Chapter XII: Part 12

The difficulties which I met in the forty years of my Polish diplomacy did not start with the masses of Polish laborers and peasants, but were, I believe, occasioned largely, if not exclusively, by the Polish nobility with the assistance of the Polish clergy. Perhaps this latter term is too narrow, for I know of instances when German priests assisted in the Polish propaganda for the sake of peace. This is a peculiarity of our race--and I do not exactly wish to condemn it--that we often place our religion above our nationality. The very opposite is true of our opponents, the Poles and the French people, who regard their nationality more highly than their religion. We are suffering from this habit. We possess, however, a certain material counter-weight, provided the State government unreservedly supports the German element. The religious element has great weight in the family circle and among women, especially the Polish women, whom I have always greatly admired. The minister has a freer access to them than the local governor or the judge. There will, however, always be a powerful weight in the scales, when the Prussian government exercises its influence with firm determination and so clearly that doubts for the future are impossible. _Vestigia terrent!_ we may say, when with 1848, no--not 1848, I mean 1831-32--the attention paid to the Polish nation became almost more pronounced in Germany than that given to the German element. Since then we have surely been able to register progress in our politics. Now I must ask your indulgence for a moment on account of my lumbago. (Voices: Sit down, Your Highness.) Sitting down does not help me. I know this visitor from years of experience. I was speaking of the possibility of having the two races living peacefully side by side. This is not impossible, for in Switzerland we see three different nationalities--the German, Italian, and French Swiss--deliberate quietly and without bitterness on matters of joint interest. In Belgium we see the Germanic Flemish form a united State with the Gallic Walloons, and we perceive that it is possible under circumstances to live peacefully together even with the Poles, when we remember East Prussia, where the Polish Masures, the Lithuanians, and the Germans work together harmoniously. Because nobody has incited the people there, no national ill feeling has appeared among them. It is true, to be sure, that the Catholic priest, with his peculiar interests, is unknown there. But look at your neighbors in Upper Silesia. Have the two races not lived there in peaceful communion for centuries, although the religious differences exist there also? What is it, then, that Silesia has not, and that has made it possible for us to live there, through centuries, in religious harmony? I am sorry to have to say it, it is the Polish nobility and the clergy of the Polish propaganda. The Polish nobles are, no doubt, very influential--more so with the Poles than the Germans--but the statistical figures are much larger than the actual number of our aggressive Polish opponents with whom we have to count.

The nobles are thinking of the time when they were all-powerful, and they cannot give up the memory of conditions when they ruled the king as well as the peasants. The Polish nobles, however, are surely too highly educated to believe that the conditions of the old Polish republic of nobles could ever return, and I should be astonished if the Polish peasants knew the history of Poland so badly that they did not recoil from the possibility of a return to the old state of affairs. The peasants must say to themselves that a "wet year," as the farmers put it, would be their lot if the nobles regained their power. Among the national-Polish representatives that are elected, you generally meet only noblemen. At least I cannot remember having seen a Polish farmer as a representative in the Reichstag or in the diet. Compare this with the election results in German districts. I do not even know whether there are Polish burghers in our sense of the word. The middle classes in the Polish cities are poorly developed. Consequently, when we reduce our opponents to their proper size, we grow more courageous in our own determination; and I should be very glad if I could encourage those who on their part are adding to the encouragement of the Polish nobles. I feel, gentlemen, that I am of one mind with you, who have traveled the hard road hither. I have no influence with other elements, but we shall not give up hope in spite of all vicissitudes.

The address of the previous speaker also referred to vicissitudes and changes. These changes have characterized our entire Polish policy, from 1815 till today. They took place whenever high Polish families gained influence at court. You all know the Radziwill family and its influence at the court of Frederick William IV. If we could make a mental test of the popular feeling of 1831 and of today, we should find that the conviction has greatly increased that we have German fellow-countrymen in the Grand duchy of Posen. The former and, I am tempted to say, childish cult of the Poles as I knew it in my childhood is no longer possible. Then we were taught Polish songs in our music lessons together with the Marseillaise, to be sure. The Polish nobleman, therefore, than whom God never created anything more reactionary, was here thrown into one pot with the French revolution, and liberalism was coupled with the cause of the Poles, because we were lacking in political perspicacity. Such feelings were ingrained in our citizens at that time. I am thinking especially of the citizens of Berlin. If today you ask the opinion of your forty-eight million fellow-countrymen, and compare their views and those of the bulk of the German army with the bugbear which had found lodging in German hearts at the time of Platen's Polish songs, you surely cannot despair of further development. We may, you must agree, register progress, although it is slow and there are lapses. It is like climbing a sandy hill or walking in the lava of Mount Vesuvius. One often glides back, but on the whole one is advancing. Your position will grow the stronger the more vigorously developed our sense of nationality will become. I ask of you, do not despair if there are clouds in the sky, especially in this rainy year which has saddened the farmers. They will disappear, and the union of the Warthe and the Vistula with Germany is irrefragable.

For centuries we have existed without Alsace-Lorraine, but no one yet has dared to think of what our existence would be if today a new kingdom of _Poland_ were founded. Formerly it was a passive power. Today it would be an active enemy supported by the rest of Europe. As long as it would not have gained possession of Danzig, Thorn, and West Prussia, and I know not what else the excitable Polish mind might crave, it would always be the ally of our enemies. It indicates, therefore, insufficient political skill or political ignorance if we rely in any way on the Polish nobles for the safety of our eastern frontier, or if we think that we can win them to fight anywhere for German possessions, sword in hand. This is an Utopian idea. The only thing which we and you, gentlemen, can do under present conditions, and which we can learn from the Poles, is to cling to one another. The Poles, too, have parties, and used to show this even more unfortunately than we, but all their parties disappear as soon as a national question is broached. I wish the same would come to be true of us, and that in national questions we would belong primarily, not to a party, but to the nation. Let us be of as divergent opinions as we choose, but when in our eastern provinces the question arises: "German or Polish," then let the party feuds be laid aside until, as the Berliners say, "After nine o'clock." Now is the time to fight and to stand together. This is just as it is in military matters--and I am glad to see among you many who have experience in such things. Before joining an attack in war we do not ask: Shall we follow our progressive or our reactionary neighbor? We advance when the drum beats the signal, and so we should in national affairs forget all party differences, and form a solid phalanx hurling all our spears, reactionary, progressive, and despotic alike, against the enemy.

If we agree on this--and the dangers of the future are compelling us to do so--we shall win our women and children for the same strict sense of nationality. And if our women are with us, and our youths, we are saved for all time. This is one of our present tasks, to give a national education to our children. I am confident that the German women possess all the necessary qualifications for this task. I shall ask you, therefore, to join me in a toast: The German Women in the Grandduchy of Posen! And may the German idea take an ever firmer hold in your country!

LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR AND THE EMPIRE!

April 1,1895

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND VON MACH, PH.D.

[The eightieth birthday of Prince Bismarck was celebrated as a national holiday everywhere in Germany. Not less than 5,250 youths from the universities and academies visited Friedrichsruh on April 1 to bear witness, before the "old man" of Germany, to their love for the emperor and the empire. After receiving a delegation from the faculties of all the universities, Bismarck addressed the students as follows:]

Gentlemen! I have just heard from the lips of your teachers, the leaders of higher education, an appreciation of my past, which means much to me. From your greeting, I infer a promise for the future, and this means even more for a man of my years than his love of approbation. You will be able, at least many of you, to live according to the sentiments which your presence here today reveals, and to do so to the middle of the next century, while I have long been condemned to inactivity and belong to the days that are past. I find consolation in this observation, for the German is not so constituted that he could entirely dismiss in his old age what in his youth inspired him. Forty and sixty years hence you will not hold exactly the same views as today, but the seed planted in your young hearts by the reign of Emperor William I. will bear fruit, and, even when you grow old, your attitude will ever be German-national because it is so today--whatever form our institutions may have taken in the meanwhile. We do not wilfully dismiss from our hearts the love of national sentiments; we do not lose them when we emigrate. I know instances of hundreds of thousands of Germans from America, South Africa, and Australia who are today bound to the fatherland with the same enthusiasm which carried many of them to the war.

We had to win our national independence in difficult wars. The preparation, the prologue, was the Holstein war. We had to fight with Austria for a settlement; no court of law could have given us a decree of separation; we had to fight. That we were facing a French war after our victory at Sadowa could not remain in doubt for anyone who knew the conditions of Europe. It was, however, desirable not to wage this war too soon nor before we had garnered to some extent the fruits of our North-German union. After the war had been waged everybody here was saying that within five years we should have to wage the next war. This was to be feared, it is true, but I have ever since considered it to be my duty to prevent it. We Germans had no longer any reason for war. We had what we needed. To fight for more, from a lust of conquest and for the annexation of countries which were not necessary for us, always appeared to me like an atrocity; I am tempted to say like a Bonapartistic and foreign atrocity, alien to the Germanic sense of justice.

Consequently since we rebuilt and enlarged our house according to our needs, I have always been a man of peace, nor have I shrunk from small sacrifices. The strong man can afford to yield at times. Neither the Caroline Islands nor Samoa were worth a war, however much stress I have always laid on our colonial development. We did not stand in need of glory won in battles, nor of prestige. This indeed is the superiority of the German character over all others, that it is satisfied when it can acknowledge its own worth, and has no need of recognition, authority, or privilege. It is self-sufficient. This is the course I have steered, and in politics it is much easier to say what one should avoid than to say what one should do. Certain principles of honesty and courage forbid one to do certain things, just as the access to certain fields is interdicted in the army maneuvers. But the decision as to what has to be done is a very different matter, and no one can be sure of it beforehand, for politics are a task which can be compared only to the navigation of unknown waters. One does not know what the weather will be or how the currents will flow, nor what storms will be raging. There is in politics this additional factor of uncertainty that one is largely dependent on the decisions of others on whom one has counted and who have failed. One never can act with complete independence. And, when our friends whose assistance we need, although we cannot guarantee it, change their minds, our whole plan has failed. Positive enterprises are, therefore, very difficult in politics, and when they succeed you should be grateful to God who has given His blessing, and not find fault with details which one or the other may regret, but accept the situation as God has made it. For man cannot create or direct the stream of time. He can sail on it and steer his craft with more or less skill, be stranded and shipwrecked, or make a favorable port.

Since we now have made a favorable port, as I conclude from the predominant although not unanimous opinion of my countrymen, whose approval is all we have worked for, let us be satisfied, and let us keep and cherish what we have won in an Emperor and an empire as it is, and not as some individuals may wish it should be, with other institutions, and a little bit more of this or that religious or social detail that they may have at heart. Let us be careful to keep what we have, lest we lose it because we do not know how to appreciate it. Germany once was a powerful empire under the Carolingians, the Saxons, and the Hohenstaufens, and when she lost her place, five, yes six hundred years passed before she regained the use of her legs--if I may say so. Political and geological developments are equally slow. Layers are deposited one on the other, forming new banks and new mountains. But I should like to ask especially the young gentlemen: Do not yield too much to the German love of criticism! Accept what God has given us, and what we have toiled to garner, while the rest of Europe--I cannot say attacked us, but ominously stood at attention. It was not easy. If we had been cited before the European Council of Elders before our French affairs were settled, we should not have fared nearly so well; and it was my task to avoid this if I possibly could. It is natural that not everything which everybody wished could be obtained under these conditions, and I mention this only to claim the indulgence of those who are perfectly justified in expecting more, and possibly in striving for more. But, above everything, do not be premature, and do not act in haste. Let us cling for the present to what we have.

The men who made the biggest sacrifices that the empire might be born were undoubtedly the German princes, not excluding the King of Prussia. My old master hesitated long before he voluntarily yielded his independence to the empire. Let us then be thankful to the reigning houses who made sacrifices for the empire which after the full thousand years of German history must have been hard for them to make; and let us be thankful to science, and those who cultivate her, for having kept alive on their hearths the fire of German unity to the time when new fuel was added and it flamed up and provided us with satisfying light and warmth.

I would then--and you will say I am an old, conservative man--compress what I have to say into these words: Let us keep above everything the things we have, before we look for new things, nor be afraid of those people who begrudge them to us. In Germany struggles have existed always, and the party schisms of today are naught but the echoes of the old German struggle between the noble families and the trade unions in the cities, and between those who had and those who had not in the peasant wars, in the religious wars, and in the thirty years' war. None of these far reaching fissures, which I am tempted to call geological, can disappear at once. And should we not be indulgent with our opponents, if we ourselves do not desist from fighting? Life is a struggle everywhere in nature, and without inner struggles we end by being like the Chinese, and become petrified. No struggle, no life! Only, in every fight where the national question arises, there must be a rallying point. For us this is the empire, not as it may seem to be desirable, but as it is, the empire and the Emperor, who represents it. That is why I ask you to join me in wishing well to the Emperor and the empire. I hope that in 1950 all of you who are still living will again respond with contented hearts to the toast

LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR AND THE EMPIRE!

THE LIFE OF MOLTKE

BY KARL DETLEV JESSEN, PH.D.

Professor of German Literature, Bryn Mawr College

To relate, in detail, the story of the life of General-Fieldmarshal Graf Helmuth von Moltke--or, as we shall briefly call him, Moltke--means to give an account of that memorable phase of modern history, perhaps, so far as Europe is concerned, the most important of the nineteenth century. This was the ascendency of Prussia, of her king and of her people, culminating in the unification and the consolidation of most of the German states into one great empire, with all its realization of military and political power, of social, economic, and, in a wide sense, of cultural eminence and efficiency. The barest outlines, however, must suffice for the present purpose.

Moltke was born at the threshold of the century the history of which he so prominently helped to shape, on October 26, 1800, at Parchim in the duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. On his father's side he descended from a family of the North German gentry which had come to various degrees of prominence in some German as well as Scandinavian states. No doubt he inherited the military instinct from this race of warriors, statesmen, and landholders; a race the characteristic traits of which indicated the line along which he was bound to develop, the field in which he was to manifest his greatest achievements. But there is just as little doubt that all the elements of character which exalted his military gifts and instincts into an almost antique nobility, simplicity, and grandeur--his dignity, purity, dutifulness, his profound religious devotion, and sense of humor--came to him from his mother, who was descended from an ancient patrician family of the little republican commonwealth, the once famous Hansatown of Lübeck. How far the Huguenot strain may have influenced him, through his paternal grandmother, is hard to tell, since we know but little of Charlotte d'Olivet.

After the family had moved to Holstein, where his father failed to make a success of an agricultural undertaking for which he seems to have lacked fitness, young Moltke entered the Royal Danish Military Academy as a cadet, and there passed his lieutenant's examination with distinction; but he sought and found a commission under the Prussian eagle. He entered the eighth grenadiers at Frankfort-on-the-Oder. A year later, in 1823, he was sent to what is now called the War Academy in Berlin. Only by the closest economy and by some outside work, partly literary, as we shall see, he managed to get along with his exceedingly small officer's pay. He distinguished himself however so much that he became, successively, a teacher at the Division School and an active military geological surveyor, and finally was taken into the General Staff of the Army. Becoming a first lieutenant in 1832, a captain in 1835, ahead of many of his comrades, he served exclusively in strategical positions. During the four years, 1835-39, he, with some comrades, was in the Turkish dominions for the purpose of organizing and drilling the Turkish Army. He witnessed, as an active participant, the Turkish defeat by the insurgent Egyptians at Nisib on the Euphrates, which was brought about by the indolent obstinacy of the Turkish commander-in-chief. Like Xenophon, Moltke retreated toward and reached the Black Sea. At Constantinople he obtained honorable dismissal from the Sultan. After his return to Prussia he became chief of the General Staff of the Fourth Army Corps. In 1841 he married Mary Burt, a young relative who was partly of English extraction. The union developed into an unusually happy married life, in spite of, or partly because of, their great difference in age.

His wife, by whom he had no issue, lived to see the beginning of his great achievements and fame, but died in 1868, before his proudest triumph. Various commands led him to Italy, Spain, England, and Russia as adjutant of Prussian princes. In 1858 he was appointed chief of the General Staff of the Prussian Army--the institution which he shaped into that great strategical instrument through which were made possible, from a military point of view, the glorious successes of the three wars--1864, 1866, 1870-71--and which has become the model of all similar organizations the world over.

Side by side with the overtowering political achievement of Bismarck and the more congenial life work of Roon, the minister of war, Moltke's service to his country and his king stands unchallenged in historical significance. He has indelibly inscribed his name on the tablets of history as one of the world's greatest strategists. But he did not lay down his work until extreme old age; in 1888, as he so simply put it in his request for relief from duty, he resigned his office, because he "could no more mount a horse." He, however, still remained president of the Commission of National Defense and his last speech in the German Reichstag, of which he had been a continuous member since its establishment, he delivered on May 14, 1890. He died on April 24, 1891. The nation felt that one of its great heroes had passed away.

In two congratulatory documents on the occasion of Moltke's ninetieth birthday, Theodor Mommsen, the historian, has summed up the results of the great soldier's life-work--in the address presented by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and in the honorary tablet of the German cities. These inscriptions may be found in Mommsen's _Reden und Aufsaetze_. Shortly after Moltke's death, in a commemorative address at the same Academy, the historian and Hellenist Ernst Curtius reviewed Moltke's relations to historical science and his achievements in military science and in history. The Academy had appointed the Fieldmarshal an honorary member in 1860 for his great achievements in the military, geographical, and historical sciences. Professor Curtius in the address draws the outlines of Moltke's character as a student, and explains how he is indebted to the teachings of Karl Ritter, the founder of scientific geography, how he clearly develops under the influence of Niebuhr, Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch, and Erman, the physicist. He points out how Moltke, as historian and as an expert cartographer, introduces scientific spirit and work into his great creation, the German General Staff. As a strategist, however, it remains to be said that he follows in the footsteps, puts into practice and develops the methods of General von Clausewitz, the first mind who put war on an empirical and scientific basis. Moltke was intimately acquainted with Gibbon through a nearly completed rendering into German of _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, a translation which, unfortunately, never was printed and seems to be lost even in manuscript. As his favorite books and writers Moltke mentions, among others, Littrow's _Astronomy,_ Liebig's _Agricultural Chemistry_, Clausewitz's _On War,_ Ranke, Treitschke, Carlyle. It appears, then, that his scientific equipment was of the most solid sort, enabling him to make the most valuable contributions to knowledge.

It is impossible to imagine to oneself Moltke breaking into tears, either of wrath or of despair, in great crises of his life, such as we know to have been the case with Bismarck. There is a contrast between these two men in their very makeup. There is tragedy in Bismarck's soul, in its volcanic eruptiveness and its conflicts. He is nervously high-strung in the extreme, the very embodiment, in Karl Lamprecht's terminology, of the type of "Reizsamkeit." He likes to listen to Beethoven's music and his sense of nature reveals him to be impressionable, sensitive. His gamut of emotions and feelings, and their expression, is extraordinary. Moltke, on the other hand, appears to be always in harmony with himself, he is far less impulsive than his great contemporary and friend. His feeling, always awake for nature, has no element of morbid and pathetic sentiment; in the earlier stages of its manifestation we see it slightly tinged by Romanticism. But he is at peace with nature, his great comforting mother. There is no sudden and surprising break in his mental or spiritual development. The ideal of the strategist, as antiquity saw it, appears to be consummated in his person. William James, himself an ardent pacificist, well observed that in the modern soldier there is a matter-of-factness far removed from the bluff and make-believe of modern life in general. He might have chosen Moltke as the best type of this sort of warrior. But there was much more than this scientific and dutiful soldier; there was at bottom of Moltke's nature a fine sense of proportion, an artistic vein, and, not the least element, a Christian philosophy of life just as far removed from mere perfunctory indifferentism as from cocksure dogmatic bigotry and self-sufficiency. We have striking evidence of this in the _Trostgedanken_, the _Consolatory Thoughts on the Earthly Life and a Future Existence_, which he laid down as the last literary utterance of his full and eventful career. But this is not all; for most astonishing of all in the richness of this well-rounded harmony of over ninety years of life is a lively source of humor, due more to endowment and inheritance from his mother than to her influence, as his letters to her bear witness. When war is declared in 1870 he remarks that a new vitality has entered his carcass, and, on the very eve of his demise, when in the morning he had attended a session of the Upper House of the Prussian Diet, loyal to his work and task to the very last moment, he closed the last and winning game of whist he played with the quotation of that grim bit of humor characteristic of Frederick the Great and his soldiery: "_Wat seggt hei nu to sine ollen Suepers_?"

In Moltke, if in any one, the character of the man reveals the character and style of his writing. Mommsen, in his address mentioned above, characterizes him as "the man who knew how to describe, as well as how to win, battles, the master of style in his rare speeches, the clever and sympathetic investigator of and writer on manifold ethnic life, the scientific explorer of the regions on the rivers Tigris and Euphrates." It is obvious, though, that this mastery of style, this superb union of form and content, was not attained miraculously and from the start. Still, his first production, published in 1827, a tale (_Novelle_) in the style of Tieck and his followers, shows distinctive talent, and a tendency toward brevity as well as adequacy of expression, not to mention a sustained sense of harmony and proportion. The young lieutenant also published, anonymously, some poetry, and showed a clever hand in translating from foreign poets. It is a pity that most of these attempts are buried in inaccessible periodicals and have never been republished. But he left the field of poetry and fiction, so far as we know, forever with his next work, the first published under his name and in pamphlet form, a work which, though of genuine political interest and love, was at the same time intended to increase his income to the level of a living wage: _Holland and Belgium in their mutual relations; from their separation under Philip II., till their re-union under William I_. He read more than five thousand pages of sources for the preparation of this small pamphlet. It was published in 1831, and followed within a year by another one: _An account of the internal state of affairs and of the social condition of Poland_. Both writings, as in fact everything else from his pen since about 1830, had a more or less direct bearing on his military vocation; since war, according to Clausewitz, is nothing but the continuation of politics by other than diplomatic means.

But the height of his literary mastery is reached in 1841 by the publication of the _Letters on the condition and events in Turkey from the years_ 1835 _till_ 1839, the matured fruit of those eventful and adventurous but, at the same time, constructive years in the Orient. They have been likened to Goethe's _Italian Journey_. The comparison is justified by striking resemblances. Both works have resulted from diaries and letters actually kept, Moltke's work, however, more faithfully retaining and professing its formal nature. But the resemblance is much closer, arising, in the so-called inner form, from a similarity of attitude, the same wide extent of interests which may be briefly called "kulturgeschichtlich," and, above all, the scientific concern in the country and its inhabitants, to which both brought the most solid and methodical qualifications. It is true, the wealth of Italy, both of antiquity and of the Renaissance, in matters literary and artistic, so exuberantly mirrored in Goethe's book of travel, is not to be found in Moltke's work. But this lack is counterbalanced by those portions dealing with historical events which Moltke actually experienced and even influenced; events, though then unsuccessful, as far as his intentions were concerned, yet important and significant for our own time, as the recent developments on the Balkan peninsula bear ample evidence. Both, Goethe as well as Moltke, are clever and artistic in handling pencil and brush as well as their descriptive pen.

And now the style, in the narrower sense. It is natural, limpid, free from all rhetorical flourishes and wordiness, placing the right word in the right place. Xenophon, Caesar, Goethe, come to mind in reading Moltke's descriptions, historical expositions, reflections. Bookish terms and unvisual metaphors, which occur in the preceding pamphlets, though rarely enough, are entirely absent. The tendency toward military brevity and precision is everywhere obvious. The omission of the cumbersome auxiliary, wherever permissible, already characteristically employed in his tale, is conspicuous, as in all his writings and letters. The words are arranged in rhythmical groups without falling into a monotonous sing song. Participial constructions, tending toward brevity, are more in evidence than in ordinary German prose. Sparingly, but with good reason and excellent handling, periodic structure is employed. Still another point is significant, showing the writer to be of born artistic instinct. In a letter to his brother Ludwig, who was to take from Moltke's overburdened shoulders part of his laborious task of translating Gibbon, he cleverly remarks on the exuberant use of adjectives by the historian as being sometimes more obscuring than elucidating, and he simply advises the omitting of some. It is a pity that the translation seems to be lost, and with it an insight into Moltke's elaboration of his style, which a translation would reveal better than original composition. In one respect these letters about Turkey were never equalled by Moltke. Henceforth, he turned absolutely matter-of-fact, a military writer _par excellence_. Even in his letters those nice bits of humor and incidental manifestations of a subtle and fine nature sense grow scarcer and scarcer. There are two essays--_The Western Boundary_, and _Considerations in the Choice of Railway Routes_--both published in the _Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift_, in 1841, and 1843 respectively, that demonstrate this tendency toward specialization. The bulk of his writings from then on falls into that technical series reserved for, and interesting chiefly to, the military man. Even his speeches in the Reichstag, few and far between, considering the extent of years over which they are spread, with all their excellent "Sachlichkeit," their directness and clearness, concern matters and problems that affect, more or less directly, his comprehensive duties as chief intellect of the military organization of his country. So, quite naturally, we see him very reluctantly yield to a gentle but persistent pressure to use his great literary talent for setting down some reminiscences from his life. He declined to publish personal memoirs, however, saying: "All that I have written about actual and real things ('Sachliches') which is worth preserving is kept in the archives of the General Staff. My personal reminiscences are better buried with me." He had turned objective in the highest possible degree, leaving behind all vanities and petty subjective points of view. But after his retirement he wrote, in 1887, on the basis of the great work on that subject by the General Staff and partly managed by himself, that short _History of the Franco-German War of_ 1870-71, which his nation cherishes as a precious inheritance. It is "sachlich" throughout. Starting with a brief reflection on the origin of modern wars he relates the events from the point of view of the directing chief of staff of the army, closing the whole by one impressive sentence: "Strassburg and Metz, estranged from our country in times of weakness, had been regained, and the German Empire had come to a renewed existence." The work is a consummation, in literary form, of his motto "Erst waegen, dann wagen!" From the very threshold of his death we possess as the sum total of his philosophy of life those already mentioned _Consolatory Thoughts on the Earthly Life and a Future Existence_. From the point of composition and style these are highly interesting because of the fact that, beside the final version, three extant parallel versions show the gradual working out of form and thought.

Something remains to be said about Moltke the correspondent. The letters preserved or published fully justify his being ranked among the best letter writers in German literature. Here, more than elsewhere, the subtle and finer characteristics of the man, the son, the brother, the friend, the gentle and always kindly responsive nature of a thoroughly human and Christian soul are revealed. Above all, however, and side by side with Bismarck's noble letters to his fiancée and wife, stand Moltke's charming and devoted letters to Mary Burt von Moltke. I shall not venture to describe their wealth of sentiment, of charm, of love, of interest in matters big and small. One of the long series, however, stands conspicuous among them; it is addressed to his fiancée, dated Berlin, February 13, 1842. Charming in its combination of a protective, paternal, and instructive attitude with that of the lover and prospective husband, it is unique also because of the advice given about the gentle art of writing letters, an art in which the great modern strategist excelled.

_LETTERS AND HISTORICAL WRITINGS OF MOLTKE_

* * * * *

THE POLITICAL AND MILITARY CONDITIONS OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE IN 1836

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND VON MACH, PH.D.

[Moltke spent four years, from 1836 to 1839, in Turkey, and, as was his habit, sent detailed accounts of his experiences to his family. After his return to Prussia, he collected his material, revised it, omitted all intimate family references, and published it under the title _Letters Concerning Conditions and Events in Turkey_. The book contained sixty-seven letters. The following is the tenth letter, dated from Pera, April 7, 1836.]

For a long time it was the task of the armies of western Europe to set bounds to the Turkish sway. Today the powers of Europe seem anxious to keep the Turkish state in existence. Not so very long ago serious concern was felt lest Islam gain the upper hand in a great part of the West, as it had done in the Orient. The adherents of the prophet had conquered countries where Christianity had been rooted for centuries. The classic soil of the apostles, Corinth and Ephesus, Nicea (the city of synods and churches), also Antioch, Nicomedia, and Alexandria had yielded to their strength. Even the cradle of Christianity and the grave of the Saviour, Palestine and Jerusalem, did homage to the Infidels, who held their possessions against the united armies of the western knights.

It was left to the Infidels to put an end to the long existence of the Roman Empire, and to dedicate St. Sophia, where Christ and the saints had been worshipped for almost one thousand years, to Allah and his prophet. At the very time when people were wrangling about religious dogmas in Constance, when the reconciliation between the Greek and the Catholic churches had failed, and the defection of forty million people from the rule of the Pope was threatening, the Moslems advanced victoriously to Steiermark and Salzburg. The noblest prince of Europe at that time, the Roman King, fled from his capital before them; and St. Stephen in Vienna came near being turned into a mosque, like St. Sophia in Byzantium.

At that time the countries from the African desert to the Caspian Sea, and from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, obeyed the orders of the Padisha. Venice and the German Emperors were registered among the tributaries of the Porte. From it three quarters of the coastlands of the Mediterranean took their orders. The Nile, the Euphrates, and almost the Danube had become Turkish rivers, as the archipelago and the Black Sea were Turkish inland waters. And after barely two hundred years this same mighty empire reveals to us a picture of dissolution which promises an early end.

In the two old capitals of the world, Rome and Constantinople, the same means have been employed to the same ends, the unity of the dogma to obtain unrestricted power. The vicar of St. Peter and the heir of the calif have fallen thereby into identical impotency.

Since Greece has declared her independence, and the principalities of Moldavia, Wallachia, and Servia are offering only a formal recognition to the Porte, the Turks are as if banished from these, their own provinces. Egypt is a hostile power rather than a subject country; Syria with her wealth, Adana (the province of Cilicia), and Crete, conquered at the cost of fifty-five attacks and the lives of seventy thousand Mussulmans, have been lost without one sword-thrust, the booty of a rebellious pasha. The control in Tripolis, hardly recovered, is in danger of being lost again. The other African states of the Mediterranean have today no real connection with the Porte; and France in her hesitation whether she should keep the most beautiful of them as her own is looking to the cabinet of St. James rather than to the Divan at Constantinople. In Arabia finally, and in the holy cities themselves, the Sultan has had no actual authority for a long time.

Even in those countries which are left to the Porte the supreme power of the Sultan is often restricted. The people on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris show little fidelity; the _Agas_ on the Black Sea and in Bosnia obey the dictates of their personal interests rather than the orders of the Padisha; and the larger cities at a distance from Constantinople are enjoying oligarchical municipal institutions, which render them almost independent.

The Ottoman monarchy, therefore, consists today of an aggregation of kingdoms, principalities, and republics which are kept together only by habit and the communion of the Koran. And if a despot is a ruler whose words are law, then the Sultan in Constantinople is very far from being a despot.

The diplomacy of Europe has long engaged the Porte in wars which are not in its interest, or has forced it to make treaties of peace in which it has lost some of its provinces. During all this time, however, the Ottoman Empire had to deal with an enemy at home who seemed more terrible than all the foreign armies and navies. Selim III. was not the first Sultan to lose his throne and his life in his struggle against the Janizaries, and his successor preferred the dangers of a reformation to the necessity of trusting himself to this society. Through streams of blood he reached his end. The Turkish Sultan gloried in the destruction of the Turkish army, but he had to crave the help of an all-too-powerful vassal in order to suppress the insurrection on the Greek peninsula. At this juncture three Christian powers forgot their ancient feuds. France and England sacrificed their ships and men to destroy the Sultan's fleet, and thus laid open to Russia the way to the heart of Turkey, and brought about what they had most wished to avoid.

The country had not yet recovered from these many wounds, when the Pasha of Egypt advanced through Syria, threatening destruction to the last descendant of Osman. A newly levied army was sent against the insurgents, but the generals fresh from the harem led it to destruction. The Porte applied to England and France, who were calling themselves its oldest and most natural allies, but received from them only promises. At this juncture Sultan Mahommed invoked the help of Russia, and his enemy sent him ships, money, and an army.

Then the world saw the remarkable spectacle of fifteen thousand Russians encamped on the Asiatic hills overlooking Constantinople, ready to protect the Sultan in his seraglio against the Egyptians. Among the Turks dissatisfaction was rampant. The Ulemas saw their influence wane; the innovations had hurt countless interests, and the new taxes incommoded all classes. Thousands of Janizaries, who were no longer permitted to call themselves such, and the relatives and friends of thousands of others who had been throttled, drowned, or shot down, were scattered through the country and the capital. The Armenians could not forget the persecution which they had recently suffered, and the Greek Christians, who constituted half of the populace of the original Turkish empire, looked upon their rulers as their enemies, and upon the Russians as fellow-believers in the same religion. Turkey at that time could not raise another army.

And just then France was laboring with her great event, England was carrying a load in her public debts, while Prussia and Austria had attached themselves more intimately than ever before to Russia, compelled to do so by the conditions of Western Europe.

Foreign armies had brought the empire to the brink of destruction; a foreign army had saved it. For this reason the Turks wished above everything else to possess an army of their own of seventy thousand regular troops. The inadequacy of this force for the protection of the extensive possessions of the Porte is apparent after one glance at the map. The very dimensions preclude the concentration of the troops, scattered through so many places, when one particular spot is in danger. The soldiers in Bagdad are 1,600 miles distant from those at Ushkodra in Albania.

This shows the great importance of establishing in the Ottoman Empire a well arranged system of militia. It presupposes, of course, that the interests of those who rule and those who are ruled are not at variance.

The present Turkish army is a new structure on an old and battered foundation. At present the Porte would have to look for its safety to its treaties rather than to its army; and the battles which will decide the survival of this State may as well be fought in the Ardennes or in the Waldai Mountains as in the Balkans.

The Ottoman monarchy needs above everything else a well ordered administration, for under present conditions it will scarcely be able to support even this weak army of seventy thousand men.

The impoverished condition of the country shows only too clearly in the lessened income of the State. In vain a number of indirect taxes have been introduced. A kind of tax on meat and meal is levied in a very primitive way on the street corners of the capital. The fishermen pay 20 per cent, of the catch in their nets. Weights and measures must be stamped anew every year; and all products of industry, from silverware and shawls to shoes and shirts, are stamped with the imperial seal. But the proceeds from these taxes are enriching only those who collect them. The riches melt before the avaricious eye of the administration, and the ruler of the most beautiful lands in three continents is drawing water with the leaky pots of the daughters of Danaus.

For the payment of its necessities the government must rely on the confiscation of property, as it passes to new heirs or outright, on the sale of offices, and finally on presents and the miserable means of adulterating the currency.

In regard to the confiscation of money inherited by State officials, the present Sultan has declared that he will do without it. This edict, however, instead of abolishing the practice, acknowledges the correctness of the principle. Formerly the edicts of confiscation were accompanied by the death warrants of those who were to be robbed. Today there are gentler means in use for relieving people of the surplus of their wealth.

The sale of offices continues to be the chief source of income of the State. The candidates borrow the money at a high rate of interest from some Armenian business house, while the government permits these "lease-holders" to recoup themselves by the exploitation of their provinces to whatever extent they wish. Withal, they must fear either a higher bidder, who leaves them no time to get rich, or the State, if they happen to have grown rich. The provinces know beforehand that the new pasha has come to rob them. They, therefore, prepare themselves. Interviews are held, and if no agreement is reached, war is waged, or if an agreement is broken a revolution takes place. As soon as the pasha has settled with the _Agas_, he stands in fear of the Porte. He, therefore, combines with other pashas for mutual protection, and the Sultan must negotiate with the future neighbors of a new pasha before he can appoint him. In a very few _pashaliks_, to be sure, the beginning of a better order of things has been made, the administrative and military powers have been separated, and the taxpayers themselves have agreed to higher taxes, provided they are permitted to pay them directly into the State treasury.

Presents are as customary here as everywhere in the Orient. Without a present the man of lower station is not permitted to approach his superior. If you ask justice of a judge you must take him a gift. Officials and officers in the army are given tips, but the man who receives most presents is the Sultan himself. The expedient of adulterating the currency has been used to the point of exhaustion. Twelve years ago the Spanish dollar was worth seven piasters; today it is bought for twenty-one. The man who then possessed one hundred thousand dollars has discovered that today he has only thirty-three thousand. This calamity has hit Turkey worse than it would have affected any other country, because very little money is here invested in land, and most fortunes consist of cash capital. In the civilized countries of Europe a fortune is the result of having created something of real worth. The man who wins his wealth in this way is increasing at the same time the wealth of his State. His money merely represents the abundance of goods at his disposal. In Turkey the coin itself is the thing of value, and wealth is nothing but the accidental accumulation of money within the possession of an individual. The very high rate of interest, which is here legally 20 per cent, is far from indicating any great activity of capital. It only indicates the great danger of letting money out of one's immediate possession. The criterion of wealth is the ease of its removal. The _Rajah_ will probably buy jewelry for one hundred thousand piasters in preference to investing his money in a factory, a mill, or a farm. Nowhere is jewelry better liked than here, and the jewels which, in rich families, even children of tender years are wearing are a glaring proof of the poverty of the country.

If it is one of the first duties of every government to create confidence, the Turkish administration leaves this task entirely unperformed. Its treatment of the Greeks, its unjust and cruel persecution of the Armenians, those faithful and rich subjects of the Porte, and other violent measures, are so fresh in everyone's memory that no one is willing to invest his money where it will pay interest only after many years. In a country where industry is without the element on which it thrives, commerce also must largely consist of the exchange of foreign merchandise for raw home products. The Turk actually gives ten _occas_ of his raw silk for one _occa_ of fabricated silk, the material for which is produced on his own soil.

Agriculture is even in a worse state. One often hears the complaint that the cost of all the necessities of life has increased in Constantinople fourfold since the annihilation of the Janizaries, as if heaven had decreed this punishment on those who exterminated the "soldiers of Islam." The fact, while true, should probably be explained differently, for, since the events referred to, the great granaries of the capital, Moldavia, Wallachia, and Egypt, which formerly had to send half of their harvests to the Bosphorus, have been closed. In the interior nobody will undertake the growing of grain on a large scale, because the government makes its purchases according to prices of its own choosing. The forced purchases by the government are a greater evil for Turkey than her losses by fire and the plague combined. They not only undermine prosperity, but they also cause its springs to dry up. As a result the government must buy its grain in Odessa, while endless stretches of fertile land, under a most benignant sky and at only an hour's distance from a city of eight hundred thousand people, lie untilled.

The outer members of this once powerful political body have died, and the heart alone has life. A riot in the streets of the capital may be the funeral procession of the Ottoman Empire. The future will show whether it is possible for a State to pause in the middle of its fall and to reorganize itself, or whether fate has decreed that the Mohammedan-Byzantine Empire shall die, like the Christian-Byzantine Empire, of its fiscal administration. The peace of Europe, however, is apparently less menaced by the danger of a foreign conquest of Turkey than by the extreme weakness of this empire, and its threatened collapse within itself.

A TRIP TO BRUSSA

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND VON MACH, PH.D.

[This is the fourteenth of the Letters Concerning Conditions and Events in Turkey. It is dated from Pera, June 16, 1836.]

Yesterday I returned from a short excursion to Asia, which I really should describe for you in poetry, because I ascended Mount Olympus. But since I did not reach the summit, and did not climb farther than the foot, or more properly speaking the toe, of the giant you will get off with prose.

I embarked on the eleventh, in the afternoon, in a small Turkish vessel, and a fresh north wind carried us in four hours to the rocky promontory of Posidonium (today Bosburun, the point of ice), a distance of eight miles. Here the sea was running very high, and our _reis_, or helmsman, who was squatting on the high and delicately carved stern of the ship, was beginning to chant his _Allah ekber_--God is merciful--when the wind died down so completely toward dusk that we did not reach Mudania before eight o'clock next morning.