CHAPTER I.

The Governmental Structure of Germany.

The peoples of this generation--at least, those of highly civilized and cultured communities--had little or no familiarity with revolutions and the history of revolutions before March, 1917, when Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown. There was and still is something about the very word "revolution" which is repugnant to all who love ordered and orderly government. It conjures up pictures of rude violence, of murder, pillage and wanton destruction. It violates the sentiments of those that respect the law, for it is by its very nature a negation of the force of existing laws. It breaks with traditions and is an overcoming of inertia; and inertia rules powerfully the majority of all peoples.

The average American is comparatively little versed in the history of other countries. He knows that the United States of America came into existence by a revolution, but "revolutionary" is for him in this connection merely an adjective of time used to locate and describe a war fought between two powers toward the end of the eighteenth century. He does not realize, or realizes but dimly, the essential kinship of all revolutions. Nor does he realize that most of the governments existing today came into being as the result of revolutions, some of them bloodless, it is true, but all at bottom a revolt against existing laws and governmental forms. The extortion of the Magna Charta from King John in 1215 was not the less a revolution because it was the bloodless work of the English barons. It took two bloody revolutions to establish France as a republic. All the Balkan states are the products of revolution. A man need not be old to remember the overthrow of the monarchy in Brazil; the revolution in Portugal was but yesterday as historians count time. Only the great wisdom and humanitarianism of the aged King Oscar II prevented fighting and bloodshed between Sweden and Norway when Norway announced her intention of breaking away from the dual kingdom. The list could be extended indefinitely.

The failure to recall or realize these things was one of the factors responsible for the universal surprise and amazement when the Hohenzollerns were overthrown. The other factor was the general--and justified--impression that the government of Germany was one of the strongest, most ably administered and most homogeneous governments of the world. And yet Germany, too, or what subsequently became the nucleus of Germany, had known revolution. It was but seventy years since the King of Prussia had been forced to stand bareheaded in the presence of the bodies of the "March patriots," who had given their lives in a revolt which resulted in a new constitution and far-reaching concessions to the people.

Even to those who did recall and realize these things, however, the German revolution came as a shock. The closest observers, men who knew Germany intimately, doubted to the very last the possibility of successful revolution there. And yet, viewed in the light of subsequent happenings, it will be seen how natural, even unavoidable, the revolution was. It came as the inevitable result of conditions created by the war and the blockade. It will be the purpose of this book to make clear the inevitableness of the _debacle_, and to explain the events that followed it.

For a better understanding of the whole subject a brief explanation of the structure of Germany's governmental system is in place. This will serve the double purpose of showing the strength of the system which the revolution was able to overturn and of dispelling a too general ignorance regarding it.

The general condemnation of Prussia, the Prussians and the Hohenzollerns must not be permitted to obscure their merits and deserts. For more than five hundred years without a break in the male line this dynasty handed down its inherited rights and produced an array of great administrators who, within three centuries, raised Prussia to the rank of a first-rate power.

The kingdom that subsequently became the nucleus for the German Empire lost fully half its territory by the Peace of Tilsit in 1807, when, following the reverses in the Napoleonic wars, Germany was formally dissolved and the Confederation of the Rhine was formed by Napoleon. The standing army was limited to 42,000 men, and trade with Great Britain was prohibited. The Confederation obeyed the letter of the military terms, but evaded its spirit by successively training levies of 42,000 men, and within six years enough trained troops were available to make a revolt against Napoleonic slavery possible. The French were routed and cut to pieces at the Battle of the Nations near Leipsic in 1813, and Prussian Germany was again launched on the road to greatness.

A certain democratic awakening came on the heels of the people's liberation from foreign domination. It manifested itself particularly in the universities. The movement became so threatening that a conference of ministers of the various states was convoked in 1819 to consider counter-measures. The result was an order disbanding the political unions of the universities, placing the universities under police supervision and imposing a censorship upon their activities.

The movement was checked, but not stopped. In 1847 ominous signs of a popular revolution moved King Frederick William IV of Prussia to summon the Diet to consider governmental reforms. The chief demand presented by this Diet was for a popular representation in the government. The King refused to grant this. A striking commentary upon the political backwardness of Germany is furnished by the fact that one of the demands made by a popular convention held in Mannheim in the following year was for trial by jury, a right granted in England more than six hundred years earlier by the Magna Charta. Other demands were for the freedom of the press and popular representation in the government.

The revolution of 1848 in Prussia, while it failed to produce all that had been hoped for by those responsible for it, nevertheless resulted in what were for those times far-reaching reforms. A diet was convoked at Frankfort-on-the-Main. It adopted a constitution establishing some decided democratic reforms and knit the fabric of the German confederation more closely together.

The structure of the Confederation was already very substantial, despite much state particularism and internal friction. An important event in the direction of a united Germany had been the establishment in 1833 of the _Zollverein_ or Customs Union. The existence of scores of small states,[1] each with its own tariffs, currency and posts, had long hindered economic development. There is a well-known anecdote regarding a traveler who, believing himself near the end of his day's journey, after having passed a dozen customs-frontiers, found his way barred by the customs-officials of another tiny principality. Angered at the unexpected delay, he refused to submit to another examination of his effects and another exaction of customs-duties.

[1] There were more than three hundred territorial sovereignties in Germany when the new constitution of the union was adopted at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.--There were principalities of less than one square mile in extent. The particularism engendered by this state of affairs has always been one of the greatest handicaps with which federal government in Germany has had to contend.

"You aren't a country," he said. "You're just a spot. I'll go around you." And this he did, without being seriously delayed in reaching his destination.

The growing power of Germany aroused the fear of the French, who realized what the union of the vital, energetic and industrious German races would mean. Years of tension culminated in the war of 1870-71. The result is known. Unprepared for the conflict, the French were crushed, just as Austria had been crushed four years earlier.

The last external obstacle in the way of German unity and strength had thus strangely been removed. On January 18, 1871, while the victorious German armies still stood at the gates of Paris, King William I was proclaimed German Emperor as Kaiser Wilhelm I.

The designation as "German Emperor" should be noted, because it is significant of the manner of union of the German Empire. The aged monarch was insistent that the title should be "Emperor of Germany." To this the sovereigns of the other German states objected, as carrying the implication of their own subjection. Between "German Emperor" or "Emperor in Germany" and "Emperor of Germany," they pointed out, there was a wide difference. "German Emperor" implied merely that the holder of that title was _primus inter pares_, merely the first among equals, the presiding officer of an aggregation of sovereigns of equal rank who had conferred this dignity upon him, just as a diet, by electing one of its number chairman, confers upon him no superiority of rank, but merely designates him to conduct their deliberations. These sovereigns' jealousy of their own prerogatives had at first led them to consider vesting the imperial honors alternately with the Prussian and Bavarian King, but this idea was abandoned as impracticable. At the urgent representations of Bismarck the aged King consented, with tears in his eyes, it is said, to accept the designation of German Emperor.

The German Empire as thus formed consisted of twenty-five states and the _Reichsland_ of Alsace-Lorraine, which was administered by a viceroy appointed by the King of Prussia. The empire was a federated union of states much on the pattern of the United States of America, but the federative character was not completely carried out because of the particularism of certain states. The Bavarians, whose customs of life, easy-going ways, and even dialects are more akin to those of the German Austrians than of the Prussians,[2] exacted far-reaching concessions as the price of their entrance into the empire. They retained their own domestic tariff-imposts, their own army establishment, currency, railways, posts, telegraphs and other things. Certain other states also reserved a number of rights which ought, for the formation of a perfect federative union, to have been conferred upon the central authority. On the whole, however, these reservations proved less of a handicap than might have been expected.

[2] The Bavarians have from early days disliked the Prussians heartily. _Saupreuss'_ (sow-Prussian) and other even less elegant epithets were in common use against the natives of the dominant state. It must in fairness be admitted that this dislike was the natural feeling of the less efficient Bavarian against the efficient and energetic Prussian.

The Imperial German Constitution adopted at this time was in many ways a remarkable document. It cleverly combined democratic and absolutist features. The democratic features were worked out with a wonderful psychological instinct. In the hands of almost any people except the Germans or Slavs the democratic side of this instrument would have eventually become the predominant one. That it did not is a tribute to the astuteness of Bismarck and of the men who, under his influence, drafted the constitution.

The German Parliament or _Reichsrat_ was composed of two houses, the _Bundesrat_, or Federal Council, and the _Reichstag_, or Imperial Diet. The Federal Council was designed as the anchor of absolutism. It was composed of fifty-eight members, of whom seventeen came from Prussia, six from Bavaria, and four each from Saxony and Wuerttemberg. The larger of the other states had two or three each, and seventeen states had but one each. In 1911 three members were granted to Alsace-Lorraine by a constitution given at that time to the _Reichsland_. The members of the Federal Council were the direct representatives of their respective sovereigns, by whom they were designated, and not of the people of the respective states. Naturally they took their instructions from their sovereigns. Nearly all legislative measures except bills for raising revenue had to originate in the Federal Council, and its concurrence with the Reichstag was requisite for the enactment of laws. A further absolutist feature of the constitution was the provision that fourteen votes could block an amendment to the constitution. In other words, Prussia with her seventeen members could prevent any change not desired by her governing class.

The Reichstag, the second chamber of the parliament, was a truly democratic institution. Let us say rather that it could have become a democratic institution. Why it did not do so will be discussed later. It consisted of 397 members, who were elected by the most unlimited suffrage prevailing at that time in all Europe. It is but recently, indeed within the last five years, that as universal and free a suffrage has been adopted by other European countries, and there are still many which impose limitations unknown to the German Constitution. Every male subject who had attained the age of twenty-five years and who had not lost his civil rights through the commission of crime, or who was not a delinquent taxpayer or in receipt of aid from the state or his community as a pauper, was entitled to vote. The vote was secret and direct, and the members of the Reichstag were responsible only to their constituents and not subject to instructions from any governmental body or person. They were elected for a term of three years,[3] but their mandates could be terminated at any time by the Kaiser, to whom was reserved the right to dissolve the Reichstag. If he dissolved it, however, he was compelled to order another election within a definitely stated period.

[3] This was later altered to five years.

One very real power was vested in the Reichstag. It had full control of the empire's purse strings. Bills for raising revenue and all measures making appropriations had to originate in this chamber, and its assent was required to their enactment. The reason for its failure to exercise this control resolutely must be sought in the history of the German people, in their inertia where active participation in governmental matters is concerned, and in those psychological characteristics which Bismarck so well comprehended and upon which he so confidently counted.

No people on earth had had a more terrible or continuous struggle for existence than the various tribes that later amalgamated to form the nucleus for the German Empire. Their history is a record of almost continuous warfare, going back to the days of Julius Caesar. In the first years of the Christian era the Germans under Arminius (Hermann) crushed the Romans of Varus's legions in the Teutoburg Forest, and the land was racked by war up to most modern times. Most of its able-bodied men were exterminated during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).[4] This almost constant preoccupation in war had a twofold result: it intensified the struggle for existence of the common man and kept him from devoting either his thoughts or energies to problems of government, and it strengthened the powers of a comparatively small ruling-class, who alone possessed any culture and education and whose efforts were naturally directed to keeping their serfs in the subjection of ignorance. These conditions prevailed until well into the last century.

[4] The population of Germany dropped from twenty to less than seven millions during this war.

The conditions can best be appreciated by a comparison with the conditions existing in England at the same time. England, too, had had her wars, but her soil was but rarely ravaged by foreign invaders, and never to the extent in which Germany repeatedly suffered. Parliamentary government of a sort had existed more than three centuries in England before it reached Germany. A milder climate than that of North Germany made the struggle for the bare necessaries of life less strenuous, and gave opportunity to a greater proportion of the people to consider other things than the mere securing of enough to eat and drink. They began to think politically centuries before political affairs ceased to rest entirely in the hands of the nobility of Germany.

The Germans of the lower and middle classes--in other words, the vast majority of the whole people--were thus both without political training and without even the inclination to think independently along political lines. Some advance had, it is true, been made along these lines since the Napoleonic wars, but the events of 1871 nevertheless found the great mass of the people without political tutelage or experience. People even more politically inclined would have found themselves handicapped by this lack of training, and the German--particularly the Southern German--is not politically inclined. This will be discussed more fully in the chapters dealing with the course of events following the revolution of 1918. It will be sufficient to point out here the German's inclination to abstract reasoning, to philosophizing and to a certain mysticism; his love of music and fine arts generally, his undeniable devotion to the grosser creature-comforts, eating and drinking, and his tendency not to worry greatly about governmental or other impersonal affairs provided he be kept well fed and amused. It is, in brief, the spirit to which the Roman emperors catered with the _panem et circenses_, and which manifests itself strikingly in the German character. The result of all this was a marked inertia which characterized German political life up to recent years. Even when a limited political awakening came it was chiefly the work of German-Jews, not of Germans of the old stock.

These, then, were the conditions that prevented the democratic features of the Imperial Constitution from acquiring that prominence and importance which they would have acquired among a different people. The Kaiser could dissolve the Reichstag at will. Why, then, bother oneself about opposing the things desired by the Kaiser and his brother princes? It merely meant going to the trouble of a new election, and if that Reichstag should prove recalcitrant also, it could in its turn be dissolved. Apparently it never occurred to the mass of the Germans that the Kaiser could not go on indefinitely dissolving a representative body which insisted upon carrying out the people's will. The Reichstag, being on the whole neither much wiser nor more determined than the people that elected it, accepted this view of the situation. Occasionally it showed a bit of spirit, notably when it adopted a vote of censure against the government in the matter of the Zabern affair in 1913. On the whole, however, it accepted meekly the role that caused it to be termed, and justly, a "debating club." And this was precisely the role that had been planned for it by the drafters of the constitution.

In justice to the Reichstag, however, one thing should be pointed out. When the German Empire was formed the country was still predominantly an agricultural land. The election districts were on the whole justly erected, and no one section of the country had a markedly disproportionate number of representatives. It was not long, however, before the flight to the cities began in Germany as in other countries, and at the beginning of the present century the greater part of Germany's population lived in the cities. The result was speedily seen in the constitution of the Reichstag, since no redistricting was ever made since the original districting of 1871. Greater Berlin, with a population around four million, elected but six representatives to the Reichstag. In other words, there were some 660,000 inhabitants for every delegate. The agricultural districts, however, and especially those of Northern Germany--East Elbia, as it is termed--continued to elect the same number of representatives as at the beginning to represent a population which had increased but little or not at all. There were districts in East and West Prussia, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Posen where fewer than ten thousand voters were able to send a representative to the Reichstag.

The result was the natural one. Throughout the world conservatism has its headquarters on the farms. The farmers cling longest to the old order of things, they free themselves the most slowly from tradition, they are least susceptible to sociological and socialistic ideas and, in so far as they own their own land, they are among the strongest supporters of vested property-rights. In no other country was this more the case than in Germany, and especially in the districts mentioned, where large estates predominate and whence have come for two hundred years the most energetic, faithful and blindly loyal servants of their sovereign. The cities, on the other hand, and particularly the larger cities are the strongholds of new ideas. They are in particular the breeding-places of Socialism and Communism. Five of the six Reichstag members elected from Greater Berlin in 1912 were Social-Democrats, and the sixth was a Progressive with advanced democratic ideas.

With the shifting population and the consequent distortion of the election districts, a tremendous advantage accrued to the rural communities; in other words, the forces opposed to democratic reforms and in favor of maintaining and even increasing the powers of the King and Emperor steadily increased proportionately their representation in the Reichstag at the expense of the friends of democracy. At the Reichstag election of 1912 the Socialists cast roundly thirty-five per cent of the total popular vote. Handicapped by the unjust districting, however, they were able to elect only 110 delegates, whereas their proportion of the total vote entitled them to 139. The Progressives, most of whose strength also lay in the cities, likewise received fewer members than their total vote entitled them to have. Under a fair districting these two parties would together have had nearly a clear majority of the Reichstag. There is reason to believe that the whole course of history of the last years would have been altered had Germany honestly reformed her Reichstag election districts ten years ago. On such small things does the fate of nations often rest.

The Kaiser, as the president of the empire, was authorized to "represent the empire internationally." He named the diplomatic representatives to foreign courts and countries and to the Vatican. He was empowered to make treaties, and to declare defensive warfare provided the enemy had actually invaded German territory. He could not declare an offensive war without the consent of the Federal Council, nor a defensive war unless the invasion mentioned had taken place. He was commander-in-chief of the navy, and of the Prussian army and the armies of the other federal states except of Saxony and Bavaria, which maintained their own military establishments. He appointed--in theory--all federal officials and officers of the army and navy. On the whole, however, his powers as German Emperor were strictly limited and hardly went beyond the powers of the ruler of any constitutional monarchy.

It was as King of Prussia, however, that he really exercised the greatest power, and thus vicariously strengthened his powers in the empire at large. The parliamentary system of Prussia was archaic and designed to make impossible any really democratic government or a too severe limitation upon the powers of the King. It was, like the Imperial Parliament, made up of two chambers, a House of Lords and a Diet. The upper chamber, the House of Lords, was composed of men appointed by the King, either for a fixed term or for life. It goes without saying that all these men were strong supporters of the monarchic system and outspoken enemies of democracy. No legislation could be enacted against their will. The composition of the Diet, moreover, was such that the House of Lords had until very recent years little to fear in the way of democratic legislation. It was elected by the so-called three-class system, under which a wealthy man frequently had greater voting power than his five hundred employees together. The ballot moreover was indirect, the delegates being elected by a complicated system of electors. In addition to all this, the ballot was open, not secret. This placed a powerful weapon in the hands of the employing classes generally and of the great estate-owners particularly. The polling-places in rural districts were generally located on land belonging to one of these estates, and the election officials were either the estate-owners themselves or men dependent on them. In these circumstances it took a brave man to vote otherwise than his employer desired, and there was no way of concealing for whom or what party he had voted. Bismarck himself, reactionary and conservative as he was, once termed the Prussian three-class voting-system "the most iniquitous of all franchise systems."

Around this a fight had waged for several years before the revolution. The Kaiser, as King of Prussia, flatly promised, in his address from the throne in 1908, that the system should be reformed. It is a matter of simple justice to record that he made the promise in good faith and tried to see that it was kept. His efforts along this line were thwarted by a small clique of men who were determined "to protect the King against himself," and who, lacking even the modicum of political prescience possessed by the Kaiser-King, failed to see that if they did not make a concession willingly they would eventually be forced to make a concession of much greater extent. From year to year measures to reform the three-class system were introduced, only to be killed by the House of Lords. Under the stress of the closing days of the war such a measure was perfected and would have become a law had not the revolution intervened. But it came too late, just as did scores of other reforms undertaken in the eleventh hour.

And thus, while the Kaiser's power as German Emperor was sharply limited, he enjoyed powers as King of Prussia which in some degree approached absolutism. The dominance of Prussia in the empire, while it could not transfer these powers to the Emperor _de jure_, did unquestionably effect to some degree a _de facto_ transfer, which, while it did not in the long run have a very actual or injurious internal effect, nevertheless played a no inconsiderable part in the outside world and was responsible for a general feeling that Germany was in effect an absolute monarchy. German apologists have maintained that Wilhelm II had less actual power as German Emperor than that possessed by the President of the United States. This statement is undoubtedly true, but with an important limitation and qualification. The President's great powers are transitory and cannot--or in practice do not--extend more than eight years at the most. His exercise of those powers is governed and restrained during the first four years by his desire to be re-elected; during the second four years he must also use his powers in such a way that a democratic people will not revenge itself at the next election upon the President's party. But the Kaiser and King was subject to no such limitation. He ruled for life, and a dissatisfied people could not take the succession away from the Hohenzollerns except by revolution. And nobody expected or talked of revolution. The only real control over abuses of power rested with a Reichstag which, as has already been explained, was too faithful a reflex of a non-political and inert constituency to make this control of more than mild academic interest.