Chapter III: Germany (2)

Throughout the 'eighties Bismarck succeeded in keeping on foot a secret understanding with Russia. How deeply he had implanted the necessity of this policy in the mind of William I. is brought home by the fact that it was the thought uppermost in the old man's mind as he lay on his deathbed. "Never lose touch with the Tsar," whispered the old man to his grandson, when he was almost too weak to speak. "There is no cause for quarrel."

The old Emperor died in 1888. In 1890 the young Emperor "dropped the pilot." In the same year Russia refused to renew her secret treaty. In 1891 the first Franco-Russian Treaty was signed, and the diplomatic supremacy of Europe passed from the Triple Alliance to be shared between the two opposing groups with which we have been familiar in recent years.

The disappearance of Prince Bismarck marked the beginning of a new phase in German policy and in German life. The younger generation, which had come to maturity, like the Kaiser, since 1870, had never known the old divided Germany, or realised the difficulties of her statesmen. Every one wondered what use the young Kaiser would make of the great Army bequeathed to him. He was believed to be a firebrand. Few believed that, imbued with Prussian traditions, he would keep the peace for twenty-five years; fewer still that, when he broke it, Germany would have the second Navy in the world.

But we are not now concerned with the baffling personality of the Kaiser himself. What is important for us here is the general attitude of mind among the German public of the Kaiser's generation, which has rendered possible the prosecution of the cherished ideas of their ruler.

The school of thought which has been steadily gaining force, under official encouragement, during the last twenty-five years is best summed up in the popular watchwords, "Germany's place in the sun" and "World-Policy" (_Weltpolitik_). These phrases embody, for Germans, who always tend to be abstract in their thinking, not only a practical policy, but a philosophy of human society and government.

This is not the place in which to analyse in detail the outlook upon life (_Weltanschauung_) of the man in the street in modern Germany. It is a confused and patchwork philosophy, drawn, consciously or unconsciously, from many quarters--from the old cosmopolitan tradition of German culture, dating from Goethe and Leasing; from the brave and arrogant claims of Fichte and the prophets and poets of the Napoleonic era; from the far-reaching influence of Hegel and his idealisation of the Prussian State; from the reaction to "realism" in politics after 1848; from the prestige of Bismarck and the deep impression made by the apparent success of his methods and principles; from the gifted Prussian historians, Treitschke and Sybel, who set their own interpretation upon Bismarck's work and imprinted it, by speech and pen, upon the mind of the German nation; and from a hasty interpretation of the theories of writers like Nietzsche and Thomas Carlyle, with their exaltation of "heroes" and "supermen," their encouragements to "live dangerously," their admiration for will-power as against reason and feeling, and their tirades against legal shams, "ballot-box democracy," and flabby humanitarianism.

The practical object of the policy of _Weltpolitik_ can be simply stated. It is to extend to the other continents, and to the world as a whole, the power and the prestige secured for Germany in Europe by the work of Bismarck. "When Germany had won a mighty position on a level with the older Great Powers," says Prince Bülow, "the path of international politics lay open to her ... In the Emperor William II. the nation found a clear-sighted, strong-willed guide who led them along the new road."

Some such expansion of German influence was inevitable from the facts of her economic development since 1871. The population of the Empire, which in 1871 was 41,000,000, has now risen to 65,000,000. The resources of the country, the neglect of which during the days of disunion had forced so many Germans to emigrate for a livelihood, have been rapidly and scientifically developed. Already in the 'eighties "Made in Germany" had become a familiar talisman, and, before the outbreak of the present war, Germany ranked with the United States as the second greatest commercial power in the world.

Simultaneously, of course, there has been a great change in the distribution of the population. In the year 1850 65 per cent, and in 1870 47 per cent of the working population were engaged in agriculture. By 1912 the proportion had sunk to 28.6 per cent.

It was inevitable also that Germany should share with the other Great Powers in the work of colonial government. The adjustment of the relations between the advanced and backward races of mankind is the greatest political task of our age; it is a responsibility shared jointly between all the civilised States, and when in the 'eighties and 'nineties the vast regions of Africa were partitioned amongst them, Germany, late in the field, asserted her claims and received her share in the responsibility.

Rapid economic development and a colonial empire--what was there in these to cause hostility between Germany and Great Britain? The United States have passed through a similar development and have accepted a similar extension of responsibility far outside their own continent. America is a great, a growing, and a self-respecting Power; yet Americans see no ground for that inevitable conflict of interests between their country and Great Britain which forms the theme of so many German books, from Prince Bülow's candid self-revelations down to less responsible writers like Bernhardi.

The explanation lies in the nature of German thought and ambitions. When Germans speak of "a place in the sun," they are not thinking of the spread of German trade, the success of German adventure or enterprise, or of the achievements of Germans in distant lands. They are thinking of the extension of the German State. British influence beyond the seas has been built up during the last four centuries by the character and achievements of British pioneers. Downing Street has seldom helped, often hindered, and generally only ratified the accomplished facts of British settlement and influence. That is not the Prussian theory or the Prussian method. It is for the State to win the territory, and then to set the people to work there, on lines laid down from above. The individual Englishman, when he goes out to colonise, carries England with him, as a part of his personality. Not so the German, at least on the Prussian theory. "The _rare case_ supervened," says Prince Bülow,[1] of an instance typical of the building up of the British Empire, "that the establishment of State rule _followed and did not precede_ the tasks of colonising and civilisation." The State itself, on this theory, has a civilising mission of expansion towards which it directs the activities of its citizens.

[Footnote 1: _Imperial Germany_, 1st ed., p. 249.]

Under the influence of ideas such as these, Germany, since the accession of William II., has built a Navy second to that of Great Britain alone.

What was the purpose of the building of the German Navy? The German official answer is that its purpose was the protection of German trade. "We are now vulnerable at sea," says Prince Bülow. "We have entrusted millions to the ocean, and with these millions, the weal and woe of many of our countrymen. If we had not in good time provided protection for them ... we should have been exposed to the danger of having one day to look on defencelessly while we were deprived of them. We should have been placed in the position of being unable to employ and support a considerable number of our millions of inhabitants at home. The result would have been an economic crisis which might easily attain the proportions of a national catastrophe."

These words may yet prove prophetic. But the catastrophe will not be the result of Germany's lack of a Navy; it will be the result of challenging the naval supremacy of Great Britain.

Prince Bülow's argument assumes, as a basis, the hostility of Great Britain. This assumption, as we know, was unjustified; and its persistence in the German mind can only be set down to an uneasy conscience. The hard fact of the matter is that it is impossible for Germany or for any other Power successfully to defend her foreign trade in case of war with Great Britain. No other Power thinks it necessary to attempt to do so, for no other Power has reason to desire or to foresee a naval conflict with Great Britain.

Ever since 1493, when the Pope divided the monopoly of traffic on the ocean between Spain and Portugal, and English mariners flouted his edict, Great Britain has stood for the policy of the Open Sea, and there is no likelihood of our abandoning it. The German official theory of the purpose of their Navy, with its suspicious attitude towards British sea-power, was, in effect, a bid for supremacy, inspired by the same ideas which made the German army, under Bismarck, supreme in Central Europe. The Kaiser's speeches on naval matters, notably his famous declaration that "our future is on the water," provide an official confirmation, if one were needed, of the real nature of Germany's naval ambitions.

But what right, it may be asked, has Great Britain to this naval supremacy? Why should we, more than any other Power, claim one of the elements for our own? Has not Germany some reason to be jealous? Why should we not allow her, together with ourselves, "a place on the Ocean"?

The answer to this lies in the character of the British Empire. One quarter of the human race live under the Union Jack, scattered throughout the oceans and controlled from a small island in the Western seas. For Great Britain, alone among the States of the world, naval supremacy, and nothing less, is a daily and hourly necessity. India realised this truth recently in a flash when, after generations of silent protection by British sea-power, German shells fell one night at Madras. Any Power that challenges the naval supremacy of Great Britain is quarrelling, not with the British Government or the British people, but with the facts of history, of geography, and of the political evolution of the world. The British Empire has not been built up, like the German, by the work of statesmen and thinkers; it is not the result, as Germans think, of far-seeing national policy or persistent ambition and "greed." It has slowly taken shape, during the last four centuries, since intercourse was opened up by sea between the different races of mankind, in accordance with the needs of the world as a whole. Its collapse, at the hands of Germany or any other Power, would not mean the substitution of a non-British Empire for a British. It would inaugurate a period of chaos in all five continents of the world.

The rulers and people of Germany, who counted on the "decadence" of Great Britain and the disintegration of her unorganised Empire, did not realise these simple facts. Their lack of perception was due partly to their political inexperience; but a deeper reason for it lies in their wholly false estimate as to what "world-policy" and "world-empire" mean. Trained in the Prussian school, they thought of them, like soldiers, in terms of conquest, glory, and prestige. That way lies Napoleonism. None of the great Powers is wholly free from blame on this score. But until Germans realise, as the other Powers are slowly realising, that the true basis of Empire is not a love of glory but a sense of responsibility towards backward peoples, it will be hard to readmit them into the comity of the Great Powers. Only a sense of common purposes and ideals, and of joint responsibility for world-problems, can make the Concert of Europe a reality.

Such is the general attitude of mind among the German public of the younger generation. Let us now turn to the effect of this new outlook upon the political parties and groupings.

The chief result has been the extinction in Germany, as a political force, of the great liberal movement of the mid-nineteenth century which in England, France, and other Western countries has grown and developed during the last generation along lines corresponding to the needs of the new century. The younger generation of middle-class Germans, indoctrinated with "orthodox" and "national" opinions at school and on military service, eschew the ideals which attracted their fathers and grandfathers in 1848; and, although so-called "liberal," "free-thinking," and Radical parties still exist, they have steadily been growing more militarist. Militarism in its new guise, bound up with ideas of industrial and commercial expansion, is far more attractive to them than in the form of the Prussian Army. The Emperor's Navy Bills were from the first more popular in commercial and industrial circles than with the old Prussian Conservatives. But as the years went on the Kaiser succeeded in converting both the Junkers to his Navy Bills and the middle classes to his Army Bills, so that by 1913, when he demanded the "great national sacrifice" of a levy of 50 million pounds by a tax, not on income, but on property, there was no difficulty whatever about "managing" the Reichstag. "The Army Bill of 1913," says Prince Bülow, "met with such a willing reception from all parties as had never been accorded to any requisition for armaments on land and sea.... So far as man can tell, every necessary and justifiable Army and Navy Bill will always be able to count on a safe Parliamentary majority."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Imperial Germany_, p. 169.]

Prince Bülow's "safe Parliamentary majority" means, of course, a majority sufficient to outvote the Social Democrats, with whom every German Government has to reckon as a permanent opposition.

So far we have left the Social Democrats out of the picture. It was necessary to do this, in discussing German policy and the relation between the German Government and Reichstag opinion; for the German Government itself habitually leaves them out of the picture. Hitherto in Germany, so far as opinion on political questions has mattered at all, it is upper-and middle-class opinion that has counted, as it counted in England up to fifty years ago. To the German Government and to the ordinary educated German the Social Democratic party, though it numbers in its voting ranks over 4 million German workmen and others, does not represent German opinion at all: it represents something un-German and anti-German--a public enemy. Between the Social Democrats and the rest of society a great gulf is fixed, across which no intercourse is possible: as the pioneers who attempted to introduce the Workers' Educational Association into Germany found, such intercourse is forbidden from either direction. The Social Democrats are the "Red Danger," "men who," in the Kaiser's words, are "the enemies of Empire and Fatherland," and "unworthy" (except, of course, in war-time) "to bear the name of Germans." We must go back a hundred years in English history to realise the depth of the animosity between the Social Democratic party and the rest of German society. "The word Radical," says an English historian, "conveyed a very different meaning in 1816 to what it does now.... The hands of the Radicals were supposed to be against every man, and every man's hand was against them. Scott, when he talks of rebels in arms, always styles them Radicals. 'Radicalism is a spirit,' wrote the Vicar of Harrow in 1820, 'of which the first elements are a rejection of Scripture, and a contempt of all the institutions of your country, and of which the results, unless averted by a merciful Providence, must be anarchy, atheism, and universal ruin.'"[1] The Vicar of Harrow in 1820 very fairly sums up the substance of innumerable German speeches, pamphlets, and election addresses in 1912 on the subject of the Social Democrats.

[Footnote 1: Spencer Walpole, _History of England_, vol. i. p. 348.]

How is this extraordinary position maintained? How is it possible that in a modern, largely industrial community, the representatives of working-class opinion should be regarded as public enemies?

The chief reason lies, of course, in the fact that the German Empire is not a democracy and is not governed by ministers responsible to Parliament. The immense numbers and rapid growth of the Social Democrats have therefore not really been a menace to the Government. In fact, it has even been held in some quarters that it has been to the interest of the German Government, which is based on the Prussian military caste, to manoeuvre the Social Democrats into an extreme position and then to hold them up as a terrible example of what democracy means. "This," they can tell the German people, "is the alternative to Prussian rule." A dangerous policy, it may be argued, for the Social Democrats may some day secure a majority in the Reichstag. The Prussian answer to this is that, without a redistribution of seats, this is barely conceivable; and that, were it to take place, the Reichstag would promptly be dissolved for new elections on a narrower franchise. Bismarck himself contemplated this course, and his successors would not shrink from it.

Another reason why it has been possible for the Government to ignore the Social Democrats has been the absence of a practical alternative programme on the part of the Social Democrats themselves. "If I had to make out a school report for the Social Democratic Movement," said Prince Bülow in the Reichstag on one occasion, "I should say, 'Criticism, agitation, discipline, and self-sacrifice, I. _a_; positive achievements, lucidity of programme, V. _b._'" The taunt is not undeserved. The Socialist Movement in Germany has suffered, like so many German movements, through a rigid adherence to logical theories. Under the leadership of old revolutionary thinkers like Bebel it has failed to adapt itself to the facts of modern German life. The vague phrases of its republican programme, survivals from a past epoch of European thought, have attracted to it a large mass of inarticulate discontent which it has never been able to weld into a party of practical reformers. In the municipal sphere and in the field of Trade Unionism, under the education of responsibility, German Socialism can show great achievements; but in national policy it has been as helpless as the rest of the German nation.

What effect, it will be asked, is the war of 1914 likely to have on the German working-class movement? In 1848 middle-class Germany made its stand for democracy. May we hope for a similar and more successful movement, in the direction of Western ideals and methods of government, from working-class Germany as a result of 1914?

It is a tempting prophecy; but the outlook is not propitious. Germany, Prussian and South German, noble, bourgeois, and working class, has rallied round the Emperor in this crisis of national history, as the brutal and cynical directors of German policy calculated that she would. For the Social Democratic Movement the war comes with a peculiar appeal. It is a war against Russia, a country about which the German workman knows little and understands less, but which he considers to be the home of a reaction far blacker than that of his own country. A war of aggression against the Western Powers would have found the Social Democrats divided. By representing Russia as the aggressor and the Western Powers as the shameless allies of the "Mongol," German diplomacy, more successful within than without, made certain of enlisting Socialist support.

Moreover, the Socialists too have to pass through a natural reaction from their refusal to recognise the forces of Nationality--from Utopian dreams of international action by the peoples across the barriers of separate governments. For the first time in the history of the party, German Socialism has been allowed to be patriotic. It is an exhilarating and heartening experience, and it is certain to leave an indelible mark upon the spirit of the movement. The great party organisation, hitherto confined to the sterile work of agitation, is being used to cope with the many problems created by the war; and this work, rather than revolutionary agitation, is likely to occupy it for some time to come.

A veil has fallen upon Germany: German books and papers are stopped at our ports: we cannot know through what thoughts the German nation is passing. But as we look with the mind's eye across the North Sea, past devastated Belgium to the populous towns of industrial Germany, we see a people skilful, highly instructed, and mechanically intelligent, yet equally devoid either of personal initiative or of great and inspiring leadership. Two generations of Prussian education have left German public life practically empty of names of more than local reputation. Great changes are needed--a change of institutions and a change of spirit; yet whence this will come we cannot divine. Only, as democrats, we can say with confidence that if the true spirit of the German people is to be liberated from its long imprisonment, its freedom must be won, not from without, but from within. Not Europe but only the Germans can make Germany herself again.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

1. GERMAN HISTORY

BRYCE. _Holy Roman Empire_. (Deals with mediaeval Germany, but also contains a most interesting final chapter on Germany in the Nineteenth Century, written in 1873.) 1904. (7s. 6d.)

CARLYLE. _Frederick the Great_, vol. i. (Best account in English of the earlier history of Prussia.) (2s. 6d.)

H.A.L. FISHER. _Napoleonic Statesmanship: Germany_. 1903. (12s. 6d.) (Germany in the Napoleonic era.)

SEELEY. _Life of Stein_. 1878. 3 vols. (30s.) (The standard work in English on reorganisation of Prussia after Napoleon.)

BISMARCK. _Reflections and Reminiscences_. (The guiding mind in Germany, 1862-1888.) 2 vols. 1898. (Can only be bought second-hand.)

HEADLAM. _Life of Bismarck_. 1899. (6s.) (Heroes of the Nations.)

HOLLAND. _Germany to the Present Day_. 1913. (2s. net.) A useful short history if supplemented by other books.

POWICKE. _Bismarck_. 1914. (6d.) (People's Books.) (Excellent.) The two great modern German historians are Treitschke and Sybel, for whom see Gooch's _History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century_, pp. 140-53. Treitschke's history is not available in English: Sybel's has been translated under the title, _The Founding of the German Empire by William I._ vols., New York, 1890-1891.

2. GERMANY UNDER WILLIAM II.

BÜLOW. _Imperial Germany_. 1914. (2s. net.) (The mind of the German Government.)

SAUNDERS. _The Last of the Huns_. 1914. (1s. net.) (In spite of its objectionable title this volume, by the late correspondent of the _Times_ in Berlin, is written with fairness and lucidity, and contains much valuable information.)

HENRI LICHTENBERGER. _Germany and its Evolution in Modern Times._ 1913. (10s. 6d net.) (Translated from the French: suggestive, especially on economic questions and on the movements of German thought.)

W.H. DAWSON. _The Evolution of Modern Germany_. 1908. (5s. net.) (The best general account of modern Germany in English.)

C. TOWER. _Germany of To-day._ 1913. Home University Library. (Is.) (Good.)

C. SAROLEA. _The Anglo-German Problem_. (2s.) (A useful popular account of German political conditions and German policy.)

_Board of Education Special Reports_, vols. iii. and ix. (3s. 3d. and 2s. 7d.) Articles by Dr. M.E. Sadler on German Education.

_Memoirs of Prince Hohenlohe_. (Imperial Chancellor, 1894-1900.) 2 vols. 1906. (24s. net.)

The Britannica War Books. _Germany_. (2s. 6d. net.) By W. Alison Phillips and J.W. Headlam. (A somewhat carelessly abridged reprint from the standard article in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.)

3. GENERAL BOOKS

H.S. CHAMBERLAIN. _The foundations of the Nineteenth Century_. English translation. 2 vols. 1910. (25s. net.) (This book had an immense vogue in Germany, and was particularly recommended by the Kaiser to his subjects. It is full of interesting, if ill-founded, generalisations tending to emphasise the importance of Race and to glorify the German race.)

THOMAS. _German Literature_. (6s.)

ROBERTSON. _German Literature_. 1914. Home University Library. (1s.)

HERFORD AND OTHERS. _Germany in the Nineteenth Century_. Manchester. 1912. (2s. 6d.) Essays on different aspects of German development.

BERNHARDT. _Germany and the Next War_. 1912. (2s. net.) (The philosophy and aims of Gorman militarism worked out.)

CRAMB. _Germany and England_. 1914. (2s. 6d. net.) (An account of Treitschke and his school of thought: interesting for the light it throws on German misconceptions about Great Britain.)

TREITSCHKE. _Selections from his Lectures on Politics_. 1914.

Translated by A.L. Gowans. (2s. net.)

The writings of the following German professors will be found interesting if procurable: Oncken, Meinecke (both contributors to the _Cambridge Modern History_), Delbrück, Sombart, Erich Marcks (see his lectures on Germany in _Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century_, edited by Kirkpatrick, Cambridge, 1900, 4s. 6d.), Schiemann, Lamprecht, Schmoller, and F. von Liszt.

_Note_.--Such considered German writings as have come to hand since the outbreak of the war show little tendency to cope with the real facts of the situation, or even to seek to understand them. They seem to indicate two developments in German opinion.

(1) A great consolidation of German national unity (except, of course, in Poland and Alsace-Lorraine).

(2) A tendency to forgo the consideration of the immediate issues and to hark back in thought to 1870 or even to the Wars of Liberation. It is difficult to judge of a nation in arms from the writings of its stay-at-homes; but no one can read recent articles by the leaders of German thought without feeling that the Germans are still, before all things and incurably, "the people of poets and philosophers," and that, by a tragic irony, it is the best and most characteristic qualities of the race which are sustaining and will continue to sustain it in the conflict in which its dreams have involved it.