Page 93

Some hold that this is a war of Prussian militarism, and not a war of the German people. This view has the merits of kindliness and convenience. Others warn us not to be misled by such sentimentalists, and assert that the heart of the German people is in the war. The point is of importance to us, because the work of the conscript in the field must be influenced by his private feelings. Notwithstanding all drill and sergeantry, the German Army remains a collection of human beings--and human beings more learned, if not better educated, than our own race! It is not a mere fighting machine, despite the efforts of its leaders to make it into one.

Among those who assert that the heart of the German people is in the war are impartial and experienced observers who have carefully studied Germany for many years. For myself, I give little value to their evidence. To come at the truth by observation about a foreign country is immensely, overpoweringly difficult. I am a professional observer: I have lived in Paris and in the French provinces for nine years; I am fairly familiar with French literature and very familiar with the French language--and I honestly would not trust myself to write even a shilling handbook about French character and life. Nearly all newspapers are conservative; nearly all foreign correspondents adopt the official or conventional point of view; and the pictures of foreign life which get into the press are, as a rule--shall I say incomplete?

Even when the honest observer says, "These things I saw with my own eyes and will vouch for," I am not convinced that he saw enough. An intelligent foreigner with first-class introductions might go through England and see with his own eyes that England was longing for protection, the death of home rule, and the repeal of the Insurance act. The unfortunate Prince Lichnowsky, after an exhaustive inquiry and access to the most secret sources of exclusive information telegraphed to the Kaiser less than a month ago that civil war was an immediate certainty throughout Ireland. Astounding fatuity? Not at all. English observers of England have made, and constantly do make, mistakes equally prodigious. See Hansard every month. So that when I read demonstrations of the thesis that the heart of the German people is in the war, I am not greatly affected by them.

German Heart Is In the War.

Still, I do myself believe that the heart of the German people is in the war, and that that heart is governed by two motives--the motive of self-defense against Russia and the motive of overbearing self-aggrandizement. I do not base my opinion on phenomena which I have observed. Beyond an automobile journey through Schleswig-Holstein, which was formidably tedious, and a yacht journey through the Kiel Canal and Kiel Bay, which was somewhat impressive, I have never traveled in Germany at all. I base my opinion on general principles. In a highly educated and civilized country such as Germany (the word "civilized" must soon take on a new significance!) it is impossible that an autocracy, even a military autocracy, could exist unrooted in the people. "Prussian militarism" may annoy many Germans, but it pleases more than it annoys, and there can be few Germans who are not flattered by it. That the lower classes have an even more tremendous grievance against the upper classes in Germany than in England or France is a certitude. But the existence and power of the army are their reward, their sole reward, for all that they have suffered in hardship and humiliation at the hands of the autocracy. It is the autocracy's bribe and sweetmeat to them.

The Germans are a great nation; they have admirable qualities, but they have also defects, and among their defects is a clumsy arrogance, which may be noticed in any international hotel frequented by Germans. It is a racial defect, and to try to limit it to the military autocracy is absurd. An educated and civilized nation has roughly the Government that it wants and deserves. And it has in the end ways of imposing itself on its apparent rulers that are more effective than the ballot box or the barricade, and just as sure. No election was needed to prove to the Italian Government that Italy did not want to fight for the Triple Alliance, and would not fight for it. The fact was known; it was immanent in the air, beyond all arguments and persuasions. Italy breathed a negative, and war was not. So in Germany the mass of Germans have for years breathed war, and war is. The war may be autocratic, dynastic, what you will; but it is also national, and it symbolizes the national defect.

How About the Leaders?

Does the German conscript believe in the efficacy of his leaders? I mean when he is lying awake and fatigued at night, not when he is shouting "Hoch!" or watching the demeanor of women in front of him. Does no doubt ever lancinate him? Again I would answer the question from general principles and not from observation. The German conscript must know what everybody knows--that in almost every bully there is a coward. And he must know that he is led by bullies. He learned that in the barrack yard. An enormous number of conscripts must also know that there is something seriously wrong with a system that for the sake of its own existence has killed freedom of the press. And the million little things that are wrong in the system he also knows out of his own daily life as a conscript. Further, he must be aware

Page 94

that there is a dearth of really great men in his system. In the past there were in Germany men great enough to mesmerize Europe--Bismarck and von Moltke. There is none today that appeals to the popular imagination as Kitchener does in England or Joffre in France. Alone, in Germany, the Kaiser has been able to achieve a Continental renown. The Kaiser has good qualities. But twenty-four years ago he committed an act of folly and (one may say) "bad form" which nothing but results could justify, and which results have not justified. Whatever his good qualities may be it is an absolute certainty that common sense, foresight, and mental balance are not among them. The conscript feels that, if he does not state it clearly to himself. And as for the military organization of which the Kaiser is the figurehead, it has shown for many years past precisely those signs which history teaches us are signs of decay. It has not withstood the fearful ordeal of success. Just lately, if not earlier, the conscript must have felt that, too.

What is the conclusion? Take the average conscript, the member of the lower middle class. He is accustomed to think politically, because at least fifty out of every hundred of him are professed Socialists with a definite and bitter political programme against certain manifestations of the autocracy. (It is calculated that two-fifths of the entire army is Socialist.) He may not argue very closely while in the act of war; indeed, he could not. But enormous experience is accumulated in his subconsciousness--experience of bullying and cowardice, of humiliation, of injustice, of lying, and of his own most secret shortcomings--for he, too, is somewhat of the bully, out for self-aggrandisement as well as for self-defense, and his conscience privately tells him so. The organization is still colossal, magnificent, terrific. In the general fever of activity he persuades himself that nothing can withstand the organization; but at the height of some hand-to-hand crisis, when one-hundredth of a dogged grain of obstinacy will turn the scale, he may re-

Page 95

member an insult from an incompetent officer, or the protectionism at home which puts meat beyond his purse in order to enrich the landowner, or even the quite penal legislation of the autocracy against the co-operative societies of the poor, and the memory (in spite of him) may decide a battle. Men think of odd matters in a battle, and it is a scientific certainty that, at the supreme pinch, the subconscious must react.

Apropos of a recent article by Mr. Arnold Bennett, wherein he speaks of the resentment which the German soldiers--two-fifths of them Socialists--must feel against the bullying discipline to which they have been subjected, the following reflections are jotted down. The reader who is interested in pursuing the subject further may profitably consult a book entitled "Imperial Germany," by Prince von Bülow, which contains some penetrating observations on the workings of the German mind, as well as the chapter on Germany in Alfred Fouillée's notable work, "Esquisse Psychologique des Peuples Européens."

The precision which characterizes the operations of the German military machine is due to the German notion of discipline. Discipline in Germany is based on the peculiar place assigned to the expert. Military experts exercise in their branch an authority different in degree but not in kind from that belonging to experts in other departments--strategy, tactics, improvements of armament, methods of mobilization. The inexpert soldier submits to the military expert as a person about to undergo a necessary operation would submit to a surgeon. It is a mistake to suppose that the Germans, a highly intelligent and educated people, are being cowed into submission by brutal non-commissioned officers. Brutality, when it occurs, is looked upon as exceptional and incidental to a system on the whole approved. The Germans would never tolerate the severe discipline to which they are subjected did they not willingly submit to it. They regard a highly efficient army as necessary to the safety of the Fatherland, and they are willing to leave the responsibility for the means of securing efficiency to the experts. During the Franco-German war, when a student in the University of Berlin, I talked with some of the brightest of the younger men about their military obligations, and I found that they took precisely the view just stated. The Pomeranian peasant may submit to military dictation in a dull, half-instinctive fashion. The flower and élite of German intelligence submit to it no less--from conviction.

How shall we account for the unique predominance of the expert in German life? The explanation would seem to lie in the phrase invented by a brilliant writer of the last century, "Deutschland ist Hamlet" (Germany is Hamlet). The Germans are a resolute people--not at all, as has been erroneously supposed, a nation of dreamers--just as Hamlet, according to recent criticism, was essentially of a resolute character. In the days of the Hansa and of the Hohenstaufen the Germans cut a great figure in oversea commerce and in war. They were great doers of deeds. The Germans are intensely volitional, but also intensely intellectual. Hence the native hue of resolution has sometimes been sicklied o'er by too much thinking. The intellect of the German refuses to sanction action until the successive steps to be taken have been worked out with logical accuracy, and a scientific groove, so to speak, has been hollowed out along which action can proceed. As soon as

Page 96

this is accomplished, the flood of volitional impulse enters gladly into the channel prepared for it and moves on in it with irresistible force. Bismarck represents the active side, as the eminent philosophers of the German people represent the side of logical construction. The two sides must be taken together to understand German history and the tendencies prevailing in Germany today.

Underneath it all, of course, is German sentiment, but of this we need take no account in discussing German discipline, except in so far as love for the Fatherland enters in to sustain the patience of the people under the burden of their military establishment.

Discipline, or the subordination of the inexpert to the expert, likewise accounts for certain peculiarities of the German political parties. Prince von Bülow mentions three examples of supremely efficient organization--the Prussian Army, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the German Social Democracy. There are some 4,200 Socialist associations, subject to the orders of forty-two district associations, these in turn being ruled by the Central Committee. The working of the Social Democratic machine is almost flawless. The discipline, it is said, is iron.

Again, the conception of Government in Germany, unlike that which prevails in England, France, or America, is determined by the idea of expertness. The Government is the political expert par excellence. Its business is to study the interests of the State as a whole. In all matters of economic theory, of finance, of administration, of social reform, it invokes the advice of specialists. But it is itself the supreme political specialist. It stands high above all the political parties. It does not depend for its existence on majorities in Parliament. It seeks the co-operation of Parliament, but reserves to itself the right of initiative and leadership.

The object of the above remarks is to explain, not to justify, and in the face of much uninstructed criticism to point out the deep sources in the nature of the German people from which spring the influences that have molded their life. The chief objections to their system may be summarized in the statements, that it takes too little account of the value of the inexpert; that it tends to suppress latent spontaneity; and, especially in the sphere of government, that it ascribes to the expert a knowledge of the needs of the people such as no ruling class can ever possess. And it overlooks the highest aim of political life and activity, which is the education of the inexpert to such a point that they may become more or less expert in understanding and promoting the public weal.

FELIX ADLER.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK. See Page 144.

EMILE BOUTROUX. (Photo from Bain News Service.) See Page 160.

Page 97

When peace is seriously desired in any quarter, the questions to be discussed by the plenipotentaries will fall into three groups:

1. Those which affect all Europe.

2. Those which chiefly affect Western Europe.

3. Those which chiefly affect Eastern Europe.

The first group is, of course, the most important, both practically and sentimentally. And the main question in it is the question of Belgium. The original cause of the war was Germany's deliberate and advertised bellicosity, and it might be thought that the first aim of peace would be by some means to extinguish that bellicosity. But relative values may change during the progress of a war, and the question of Belgium--which means the question of the sanction of international pledges--now stands higher in the general view than the question of disarmament. Germany has outraged the public law of Europe, and she has followed up her outrage with a series of the most cowardly and wanton crimes. She ought to pay, and she ought to apologize. Only by German payment and German apology can international law be vindicated. Germany should pay a sum large enough to do everything that money can do toward the re-establishment of Belgium's well-being. I have no competence to suggest the amount of the indemnity. A hundred million pounds does not appear to me too large.

Then the apology. It may be asked: Why an apology? Would not an apology be implied in the payment of an indemnity?

It is undeniable that Germany is now directed by hysteric stupidity wielding a bludgeon. Granted, if you will, that half the nation is at heart against the stupidity and the bludgeon. So much the worse for the half. Citizens who have not had the wit to get rid of the Prussian franchise law must accept all the consequences of their political ineffectiveness. The peacemakers will not be able to divide Germany into two halves.

For Potsdam a first-rate spectacular effect is needed, and that effect would best be produced by a German national apology carried by a diplomatic mission with ceremony to Brussels and published in all German official papers, and emphasized by a procession of Belgian troops down Unter den Linden. This visible abasement of German arms in front of the Socialists of Berlin would be an invaluable aid to the breaking of military tyranny in Prussia.

So much for the Belgium question and the sanction of international pledges. The other question affecting the whole of Europe is the hope of a universal limitation of armaments. But there is a particular question, touching France, which in practice would come before that. I mean Alsace-Lorraine. Unless Germany conquers Europe, Alsace-Lorraine should be restored to France. A profound national sentiment, to which all conceivable considerations of expediency or ultimate advantage are unimportant, demands imperatively the return of the plunder. And in the councils of the Allies, either alone or with German representatives, the attitude of French diplomacy would be: "Is it clear about Alsace-Lorraine? If so, we may proceed. If not, it's no use going any further."

Question of Armaments.

We now come to armaments. I have seen it suggested that the destruction of Essen, Wilhelmshaven, and Heligoland ought to be a condition of peace with Germany. Certainly the disappearance of these phenomena would be a gain

Page 98

to the world. So would the disappearance of Rosyth and Toulon. It seems to me, however, very improbable that their destruction or dismantling by international command would occur after hostilities have ceased, or could usefully so occur. If the French Army on its way to Berlin can treat the Krupp factory as the German Army on its way to Paris treated Rheims Cathedral, well and good! In fact, most excellent! And if the British Navy can somehow emasculate Wilhelmshaven and Heligoland I shall not complain that its behavior has been purely doctrinaire. But otherwise I see nothing practical in the Essen-Wilhelmshaven-Heligoland suggestion. Nor in the project for dethroning the Kaiser and sending him and his eldest son to settle their differences in St. Helena! The Kaiser--happily--is not a Napoleon, nor has he yet himself accomplished anything big enough or base enough to merit Napoleon's fate. Any dethroning that may enliven the gray monotony of the post-bellum era at Potsdam should and will be done by the German soldiers themselves. Even in international politics it is futile to try to meddle in other people's private affairs.

Disarmament in Germany can be achieved by the exercise of one principle, and one principle only. That principle is the principle of mutuality. A scheme in which every nation will proportionately share should be presented to Germany, and she should be respectfully but quite firmly asked to participate in it. There would be no sense in saying to Germany: "You must disarm." The magic words would be: "We are going to disarm, and so are you, whether you want to or not." As to the procedure of disarmament--whether it shall be slow or fast, whether it shall include destruction or be content with mere omission to renew, how the proportions shall be decided, who shall give the signal to begin--here are matters which I am without skill or desire to discuss. All I know about them is that they are horribly complicated, unprecedentedly difficult, and bursting with danger; and that they will strain the wisdom, patience, and ingenuity of the negotiators to the very utmost.

Three Vital Points.

Compared to disarmament, all remaining questions whatsoever affecting peace are simple and secondary. Indemnities for France or Russia, or both, a Polish Kingdom, a Balkan United States, the precise number of nations into which Austria-Hungary is to be shattered, the ownership of the east coast of the Adriatic, even the reparation of the infamy by which Denmark was robbed of Schleswig-Holstein--what are these but favorable ground for the art of compromise? The vital points, at any rate for us Westerners, are only three: Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and disarmament. * * * Stay, there is another. It is vital to Great Britain's reputation that she should accept nothing--neither indemnity, nor colonies; not a single pound, not a single square mile.

Many persons, I gather, find it hard to believe that Prussia will ever admit that she is beaten or consent to her own humiliation. Naturally her conduct will depend upon the degree to which she is beaten. She has admitted defeat and swallowed the leek before, though it is a long time ago. Meanwhile she has forgotten, and her opponents seem to have forgotten also, that though her name is Prussia she is subject to the limitations of the human race. Out of her prodigious score off little Denmark, her thrashing of Austria--a country which never wins a war--and her victory over France, there grew a legend that Prussia, and therefore Germany, was not as other nations. This legend is contrary to fact. Every nation must yield to force--here, indeed, is Germany's contribution to our common knowledge.

If in July, 1870, it had been prophesied that France would give up Alsace-Lorraine and pay two hundred millions to get rid of a foreign army of occupation, France would have protested that she would fight to the last man and to the last franc first. But nations don't do these things. If Germany won

Page 99

the present war and fulfilled her dream of establishing an army in this island, we should yield, and we should submit to her terms, we who have never been beaten save by our own colonies--that is a scientific certainty. And Germany's terms would not be amusing; in their terribleness they would outrun our poor Anglo-Saxon imagination. Similarly, if Germany is beaten, she will bow the head, and to precisely the extent to which she is walloped. We need not worry about that. Were she recalcitrant we need not even murmur in her ear: "What would you have extorted if you'd won?" A gesture of the still uplifted sword would suffice to convince her that facts are facts.

Assuming that the tide turns not again, the chances of a thorough, workmanlike common sense peace can only be imperiled by one thing--the deep desire of France and of Belgium for repose and recuperation. We in England do not know what war is. We have not lived in hell. Our plains have not been devastated, nor our women and children shot, nor our ears deafened by the boom of cannon, nor our cathedrals shelled, nor our land turned into a vast and bloody hospital; and we have not experienced the appalling terror and shame of the foe's absolute dominion in our streets and lanes. We have suffered; we shall suffer; but our suffering is nought and less than nought weighed against the suffering on the Continent. Why, in the midst of a war of unparalleled horror, we grumble if a train is late! We can talk calmly of fighting Germany to a stand-still, even if the job takes two years, and it behooves us to talk so, and to prepare for the task; and for myself I am convinced that we could make good the word. But France and Belgium will not use that tone, if Russia does. Once the German armies are across the frontiers, the instinctive pressure in favor of peace would be enormous, and considerations of the distant future, of the welfare of our descendants and the progress of mankind, would count little in the scale. In that moment, if it happily comes, our part and Russia's would be to sustain and encourage and salve the supreme victims of fate. A tremendous factor in our favor would be the exhaustion of Germany; and the measure of our power and of the fear we inspire is the furious intensity of Germany's anger against our inconvenient selves. Without us the war could not last beyond the end of this year, and the peace would be unsatisfactory.

And even with us, insisting on our own terms of reconciliation, I do not see how it can last over six months more on anything like the present scale, for the Kaiser, despite his kinship with Deity, can neither create men nor extract gold coins out of an empty hat. Military arguments, in Germany as elsewhere, hold good only for a certain period.

Page 100

As our reporter entered Sir James Barrie's hotel room by one door, the next door softly closed. "I was alone," writes our reporter. "I sprang into the corridor and had just time to see him fling himself down the elevator. Then I understood what he had meant when he said on the telephone that he would be ready for me at 10:30.

I returned thoughtfully to the room, where I found myself no longer alone. Sir James Barrie's "man" was there; a stolid Londoner, name of Brown, who told me he was visiting America for the first time.

"Sir James is very sorry, but has been called away," he assured me without moving a muscle. Then he added: "But this is the pipe," and he placed a pipe of the largest size on the table.

"The pipe he smokes?" I asked.

Brown is evidently a very truthful man, for he hesitated. "That is the interview pipe," he explained. "When we decided to come to America, Sir James said he would have to be interviewed, and that it would be wise to bring something with us for the interviewers to take notice of. So he told me to buy the biggest pipe I could find, and he practiced holding it in his mouth in his cabin on the way across. He is very pleased with the way the gentlemen of the press have taken notice of it."

"So that is not the pipe he really smokes?" I said, perceiving I was on the verge of a grand discovery. "I suppose he actually smokes an ordinary small pipe."

Again Brown hesitated, but again truth prevailed.

"He does not smoke any pipe," he said, "nor cigars, nor cigarettes; he never smokes at all; he just puts that one in his mouth to help the interviewers."

"It has the appearance of having been smoked," I pointed out.

"I blackened it for him," the faithful fellow replied.

"But he has written a book in praise of My Lady Nicotine."

"So I have heard," Brown said guardedly. "I think that was when he was hard up and had to write what people wanted; but he never could abide smoking himself. Years after he wrote the book he read it; he had quite forgotten it, and he was so attracted by what it said about the delights of tobacco that he tried a cigarette. But it was no good; the mere smell disgusted him."

Strange Forgetfulness.

"Odd that he should forget his own book," I said.

"He forgets them all," said Brown. "There is this Peter Pan foolishness, for instance. I have heard people talking to him about that play and mentioning parts in it they liked, and he tried to edge them off the subject; they think it is his shyness, but I know it is because he has forgotten the bits they are speaking about. Before strangers call on him I have seen him reading one of his own books hurriedly, so as to be able to talk about it if that is their wish. But he gets mixed up, and thinks that the little minister was married to Wendy."

"Almost looks as if he hadn't written his own works," I said.

"Almost," Brown admitted uncomfortably.

I asked a leading question. "You don't suppose," I said, "that any one writes them for him? Such things have been. You don't write them for him by any chance, just as you blackened the pipe, you know?"

Brown assured me stolidly that he did not. Suddenly, whether to get away

Page 101

from a troublesome subject I cannot say, he vouchsafed me a startling piece of information. "The German Kaiser was on our boat coming across," he said.

"Sure?" I asked, wetting my pencil.

He told me he had Sir James's word for it. There was on board, it seems, a very small, shrunken gentleman with a pronounced waist and tiny, turned-up mustache, who strutted along the deck trying to look fierce and got in the other passengers' way to their annoyance until Sir James discovered that he was the Kaiser Reduced to Life Size. After that Sir James liked to sit with him and talk to him.

Sir James is a great admirer of the Kaiser, though he has not, like Mr. Carnegie, had the pleasure of meeting him in society. When he read in the papers on arriving here that the Kaiser had wept over the destruction of Louvain, he told Brown a story. It was of a friend who had gone to an oculist to be cured of some disease in one eye. Years afterward he heard that the oculist's son had been killed in some Indian war, and he called on the oculist to commiserate with him.

"You cured my eye," he said to him, "and when I read of your loss I wept for you, Sir; I wept for you with that eye."

"Sir James," Brown explained, "is of a very sympathetic nature, and he wondered which eye it was that the Kaiser wept with."

I asked Brown what his own views were about the war, and before replying he pulled a paper from his pocket and scanned it. "We are strictly neutral," he then replied.

"Is that what is written on the paper?" I asked. He admitted that Sir James had written out for him the correct replies to possible questions. "Why was he neutral?" I asked, and he again found the reply on the piece of paper: "Because it is the President's wish."

Brown Must Be Neutral.

So anxious, I discovered, is Sir James to follow the President's bidding that he has enjoined Brown to be neutral on all other subjects besides the war; to express no preference on matters of food, for instance, and always to eat oysters and clams alternately, so that there can be no ill-feeling. Also to walk in the middle of the streets lest he should seem to be favoring either sidewalk, and to be very cautious about admitting that one building in New York is higher than another. I assured him that the Woolworth Building was the highest, but he replied politely, "that he was sure the President would prefer him to remain neutral." I naturally asked if Sir James had given him any further instructions as to proper behavior in America, and it seems that he had done so. They amount, I gather, to this, that Americans have a sense of humor which they employ, when they can, to the visitor's undoing.

"When we reach New York," Sir James seems to have told Brown in effect, "we shall be met by reporters who will pretend that America is eager to be instructed by us as to the causes and progress of the war; then, if we are fools enough to think that America cannot make up its mind for itself, we shall fall into the trap and preach to them, and all the time they are taking down our observations they will be saying to themselves, 'Pompous asses.'

"It is a sort of game between us and the reporters. Our aim is to make them think we are bigger than we are, and theirs is to make us smaller than we are; and any chance we have of succeeding is to hold our tongues, while they will probably succeed if they make us jabber. Above all, oh, Brown, if you write to the papers giving your views of why we are at war--and if you don't you will be the only person who hasn't--don't be lured into slinging vulgar abuse at our opponents, lest America takes you for another university professor."

There is, I learned, only one person in America about whom it is impossible, even in Sir James's opinion, to preserve a neutral attitude. This is the German Ambassador, whose splendid work for England day by day and in every paper and to all reporters cannot, Sir James thinks, be too cordially recognized. Brown has been told to look upon the German Ambasador as England's great-

Page 102

est asset in America just now, and to hope heartily that he will be long spared to carry on his admirable work.

Lastly, it was pleasant to find that Brown has not a spark of sympathy with those who say that, because Germany has destroyed art treasures in Belgium and France, the Allies should retaliate with similar rudeness if they reach Berlin. He holds that if for any reason best known to themselves (such as the wish for a sunnier location) the Hohenzollerns should by and by vacate their present residence, a nice villa should be provided for them, and that all the ancestral statues in the Sieges-Allee should be conveyed to it intact, and perhaps put up in the back garden. There the Junkers could drop in of an evening, on their way home from their offices, and chat pleasantly of old times. Brown thinks they should be allowed to retain all their iron crosses, and even given some more, with which, after smart use of their pocket combs, they would cut no end of a dash among the nursemaids.

As for the pipe, I was informed that it had now done its work, and I could take it away as a keepsake. I took it, but wondered afterward at Brown's thinking he had the right to give it me.

A disquieting feeling has since come over me that perhaps it was Sir James I had been interviewing all the time, and Brown who had escaped down the elevator.

I believe in peace with all my heart. I believe that war is outrage--a black stain on the humanity and the fame of man. I hate militarism and the god of force. I would go any length to avoid war for material interests, war that involved no principles, distrusting profoundly the common meaning of the phrase "national honor."

But I believe there is a national honor charged with the future happiness of man, that loyalty is due from those living to those that will come after; that civilization can only wax and flourish in a world where faith is kept; that for nations, as for individuals, there are laws of duty, whose violation harms the whole human race; in sum, that stars of conduct shine for peoples, as for private men.

And so I hold that without tarnishing true honor, endangering civilization present and to come, and ruining all hope of future tranquillity, my country could not have refused to take up arms for the defense of Belgium's outraged neutrality, solemnly guaranteed by herself and France.

I believe, and claim in proof, the trend of events and of national character during the last century, that in democracy alone lies any coherent hope of progressive civilization or any chance of lasting peace in Europe, or the world.

I believe that this democratic principle, however imperfectly developed, has so worked in France, in England, in the United States, that these countries are already nearly safe from inclination to aggress, or to subdue other nationalities.

And I believe that while there remain autocratic Governments basing themselves on militarism, bitterly hostile to the democratic principle, Europe will never be free of the surcharge of swollen armaments, the nightmare menace of wars like this--the paralysis that creeps on civilizations which adore the god of force.

And so I hold that, without betrayal of trusteeship, without shirking the elementary defense of beliefs coiled within its

Page 103

fibre, or beliefs vital to the future welfare of all men, my country could not stand by and see the triumph of autocratic militarism over France, that very cradle of democracy.

I believe that democratic culture spreads from west to east, that only by maintenance of consolidate democracy in Western Europe can democracy ever hope to push on and prevail till the Eastern powers have also that ideal under which alone humanity can flourish.

And so I hold that my country is justified at this juncture in its alliance with the autocratic power of Russia, whose people will never know freedom till her borders are joined to the borders of democracy.

I do not believe that jealous, frightened jingoism has ever been more than the dirty fringe of England's peace-loving temper, and I profess my sacred faith that my country has gone to war at last, not from fear, not from hope of aggrandizement, but because she must--for honor, for democracy, and for the future of mankind.

In one of Shaw's plays--I think it is "Superman"--one of the characters hints, toward the end of the last act, that the hero is a gentleman somewhat prone to talking. The hero admits it, but excuses himself on the ground that it is the only way he knows of explaining his opinions.

Times of stress and struggle, whether individual or national, afford men and women other methods of expressing their views, and a large number of our citizens are, very creditably, taking the present opportunity to act instead of shout. There are the young fellows who in their thousands are pressing around the door of the recruiting offices. They are throwing up, many of them, good jobs for the privilege of drilling for the next six months for eight hours a day. Their reward will be certain hardship, their share of sickness and wounds, the probability of lying ten deep in a forgotten grave, their chance of glory a name printed in small type among a thousand others on a War Office report.

There are the mothers and wives and children who are encouraging them to go; to whom their going means semi-starvation. The old, bent crones whose feeble hands will have to grasp again the hoe and the scrubbing brush. The young women who know only too well what is before them--the selling of the home just got together; first the easy chair and the mirror, and then the bed and the mattress; the weary tramping of the streets, looking for work. The children awestruck and wondering.

There are the men who are quietly going on with their work, doing their best with straitened means to keep their business going; giving employment; getting ready to meet the income tax collector, who next year one is inclined to expect will be demanding anything from half a crown to five shillings in the pound. There are others. But there is a certain noisy and, to me, particularly offensive man (and with him, I am sorry to say, one or two women) very much to the fore just now with whose services the country could very well dispense. He is the man who does his fighting with his mouth. Unable for reasons of his own to get at the foe in the field, he thirsts for the blood of the unfortunate unarmed and helpless Germans that the fortunes of war have left stranded in England. He writes to the paper thoughtfully suggesting plans that have occurred to him

Page 104

for making their existence more miserable than it must be. He generally concludes his letter with a short homily directed against the Prussian Military Staff for their lack of the higher Christian principles.

He has spies on the brain. Two quite harmless English citizens have already been shot in consequence of the funk this spy mania has created among us. The vast majority of Germans in England have come to live in England because they dislike Germany. That a certain number of spies are among us I take to be highly probable. I take it that if the Allies know their business a certain number of English spies are doing what they can for us at great personal risk to themselves in Germany. Until the German Army has landed on our shores German spies can do little or no harm to us. The police can be trusted to know something about them, and if any are caught red-handed the rules of war are not likely to be strained for their benefit.

A Story from the South.

From a small town in the South of England comes a story I can vouch for. A couple of Boy Scouts had been set to guard the local reservoir. About noon one sunny day they remarked the approach, somewhat ostentatious, of a desperate-looking character. Undoubtedly a German spy! What can he be up to! The boys approached him and he fled, leaving behind him the damning evidence--a tin suggestive of sardines and labeled "Poison!" That the gentleman should have chosen broad daylight for his nefarious design, should have been careful to label his tin, seemed to the good townsfolk under present scare conditions proof that they had at last discovered the real German spy, full of his devilish cunning. The tin was taken possession of by the police. And then the Sergeant's little daughter, who happened to have had a few lessons in French, suggested that the word on the tin was "Poisson," and the town now breathes again.

So long as the war continues the spy will be among us. I suggest that we face the problem of his activities without blue funk and hysteria. The men and women who are shrieking for vicarious vengeance upon all the Germans remaining in our midst must remember that there are thousands of English families at the present moment residing in Germany and Austria. The majority of them, comparatively poor people, with all their belongings around them, were unable to get away. I shall, until I receive convincing proof to the contrary, continue to believe that they are living among their German neighbors unmolested. Even were it not so, I would suggest our setting the example of humanity rather than our slavishly following an example of barbarity.

We are fighting for an idea--an idea of some importance to the generations that will come after us. We are fighting to teach the Prussian Military Staff that other laws have come to stay--laws superseding those of Attila the Hun. We are fighting to teach the German people that, free men with brains to think with, they have no right to hand themselves over body and soul to their rulers to be used as mere devil's instruments; that if they do so they shall pay the penalty, and the punishment shall go hard. We are fighting to teach the German Nation respect for God! Our weapons have got to be hard blows, not hard words. We are tearing at each other's throats; it has got to be done. It is not a time for yelping.

Jack Johnson as a boxer I respect. The thing I do not like about him is his habit of gibing and jeering at his opponent while he is fighting him. It isn't gentlemanly, and it isn't sporting. The soldiers are fighting in grim silence. When one of them does talk, it is generally to express admiration of German bravery. It is our valiant stay-at-homes, our valiant clamorers for everybody else to enlist but themselves, who would have us fight like some drunken fish hag, shrieking and spitting while she claws.

Incredible Reports of Atrocities.

Half of these stories of atrocities I do not believe. I remember when I was living in Germany at the time of the

Page 105

Boer war the German papers were full of accounts of Tommy Atkins's brutality. He spent his leisure time in tossing babies on bayonets. There were photographs of him doing it. Detailed accounts certified by most creditable witnesses. Such lies are the stock in trade of every tenth-rate journalist, who, careful not to expose himself to danger, slinks about the byways collecting hearsay. In every war each side, according to the other, is supposed to take a fiendish pleasure in firing upon hospitals--containing always a proportion of their own wounded. An account comes to us from a correspondent with the Belgian Army. He tells us that toward the end of the day a regrettable incident occurred. The Germans were taking off their wounded in motor cars. The Belgian sharpshooters, not noticing the red flag in the dusk, kept up a running fire, and a large number of the wounded were killed. Had the incident been the other way about it would have been cited as a deliberate piece of villainy on the part of the Germans. According to other accounts, the Germans always go into action with screens of women and children before them. The explanation, of course, is that a few poor terrified creatures are rushing along the road. They get between the approaching forces, and I expect the bullets that put them out of their misery come pretty even from both sides.

The men are mad. Mad with fear, mad with hate, blinded by excitement. Take a mere dog fight. If you interfere you have got to be prepared for your own dog turning upon you. In war half the time the men do not know what they are doing. They are little else than wild beasts. There was great indignation at the dropping of bombs into Antwerp. One now hears that a French dirigible has been dropping bombs into Luxembourg--a much more dignified retort. War is a grim game. Able editors and club-chair politicians have been clamoring for it for years past. They thought it was all goose-step and bands.

The truth is bad enough, God knows. There is no sense in making things out worse than they are. When this war is over we have got to forget it. To build up barriers of hatred that shall stand between our children and our foemen's children is a crime against the future.

These stories of German naval officers firing on their wounded sailors in the water! They are an insult to our intelligence. At Louvain fifty of the inhabitants were taken out and shot. On Monday the fifty had grown to five hundred; both numbers vouched for by eye-witnesses, "Dutchmen who would have had no interest," &c. That the beautiful old town has been laid in ashes is undoubted. Some criminal lunatic strutting in pipeclay and mustachios was given his hour of authority and took the chance of his life. If I know anything of the German people it will go hard with him when the war is over, if he has not had the sense to get killed. But that won't rear again the grand old stones or wipe from Germany's honor the stain of that long line of murdered men and women--whatever its actual length may have been. War puts a premium on brutality and senselessness. Men with the intelligence and instincts of an ape suddenly find themselves possessed of the powers of a god. And we are astonished that they do not display the wisdom of a god!

There are other stories that have filtered through to us. There was a dying Uhlan who caught a child to his arms and kissed him. One would like to be able to kiss one's own child before one dies, but failing that--well, after all, there is a sort of family likeness between them. The same deep wondering eyes, the same--and then the mist grows deeper. Perhaps after all it was Baby Fritz that he kissed.

And of a Belgian woman. She had seen her two sons killed before her eyes. She tells of that and of other horrors. Among such, of the German lads she had stepped over, their blue eyes quiet in death. The passion and the fear and the hate cleansed out of them. Just boys with their clothes torn--so like boys.

"They, too, have got mothers, poor lads!" is all she says, thinking of them lying side by side with her own.

Page 106

When the madness and the folly are over, when the tender green is creeping in and out among the blackened ruins, it will be well for us to think of that dying Uhlan who had to put up with a French baby instead of his own; of that Belgian mother to whom the German youngsters were just "poor lads"--with their clothes torn.

And the savagery and the cruelty and the guiltiness that go to the making of war we will seek to forget.

Following is the text of an address by Mr. Kipling to a mass meeting at Brighton, Sept. 8, 1914:

Through no fault nor wish of ours we are at war with Germany, the power which owes its existence to three well-thought-out wars; the power which for the last twenty years has devoted itself to organizing and preparing for this war; the power which is now fighting to conquer the civilized world.

For the last two generations the Germans in their books, teachers, speeches, and schools have been carefully taught that nothing less than this world conquest was the object of their preparations and their sacrifices. They have prepared carefully and sacrificed greatly.

We must have men, and men, and men, if we with our allies are to check the onrush of organized barbarism.

Have no illusions. We are dealing with a strong and magnificently equipped enemy, whose avowed aim is our complete destruction.

The violation of Belgium, the attack on France, and the defense against Russia are only steps by the way. The Germans' real objective, as she has always told us, is England and England's wealth, trade, and worldwide possessions.

If you assume for an instant that that attack will be successful, England will not be reduced, as some people say, to the rank of a second-rate power, but we shall cease to exist as a nation. We shall become an outlying province of Germany, to be administered with what severity German safety and interest require.

We arm against such a fate. We enter into a new life in which all the facts of war that we had put behind or forgotten for the past hundred years have returned to the front and test us as they tested our fathers. It will be a long and a hard road, beset with difficulties and discouragements, but we tread it together and we will tread it together to the end.

Our petty social divisions and barriers have been swept away at the outset of our mighty struggle. All the interests of our life of six weeks ago are dead. We have but one interest now, and that touches the naked heart of every man in this island and in the empire.

If we are to win the right for ourselves and for freedom to exist on earth, every man must offer himself for that service and that sacrifice.

Page 107

STAUNTON, Va., Sept. 25, 1914.--On Sept. 5 The Staunton News printed some verses by Dr. Charles Minor Blackford, an associate editor, addressed to Rudyard Kipling, calling attention to the apparent inconsistency of his attitude of distrust of Russia as shown in his well-known poem, "The Truce of the Bear," and his present advocacy of the alliance between Russia and Great Britain. A copy of the verses was sent to Mr. Kipling and the following reply was received from him:

Bateman's Burwash, Sussex.

Dear Sir: I am much obliged for your verses of Sept. 4. "The Truce of the Bear," to which they refer, was written sixteen years ago, in 1898. It dealt with a situation and a menace which have long since passed away, and with issues that are now quite dead.

The present situation, as far as England is concerned, is Germany's deliberate disregard of the neutrality of Belgium, whose integrity Germany as well as England guaranteed. She has filled Belgium with every sort of horror and atrocity, not in the heat of passion, but as a part of settled policy of terrorism. Her avowed object is the conquest of Europe on these lines.

As you may prove for yourself if you will consult her literature of the last generation, Germany is the present menace, not to Europe alone, but to the whole civilized world. If Germany, by any means, is victorious you may rest assured that it will be a very short time before she turns her attention to the United States. If you could meet the refugees from Belgium flocking into England and have the opportunity of checking their statements of unimaginable atrocities and barbarities studiously committed, you would, I am sure, think as seriously on these matters as we do, and in your unpreparedness for modern war you would do well to think very seriously indeed. Yours truly,

RUDYARD KIPLING.

To the Editor of The London Times:

Sir: A nation's first duty is to its own people. We are asked to intervene in the Continental war because unless we do so we shall be "isolated." The isolation which will result for us if we keep out of this war is that, while other nations are torn and weakened by war, we shall not be, and by that fact might conceivably for a long time be the strongest power in Europe, and, by virtue of our strength and isolation, its arbiter, perhaps, to useful ends.

We are told that if we allow Germany to become victorious she would be so powerful as to threaten our existence by the occupation of Belgium, Holland, and possibly the North of France. But, as your article of today's date so well points out, it was the difficulty which Germany found in Alsace-Lorraine which prevented her from acting against us during the South African War. If one province, so largely German in its origin and history, could create this embarrassment, what trouble will not Germany pile up for herself if she should attempt the absorption of a Belgium, a Holland, and a Normandy? She would have created for herself embarrassments compared with which Alsace and Poland would be a trifle; and Russia, with her 160,000,000, would in a year or two be as great a menace to her as ever.

The object and effect of our entering into this war would be to insure the vic-

Page 108

tory of Russia and her Slavonic allies. Will a dominant Slavonic federation of, say, 200,000,000 autocratically governed people, with a very rudimentary civilization, but heavily equipped for military aggression, be a less dangerous factor in Europe than a dominant Germany of 65,000,000 highly civilized and mainly given to the arts of trade and commerce?

The last war we fought on the Continent was for the purpose of preventing the growth of Russia. We are now asked to fight one for the purpose of promoting it. It is now universally admitted that our last Continental war--the Crimean war--was a monstrous error and miscalculation. Would this intervention be any wiser or likely to be better in its results?

On several occasions Sir Edward Grey has solemnly declared that we are not bound by any agreement to support France, and there is certainly no moral obligation on the part of the English people so to do. We can best serve civilization, Europe--including France--and ourselves by remaining the one power in Europe that has not yielded to the war madness.

This, I believe, will be found to be the firm conviction of the overwhelming majority of the English people.

Yours faithfully,

NORMAN ANGELL.

4 Kings Bench Walk, Temple, E.C., July 31.

Unless we are all mad, there is at the back of the most bewildering business a story; and if we are all mad, there is no such thing as madness. If I set a house on fire, it is quite true that I may illuminate many other people's weaknesses as well as my own. It may be that the master of the house was burned because he was drunk; it may be that the mistress of the house was burned because she was stingy, and perished arguing about the expense of the fire-escape. It is, nevertheless, broadly true that they both were burned because I set fire to their house. That is the story of the thing. The mere facts of the story about the present European conflagration are quite as easy to tell.

Before we go on to the deeper things which make this war the most sincere war of human history, it is easy to answer the question of why England came to be in it at all; as one asks how a man fell down a coal hole, or failed to keep an appointment. Facts are not the whole truth. But facts are facts, and in this case the facts are few and simple.

Prussia, France, and England had all promised not to invade Belgium, because it was the safest way of invading France. But Prussia promised that if she might break in through her own broken promise and ours she would break in and not steal. In other words, we were offered at the same instant a promise of faith in the future and a proposal of perjury in the present.

Those interested in human origins may refer to an old Victorian writer of English, who in the last and most restrained of his historical essays wrote of Frederick the Great, the founder of this unchanging Prussian policy. After describing how Frederick broke the guarantee he had signed on behalf of Maria Theresa he then describes how Frederick sought to put things straight by a promise that was an insult. "If she would but let him have Silesia, he would, he said, stand by her against any power which should

Page 109

try to deprive her of her other dominions; as if he was not already bound to stand by her, or as if his new promise could be of more value than the old one." That passage was written by Macaulay; but so far as the mere contemporary facts are concerned, it might have been written by me.

Diplomacy That Might Have Been.

Upon the immediate logical and legal origin of the English interest there can be no rational debate. There are some things so simple that one can almost prove them with plans and diagrams, as in Euclid. One could make a kind of comic calendar of what would have happened to the English diplomatist if he had been silenced every time by Prussian diplomacy. Suppose we arrange it in the form of a kind of diary:

July 24--Germany invades Belgium.

July 25--England declares war.

July 26--Germany promises not to annex Belgium.

July 27--England withdraws from the war.

July 28--Germany annexes Belgium. England declares war.

July 29--Germany promises not to annex France. England withdraws from the war.

July 30--Germany annexes France. England declares war.

July 31--Germany promises not to annex England.

Aug. 1--England withdraws from the war. Germany invades England.

How long is anybody expected to go on with that sort of game, or keep peace at that illimitable price? How long must we pursue a road in which promises are all fetiches in front of us and all fragments behind us? No; upon the cold facts of the final negotiations, as told by any of the diplomatists in any of the documents, there is no doubt about the story. And no doubt about the villain of the story.

These are the last facts, the facts which involved England. It is equally easy to state the first facts--the facts which involved Europe. The Prince who practically ruled Austria was shot by certain persons whom the Austrian Government believed to be conspirators from Servia. The. Austrian Government piled up arms and armies, but said not a word either to Servia, their suspect, or Italy, their ally. From the documents it would seem that Austria kept everybody in the dark, except Prussia. It is probably nearer the truth to say that Prussia kept everybody in the dark, including Austria.

The Demands on Servia.

But all that is what is called opinion, belief, conviction, or common sense, and we are not dealing with it here. The objective fact is that Austria told Servia to permit Servian officers to be suspended by the authority of Austrian officers, and told Servia to submit to this within forty-eight hours. In other words, the Sovereign of Servia was practically told to take off not only the laurels of two great campaigns, but his own lawful and national crown, and to do it in a time in which no respectable citizen is expected to discharge a hotel bill. Servia asked for time for arbitration--in short, for peace. But Russia had already begun to mobilize, and Prussia, presuming that Servia might thus be rescued, declared war.

Between these two ends of fact, the ultimatum to Servia, the ultimatum to Belgium, any one so inclined can, of course, talk as if everything were relative. If any one asks why the Czar should rush to the support of Servia, it is easy to ask why the Kaiser should rush to the support of Austria. If any one say that that the French would attack the Germans, it is sufficient to answer that the Germans did attack the French.

There remain, however, two attitudes to consider, even perhaps two arguments to counter, which can best be considered and countered under this general head of facts. First of all, there is a curious, cloudy sort of argument, much affected by the professional rhetoricans of Prussia, who are sent out to instruct and correct the minds of Americans or Scandinavians. It consists of going into convulsions of incredulity and scorn at the mention of Russia's responsibility for Servia or England's responsibility for Belgium; and suggesting that, treaty or

Page 110

no treaty, frontier or no frontier, Russia would be out to slay Teutons or England to steal colonies.

England Kept Her Contracts.

Here, as elsewhere, I think the professors dotted all over the Baltic plain fail in lucidity and in the power of distinguishing ideas. Of course, it is quite true that England has material interests to defend, and will probably use the opportunity to defend them; or, in other words, of course England, like everybody else, would be more comfortable if Prussia were less predominant. The fact remains that we did not do what the Germans did. We did not invade Holland to seize a naval and commercial advantage; and whether they say that we wished to do it in our greed or feared to do it in our cowardice, the fact remains that we did not do it. Unless this common sense principle be kept in view, I cannot conceive how any quarrel can possibly be judged. A contract may be made between two persons solely for material advantages on each side; but the moral advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the person who keeps the contract. Surely, it cannot be dishonest to be honest--even if honesty is the best policy. Imagine the most complex maze of indirect motives, and still the man who keeps faith for money cannot possibly be worse than the man who breaks faith for money.

It will be noted that this ultimate test applies in the same way to Servia as to Belgium and Britain. The Servians may not be a very peaceful people; but on the occasion under discussion it was certainly they who wanted peace. You may choose to think the Serb a sort of a born robber; but on this occasion it was certainly the Austrian who was trying to rob. Similarly, you may call England perfidious as a sort of historical summary, and declare your private belief that Mr. Asquith was vowed from infancy to the ruin of the German Empire --a Hannibal and hater of the eagles. But when all is said, it is nonsense to call a man perfidious because he keeps his promise. It is absurd to complain of the sudden treachery of a business man in turning up punctually to his appointment, or the unfair shock given to a creditor by the debtor paying his debts. Lastly, there is an attitude not unknown in the crisis against which I should particularly like to protest. I should address my protest especially to those lovers and pursuers of peace who, very shortsightedly, have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which is impatient of these preliminary details about who did this or that and whether it was right or wrong. They are satisfied with saying that an enormous calamity called war has been begun by some or all of us, and should be ended by some or all of us. To these people this preliminary chapter about the precise happenings must appear not only dry (and it must of necessity be the dryest part of the task), but essentially needless and barren. I wish to tell these people that they are wrong; that they are wrong upon all principles of human justice and historic continuity; but that they are especially and supremely wrong upon their own principles of arbitration and international peace.

As to Certain Peace Lovers.

These sincere and high-minded peace lovers are always telling us that citizens no longer settle their quarrels by private violence, and that nations should no longer settle theirs by public violence. They are always telling us that we no longer fight duels, and need no longer wage wars. In short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on the fact that an ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an axe.

But how is he prevented from avenging himself with an axe? If he hits his neighbor on the head with the kitchen chopper what do we do? Do we all join hands, like children playing mulberry bush, and say: "We are all responsible for this, but let us hope it will not spread. Let us hope for the happy, happy day when he shall leave off chopping at the man's head, and when nobody shall ever chop anything forever and ever." Do we say: "Let bygones be bygones. Why go back to all the dull details with which the business began?

Page 111

Who can tell with what sinister motives the man was standing there within reach of the hatchet?"

We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking for the facts of provocation and the proper object of punishment. We do not go into the dull details; we do inquire into the origins; we do emphatically inquire who it was that hit first. In short, we do what I have done very briefly in this place.

Given this, it is indeed true that behind these facts there are truths--truths of a terrible, of a spiritual sort. In mere fact the Germanic power has been wrong about Servia, wrong about Russia, wrong about Belgium, wrong about England, wrong about Italy. But there was a reason for its being wrong everywhere, and of that root reason, which has moved half the world against it, I shall speak later in this series. For that is something too omnipresent to be proved, too indisputable to be helped by detail. It is nothing less than the locating, after more than a hundred years of recriminations and wrong explanations, of the modern European evil--the finding of the fountain from which poison has flowed upon all the nations of the earth.

It will hardly be denied that there is one lingering doubt in many who recognize unavoidable self-defense in the instant parry of the English sword and who have no great love for the sweeping sabre of Sadowa and Sedan. That doubt is the doubt of whether Russia, as compared with Prussia, is sufficiently decent and democratic to be the ally of liberal and civilized powers. I take first, therefore, this matter of civilization.

It is vital in a discussion like this that we should make sure we are going by meanings and not by mere words. It is not necessary in any argument to settle what a word means or ought to mean. But it is necessary in every argument to settle what we propose to mean by the word. So long as our opponent understands what is the thing of which we are talking, it does not matter to the argument whether the word is or is not the one he would have chosen. A soldier does not say, "We were ordered to go to Mechlin, but I would rather go to Malines." He may discuss the etymology and archaeology of the difference on the march, but the point is that he knows where to go. So long as we know what a given word is to mean in a given discussion, it does not even matter if it means something else in some other and quite distinct discussion. We have a perfect right to say that the width of a window comes to four feet, even if we instantly and cheerfully change the subject to the larger mammals and say that an elephant has four feet. The identity of the words does not matter, because there is no doubt at all about the meanings, because nobody is likely to think of an elephant as four feet long, or of a window as having tusks and a curly trunk.

Two Meanings of "Barbarian."

It is essential to emphasize this consciousness of the thing under discussion in connection with two or three words that are, as it were, the keywords of this war. One of them is the word "barbarian." The Prussians apply it to the Russians, the Russians apply it to the Prussians. Both, I think, really mean something that really exists, name or no name. Both mean different things. And if we ask what these different things are we shall understand why England and France prefer Russia, and consider Prussia the really dangerous barbarian of the two.

To begin with, it goes so much deeper even than atrocities; of which, in the past, at least, all the three empires of Central Europe have partaken pretty

Page 112

equally; as they partook of Poland. An English writer, seeking to avert the war by warnings against Russian influence, said that the flogged backs of Polish women stood between us and the Alliance. But not long before the flogging of women by an Austrian General led to that officer being thrashed in the streets of London by Barclay and Perkins draymen. And as for the third power, the Prussians, it seems clear that they have treated Belgian women in a style compared with which flogging might be called an official formality.

But, as I say, something much deeper than any such recrimination lies behind the use of the word on either side. When the German Emperor complains of our allying ourselves with a barbaric and half Oriental power, he is not (I assure you) shedding tears over the grave of Kosciusko. And when I say (as I do most heartily) that the German Emperor is a barbarian, I am not merely expressing any prejudices I may have against the profanation of churches or of children. My countrymen and I mean a certain and intelligible thing when we call the Prussians barbarians. It is quite different from the thing attributed to Russians; and it could not possibly be attributed to Russians. It is very important that the neutral world should understand what this thing is.

If the German calls the Russian barbarous, he presumably means imperfectly civilized. There is a certain path along which Western nations have proceeded in recent times; and it is tenable that Russia has not proceeded so far as the others; that she has less of the special modern system in science, commerce, machinery, travel, or political constitution. The Russ plows with an old plow; he wears a wild beard; he adores relics; his life is as rude and hard as that of a subject of Alfred the Great. Therefore, he is, in the German sense, a barbarian. Poor fellows, like Gorky and Dostoieffsky, have to form their own reflections on the scenery, without the assistance of large quotations from Schiller on garden seats; or inscriptions directing them to pause and thank the All-Father for the finest view in Hesse-Pumpernickel. The Russians, having nothing but their faith, their fields, their great courage, and their self-governing communes, are quite cut off from what is called (in the fashionable street in Frankfort) the true, the beautiful, and the good. There is a real sense in which one can call such backwardness barbaric, by comparison with the Kaiserstrasse; and in that sense it is true of Russia.

Now we, the French and English, do not mean this when we call the Prussians barbarians. If their cities soared higher than their flying ships, if their trains traveled faster than their bullets, we should still call them barbarians. We should know exactly what we meant by it; and we should know that it is true. For we do not mean anything that is an imperfect civilization by accident. We mean something that is the enemy of civilization by design. We mean something that is willfully at war with the principles by which human society has been made possible hitherto. Of course, it must be partly civilized even to destroy civilization. Such ruin could not be wrought by the savages that are merely undeveloped or inert. You could not have even Huns without horses or horses without horsemanship. You could not have even Danish pirates without ships, or ships without seamanship.

The "Positive Barbarian."

This person, whom I may call the positive barbarian, must be rather more superficially up to date than what I may call the negative barbarian. Alaric was an officer in the Roman legions, but for all that he destroyed Rome. Nobody supposes that Eskimos could have done it at all neatly. But (in our meaning) barbarism is not a matter of methods but of aims. We say that these veneered vandals have the perfectly serious aim of destroying certain ideas which, as they think, the world has outgrown; without which, as we think, the world will die.

It is essential that this perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or positive barbarian, should be seized. He has what he fancies is a new idea, and he is going to

Page 113

apply it to everybody. As a fact, it is simply a false generalization, but he is really trying to make it general. This does not apply to the negative barbarian; it does not apply to the Russian or the Servian, even if they are barbarians. If a Russian peasant does beat his wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him; he is likely to beat less rather than more as the past fades away. He does not think, as the Prussian would, that he has made a new discovery in physiology in finding that a woman is weaker than a man. If a Servian does knife his rival without a word, he does it because other Servians have done it. He may regard it even as piety--but certainly not as progress. He does not think, as the Prussian does, that he founds a new school of horology by starting before the word "Go." He does not think he is in advance of the world in militarism--merely because he is behind it in morals.

No; the danger of the Pruss is that he is prepared to fight for old errors as if they were new truths. He has somehow heard of certain shallow simplifications, and imagines that we have never heard of them. And, as I have said, his limited but very sincere lunacy concentrates chiefly in a desire to destroy two ideas, the twin root ideas, of national society. The first is the idea of record and promise; the second is the idea of reciprocity.

It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through time, is what chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages, but from brutes and reptiles. This was noted by the shrewdness of the Old Testament when it summed up the dark, irresponsible enormity of Leviathan in the words, "Will he make a pact with thee?" The promise, like the wind, is unknown in nature and is the first mark of man. Referring only to human civilization, it may be said with seriousness that in the beginning was the Word. The vow is to the man what the song is to the bird or the bark to the dog; his voice, whereby he is known. Just as a man who cannot keep an appointment is not fit to fight a duel, so the man who cannot keep an appointment with himself is not sane enough even for suicide. It is not easy to mention anything on which the enormous apparatus of human life can be said to depend. But if it depends on anything it is on this frail cord, flung from the forgotten hills of yesterday to the invisible mountains of tomorrow. On that solitary string hangs everything from Armageddon to an almanac, from a successful revolution to a return ticket. On that solitary string the barbarian is hacking heavily with a sabre which is fortunately blunt.

Prussia's Great Discovery.

Any one can see this well enough merely by reading the last negotiations between London and Berlin. The Prussians had made a new discovery in international politics--that it may often be convenient to make a promise, and yet curiously inconvenient to keep it. They were charmed, in their simple way, with this scientific discovery and desired to communicate it to the world. They therefore promised England a promise on condition that she broke a promise, and on the implied condition that the new promise might be broken as easily as the old one. To the profound astonishment of Prussia, this reasonable offer was refused. I believe that the astonishment of Prussia was quite sincere. That is what I mean when I say that the barbarian is trying to cut away that cord of honesty and clear record on which hangs all that men have made.

The friends of the German cause have complained that Asiatics and Africans upon the very verge of savagery have been brought against them from India and Algiers. And in ordinary circumstances I should sympathize with such a complaint made by a European people. But the circumstances are not ordinary. Here again the quite unique barbarism of Prussia goes deeper than what we call barbarities. About mere barbarities, it is true, the Turco and the Sikh would have very good reply to the superior Teuton. The general and just reason for not using non-European tribes against

Page 114

Europeans is that given by Chatham against the use of the red Indian--that such allies might do very diabolical things. But the poor Turco might not unreasonably ask, after a week-end in Belgium, what more diabolical things he could do than the highly cultured Germans were doing themselves.

Nevertheless, as I say, the justification of any extra-European aid goes deeper than by any such details. It rests upon the fact that even other civilizations, even much lower civilizations, even remote and repulsive civilizations, depend as much as our own on this primary principle on which the supermorality of Potsdam declares open war. Even savages promise things, and respect those who keep their promises. Even Orientals write things down; and though they write them from right to left, they know the importance of a scrap of paper. Many merchants will tell you that the word of the sinister and almost unhuman Chinaman is often as good as his bond; and it was amid palm trees and Syrian pavilions that the great utterance opened the tabernacle to him that sweareth to his hurt and changeth not. There is doubtless a dense labyrinth of duplicity in the East; and perhaps more guile in the individual Asiatic than in the individual German. But we are not talking of the violations of human morality in various parts of the world.

A Fight Against Anarchy.

We are talking about a new inhuman morality which denies altogether the day of obligation. The Prussians have been told by their literary men that everything depends upon "mood," and by their politicians that all arrangements dissolve before "necessity." That is the importance of the German Chancellor's phrase. He did not allege some special excuse in the case of Belgium, which might make it seem an exception that proved the rule. He distinctly argued, as on a principle applicable to other cases, that victory was a necessity and honor was a scrap of paper. And it is evident that the half-educated Prussian imagination really cannot get any further than this. It cannot see that if everybody's action were entirely incalculable from hour to hour, it would not only be the end of all promises but the end of all projects.

In not being able to see that, the Berlin philosopher is really on a lower mental level than the Arab who respects the salt, or the Brahmin who preserves the caste. And in this quarrel we have a right to come with scimitars as well as sabres, with bows as well as rifles, with assegai and tomahawk and boomerang, because there is in all these at least a seed of civilization that these intellectual anarchists would kill. And if they should find us in our last stand girt with such strange swords and following unfamiliar ensigns and ask us for what we fight in so singular a company, we shall know what to reply: "We fight for the trust and for the tryst; for fixed memories and the possible meeting of men; for all that makes life anything but an uncontrollable nightmare. We fight for the long arm of honor and remembrance; for all that can lift a man above the quicksands of his needs and give him the mastery of time."

Page 115

In the last summary I suggested that barbarism, as we mean it, is not mere ignorance or even mere cruelty. It has a more precise sense, and means militant hostility to certain necessary human ideas. I took the case of the vow or the contract which Prussian intellectualism would destroy. I urged that the Prussian is a spiritual barbarian, because he is not bound by his own past, any more than a man in a dream. He avows that when he promised to respect a frontier on Monday he did not foresee what he calls "the necessity" of not respecting it on Tuesday. In short, he is like a child who at the end of all reasonable explanations and reminders of admitted arrangements has no answer except "But I want to."

There is another idea in human arrangements so fundamental as to be forgotten, but now for the first time denied. It may be called the idea of reciprocity; or, in better English, of give and take. The Prussian appears to be quite intellectually incapable of this thought. He cannot, I think, conceive the idea that is the foundation of all comedy--that in the eyes of the other man he is only the other man. And if we carry this clue through the institutions of Prussianized Germany we shall find how curiously his mind has been limited in the matter. The German differs from other patriots in the inability to understand patriotism. Other European peoples pity the Poles or the Welsh for their violated borders, but Germans only pity themselves. They might take forcible possession of the Severn or the Danube, of the Thames or the Tiber, of the Garry or the Garonne--and they would still be singing sadly about how fast and true stands the watch on the Rhine and what a shame it would be if any one took their own little river away from them. That is what I mean by not being reciprocal; and you will find it in all that they do, as in all that is done by savages.

"Laughs When He Hurts You."

Here again it is very necessary to avoid confusing this soul of the savage with mere savagery in the sense of brutality or butchery, in which the Greeks, the French, and all the most civilized nations have indulged in hours of abnormal panic or revenge. Accusations of cruelty are generally mutual. But it is the point about the Prussian that with him nothing is mutual. The definition of the true savage does not concern itself even with how much more he hurts strangers or captives than do the other tribes of men. The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts you and howls when you hurt him. This extraordinary inequality in the mind is in every act and word that comes from Berlin.

For instance, no man of the world believes all he sees in the newspapers, and no journalist believes a quarter of it. We should therefore be quite ready in the ordinary way to take a great deal off the tales of German atrocities; to doubt this story or deny that. But there is one thing that we cannot doubt or deny--the seal and authority of the Emperor. In the imperial proclamation the fact that certain "frightful" things have been done is admitted and justified on the ground of their frightfulness. It was a military necessity to terrify the peaceful populations with something that was not civilized, something that was hardly human.

"Howls When You Hurt Him."

Very well. That is an intelligible policy; and in that sense an intelligible argument. An army endangered by foreigners may do the most frightful things. But then we turn the next page of the Kaiser's public diary, and we find him writing to the President of the

Page 116

United States to complain that the English are using dumdum bullets and violating various regulations of The Hague Conference. I pass for the present the question of whether there is a word of truth in these charges. I am content to gaze rapturously at the blinking eyes of the true, or positive, barbarian. I suppose he would be quite puzzled if we said that violating The Hague Conference was "a military necessity" to us; or that the rules of the conference were only a scrap of paper. He would be quite pained if we said that dumdum bullets "by their very frightfulness" would be very useful to keep conquered Germans in order. Do what he will, he cannot get outside the idea that he, because he is he and not you, is free to break the law and also to appeal to the law. It is said that the Prussian officers play at a game called Kriegspiel, or the war game. But in truth they could not play at any game, for the essence of every game is that the rules are the same on both sides.

But, taking every German institution in turn, the case is the same; and it is not a case of mere bloodshed or military bravado. The duel, for example, can legitimately be called a barbaric thing, but the word is here used in another sense. There are duels in Germany; but so there are in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain; indeed, there are duels wherever there are dentists, newspapers, Turkish baths, time tables, and all the curses of civilization--except in England and a corner of America. You may happen to regard the duel as a historic relic of the more barbaric States on which these modern States were built. It might equally well be maintained that the duel is everywhere the sign of high civilization, being the sign of its more delicate sense of honor, its more vulnerable vanity, or its greater dread of social disrepute. But whichever of the two views you take, you must concede that the essence of the duel is an armed equality. I should not, therefore, apply the word barbaric, as I am using it, to the duels of German officers, or even the broadsword combats that are conventional among the German students. I do not see why a young Prussian should not have scars all over his face if he likes them; nay, they are often the redeeming points of interest on an otherwise somewhat unenlightening countenance. The duel may be defended; the sham duel may be defended.

The One-Sided Prussian Duel.

What cannot be defended is something really peculiar to Prussia, of which we hear numberless stories, some of them certainly true. It might be called the one-sided duel. I mean the idea that there is some sort of dignity in drawing the sword upon a man who has not got a sword--a waiter, or a shop assistant, or even a schoolboy. One of the officers of the Kaiser in the affair at Zabern was found industriously hacking at a cripple. In all these matters I would avoid sentiment. We must not lose our tempers at the mere cruelty of the thing, but pursue the strict psychological distinction. Others besides German soldiers have slain the defenseless, for loot or lust or private malice, like any other murderer. The point is that nowhere else but in Prussian Germany is any theory of honor mixed up with such things, any more than with poisoning or picking pockets. No French, English, Italian, or American gentleman would think he had in some way cleared his own character by sticking his sabre through some ridiculous greengrocer who had nothing in his hand but a cucumber. It would seem as if the word which is translated from the German as "honor" must really mean something quite different in German. It seems to mean something more like what we should call "prestige."

Absence of the Reciprocal Idea.

The fundamental fact, however, is the absence of the reciprocal idea. The Prussian is not sufficiently civilized for the duel. Even when he crosses swords with us his thoughts are not as our thoughts; when we both glorify war we are glorifying different things. Our medals are wrought like his, but they do not mean the same thing; our regiments are cheered as his are, but the thought in the heart is not the same; the Iron

Page 117

Cross is on the bosom of his King, but it is not the sign of our God. For we, alas! follow our God with many relapses and self-contradictions, but he follows his very consistently. Through all the things that we have examined, the view of national boundaries, the view of military methods, the view of personal honor and self-defense, there runs in their case something of an atrocious simplicity; something too simple for us to understand; the idea that glory consists in holding the steel, and not in facing it.

If further examples were necessary it would be easy to give hundreds of them. Let us leave, for the moment, the relations between man and man in the thing called the duel. Let us take the relation between man and woman, in that immortal duel which we call a marriage. Here again we shall find that other Christian civilizations aim at some kind of equality, even if the balance be irrational or dangerous. Thus, the two extremes of the treatment of women might be represented by what are called the respectable classes in America and in France. In America they choose the risk of comradeship, in France the compensation of courtesy. In America it is practically possible for any young gentleman to take any young lady for what he calls (I deeply regret to say) a joy ride; but at least the man goes with the woman as much as the woman with the man. In France the young woman is protected like a nun while she is unmarried; but when she is a mother she is really a holy woman; and when she is a grandmother she is a holy terror.

By both extremes the woman gets something back out of life. There is only one place where she gets little or nothing back, and that is the north of Germany. France and America aim alike at equality; America by similarity, France by dissimilarity. But North Germany does definitely aim at inequality. The woman stands up with no more irritation than a butler; the man sits down with no more embarrassment than a guest. This is the cool affirmation of inferiority, as in the case of the sabre and the tradesmen. "Thou goest with women; forget not thy whip," said Nietzsche. It will be observed that he does not say "poker," which might come more naturally to the mind of a more common or Christian wife-beater. But, then, a poker is a part of domesticity, and might be used by the wife as well as the husband. In fact, it often is. The sword and the whip are the weapons of a privileged caste.

Pass from the closest of all differences, that between husband and wife, to the most distant of all differences, that of the remote and unrelated races who have seldom seen each other's faces, and never been tinged with each other's blood. Here we still find the same unvarying Prussian principle. Any European might feel a genuine fear of the Yellow Peril, and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it. Many might say, and have said, that the heathen Chinee is very heathen indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture and utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people do not. Nor do I doubt the German Emperor's sincerity when he sought to point out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign would be, supposing that it could come.

But now comes the comic irony, which never fails to follow on the attempt of the Prussian to be philosophic. For the Kaiser, after explaining to his troops how important it was to avoid Eastern barbarism, instantly commanded them to become Eastern barbarians. He told them, in so many words, to be Huns, and leave nothing living or standing behind them. In fact, he frankly offered a new army corps of aboriginal Tartars to the Far East, within such time as it may take a bewildered Hanoverian to turn into a Tartar. Any one who has the painful habit of personal thought will perceive here at once the non-reciprocal principle again. Boiled down to its bones of logic, it means simply this: "I am a German and you are a Chinaman. Therefore, I

Page 118

being a German, have a right to be a Chinaman. But you have no right to be a Chinaman, because you are only a Chinaman." This is probably the highest point to which the German culture has risen.

"The Principle of Being Unprincipled."

The principle here neglected, which may be called mutuality by those who misunderstand and dislike the word equality, does not offer so clear a distinction between the Prussian and the other peoples as did the first Prussian principle of an infinite and destructive opportunism; or, in other words, the principle of being unprincipled. Nor upon this second can one take up so obvious a position touching the other civilizations or semi-civilizations of the world. Some idea of oath and bond there is in the rudest tribes, in the darkest continents. But it might be maintained, of the more delicate and imaginative element of reciprocity, that a cannibal in Borneo understands it almost as little as a professor in Berlin. A narrow and one-sided seriousness is the fault of barbarians all over the world. This may have been the meaning, for aught I know, of the one eye of the Cyclops; that the barbarian cannot see around things or look at them from two points of view, and thus becomes a blind beast and an eater of men. Certainly there can be no better summary of the savage than this, which, as we have seen, unfits him for the duel. He is the man who cannot love--no, nor even hate--his neighbor as himself.

But this quality in Prussia does have one effect which has reference to the same question of the lower civilizations. It disposes once and for all at least of the civilizing mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans are the last people in the world to be trusted with the task. They are as short-sighted morally as physically. What is their sophism of "necessity" but an inability to imagine tomorrow morning? What is their non-reciprocity but an inability to imagine, not a god or devil, but merely another man? Are these to judge mankind? Men of two tribes in Africa not only know that they are all men but can understand that they are all black men. In this they are quite seriously in advance of the intellectual Prussian, who cannot be got to see that we are all white men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the Northeast Teuton anything that marks him out especially from the more colorless classes of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the gray or the drab. Yet he will explain in serious official documents that the difference between him and us is a difference between "the master race and the inferior race."

How to Know "The Master Race."

The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the end of an argument, and the difficulty here is that there is no way of testing which is a master race except by asking which is your own race. If you cannot find out, (as is usually the case,) you fall back on the absurd occupation of writing history about prehistoric times. But I suggest quite seriously that if the Germans can give their philosophy to the Hottentots there is no reason why they should not give their sense of superiority to the Hottentots. If they can see such fine shades between the Goth and the Gaul, there is no reason why similar shades should not lift the savage above other savages; why any Ojibway should not discover that he is one tint redder than the Dakotas, or any nigger in the Kameruns say he is not so black as he is painted. For this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and worst of the refusals of reciprocity. The Prussian calls all men to admire the beauty of his large blue eyes. If they do, it is because they have inferior eyes; if they don't, it is because they have no eyes.

Wherever the most miserable remnant of our race, astray and dried up in deserts or buried forever under the fall of bad civilization, has some feeble memory that men are men, that bargains are bargains, that there are two sides to a question, or even that it takes two to make a quarrel--that remnant has the

Page 119

right to assist the New Culture, to the knife and club and the splintered stone. For the Prussian begins all his culture by that act which is the destruction of all creative thought and constructive action. He breaks that mirror in the mind in which a man can see the face of his friend or foe.

The German Emperor has reproached this country (England) with allying itself with "barbaric and semi-Oriental power." We have already considered in what sense we use the word barbaric; it is in the sense of one who is hostile to civilization, not one who is insufficient in it. But when we pass from the idea of the barbaric to the idea of the Oriental, the case is even more curious. There is nothing particularly Tartar in Russian affairs, except the fact that Russia expelled the Tartars. The Eastern invader occupied and crushed the country for many years; but that is equally true of Greece, of Spain, and even of Austria. If Russia has suffered from the East, she has suffered in order to resist it; and it is rather hard that the very miracle of her escape should make a mystery about her origin. Jonah may or may not have been three days inside a fish; but that does not make him a merman. And in all the other cases of European nations who escaped the monstrous captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity of the European type. We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain. Copper-colored men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that "Don Quixote" was an African fable on the lines of "Uncle Remus." I have never heard that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro ancestry. In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognize the resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of bondage. But Russia is rather remote; and those to whom nations are but names in newspapers can really fancy, like Mr. Baring's friend, that all Russian churches are "mosques." Yet the land of Turgenev is not a wilderness of fakirs; and even the fanatical Russian is as proud of being different from the Mongol as the fanatical Spaniard was proud of being different from the Moor.

"Scratch a Russian."

The town of Reading, as it exists, offers few opportunities for piracy on the high seas; yet it was the camp of the pirates in Alfred's days. I should think it hard to call the people of Berkshire half Danish merely because they drove out the Danes. In short, some temporary submergence under the savage flood was the fate of many of the most civilized States of Christendom, and it is quite ridiculous to argue that Russia, which wrestled hardest, must have recovered least. Everywhere, doubtless, the East spread a sort of enamel over the conquered countries; but everywhere the enamel cracked. Actual history, in fact, is exactly opposite to the cheap proverb invented against the Muscovite. It is not true to say, "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar." In the darkest hour of the barbaric dominion it was truer to say, "Scratch a Tartar and you find a Russian." It was the civilization that survived under all the barbarism. This vital romance of Russia, this revolution against Asia, can be proved in pure fact; not only from the almost superhuman activity of Russia during the struggle, but also (which is much rarer as human history goes) by her quite consistent conduct since. She is the only great nation which has really expelled the Mongol from her country and continued to protest against presence of the Mongol in her continent. Knowing what he had been in Russia, she knew what

Page 120

he would be in Europe. In this she pursued a logical line of thought, which was, if anything, too unsympathetic with the energies and religions of the East. Every other country, one may say, has been an ally of the Turk--that is, of the Mongol and the Moslem. The French played them as pieces against Austria; the English warmly supported them under the Palmerston régime; even the young Italians sent troops to the Crimea; and of Russia and her Austrian vassal it is nowadays needless to speak. For good or evil, it is the fact of history that Russia is the only power in Europe that has never supported the Crescent against the Cross.

That doubtless will appear an unimportant matter, but it may become important under certain peculiar conditions. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there were a powerful Prince in Europe who had gone ostentatiously out of his way to pay reverence to the remains of the Tartar, Mongol, and Moslem left as an outpost in Europe. Suppose there were a Christian Emperor who could not even go to the tomb of the crucified without pausing to congratulate the last and living crucifier. If there were an Emperor who gave guns and guides and maps and drill instructors to defend the remains of the Mongol in Christendom, what would we say to him? I think at least we might ask him what he meant by his impudence when he talked about supporting a semi-Oriental power. That we support a semi-Oriental power we deny. That he has supported an entirely Oriental power cannot be denied, no, not even by the man who did it.

Whom Has Prussia Emancipated?

But here is to be noted the essential difference between Russia and Prussia; especially by those who use the ordinary liberal arguments against the latter Russia has a policy, which she pursues, if you will, through evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as evil. Let it be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the Finns, the Poles--though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than do the Prussian Poles. But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia has been a despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to others. She did, so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians or the Montenegrins. But whom did Prussia ever emancipate--even by accident? It is, indeed, somewhat extraordinary that in the perpetual permutations of international politics the Hohenzollerns have never gone astray into the path of enlightenment. They have been in alliance with almost everybody off and on; with France, with England, with Austria, with Russia. Can any one candidly say that they have left on any one of these people the faintest impress of progress or liberation? Prussia was the enemy of the French monarchy, but a worse enemy of the French Revolution. Prussia had been an enemy of the Czar, but she was a worse enemy of the Duma. Prussia totally disregarded Austrian rights; but she is today quite ready to inflict Austrian wrongs. This is the strong particular difference between the one empire and the other. Russia is pursuing certain intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals, and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and will protect the weak. But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant; everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny. This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places; shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and raping girls in Wicklow, but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one solitary flag. Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is the Prussian; unconsciously consistent, instinctively restrictive, innocently evil; "following darkness like a dream."

Disinterested Despotism.

Suppose we heard of a person (gifted with some longevity) who had helped Alva to persecute Dutch Protestants, then helped Cromwell to persecute Irish Catholics, and then helped Claverhouse to persecute Scotch Puritans--we should find it rather easier to call him a persecutor than to call him a Protestant or

Page 121

Catholic. Curiously enough, this is actually the position in which the Prussian stands in Europe. No arguments can alter the fact that in three converging and conclusive cases he has been on the side of three distinct rulers of different religions, who had nothing whatever in common except that they were ruling oppressively. In these three Governments, taken separately, one can see something excusable, or at least human. When the Kaiser encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the revolution, the Russian rulers undoubtedly believed they were wrestling with an inferno of atheism and anarchy. A Socialist of the ordinary English kind cried out upon me when I spoke of Stolypin and said he was chiefly known by the halter called "Stolypin's Necktie." As a fact, there were many other things interesting about Stolypin besides his necktie--his policy of peasant proprietorship, his extraordinary personal courage, and certainly none more interesting than that movement in his death agony, when he made the sign of the cross toward the Czar, as the crown and captain of his Christianity. But the Kaiser does not regard the Czar as the captain of Christianity. Far from it. What he supported in Stolypin was the necktie, and nothing but the necktie; the gallows, and not the cross. The Russian ruler did believe that the Orthodox Church was orthodox. The Austrian Archduke did really desire to make the Catholic Church catholic. He did really believe that he was being pro-Catholic in being pro-Austrian. But the Kaiser cannot be pro-Catholic, and, therefore, cannot have been really pro-Austrian; he was simply and solely anti-Servian; nay, even in the cruel and sterile strength of Turkey, any one with imagination can see something of the tragedy, and, therefore, of the tenderness of true belief. The worst that can be said of the Moslems is, as the poet put it, they offered to man the choice of the Koran or the sword. The best that can be said for the German is that he does not care about the Koran, but is satisfied if he can have the sword. And for me, I confess, even the sins of these three other striving empires take on, in comparison, something that is sorrowful and dignified; and I feel they do not deserve that this little Lutheran lounger should patronize all that is evil in them, while ignoring all that is good. He is not Catholic; he is not Orthodox; he is not Mohammedan. He is merely an old gentleman who wishes to share the crime, though he cannot share the creed. He desires to be a persecutor by the pang without the palm. So strongly do all the instincts of the Prussian drive against liberty that he would rather oppress other peoples' subjects than think of anybody going without the benefits of oppression. He is a sort of disinterested despot. He is as disinterested as the devil, who is ready to do any one's dirty work.

The Paradox of Prussia.

This would seem obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts which cannot be explained otherwise. Indeed it would be inconceivable if we were thinking of a whole people, consisting of free and varied individuals. But in Prussia the governing class is really a governing class, and a very few people are needed to think along these lines to make all the other people act along them. And the paradox of Prussia is this: That while its princes and nobles have no other aim on this earth but to destroy democracy wherever it shows itself, they have contrived to get themselves trusted, not as wardens of the past, but as forerunners of the future. Even they cannot believe that their theory is popular, but they do believe that it is progressive. Here again we find the spiritual chasm between the two monarchies in question. The Russian institutions are, in many cases, really left in the rear of the Russian people, and many of the Russian people know it. But the Prussian institutions are supposed to be in advance of the Prussian people, and most of the Prussian people believe it. It is thus much easier for the war lords to go everywhere and impose a hopeless slavery upon every one, for they have al-

Page 122

ready imposed a sort of hopeful slavery on their own simple race.

A Factory of Thumbscrews.

And when men shall speak to us of the hoary iniquities of Russia and of how antiquated is the Russian system we shall answer, "Yes; that is the superiority of Russia." Their institutions are part of their history, whether as relics or fossils. Their abuses have really been uses; that is to say, they have been used up. If they have old engines of terror or torment, they may fall to pieces from mere rust, like an old coat of armor. But in the case of the Prussian tyranny, if it be tyranny at all, it is the whole point of its claim that it is not antiquated, but just going to begin, like the showman. Prussia has a whole thriving factory of thumbscrews, a whole humming workshop of wheels and racks, of the newest and neatest pattern, with which to win Europe back to reaction * * * infandum renovare dolorem. And if we wish to test the truth of this, it can be done by the same method which showed us that Russia, if her race or religion could sometimes make her an invader and an oppressor, could also be made an emancipator and a knight errant. In the same way, if the Russian institutions are old-fashioned, they honestly exhibit the good as well as the bad that can be found in old-fashioned things. In their police system they have an inequality which is against our ideas of law. But in their commune system they have an equality that is older than law itself. Even when they flogged each other like barbarians, they called each other by their Christian names like children. At their worst, they retained all the best of a rude society. At their best, they are simply good, like good children or good nuns. But in Prussia, all that is best in the civilized machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose; and that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty throughout the world.

In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what seems to be mainly a mental limitation--a kind of knot in the brain. Toward the problem of Slav population, of English colonization, of French armies, and of reinforcements it shows the same strange philosophic sulks. So far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying, "It is very wrong that you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you." The spokesman of this system seems to have a curious capacity for concentrating this entanglement or contradiction sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor's celebrated suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all become Huns. A much stronger instance is his more recent order to his troops touching the war in Northern France. As most people know, his words ran: "It is my royal and imperial command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valor of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over Gen. French's contemptible little army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can afford to pass over. What I am interested in is the mentality, the train of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space. If French's little army is contemptible it would seem clear that

Page 123

all the skill and valor of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it, but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and valor of the German Army are concentrated on it it is not being treated as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments in his mind, and he insisted on saying them both at once. He wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the same moment, in the utter weakness of the British Nation in their attack and the supreme skill and valor of the Germans in repelling such an attack. Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England and yet a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these contradictory conceptions simultaneously he got rather mixed. Therefore he bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of this almost invisible earwig, and let the impure blood of this cockroach redden the Rhine down to the sea.

Prof. Harnack's Reproach.

But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any accidental and hereditary Prince; and it is quite equally clear in the case of the philosophers who have been held up to us, even in England, as the very prophets of progress. And in nothing is it shown more sharply than in the curious, confused talk about race, and especially about the Teutonic race. Prof. Harnack and similar people are reproaching us, I understand, for having broken "the bond of Teutonism"--a bond which the Prussians have strictly observed, both in breach and observance. We note it in the open annexation of lands wholly inhabited by negroes, such as Denmark. We note it equally in their instant and joyful recognition of the flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the Turks. But it is still the abstract principle of Prof. Harnack which interests me most, and in following it I have the same complexity of inquiry, but the same simplicity of result. Comparing the professor's concern about "Teutonism" with his unconcern about Belgium, I can only reach the following result: "A man need not keep a promise he has made. But a man must keep a promise he has not made." There certainly was a treaty binding Britain to Belgium, if it was only a scrap of paper. If there was any treaty binding Britain with Teutonism it is, to say the least of it, a lost scrap of paper--almost what one might call a scrap of waste paper. Here again the pedants under consideration exhibit the illogical perversity that makes the brain reel. There is obligation and there is no obligation; sometimes it appears that Germany and England must keep faith with each other; sometimes that Germany need not keep faith with anybody and anything; sometimes that we, alone among European peoples, are almost entitled to be Germans; sometimes that besides us Russians and Frenchmen almost rise to a Germanic loveliness of character. But through all there is, hazy but not hypocritical, this sense of some common Teutonism.

Prof. Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same thing. Prof. Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was exactly like Prof. Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Prof. Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an Englishman is like he simply photographs the same German over again. In both cases there is probably sincerity, as well as simplicity. Haeckel was so certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely related and linked up that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman are almost alike that he really risks the generalization that they are exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish face twice over, and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins. Thus he can prove the

Page 124

existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as Haeckel has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of God.

Germans and English.

Now, the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except in the sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything good and evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random from the great European family. They are opposite from the roots of their history--nay, of their geography. It is an understatement to call Britain insular. Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by the sea till it nearly splits into three islands, and even the midlands can almost smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful, and fertile inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and narrow paths, as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy is really national because it is natural. It has cohered out of hundreds of accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and after it. But the German Navy is an artificial thing, as artificial as a constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply copied the British Navy, as Frederick II. copied the French Army, and this Japanese or antlike assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which the Germans have and the English markedly have not. There are other German superiorities which are very much superior. The one or two really jolly things that the Germans have got are precisely the things which the English haven't got, notably a real habit of popular music and of the ancient songs of the people; not merely spreading from the towns or caught from the professionals. In this the Germans rather resemble the Welsh, though heaven knows what becomes of Teutonism if they do. But the difference between the Germans and the English goes deeper than all these signs of it. They differ more than any other two Europeans in the normal posture of the mind.

Above all, they differ in what is the most English of all English traits--that shame which the French may be right in calling "the bad shame," for it is certainly mixed up with pride and suspicion, the upshot of which we call shyness. Even an Englishman's rudeness is often rooted in his being embarrassed. But a German's rudeness is rooted in his never being embarrassed. He eats and makes love noisily. He never feels a speech or a song or a sermon or a large meal to be what the English call "out of place" in particular circumstances. When Germans are patriotic and religious they have no reactions against patriotism and religion, as have the English and the French. Nay, the mistake of Germany in the modern disaster largely arose from the facts that she thought England was simple, when England is very subtle. She thought that because our politics have become largely financial they had become wholly financial; that because our aristocrats had become pretty cynical they had become entirely corrupt. They could not seize the subtlety by which a rather used-up English gentleman might sell a coronet when he could not sell a fortress; might lower the public standards and yet refuse to lower the flag. In short, the Germans are quite sure that they understand us entirely because they do not understand us at all. Possibly, if they began to understand us they might hate us even more, but I would rather be hated for some small but real reason than pursued with love on account of all kinds of qualities which I do not possess and which I do not desire. And when the Germans get their first genuine glimpses of what modern England is like they will discover that England has a very broken, belated, and inadequate sense of having an obligation to Europe; but no sort of sense whatever of having any obligation to Teutonism.

Slippery Strength of Stupidity.

This is the last and strongest of the Prussian qualities we have here considered. There is in stupidity of this sort a strange, slippery strength, because it can be not only outside rules, but outside reason. The man who really cannot see that he is contradicting him

Page 125

self has a great advantage in controversy, though the advantage breaks down when he tries to reduce it to simple addition, to chess--or to the game called war. It is the same about the stupidity of the one-sided kinship. The drunkard who is quite certain that a total stranger is his long-lost brother has a great advantage until it comes to matters of detail. "We must have chaos within," said Nietzsche, "that we may give birth to a dancing star."

In these slight notes I have suggested the principal strong points of the Prussian character--a failure in honor which almost amounts to a failure in memory; an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that the other party is an ego, and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud. To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness, which can expand or contract without reference to reason or record--a potential infinity of excuses. If the English had been on the German side the German professors would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved the Teutons. As the English are on the other side, the German professors will say that these Teutons were not sufficiently evolved; or they will say they were just sufficiently evolved to show that they were not Teutons. Probably they will say both. But the truth is that all that they call evolution should rather be called evasion. They tell us they are opening windows of enlightenment and doors of progress. The truth is that they are breaking up the whole house of the human intellect that they may abscond in any direction. There is an ominous and almost monstrous parallel between the position of their overrated philosophers and of their comparatively underrated soldiers. For what their professors call roads of progress are really routes of escape.