger sentiment, degenerates into collective selfishness and hatred, and cuts a nation off from the fellowship of its kind. She has made us realize the intrinsic hideousness and inhumanity of war. She is now rendering us another and not less valuable service. While we have dallied with materialism, she has boldly adopted it both as her national policy and as her philosophy of life. And she is now teaching us, out of the fulness of her own experience, that Mammon, when worshipped for his own sake, will brook no rival god. It is something to be able to warn those who are en- tangling themselves in the snares of a temptress, to warn them by one's own example, that " the dead are with her and that her guests are in the depths of Hell." CHAPTER X OUR DEEPEST DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY WE owe a deep debt of gratitude to Germany for the thoroughness, both in theory and practice, which has made her overplay the parts of the patriot, the fighter, and the trader, and in so doing open our eyes to the evils which are latent in self- centred patriotism, in militarism, and in the quest of wealth. We owe a still deeper debt of gratitude to Germany for having compelled us to reconsider our attitude towards life. Her own attitude towards life has been so clearly denned and so forcibly obtruded on us in the course of the war, that we cannot avoid studying and criticizing it ; and in the act of criticizing an attitude which is in some sort a challenge and a defiance, we are being compelled to reflect on and criticize our own. Germany sees life through a distorting medium; but she sees her caricature of life " steadily " and " whole." When I say this I mean two things. I mean, in the first place, that she sees life from the cradle to the grave as an undivided whole. What is good or bad for the child is good or bad, mutatis mutandis, for the man. There is no break of gauge on the threshold of manhood or elsewhere. I mean, in the second place, that she has fully made 247 248 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY up her mind as to the meaning and value of life. She has decided that " salvation " is to be achieved by self-aggrandizement, not by self-development ; and she is practising this religion, if one may call it so, with a whole-heartedness which puts the votaries of nobler faiths to shame. Let us consider her outlook on life under each of these heads. The docility of the average adult in Germany is as complete as the docility of the average school-child in other countries. Hence, in Germany it is possible to do what is not possible elsewhere, to make the ideal which dominates education the dominant ideal of life. Now, the ideal which dominates education in Germany does not materially differ from that which dominates education in other countries. In all parts of what we call the civilized world a certain type of education has long been accepted as orthodox. The leading features of this orthodox education are the following, on the part of the teacher coercive discipline and dogmatic instruction; on the part of the child mechanical obedience and passive reception of what is taught. These features are familiar to all of us. We are inclined to accept them as inevitable, as rooted in the nature of things, and to regard the scheme of education to which they belong as a dispensation of Providence which is beyond criti- cism, and which we can but take and make the best of. But, except in Germany, we do not seriously allow this scheme of education to dominate our adult lives. We think of it as suitable for children, and when we grow up we put it away such at least is our intention with other childish things. Insensibly, indeed, it continues to influence us. DEEPEST DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 249 But that we are in revolt against it is proved by the fact that, directly our education (in the conventional sense of the word) is finished, we free ourselves from the disciplinary control which is of its essence, and try to order our lives for ourselves and on other lines. To some of us this day of liberation comes at the age of fourteen, to others at sixteen, to others at eighteen or even later. But sooner or later it comes to all of us; and then, instead of building on the foundations which education has laid, we set to work to reconstruct life on another basis, if not on another site. It is in this work of reconstruction that nation differs from nation. And it is in adhering to the ground-plan and building on the foundations which education has laid that Germany stands apart from the rest of the world. If coercive discipline and dogmatic instruction are good for children and adolescents, they must surely be good, with certain necessary modifications, for adults of all ages. If the conventional scheme of education is the only conceivable scheme, if the principle which is at the heart of it is beyond criticism, should it not form the basis, to say the least, of the adult scheme of life ? So the German State seems to have argued ; and, according to its wont, it has translated its theory into practice. Of all modern nations Germany alone, following the example of ancient Sparta, has brought her scheme of life into harmony with her scheme of education. In Germany, educa- tion is what it ought always to be, a lifelong process. The adult citizen is subjected by the State to constant control and supervision, differing only in degree from that to which the child is subjected by his 250 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY teacher. From the day of his birth till he arrives at years of discretion he is kept in leading-strings. The pressure on him is then relaxed, except indeed during his term of service in the army; but he continues to be kept in leading-strings till the day of his death. It is because there is no break of gauge in the life of the citizen that Germany, as a nation, is in some respects irresistibly strong. But nations, like individuals, have the defects of their qualities ; and even logical consistency and inward harmony can be bought at too high a price. It is one thing to bring life as a whole under the domina- tion of a single ideal. It is another thing to possess an ideal which is worthy to dominate the whole of life. That the German ideal is unworthy to dominate life let alone the whole of life I need not take pains to prove. For it is not with the defects of the German ideal that I am now concerned, but with the fact that Germany has based her scheme of life be the ideal that dominates it good or bad on her scheme of education, and in doing so has dealt with life, in all its gradation and duration, as an unbroken whole. It is here that Germany is strong, and that we and our Allies and we perhaps even more than our Allies are weak. Life is an unbroken whole; and we ought to deal with it as such. Germany has so dealt with it. We have not. Education is a continuous and lifelong process; and we ought to deal with it as such. Germany has so dealt with it. We have not. The German ideal of education coincides at every vital point with the German ideal of life. Our ideal of educa- tion, so far as we can be said to have one, is opposed DEEPEST DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 251 to our ideal of life. As educationists, we believe in the type of education which Germany has idealized and transformed into a philosophy of life. We believe in dogmatic direction and the discipline of drill. As citizens of a free country, as rulers of a great Empire, we believe in the anti-German philosophy of " Live and let live." From the cradle to the grave Germany stamps her philosophy of life on every German citizen. This is her strength. We are of two minds; and this is our weakness. Germany subjects the child to coercive discipline and dogmatic pressure; and when he grows up, though she loosens the reins that control him, she continues to treat him as a child. We too subject the child to coercive discipline and dogmatic pres- sure; but long before he is grown up we give him his freedom and tell him to live his own life and work out his own salvation. Are we wise ? Is not the change which we bring about too violent and too abrupt ? If we really believe in our ideal of life, ought we not to train the young to live up to it ? Germany, in her effort to strangle spontaneous life, has arrayed herself against the strongest of all forces, the instinct to live. If that instinct is fighting on our side, the reason is that, as citizens and rulers, we have instinctively respected spon- taneous life. But have we done so, are we doing so, as teachers ? I am raising a question which has many side issues and which bristles with practical difficulties. I do not wish to dogmatize about it, but I do wish to set people thinking. I wish people to realize that there is a civil war in this country, from which Germany is free a war between two conflicting 252 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY ideals, the very ideals that are meeting and grappling in the great war which is shaking the whole world. And I wish them to realize that this civil war becomes fiercer and intenser as time goes on. For, on the one hand, with the spread of education, our educa- tional ideal is constantly striving to encroach on our adult life. And, on the other hand, with our growing consciousness of the meaning and value of freedom, our ideal of life is trying, in its blind instinctive way, to dominate the education of the young. What is to be the issue of this vital struggle? Are we to leave things as they are, trusting that somehow or other they will right themselves? This is the policy of those who hold that, because we have hitherto stumbled along pretty successfully, there is no need for a radical change. I think that this policy is mistaken, and, if persisted in, will lead to disaster. I think that there is need, and urgent need, for a radical change. I think that the catastrophe of this terrible war has come upon us in order, for one thing, to compel us to reconsider our ways. Many of the weaknesses which the war has revealed in us are due to our being of two minds about the great issues of life. In particular, the want of discipline which has manifested itself in strikes, slackness at work, and over-drinking, is due to the fact that the manhood of the nation, which is not disciplined, as in Germany, by a des- potic and inquisitorial State, does not learn, during the periods of childhood and adolescence, to dis- cipline itself. If the war, which is judging us all, will condemn Germany for having adopted a false ideal of life, it will condemn us for having tried to DEEPEST DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 253 live under two irreconcilable ideals. The time has come for us to reconsider our ways. Fas est et ab hoste doceri. Germany has set us an example of consistency and singleness of purpose which we ought to follow. To follow but on English, not on German, lines. Let us ask ourselves one crucial question. Are we prepared to bring our ideal of life into harmony with our ideal of education the ideal of coercive discipline and dogmatic pressure? If we are not, if the bare suggestion of this is abhorrent to us, we must resolutely face the only alternative to it. We must begin to think seriously of bringing our ideal of education into harmony with our ideal of life. How best to do this, how best to let the rising generation live, how best to help it to unfold its hidden life, how best, in educating it, to harmonize order with freedom, direction with spontaneity, organization from without with growth from within, is a problem which will give us much to think about for many generations. One thing, however, is clear. If we are to reform education in order to make it the basis of a har- monious scheme of life, we must reconstruct our whole " theory of things." We have stumbled upon our national ideal of " live and let live." We did not think our way to it ; and we have never tried to think it out. The time has come for us to ask ourselves what it implies in other words, what larger ideal is behind it. " Live and let live." Why are we to let live? Because if we do not, we shall strangle life, first in others and then in ourselves. " In others, yes," says the worshipper of " power." " But why in ourselves ? Has not he 254 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY who is strong enough to strangle life in others, raised his own life to a higher level ? " Let us go back to the German ideal. In basing her scheme of life on her scheme of education, Germany has gone perilously near to recognizing the existence of two ideals of life. As this would be incompatible with her logical consistency and singleness of purpose, we must assume that in her estimation one only of them is really worthy of the name. Which, then, is the ideal state, the teacher's or the pupil's, the master's or the slave's ? In the light of a higher ideal both states might be equally transfigured. But when the antithesis of authority to obedience is itself idealized, we cannot but ask on which side of the antithesis the true life is to be lived. For consider what happens when, as in Germany, the State plays the schoolmaster the rigid disciplinarian, the dogmatic instructor to the nation at large. A small minority an inner ring of officers and officials rides roughshod over the majority, drills it, dragoons it, instructs it, moulds it to its will. In doing this the minority becomes overbearing, arrogant, self-sufficient, self- centred. At any rate, that is the frame of mind which the constant exercise of autocratic authority tends to generate. With what feelings will it be regarded by the docile majority who bear its pres- sure? With resentment, perhaps, but also with secret envy. To be in a position to say " Do what I tell you " is the cherished dream of every German. Thus the exercise of autocratic authority is enjoyed by those who rule, envied by those who obey, prized above all things by both sections of the DEEPEST DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 255 community. In other words, when the antithesis of authority to obedience is idealized, when the national ideal is that of an irresponsible State play- ing the schoolmaster to the whole nation, the ideal life, in the judgment of both the opposing parties, is that of the schoolmaster, not of the pupil, of the rulers, not of the ruled. But here a practical difficulty arises. For how long and on what conditions will the majority the nation consent to be ruled by the minority the overbearing and dictatorial State? For ever, on one condition. To be in a position to say " Do what I tell you " is, as I have just said, the cherished dream of every German. If the State is to retain its hold on the devotion of its subjects, it must help them, one and all, to fulfil this dream. But how is this to be done ? The delegation of authority calls into being a whole hierarchy of officials, not one of whom is too small to play the petty tyrant when he gets the chance. But that is not enough. There may be hundreds of thousands of German officials. But there are tens of millions of German citizens. How is their pious aspiration towards the ideal life the life of the despot and the dog- matist to be gratified? By enabling the German nation to play the schoolmaster towards the rest of mankind. The ideal life is always the life of a minority, of the " elect." But there is no reason why the minority in Germany should not expand till it embraced the entire nation, in which case the subject majority would be the whole non-German world. The nation will allow itself to be drilled and dragooned by the State, if the State will allow it make it possible for it to drill and dragoon 256 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY the rest of mankind. The State has entered into the spirit of this bargain. " If you will do what I tell you," it says to the nation, "you in your turn shall say ' Do what I tell you,' to all the peoples of the earth." This bargain, when duly ratified by both the contracting parties, withdraws Germany from the fellowship of the nations. Henceforth the supposed welfare of his country (which he identifies with its political and commercial ascendancy) is, for the patriotic German, the final end of all that he thinks and does. " I am my own ideal," says the German people, " I am a law unto myself. I make my own moral code. I am my own arbiter of right and wrong. Whatever serves my will to power is good. Whatever thwarts it is evil. Murder, plunder, lust, lying, cruelty, treachery, disloyalty, dishonesty, if these will further the interests of Germany their viciousness will turn to virtue. For I am under the special protection and patronage of the Almighty; and my aggrandizement, by whatever means and at whatever cost to others, is His will . ' ' The attitude of Germany towards other countries is, in brief, frankly inhuman. The " heathen " nations are Dunger-volk. Their function is to manure the soil in which the German " world-race " is to be raised. " It was the English Army," said a German sergeant to a neutral subject travelling in Germany, " backed by the unexpectedly fine fighting of the French and our treacherous betrayal by those wicked Belgians that put our plans back for a year." The paradoxi- cal audacity of the words that I have italicized takes one's breath away. The inversion of the real order of things could not be more complete. DEEPEST DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 257 The Belgians were wicked traitors because they dared to resist a wickedly treacherous invasion of their country ! Two " saving " senses must have died out of the speaker's soul, imaginative sym- pathy, which makes it possible for a man to enter into the feelings of others, and the sense of humour, which makes it possible for him to laugh at himself. The inability of the average German to look at things from any point of view but his own may almost be said to amount to genius. To reason with such a mind would be useless. To reason is to appeal to a common ground of agreement; and Germany, by deliberately substituting a national for a human standpoint in morals and politics, has separated herself so completely from the rest of the nations that, instead of a common ground of agreement, there is a fathomless gulf between her and them. Salvation, then, as Germany understands the word, is for her alone, and is to be achieved by self-aggrandizement, which will take the form either of forcibly dominating others or of making them subservient to her material interests. Pro- fessor Dr. Paul Forster has recently written a letter to the " Tag " in which he expounds the views of schoolmasters serving in the trenches as to the future of education in Germany. Various changes are advocated, all crassly materialistic and sordidly utilitarian. A writer in the Westminster Gazette, in a brief resume of Professor Forster's letter, says that the German boy of the future " will be in- structed to discover what interests Germany has in other countries. That will be the touchstone of the value of his geography lessons " ; and adds s 258 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY that " he is to be taught to despise and neglect the learning of all countries, except in so far as it can be made subservient to the commercial interests of his own country." (Bei welchem Lande heraus- heben : welche Interesse hdben wir dort P) There is nothing cynical in these proposals. They are made in perfect good faith. Germany is a predatory nation, and takes no pains to conceal the fact. What she can get out of the other nations, what material gains she can make at their expense, is the only thing that matters. This planet of ours exists for her benefit, not for the benefit of the human race. Here we have tribalism in its most malignant form, tribalism poisoned and perverted by the belief of the tribe (or the nation) that it is the Chosen People of the Universal God. Tribalism was a necessary stage in the evolution of human society; and human nature has been permanently enriched by the self-effacing devotion which the tribe evoked from its tribesmen. But this relapse into tribalism in the twentieth century, this revival of it on a vast scale by one of the mightiest of modern nations, is a strange and terrible tragedy which bids fair to undo the work of a hundred generations. Since the days of tribal selflessness and tribal selfishness a great drama has been enacted " Une immense esperance a traverse la terre ; Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux." For the Prussianized Germany of to-day this drama is an idle phantasy. The immense hope for the human race the hope of all-embracing brother- hood under the all-loving fatherhood of God the appeal of the over-arching Heaven to the general heart of man, are for her as though they had never DEEPEST DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 259 been. Her outlook on the Universe is national, not cosmic. 1 In other words she has become an 1 If the pious German, in one of his devotional moods, does "lift his eyes to the heavens," he sees nothing there but the canopy of his own country. The Rev. Fritz Philippe, in a sermon recently delivered in Berlin, said that " Germany's divine mission is to crucify humanity. It is therefore the duty of German soldiers to strike blows of merciless violence; they must kill, they must burn, they must work wholesale destruction. Half-measures would be impious ; there must be thorough war without compassion." The Rev. Dr. Lobet, pastor of the principal Lutheran Church in Leipzig, told his flock that " we (Germans) are carrying out Divine wishes in destroying our enemies and in establishing our own power ... we must therefore fight the wicked by all possible means ; their sufferings must please us ; their cries of anguish must fall upon deaf German ears. There can be no compro- mise with the forces of hell, no pity for the slaves of Satan." Dr. Rheinhold Seeberg, Professor of Theology at the University of Berlin, in a sermon preached in the cathedral, said : " We do not hate our enemies. No, we obey the Divine command to love them. When we kill them, when we inflict untold sufferings on them, when we burn their homes and overrun their territories, we are performing a labour of love." The Standard's special correspondent in Switzerland, who has regaled us with these choice extracts, says that they " are fair examples of the work of the German pulpit since the beginning of the war. Practically every preacher in Germany has delivered sermons on these lines Sunday after Sunday, until the congregations of all churches have become saturated with pharisaical self-satisfaction." Are these ministers of the State-enthralled Lutheran Church speaking to their brief, or do they really believe these things ? It is possible so strange is the German psychology that they both speak to their brief and believe what they say. But what a pass things have come to when the pulpit utterances of professors and pastors are scarcely to be distinguished from the maniacal ravings of criminal lunatics ! Yet it is to this hideous practical paradox, to this open advocacy of the perpetration of nameless crimes and horrors ad majorem Dei gloriam, that the doctrine of a " Chosen People " logically leads. In the days of the Inquisition the doctrine of a Chosen Church led to the same goal. 260 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY egomaniac. Egomania in a human being is a recognized form of madness, and as such is a calam- ity for him and his neighbours. The egomania of a great nation is a calamity for the whole world. When the expansive instincts are at work, whether in an individual or a people, they must take one of two alternative paths, the path of self-aggran- dizement which leads to the semblance of growth and greatness, or the path of self-development which leads to the reality. In Germany they have taken the former path. But the doom of those who think to be " saved " by self-aggrandizement is that in their efforts to expand life they inevitably contract it. For we expand life through imagina- tion and sympathy, which take us out of ourselves, in general into the world around us, and in particular into the lives of other men. If life is really expand- ing, it must overflow into those channels. And if those channels are closed against it by its own action, it has ceased to expand, and, since the fountain of life is fed by its outflow even more than by its intake, it has therefore begun to contract. The truth is that life is one and indivisible, and that " the united spirit of life " is " our only true self/' It is open to us to share in that universal life through oneness with our kind. If we will not do so, we cut ourselves off from the rising sap that vitalizes all things, and doom ourselves to wither on our stalks. This is the answer to the question that I recently left unanswered. The power to strangle life is a proof of deficient, not of superabundant vitality. The muscular force of a maniac is notorious, but it is not the force of sanity and health. He who DEEPEST DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 261 thinks to expand his own life by encroaching on life in others, does not know where the one unfailing source of life is to be found. He does not know that love, the apotheosis of sympathy, is the mightiest of all expansive forces, and that the real self is to be won, not by self-aggrandizement, but by the self-loss that finds its consummation in love. These are truths which Germany must learn for herself, for no one else can teach them to her. Having separated herself from her kind and un- learned the language of our common humanity, she has become spiritually deaf and dumb, and it is impossible to converse with her except in the dread- ful sign-language of war. She must dree her own weird. But what of us, her enemies ? In choosing the path of self-aggrandizement, in waging war for dominion and plunder, she has compelled us, with or without the consent of our consciousness, to take the path of self-development. So far we have not got beyond the conception of national self- development, of the right of each nation, however small, to live its own life, to develop its own type of civilization, to pursue its own ideal, to make its own contribution to the cause of human progress. It is something to have arrived at this conception; and we owe Germany a supreme debt of gratitude for having forced us to champion the cause of nationality, and in doing so to marshal our forces under the banner of freedom, the banner which "torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-cloud against the wind." Shall we be able to advance from the conception of national self-development to the larger conception 262 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY of human self-development, of the fulfilment of man's destiny by the realization, in each and in all, of those infinite potencies of life which we hold from the source of all life as a sacred trust ? Time alone can answer this question. But one thing is certain. If self-development is to win acceptance as the ideal end of man's being, our attitude towards education must be radically changed; for, on the one hand, self-development cannot be begun too early, and, on the other hand, under the existing educational regime, it cannot make a fair start in childhood or youth. Should such a change take place, should a revolution in our educational ideals and aims and principles be the outcome, however remote, of the present struggle, we shall not have fought and suffered in vain. In paying this last tribute of thanks to Germany I have but developed an idea which I had already briefly expounded, the idea that Germany's attempt to contract the life of the soul in herself by self- aggrandizement, in other people by rigid and oppressive rule is in its way as necessary to the growth of the human soul as is the effort to expand life; the idea that Germany is providing the soul with what it needs above all things needs for its own security, which would be imperilled if it were not forced to consolidate its gains, with resist- ance to be met and fought against and overcome. We shall not fight the less strenuously for enter- taining this idea. Nay, we shall fight the more strenuously, for we shall realize that if we are to see a meaning and a purpose in Germany's insane " will to power " we must fight her to a standstill; that only by being fought to a standstill can DEEPEST DEBT TO GERMAN DOCILITY 263 Germany (in her present mood) fulfil her function in life and make good her right to exist. Let us fight to the death, then, for the right to live. Let us fight to the death, for Germany's sake as well as for our own. A victory for Germany would be even more fatal to her than to us. For if she is to find her lost soul, her people must win freedom the freedom that carries responsibility with it for themselves. And this they will not begin to do until the ruling caste, to which they are so blindly loyal, has been discredited in their eyes. Let us continue to fight then, without counting the cost. Let us " bear it out even to the edge of doom." But while we do so let us remind ourselves that there is one bond of union between our enemies and ourselves, the bond of suffering. The sorrow and misery which the war has caused are incalculable; but we who are fighting for freedom have suffered no more than our enemies who are fighting for dominion. For if their territories have been less devastated by hostile forces, their losses in battle have probably been heavier; and their privations, though much less than those of the dwellers in the devastated territories, have probably been more widely spread. At any rate, they have suffered deeply and continuously ; and it is well that we should learn to regard this as a bond between us and them. The war will not last for ever ; and when it is over we shall have to live in peace, and some day or other we shall try to live in amity, with those whom we now regard as implacable enemies. We shall be the better able to do this if we can familiarize 264 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY ourselves with the thought that we and they are suffering in what is in the last resort a common cause; that, as we who are fighting for freedom are working, though we may not know it, for the emancipation of Humanity from the bonds of its lower self, so, in their own despite, are they who are selfishly striving to dominate the world ; in fine, that their sorrows and miseries as well as ours are growing-pains of the human spirit. PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. UNIVERSITY OP CALIFORNIA LIBRARY BERKELEY THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW expiration ?f loan 21 aEpIlca " 011 ' made before JUL S3 1921 AUG191987 ,: MAY 2 1 87 20m-ll,'20 YB 21386 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY