Chapter 9

As for Napoleon, he performed a prolonged autopsy upon the Germans. They were dismembered or joined together as suited his plans. At his beck they fought against one another, or against Russia, or against England. He tossed them crowns, that they still wear proudly, as a master tosses biscuits to obedient spaniels. He put his poor relatives to rule over them, here and there, and they were grateful. He marched into their present capital, took away their monuments, and the sword of Frederick the Great, and they hailed him with tears and rejoicing as their benefactor, while their wittiest poet and sweetest singer, lauded him to the skies.

It is unpleasant to recall, but quite unfair to forget, these happenings of the last two hundred years in the history of the German people. What would any man say, after this, was their greatest need, if not self-confidence; if not twenty-five years of peace to enable them to recover from their beatings and humiliation; if not a powerful army and navy to give them the sense of security, by which alone prosperity and pride in their accomplishments and in themselves can be fostered; if not a ruler who holds ever before their eyes their ideals and the unfaltering energy required of them to attain them!

What nation would not be self-conscious after such dire experiences? What nation would not be tenderly sensitive as to its treatment by neighboring powers? What nation would not be even unduly keen to resent any appearance of an attempt to jostle it from its hard-won place in the sun? Their self-consciousness and sensitiveness and vanity are patent, but they are pardonable. As the leader of the Conservative party in the Reichstag, Doctor von Heydebrandt, speaking at Breslau in October, 1911, anent the Morocco controversy, said, after, alluding to the "bellicose impudence" of Lloyd-George: "The [British] ministry thrusts its fist under our nose, and declares, I alone command the world. It is bitterly hard for us who have 1870 behind us." They feel that they should no longer be treated to such bumptiousness.

I trust that I am no swashbuckler, but I have the greatest sympathy with the present Emperor in his capacity as war-lord, and in his insistent stiffening of Germany's martial backbone.

When shall we all recover from a certain international sickliness that keeps us all feverish? The continual talk and writing about international friendships, being of the same family, or the same race, the cousin propagandism in short, is irritating, not helpful. I do not go to Germany to discover how American is Germany, nor to England to discover how American is England; but to Germany to discover how German is Germany, to England to see how English is England. I much prefer Americans to either Germans or Englishmen, and they prefer Germans or Englishmen, as the case may be, to Americans. What spurious and milksoppy puppets we should be if it were not so. So long as there are praters going about insisting that Germany, with a flaxen pig-tail down her back, and England, in pumps instead of boots, and a poodle instead of a bulldog, shall sit forever in the moonlight hand in hand; or that America shall become a dandy, shave the chin-whisker, wear a Latin Quarter butterfly tie of red, white, and blue, and thrum a banjo to a little brown lady with oblique eyes and a fan, all day long; just so long will the bulldog snarl, the flaxen-haired maiden look sulky, the chin-whisker become stiffer and more provocative, and the fluttering fan seem to threaten blows.

We have been surfeited with peace talk till we are all irritable. One hundredth part of an ounce of the same quality of peace powders that we are using internationally would, if prescribed to a happy family in this or any other land, lead to dissensions, disobedience, domestic disaster, and divorce. Mr. Carnegie will have lived long enough to see more wars and international disturbances, and more discontent born of superficial reading, than any man in history who was at the same time so closely connected with their origin. Perhaps it were better after all if our millionaires were educated!

The peace party need war just as the atheists need God, otherwise they have nothing to deny, nothing to attack. Peace is a negative thing that no one really wants, certainly not the kind of peace of which there is so much talking to-day, which is a kind of castrated patriotism. Peace is not that. Peace can never be born of such impotency. When German statesmen declare roundly that they will not discuss the question of disarmament, they are merely saying that they will not be traitors to their country. If the Emperor rattles the sabre occasionally, it is because the time has not come yet, when this German people can be allowed to forget what they have suffered from foreign conquerors, and what they must do to protect themselves from such a repetition of history.

When the final judgment is passed upon the Emperor, we must recall his deep religious feeling that he is inevitably an instrument of God; his ingrained and ineradicable method of reading history as though it were a series of the ipse dixits of kings; his complacent neglect of how the work of the world is done by patient labor; of how works of art are only born of travail and tears: his obsession by that curious psychology of kings that leads them to believe that they are somehow different, and under other laws, as though they lived in another dimension of space. In addition, he is a man of unusually rapid mental machinery, of overpowering self-confidence, of great versatility, of many advantages of training and experience, and, above all, he is unhampered. He is answerable directly to no one, to no parliament, to no minister, to no people. He is father, guardian, guide, school- master, and priest, but in no sense a servant responsible to any master save one of his own choosing.

The only wonder is that he is not insupportable. Those who have come under the spell of his personality declare him to be the most delightful of companions; what Germany has grown to be under his reign of twenty-five years all the world knows, much of the world envies, some of the world fears; what his own people think of him can best be expressed by the statement that his supremacy was never more assured than to-day.

I agree that no one man can be credited with the astonishing expansion of Germany in all directions in the last thirty years; but so interwoven are the advice and influence, the ambitions and plans, of the German Emperor with the progress of the German people, that this one personality shares his country's successes as no single individual in any other country can be said to do.

Whether he likes Americans or not one can hardly know. No doubt he has made many of them think so; and, alas, we suffer from a national hallucination that we are liked abroad, when as a matter of fact we are no more liked than others; and in cultured centres we are in addition, laughed at by the careless and sneered at by the sour.

That the Kaiser is liked by Americans, both by those who have met him and by those who have not, is, I think, indisputable. He is of the stuff that would have made a first-rate American. He would have been a sovereign there as he is a sovereign here. He would have enjoyed the risks, and turmoil, and competition; he would have enjoyed the fine, free field of endeavor, and he would have jousted with the best of us in our tournament of life, which has trained as many knights sans peur et sans reproche as any country in the world.

I believe in a man who takes what he thinks belongs to him, and holds it against the world; in the man who so loves life that he keeps a hearty appetite for it and takes long draughts of it; who is ever ready to come back smiling for another round with the world, no matter how hard he has been punished. I believe that God believes in the man who believes in Him, and therefore in himself. Why should I debar a man from my sympathy because he is a king or an emperor? I admire your courage, Sir; I love your indiscretions; I applaud your faith in your God, and your confidence in yourself, and your splendid service to your country. Without you Germany would have remained a second-rate power. Had you been what your critics pretend that they would like you to be, Germany would have been still ruling the clouds.

Here's long life to your power, Sir, and to your possessions, and to you! And as an Anglo-Saxon, I thank God, that all your countrymen are not like you!

IV GERMAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE PRESS

In the days when Bismarck was welding the German states into a federal organization and finally into an empire, he used the press to spray his opinions, wishes, and suspicions over those he wished to instruct or to influence. He used it, too, to threaten or to mislead his enemies at home and abroad. The Hamburger Nachrichten was the newspaper for which he wrote at one time, and which remained his confidential organ, though as his power grew he used other journals and journalists as well.

As Germany has few traditions of freedom, having rarely won liberty as a united people, but having been beaten into national unity by her political giants, or her robuster sovereigns, so the press before and during Bismarck's long reign, from 1862 to 1890, was kept well in hand by those who ruled. It is only lately that caricature, criticism, and opposition have had freer play. That a journalist like Maximilian Harden (a friend and confidant of Bismarck, by the way) should be permitted to write without rebuke and without punishment that the present Kaiser "has all the gifts except one, that of politics," marks a new license in journalistic debate. That this same person was able, single-handed, to bring about the exposure and downfall of a cabal of decadent courtiers whose influence with the Emperor was deplored, proves again how completely the German press has escaped from certain leading-strings. A sharp criticism of the Emperor in die Post, even as lately as 1911, excited great interest, and was looked upon as a very daring performance.

There are some four thousand daily and more than three thousand weekly and monthly publications in Germany to-day; but neither the press as a whole, nor the journalists, with a few exceptions, exert the influence in either society or politics of the press in America and in England. As compared with Germany, one is at once impressed with the greater number of journals and their more effective distribution at home. In America there are 2,472 daily papers; 16,269 weeklies; and 2,769 monthlies. Tri-weekly and quarterly publications added bring the total to 22,806. One group of 200 daily papers claim a circulation of 10,000,000, while five magazines have a total circulation of 5,000,000. It is calculated that there is a daily, a weekly, and a monthly magazine circulated for every single family in America. Not an unmixed blessing, by any means, when one remembers that thousands, untrained to think and uninterested, are thus dusted with the widely blown comments of undigested news. Editorial comment of any serious value is, of course, impossible, and the readers are given a strange variety of unwholesome intellectual food to gulp down, with mental dyspepsia sure to follow, a disease which is already the curse of the times in America, where superficiality and insincerity are leading the social and political dance.

To carry the comparison further, there are 22,806 newspapers published in America; 9,500 in England; 8,049 in Germany; and 6,681 in France: or 1 for every 4,100 of the population in America; 1 for every 4,700 in Great Britain; 1 for every 7,800 in Germany, and 1 for every 5,900 in France.

That a prime minister should have been a contributor to the press, as was Lord Salisbury; that a correspondent or editorial writer of a newspaper should find his way into cabinet circles, into diplomacy, or into high office in the colonies; that the editor and owner of a great newspaper should become an ambassador to England, as in the case of Mr. Reid, is impossible in Germany. The character of the men who take up the profession of journalism suffers from the lack of distinction and influence of their task. Raymond, Greeley, Dana, Laffan, Godkin, in America, and Delane, Hutton, Lawson, and their successors, Garvin, Strachey, Robinson, in England, are impossible products of the German journalistic soil at present.

There have been great changes, and the place of the newspaper and the power of the journalist is increasing rapidly, but the stale atmosphere of censordom hangs about the press even to-day. Freedom is too new to have bred many powerful pens or personalities, and the inconclusive results of political arguments, written for a people who are comparatively apathetic, lessen the enthusiasm of the political journalist. There are not three editors in Germany who receive as much as six thousand dollars a year, and the majority are paid from twelve hundred to three thousand a year. This does not make for independence. I am no believer in great wealth as an incentive to activity, but certainly solvency makes for emancipation from the more debasing forms of tyranny.

Several of the more popular newspapers are owned and controlled by the Jews, and to the American, with no inborn or traditional prejudice against the Jews as a race, it is somewhat difficult to understand the outspoken and unconcealed suspicion and dislike of them in Germany. There is no need to mince matters in stating that this suspicion and dislike exist. A comedy called "The Five Frankfurters" has been given in all the principal cities during the last year and has had a long run in Berlin. It is a scathing caricature of certain Jewish peculiarities of temperament and ambition.

There is even an anti-semitic party, small though it be, in the Reichstag, while the party of the Centre, of the Conservatives and the Agrarians, is frankly anti-semitic as well. No Jew can become an officer in the army, no Jew is admitted to one of the German corps in the universities, no Jew can hold office of importance in the state, and I presume that no unbaptized Jew is received at court. I am bound to record my personal preference for the English and American treatment of the Jew. In England they have made a Jew their prime minister, and in America we offer him equal opportunities with other men, and applaud him whole-heartedly when he succeeds, and thump him soundly with our criticism when he misbehaves. The German fears him; we do not. We have made Jews ambassadors, they have served in our army and navy, and not a few of them rank among our sanest and most generous philanthropists.

To a certain extent society of the higher and official class shuts its doors against him. One of the well-known restaurants in Berlin, until the death of its founder, not long ago, refused admission to Jews.

I venture to say that no intelligent American stops to think whether the Speyer brothers, or Kahn, or Schiff, or the members of the house of Rothschild, are Jews or not, in estimating their political, social, and philanthropic worth. Even as long ago as the close of the fourteenth century the great strife between the princes of Germany and the free cities ceased, in order that both might unite to plunder the Jews.

Luther preached: "Burn their synagogues and schools; what will not burn bury with earth that neither stone nor rubbish remain." "In like manner break into and burn their houses." "Forbid their rabbis to teach on pain of life and limb." "Take away all their prayer-books and Talmuds, in which are nothing but godlessness, lies, cursing, and swearing." In the chronicles of the time occurs frequently "Judaei occisi, combusti."

The German comes by his dislike of the Jew through centuries of traditional conflict, plunder, and hatred, and the very moulder of the present German speech, Luther, was a furious offender. The Jews have been materialists through all ages, claim the Germans: "The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness." It is to be in our day the battle of battles, they claim, whether we are to be socially, morally, and politically orientalized by this advance guard of the Orient, the Jews, or whether we are to preserve our occidental ideals and traditions. Many more men see the conflict, they maintain, than care to take part in it. The money-markets of the world are ramparts that few men care to storm, but, if the independent and the intelligent do not withstand this semitization of our institutions, the ignorant and the degraded will one day take the matter into their own hands, as they have done before, and as they do to this day in some parts of Russia.

There are 600,000 Jews in Germany, 400,000 of them in Prussia and 100,000 of these in Berlin. In New York City alone there are more than 900,000. They are always strangers in our midst. They are of another race. They have other standards and other allegiances. Perhaps we are all of us, the most enlightened of us, provincial at bottom, we like to know who and what our neighbors are, and whence they came; and we dislike those who are outside our racial and social experiences, and our moral and religious habits, and the Jew is always, everywhere, a foreigner. At any rate, so the German maintains.

Strange as it may sound in these days, the Germans are not at heart business men. There are more eyes with dreams in them in Germany than in all the world besides. They work hard, they increase their factories, their commerce, but their hearts are not in it. The Jew has amassed an enormous part of the wealth of Germany, considering his small proportion of the total population. The German, because he is not at heart a trader, is an easy prey for him.

These things trouble us in America very little, and we smile cynically at the not altogether untruthful portraits of "Potash and Pearlmutter," and their vermin-like business methods. There is an undercurrent of feeling in America, that the virile blood is still there which will stop at nothing to throw off oppression, whether from the Jew or from any one else. If we are pinched too hard financially, if confiscation by the government or by individuals goes too far, no laws even will restrain the violence which will break out for liberty. So we are at peace with ourselves and with others, trusting in that quiet might which will take governing into its own hands, at all hazards, if the state of affairs demands it.

With the Germans it is different. No people of modern times has been so harried and harrowed as these Germans. The Thirty Years' war left them in such fear and poverty that even cannibalism existed, and this was years after Massachusetts and Maryland were settled. But nothing has tarnished their idealism. Whether as followers of Charlemagne, or as hordes of dreamers seeking to save Christ's tomb and cradle in the Crusades, or as intoxicated barbarians insisting that their emperor must be crowned at Rome, or as the real torch-bearers of the Reformation, or even now as dreamers, philosophers, musicians, and only industrial and commercial by force of circumstances, they are, least of all the peoples, materialists.

They have given the world lyric poetry, music, mythology, philosophy, and these are still their souls' darlings. They entered the modern world just as science began to marry with commerce and industry, and so their unworn, fresh, and youthful intellectual vigor found expression in industry. Renan writes that he owes his pleasure in intellectual things to a long ancestry of non-thinkers, and he claims to have inherited their stored-up mental forces. Germany is not unlike that. Her recent industrial and intellectual activity may be the release from bondage, of the centuries of stored-up intellectual energy from the ''Woods of Germany.''

It is true that they are easily governed and amenable, but this is due not wholly to the fact that they have been so long under the yoke of rulers, or because they are of cow-like disposition, but because their ideals are spiritual, not material. The American seeks wealth, the Englishman power, the Frenchman notoriety, the German is satisfied with peaceful enjoyment of music, poetry, art, and friendly and very simple intercourse with his fellows.

Certainly I am not the man to say he is wrong, when I see how spiritual things in my own country are cut out of the social body as though they were annoying and dangerous appendices.

The German of this type looks down upon the spiritual and intellectual development of other countries as far inferior to his own. Such an one in talking to an Englishman feels that he is conversing with a high-spirited, thoroughbred horse; to a Frenchman, as though he were a cynical monkey; to an American, as though he were a bright youth of sixteen.

The German considers his dealings with the intangible things of life to be a higher form, indeed the highest form, of intellectual employment. He is therefore racially, historically, and by temperament jealous or contemptuous, according to his station in life, of the cosmopolitan exchanger of the world, the Jew. He denies to him either patriotism or originality, and looks upon him as merely a distributer, whether in art, literature, or commerce, as an exchanger who amasses wealth by taking toll of other men's labor, industry, and intellect. It has not escaped the German of this temper, that the whirling gossip and innuendoes that have lately annoyed the present party in power in England, have had to do with three names: Isaacs, Samuels, and Montagu, all Jews and members of the government.

German politics, German social life, and the German press cannot be understood without this explanation. The German sees a danger to his hardly won national life in the cosmopolitanism of the Jew; he sees a danger to his duty-doing, simple-living, and hard-working governing aristocracy in the tempting luxury of the recently rich Jew; and besides these objective reasons, he is instinctively antagonistic, as though he were born of the clouds of heaven and the Jew of the clods of earth. This does not mean that the German is a believer, in the orthodox sense of the word, for that he is not. He loves the things of the mind not because he thinks of them as of divine creation, and as showing an allegiance to a divine Creator, but because they are the playthings of his own manufacture that amuse him most. His superiority to other nations is that he claims to enjoy maturer toys. Not even France is so entirely unencumbered by orthodox restraints in matters of belief.

So far, therefore, as the German press is Jew-controlled, it is suspected as being not German politically, domestically, or spiritually; as not being representative, in short. It should be added that, though this is the attitude of the great majority in Germany, there is a small class who recognize the pioneer work that the Jew has done. Few men are more respected there, and few have more influence than such men as Ballin and Rathenau and others. For the very reason that the German is an idealist the Jew has been of incomparable value to him in the development of his industrial, commercial, and financial affairs. Not only as a scientific financier has he helped, not only has he provided ammunition when German industrial undertakings were weak and stumbling, but along the lines of scientific research, as chemists, physicists, artists -- perhaps no one stands higher than the Jew Liebermann as a painter -- the Jew has done yeoman service to the country in return for the high wages that he has taken. There are Germans who recognize this, and there are in the Jewish world not a few men to whom the doors of enlightened society are always open.