Chapter 16

2. What I hope then, for the present, as the most desirable result of the war, is a thorough understanding between the nations of the Western European Continent, construction of a powerful political block, corresponding to the area of western mentality, in close connection with America; such a block would discourage aggression from the east; it would urge Russia on the path of reform and home improvement. England would be welcome to join it, on condition of renouncing those pretensions to monopolizing the seas which are as constant a menace to peace as Russian aggressiveness is. So we should have, if not "the United States of Europe," which at present lies beyond the boundary lines of possibilities, a strong peace union of the homogeneous western nations. Alas! this result can be reached only by destroying the present unnatural connections, which mean the continuance of war till a crushing decision is obtained.

3. The American colonies of England did not think of union as of a peace scheme; they had been compelled into it by war, by the necessity of self-defense. It is only such an overpowering motive which has force enough to blot out petty rivalries and minor antagonisms. If union between States belonging to the same race and not divided either by history or by serious conflicting interests could be effected only under the pressure of a common peril, we must infer "a minori ad majus" that such a powerful incentive will be more necessary still to persuade into union nations of different races, each cherishing memories of mutual collisions and actually aware of not unimportant clashing interests.

The menace of aggression from the east has been brought home to us by the present war; gradually it will be understood even by those Occidentals who at present unhappily lend their support to that aggression. On this perception of the higher common interests of self-defense do I build the possibilities of a western coalition. But a time may come when Russia will be compelled to join it and to complete thereby the union of the whole of Europe; it may come sooner than the conversion of Russia to western ideas could be effected by natural evolution; it may come through the yellow peril, the menace of which has been brought nearer to us by the accursed policy of England.

Let Japan organize the dormant forces of China, as it seems bent upon doing, and the same law of eastern aggressiveness which is at the bottom of the present war will push the yellow mass toward Europe. Russia, as comparatively western, will have to bear their first onset; for this she will require Occidental assistance, and in the turmoil of that direful conflict--or, let us hope, in order to avoid it--she will readily give up all designs against her western neighbors, and she may become really western by the necessities which impel her to lean on the west.

But this may or may not happen. What I see before me as a tangible possibility is the great western block. It is the only principle of reconstruction after war that contains a guarantee of a permanent peace; it is the one, therefore, which the pacifists of all nations should strive for, once they get rid of the passing mentality of conflict that now obscures the judgment of the best among us.

Neutral Spirit of the Swiss

An Interview With President Motta of the Swiss Confederation

[From The London Times, Jan. 30, 1915.]

BERNE, Jan. 20.

The President of the Swiss Confederation is the symbol of a democracy so perfect that the man in the street is not quite sure who the President is. He knows that he is one of a council of seven, and that he is elected for one year, and that is all. In the Federal Palace, the Berne Westminster and Downing Street, the anonymity is almost as complete. Officers pass and repass in the corridors--one of the signs, like the waiting military motor cars at the door, of mobilization--but this does not change the spirit, simple and civilian, of the interior.

M. Motta, Chief of State for this year, is a man of early middle life. He is the best type of Swiss, a lawyer by profession, whose limpid French seems to express culture as well as candor. Nor could one doubt for a moment the sincerity of his speech. Speaking on the Swiss position in the war, M. Motta was anxious to remove the impression that it was colored, dominated by the existence of the German-speaking cantons, more numerous than the French. "Of course," he said, "we have our private sympathies, which incline us one way or the other, and there is the language tie--though here we are greatly attached to our Bernese patois--but I would have you believe the Swiss are essentially just and impartial, they look at the war objectively.

"We have good-will toward all the nations. Need I say that we respect and esteem England? Have you not found that you are well received? There is no antagonistic feeling against any one. Our neutrality is imposed upon us by our position, a neutrality that is threefold in its effects, for it is political, financial, and economic. Italy, France, Germany, Austria, are our neighbors; we send them goods, and we receive supplies from them in return."

We then talked of the army, of that wonderful little army which, at this moment, is watching the snowy passes of the Alps. Two years ago it is said to have impressed the Kaiser on manoeuvres; perhaps for that reason he has refrained to pass that way. Outside, in the slippery streets, over which the red-capped children passed with shouts of glee, I had seen something of the preparations; the men, steel-like and stolid, marching by, the officers, stiff and martial-looking, saluting right and left under the quaint arcades of this charming city. Colored photographs of corps commanders adorned the windows and seemed to find a ready sale. These things pointed in the same direction. Switzerland, posted on her crests, was watching the issue of the terrific struggle in the plains.

"We must defend our neutrality," the President said, "our 600 years of freedom. There is not a single man in the country who thinks differently. I am an Italian-Swiss, one of the least numerous of our nationalities, but there is only one voice here as elsewhere--only one voice from Ticino to Geneva. That we shall defend our neutrality is proved by the great expenditure on our army; otherwise, it would be the height of folly."

The President spoke of army expenditure, of the simple army system, of the reorganization which had been carried out some years before. Switzerland was spending £20,000 a day, a large sum for a small country. Since the day when the general mobilization had been decreed--some classes have now been liberated--Switzerland had spent £4,500,000. It was a lot of money.

The army, of course, was a militia; some few officers were professional soldiers, others were drawn from a civil career and were doctors, lawyers, engineers, and merchants. In 1907 the country had consented to lengthen the periods of training in what are quaintly called the "recruits' schools" and "rehearsal schools." In the former category the men do sixty-five days' training a year, in the latter forty-five.

"I assure you," continued M. Motta, "whatever sympathy the German-Swiss may feel toward Germany, the French-Swiss toward France, or the Italian toward Italy, it is nothing like as warm and as intimate as that which each Swiss feels toward his fellow-Swiss."

This was the national note which dominated everything. At first there was a little difficulty in the councils of the nation. Some showed a tendency to lose their balance, but that phase had passed, and each day, I gathered, purely Swiss interests were coming uppermost.

"And the press, M. le President?"

M. Motta admitted that some writers had been excessive in their language and had been lacking in good taste; but, on the whole, he thought the newspapers had impartially printed news from both sides, and he cited a list of leading organs--Switzerland is amazingly full of papers--which had been conspicuous for their moderation.

And then there was the question of contraband. Orders were very precise on the subject; the Cabinet had limitless power since the opening of the war; if there was any smuggling it was infinitesimal, and, as to foodstuffs, Switzerland regretted she could not import more for her own needs. The Government had established a monopoly and forbidden re-exportation, but supplies were not up to the normal. The route by the Rhine was closed.

Finally came the phrase, concluding the conversation: "Whoever violates our neutrality will force us to become the allies of his enemy." There could be nothing more categorical.

TO KING AND PEOPLE.

By WALTER SICHEL.

[From King Albert's Book.]

_All the great things have been done by the little peoples._--DISRAELI.

Sire, King of men, disdainer of the mean, Belgium's inspirer, well thou stand'st for all She bodes to generations yet unseen, Freedom and fealty--Kingship's coronal.

Nation of miracles, how swift you start To super-stature of heroic deeds So brave, so silent beats your bleeding heart That ours, e'en in the flush of welcome, bleeds.

No sound of wailing. Look, above, afar, Throbs in the darkness with triumphant ray A little yet an all-commanding star, The morning star that heralds forth the day.

A Swiss View of Germany

By Maurice Millioud

M. Maurice Millioud, an eminent member of the Faculty of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, has written an article of marked breadth and penetration in which he presents a quite novel view of the forces which, in combination, have brought Germany to its actual position. These forces are political, social, and economic; beneath and through them works the subtle impulsion of a national conception of right and might which the author sums up as the "ideology of caste." Want of space forbids the publication of the entire article. We give its most significant parts with such summary of those portions which it was necessary to omit as, we trust, will enable our readers to follow the general argument.

Humanitarians the most deeply buried in dreams yield with stupefaction to the evidence of fact. European war was possible, since here it is, and even a world war, for all continents are represented in the mêlée. Millions of men on the one side or the other are ranged along battle fronts of from 500 to 1,000 kilometers. We are witnessing a displacement of human masses to which there is nothing comparable except the formidable convulsions of geologic ages.

The world then was in formation. Will a new Europe, a new society, a new humanity, take form from the prodigious shock by which our imagination is confounded?

We can at least seek to understand what we cannot hinder.

This war was not a matter of blind fate, but had been foreseen for a long time. What are the forces that have set the nations in movement? I do not seek to establish responsibility. Whosoever it may be, those who have let loose the conflict have behind them peoples of one mind. That, perhaps, is the most surprising feature in an epoch when economic, social, and moral interests are so interwoven from one end of the earth to the other that the conqueror himself must suffer cruelly from the ruin of the conquered.

The Governments have determined the day and the hour. They could not have done it in opposition to the manifest will of the nations. Public sentiment has seconded them. What is it then which rouses man from his repose, impels him to desert his gains, his home, the security of a regular life, and sends him in eager search for bloody adventures?

This problem involves different solutions because it embraces a number of cases. Between the Russians, the French, the English, the Germans there is a similarity of will, but not, it seems, an analogy of sentiment. I shall undertake to analyze the case of Germany. It has peculiar interest on account of its importance, of its definiteness, of the comparisons to which it leads, and the reflections which it suggests. Numerous facts easy to verify and in part recent permit us to throw some light upon it and offer us a guarantee against hazardous conjectures.

_Defining a caste as "a group of men bound to each other by solidarity of functions in society," such as the Brahmins of India and the feudal nobility, Prof. Millioud says that he will use the terms as equivalent or nearly equivalent to a "directing class." Quoting the article from Vorwaerts which led to the suspension of that Socialist organ and which "admits by implication that responsibility for the war falls on Germany," he proceeds to examine the origins of the influence of the war party and the interests it served._

Here we must have recourse to history. In Germany the dominant class is composed in part of an aristocracy by birth and of bourgeois capitalists, more or less of them ennobled. The interior policy of Germany since 1871 and even since 1866 is explained by the relations, sometimes kindly, sometimes hostile, of these two categories of persons, by the opposition or the conjunction of these two influences, and not by a struggle of the dominant class against the socialistic mass. That struggle, which is in France and is becoming in England a fact of essential gravity, has been in Germany only a phenomenon of secondary importance. It has determined neither the profound evolution of the national life nor the chief decisions of the Government.

In Germany, as is known, the abolition of the ancien régime did not take place brusquely as in France. After the revolution and the French occupation, the noble caste recovered all its privileges. It has lost them little by little, but not yet entirely. Even the liquidation of the property of the feudal régime was not completed until toward 1850. Napoleon made some sad cuts in the little sovereignties, but from 1813 to 1815 the princely families did their utmost to recover their independence. The greater part were mediatized, but their tenacity offered a serious obstacle up to 1871 to the establishment of German unity.

That unity was accomplished in despite of them, by sword and fire, as Bismarck said, that is to say, by the wars of 1866 and 1870. Care was taken, however, not to abase them more than was strictly necessary, for it was intended to maintain the hierarchy. What was wanted was a monarchical unity, made from above down, and not a democratic unity brought about by popular impulsion.

On the other hand, the smaller nobles formed, after 1820, a vast association for the defense of their rights, the Adelskette. Moreover, they could not be sacrificed, in the first place, because they had rendered invaluable services in the wars of independence, they had arisen as one man, and they had ruined themselves in sacrifices for the national cause, they had organized the people and led it to victory, finally because they served to restrain the high nobility whose domination was feared. They sustained the throne against the princes, the higher nobility against the democracy, the lesser nobility against the higher, the two forming an intermediary class between the monarch and the nation. That was the social conception which prevailed with those who were working to realize the unity of Germany, so that the nobility, lesser or higher, in default of its privileges retained its functions.

Treitschke, in his last lessons, about 1890, called it "a political class." For the bourgeois, he said, wealth, instruction, letters, arts. Their part is fine enough. The nobility is apt at governing. That is its special distinction. For a long time, in fact, the nobility has filled alone or almost alone the great administrative, governmental, and military posts.

Bismarck was the finished type, the representative par excellence of this class of men. He had their intellectual and moral qualities carried to the highest degree of superiority. But he underwent evolution after 1871, and his caste with him, under the pressure of general circumstances.

Bismarck was a Junker, a Prussian rustic, monarchist, particularist, agrarian and militarist. Each of his qualities is an attribute of a mentality of caste, a very curious one, not lacking in grandeur, but very narrow and not always adequate to the conduct of affairs.

Monarchist means anti-Parliamentarian. The fine scorn of rhetoric and even of public discussion, a conviction that democracy will not lead to anything beyond a display of mediocrity, that is one of the salient features of his mind. Patriotism conceived as an attachment to personal relations, as the service of one man, the subject, to another man, the King, and not the service of an anonymous person, the functionary, to an abstraction, the State, the republic, this was formerly designated by the word faithful, (féal,) which has disappeared from our vocabulary because it is without meaning in our present moral state.

The Junker is particularist, at least he was. The political and administrative centralization which the Jacobins achieved in France inspires him with horror. For him it is disorder. He sees in it nothing but a dust heap of individuals crushed beneath a formula. Even today, when the German accuses France of anarchy, that is what he means. He figures to himself the nation as a vast hierarchy of liberties, an autonomy of States within the empire, of provinces within the State, of communes within the province, of proprietors within the commune. Equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, of force, but impersonal equality before the law is for him an unnatural thing, an invention of the professors which at heart he despises.

He is agrarian and militarist, that is to say, conservative and enamored of force. In 1830 four-fifths of the population lived by agriculture and the landlord governed his peasants patriarchally. He kept the conservatist spirit of a rustic, a very lively sense of authority and the military instinct. He had scant liking for distant enterprises or adventures. He was at once religious, warlike, and realist, knowing how to nurse his ambitions and to confine his view to what was within reach.

Bismarck for a long time was the decided opponent of naval armaments and colonial policy, in short, of imperialism. Even his projects for social reform--insurance against sickness, against old age--which have been accepted as concessions to modern ideas, were due entirely to his monarchical and patriarchal conception of the State. He copied the ancient decrees of Colbert as to naval personnel. He would have gone as far as assurance against non-employment. In the dominion of the King, he said, no one should die of hunger.

The Junker made a force of Prussia; he made Prussia itself. It was due to him that she passed after 1815 from the form of a Polizeistaat to the form of Kulturstaat, the latter only an expansion of the former. In place of a watchful, regulating, and vexatious State she became an organized State, the instructor of youth, the protector of religion, the source of inspiration for agricultural reforms, and all great commercial and industrial enterprises. This State was not an emanation from the national will, but the creator of a nation, the living and moving self-incarnation of the Hegelian "idea," that is to say, the Divine thought.

Of all the German aristocracy the noble of Pomerania or Brandenburg, the Prussian Junker, represented this social type most definitely. In the south the liberal tendencies--to be exact, the memories of the French Revolution--persisted far into the nineteenth century. But it is well known that German unity was accomplished by military force and against liberalism.

After 1871, and even after Sadowa, the problem of interior policy which presented itself was that of the "Prussianization" of Germany. At one time it seemed that Bismarck was on the point of succeeding in it. What was that national liberal party upon which he depended for so long? It was the old liberal party, with advanced tendencies tainted with democratic liberalism and even with cosmopolitanism, keeping up its relations with the intellectuals, the university men, who made so much noise with pen and voice about 1848 and later. They dreamed of the unity of Germany in the democratic liberty and moral hegemony of their nation, having become in Europe the sobered heir of the French Revolution.

Under the influence of Bismarck they sacrificed to their dream of unity, to their national dream, their liberal dream, and they secured for the Chancellor the support of the upper bourgeoisie.

It was indeed the Prussianization of Germany, but in that spirit and in that system contemporary German militarism would never have fructified. It was contrary to the characteristic tendencies of a monarchical State supported by a conservative caste, which was also particularist, military, and agricultural. A State of this kind tends to become a closed State.

What then happened? An event of capital importance which everybody knows, but of which we only now begin to see the consequences. It was the radical transformation of Germany from an agricultural to an industrial nation. In its origin this phenomenon dates from before the nineteenth century. By 1848 it had become perceptible. Since 1866, and especially since 1871, it has dominated the entire social evolution of the empire. Here, in fact, is the revolution. It partakes of the character of a tragedy, it has overturned the conditions of life throughout the entire German territory.

At the close of the War of Independence, four out of five Germans lived on the land, two out of three were engaged in agriculture. By 1895 the agricultural population was only 35.7 per cent. That, supported by industry and commerce, kept continually increasing. In 1895 it was 50.6 per cent.

This progress of industry and trade indicates the rise of a new class of the population, that of the capitalists. It seemed at first that their arrival would result in a dispossession of the nobility. For example, under the ancien régime the bourgeois could not acquire the property of the nobles. Toward 1880, for Eastern Prussia only, 7,086 estates of 11,065 belonged to non-nobles. They could have been acquired only with money. Capital was supplanting birth. Today even, in Prussia, five members of the Ministry, a little more than one-third, are bourgeois not enjoying the particle von.

The new dominant class encroached upon the ancient in two ways, by depriving it of its clientele and by acquiring a considerable weight in the State. "The weight of a social class" is the totality of its means of action, which it possesses on account of its numbers, its personal influence, its wealth, and the importance of the interests which it represents. The clientele of the agrarian nobility was essentially the peasants, who have continually diminished in number, the attraction of industrial and commercial employments having caused a great migration to the interior, to the factories, and the cities.

For many years this phenomenon has been disclosed by statistics and pointed out by economists and sociologists, but no remedy has been found. Today, although emigration abroad has much moderated, Germany has not labor for its tillage. It is obliged to import farm hands and even cereals. It no longer produces foodstuffs sufficient for its own support.