Chapter 17

Moreover, the peasant who remains upon the soil is freed from the landlord, and agricultural production has become specialized--industrialized. There is the case, for instance, of that peasant woman who declared that she had not the time to wash her linen and who sent it to the steam laundry at Karlsruhe. Here is not merely an economic transformation, but a moral evolution. The agriculturist who no longer produces in order to consume but in order to sell, and who must live from the product of his sales, tries to produce as much as possible. He hires foreign labor to get from it all that he can. The impersonal relations of employer and employed replace the patriarchal traditions. Thus the land owner finds himself caught in the mechanism of the capitalistic system.

As to the "weight" of the new class, it increased prodigiously during the years following the war of 1870, thanks to the millions which the empire could invest in its industries and which allowed it to endow its commerce and its merchant marine, to complete the network of its roads, canals, and railways.

The law of concentration of capital was verified on this occasion in a striking manner. In the famous years 1871 to 1874, which the Germans call the Gründejahre, the foundation years, gigantic industrial and commercial enterprises took a spring which seemed irresistible. A Director of the Deutsche Bank, of the Dresdener Bank, the President of a company for transatlantic commerce, such as the Hamburg-American Line, or of the committee of great electric establishments, enjoyed an influence in the councils of the State far greater than that of a Baron, a Count, or a little mediatized Prince.

What was the aristocracy of birth going to do about it? Struggle desperately? It took that tack at first. Bismarck ranged himself in its support for some time. He was himself an agrarian. But he was not long in installing paper mills on his estates at Varzin. It is said that the Emperor himself possesses porcelain factories. A part of the nobility for a long time tried to adapt itself to the new method of production. It took to it awkwardly and often ended in ruin.

Freytag has described this phenomenon at its beginnings in a romance which is a chef d'oeuvre. A part of the nobility yielded, fell into the hands of the financiers, the money lenders, the managers of agricultural enterprises, sold their lands, and took refuge in the great civil, administrative and military posts. The remainder resisted as well as they could. There was antagonism between their interests and those of the capitalists, between the religious and particularist tendencies on one hand and free thought and cosmopolitanism on the other. The agrarians demanded tariff duties on agricultural products to raise the price of their foodstuffs. The industrials wanted a low cost of living in order to avoid the rise of wages and to compete with better advantage for foreign markets.

Bismarck was the target for vehement opposition when he inclined toward the party of the traders and the industrials in his colonial and tariff policy. This evolution came about 1879. For a while the great Chancellor was looked upon almost as a traitor.

Nevertheless, his view was just. Balancing the forces on the one hand by those on the other, ceding protective duties first to one side and then to the other, offsetting the advantages which he offered to one side by the prerogatives which he accorded to the other, he finally succeeded in reconciling them.

From this reconciliation of the two dominant classes has resulted the extraordinary power of Germany. The bourgeois parties have from time to time grumbled over the military appropriations, but they have always voted them. And militarism, which is the support of the aristocracy, has been placed at the service of capitalistic ambition. By the prestige of force, awakening hopes here and inspiring fears there, more than once by the help of manoeuvres of intimidation, it has become an instrument of economic conquest.

Other combinations, other reciprocal interlacings, have taken place which have given an exceptional and unique character to contemporary Germany. It is a case of social psychology of extreme interest. To describe it would require long detail. The combination of the aristocratic and military tendency with the industrial and plutocratic tendency, the tendency of the police spirit, the regularizing spirit of the Kulturstaat with the individual initiative of the capitalist _entrepreneur_, methodical habits of administration with the love of risk characteristic of the speculator, all this constitutes imperialism, German imperialism, distinct from every other, because to a definite object, economic conquest, it adds another, less precise, in which the moral satisfaction dear to aristocracy, the pleasure of dominating, the love of displaying force, the tendency to prove one's own superiority to one's self, play a large part.

Economic conquest has become a necessity for Germany. Transformed into an industrial State, it no longer produces its own food. Since 1885 its imports have exceeded its exports by 1,353,000,000 marks. Whence did Germany derive these 1,300,000,000 marks which were needed, good year and bad, to meet its balance of trade? It owes them to its maritime commerce and the revenue of its capital invested abroad. Its maritime commerce then must augment and must triumph over all competition. At every cost it must open for itself outlets for its industrial products in order to buy foodstuffs which it does not produce sufficiently. If not, famine.

Let us see now how the complicated play of all these social forces and the effect of this economic situation have been embodied in formulas, what has been its intellectual expression.

This is no idle question, for men have always claimed to be guided by ideas, and generally they are, but they rarely know where their ideas come from or in what they consist. Without intellectual expression imperialism would not have extended to all the classes of society. The passion of economic conquest did not prevail throughout the whole of Germany. The bourgeois in the Liberal provinces, the corps of officers, the corps of teachers, the clergy were refractory to it. This direct form of imperialism does not seduce them. Not everybody can see his country and the universe through the eyes of an oligarch of high finance. A doctrine works with power when it appeals to instincts, when it awakens collective emotions, diverse enough in themselves, and joins them to each other with an appearance of logical deduction. It is not indispensable, but it is useful that it should borrow the language of the day. In the mediaeval epoch this language was religious. Beginning with the seventeenth century it was metaphysical. In our own time it is a scientific language set off by Greek words.

If the German philosophies of the second half of the nineteenth century are considered, there are not many of them that pass beyond the limit of the school. They are honest, scholarly productions elaborated by men who have read much, of whom some, like Wundt, are eminent specialists, but who have not conquered either their subjects or their readers. One feels that they are not of their century.

It is not from them, it is not from Eucken, the pleasant popularizer, it is not from Windelbund or Ostwald that the cultivated public sought the direction for its thought. To satisfy the need of general ideas which was everywhere felt, associations were formed, churches with or without God, of which a very important one was the "Monistenbund," in which Haeckel exploited his materialism transformed into a sort of biological pantheism.

But it was outside of the associations and outside of the school that the flame of creative genius burned brightly. The man of the last generation was Nietzsche. That his thought has been perverted by his interpreters there is no doubt. They have taken this eagle who gazed unblinded at the sun and exhibited him to the young people in all sorts of philosophic rôles for the benefit of the industrial and military coalition. Nietzsche depicted in lines of fire the resurrection of heroism, his vision of the superman was that of an ardent soul, steeled by sufferings, meditating a tragic conception of life with serenity, and in his solitary individualism surmounting the infirmity of man and his own by the insistent will to eternal ascension.

He was made the apostle of brute force, a sort of Messiah of the "struggle for life." Moreover, he was soon put one side and Gobineau was revived. He also, who if he did not have genius had wit, would have been surprised and hardly flattered perhaps by the rôle which they made him play. The dolichocephalic (long-skulled) blonde whom he celebrated was not exactly the one whom we are now judging by his works, but at least he proclaimed the superiority of the German race.

His doctrine was the centre around which were gathered a complete ensemble of dogmas and of very diverse theories, whose connected thread it is not easy to discover when it is searched for logically, but appears quite distinctly when not reason, but reasons, are demanded. The reasons are found in the need of justifying in theory the economic and military imperialism, born as we have seen from conditions of fact and from very practical motives.

I do not pretend that it was calculated, nor that the optimates made express requisition of the naturalists, economists, and historians and sociologists and moralists to provide an imperialistic philosophy for the use of adult and normal dolichocephalous blondes. But there certainly was a coincidence. It may have been due to the influence of what is called a _milieu ambiant_, that of the commercial and military party. The authors of the doctrine lived in a special atmosphere. Their intellect was there formed--or deformed--their work consisted in gathering facts, inventing reasonings, elaborating formulas, so as to subject natural science, history and morality to the service of that keen will for hegemony which was in Germany the common characteristic and was the connecting link between the ancient and the new directing class.

To convince one that this is so, it is enough to arrange the works of the pan-Germanists in a series passing from the simplest to the most complicated. The dates are of no importance. We might put at one of the extremes the works of the Prussian General, von Bernhardi, and at the other the gigantic lucubration of a famous pan-German zealot, a neophite, a convert, almost a deserter, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

_Prof. Millioud examines at some length and acutely the tendencies and teachings of von Bernhardi, now familiar to American readers, sums up the work of the philosophers of minor rank and turns to Mr. Chamberlain._

With Mr. Chamberlain the thesis of vital competition, the morality of force, the judgment of history against little nations, the civilizing mission imposed upon greater Germany by its very greatness, by its economic, scientific and artistic superiority, everything tends to the glorification of the German, to his duty to govern the whole world which he feels so imperatively and which he accepts with such a noble simplicity. His work is not easily summarized, not only because it counts 1,379 pages and two appendices, but because all is in everything, and everything in the universe is also in Mr. Chamberlain's book. And the German has made everything. Not indeed the world; that he has only remade and is about to remake. But he has a way of remaking so creative that one might say that without him the Creator Himself would be a bit embarrassed. He has gathered to himself alone the heritage of Greece and Rome as far as it was worth anything. From the year 1200 to the year 1800 he founded, ripened, and saved a new civilization several times over. The mother of our sciences and our arts, Italy, is Germanic; the great architecture of the Middle Ages is Germanic; the true interpretation of Christianity, the true conception of art, the true social economy, the love of nature, the sense of individuality, the exploration of the world and of the soul, the great reawakenings of conscience, all the great flashes of thought are Germanic; everything is Germanic, except you and me, perhaps; so much the worse for me and so much the worse for you. After this book, the success of which has been prodigious, it would truly seem that there is nothing more to say. Germanic thought has appropriated the universe to itself. It only remained for the German sword to complete the work. It is drawn!

I have tried to describe the modifications, or rather the successive additions, by which the elementary themes disclosing economic, political, and military appetites in the directing class have been disguised as theories of biology, history, political economy, sociology, and morality. It would take another study or another article to show how science was perverted to such ends. The severity of methods, rigor in the determination of facts, precision in reasoning, prudence in generalization, serene impartiality and objectivity in verification, in a word the scientific spirit, cannot be bent to so many pleasant compromises without sacrificing a great part of its dignity and its title to respect.

This has been a singular and melancholy event for those of us who have been raised in respect for German science and in admiration for its methods, as well as for its discoveries. Certainly, from Liebig to Roentgen and to Behring, from Kant to Wundt, Germany has counted many distinguished pioneers. In the matter of fecund originality, however, and creative inspiration, Italy and France have always equaled, if not surpassed, her. She has had no Marconi, no Pasteur or Poincaré, no Carrel.

What we have received from her so long that it has become almost a matter of instinct is less dazzling flashes than an equal and constant light. And the savants, the university men who bring to us anthropological romances, history stuffed with legends and personal prejudices, sociology constructed in contempt of the facts!

In these later days we have seen all these joining under the guidance of their most illustrious members to address the civilized nations in an appeal in which by virtue of their quality as savants they undertook to pronounce upon facts which they don't understand, to deny those which they cannot help understanding, and solemnly to declare that it is not true that Germany has violated the neutrality of the territory of Belgium. For proof of this, nothing but their word of honor. Do they take us for those young gentlemen who said to Monge, "Professor, give us your word of honor that this theorem is true and we will excuse you from the demonstration of it"?

Fully to explain the rôle of the intellectual savants and university men in the formation of the ideology of caste which prevails among the Germans it would be necessary to recite the history of instruction in Germany, not such as Davis and Paulson have written it, but such as it actually is under the influence of institutions and programmes--I mean the moral history of instruction.

The great Frederick was wont to cry, "I commence by taking; afterward I shall always have pedants enough to establish my rights." Pedants or not, the members of the teaching corps of every grade in Germany are a wheel of the State, their mission is to form not men, but Germans, to inculcate the national idea. Their views have penetrated even to the common people.

Germany receives a double education--that of the school and that of the barracks. The spirit of these two institutions is the same, and their influence, which has been exercised since 1848 in opposition to humanitarian and internationalist ideas, has encountered no serious obstacles, for it went readily with certain old instincts which it was not difficult to reawaken and which general circumstances favored.

"Latrocinia nullam habent infamiam," said Caesar, speaking of the Germans. Pillage brings no shame. This desire of gain, this positive and realistic tendency is one of the motives which the brusque and prodigious economic expansion of Germany has promoted in the most efficient manner.

This total assimilation of a people of 70,000,000 of souls by an aristocratic, almost a feudal, directing class, a combination of plutocrats and militarists, is in reality a most curious phenomenon, more than curious, in a sense grandiose, and in any case full of suggestions and menaces.

Surrender of body and soul, confidence almost religious, enthusiastic faith, the directing class has conquered everything within in order to conquer everything without. Now it stakes everything upon the cast of the dice. I have not undertaken to decide whether it is just or not. The event will determine whether it is genius or madness.

THE LAND OF MAETERLINCK

By Alfred Sutro

[From King Albert's Book.]

I have translated many books of Maeterlinck's; I have wandered with him among the canals of Bruges and the fragrant gardens of Ghent; I have seen the places where he dreamed of Pelléas and Mélisande, and the hives of the bees he loved. Through him I learned to know Belgium, today all the world knows. Her cities are laid waste now and her people scattered, but her people will return and rebuild the cities, and the enemy will be dust. The day will come when the war will be far distant, a thing of the past, remote, forgotten, but never, while men endure or heroism counts, will it be forgotten what the Belgians did for Liberty's sake and for the sake of Albert, their King.

America and Prohibition Russia

Two Mustard Seeds of Reform Carried From This Land to the Steppes

By Isabel F. Hapgood

When Russia recently abolished the sale of liquor, first in the shops run as a Government monopoly, and, after a brief experience of the beneficent results, in the restaurants and clubs as well, an astonished and admiring world recognized the measure as one of the greatest events in the moral history of a nation. It takes rank with the reforms of Peter the Great. It almost casts into the shade the emancipation of the serfs.

There has always existed in Russia a strong party which severely disapproved of Peter precisely because he forced "Western" ideas upon them. Their idea has always been that Russia would have developed a far higher degree of genuine culture and far more precious spiritual qualities had she been left to the promptings of her own genius and its "healthy, natural" development. And there are, indubitably, persons scattered through the vast Russian Empire who entertain parallel opinions with regard to the total prohibition of liquor just effected, and with regard to the projected change in the calendar now assumed to be imminent. I trust that I shall not increase their numbers to dangerous proportions if I call attention to the fact that these reforms have also, like Peter the Great's ideas, been imported from the West--from the Far West, the United States. I am sure my fellow-countrymen will be gratified to learn the truth, and I cheerfully accept the risk, and assume that Russia will, in all probability, remain ignorant of my interference!

It is true that we do not have actual, effective prohibition anywhere here in America, and that we do not seem to be within measurable distance of such an achievement; that Russia has distanced us again in this, just as she distanced us by emancipating her serfs, without a war, before we emancipated our slaves, with the aid of a war. But we have supplied the scriptural mustard seed in the case of prohibition in Russia, and have either furnished the seed for the change in the calendar, or, at any rate, have provided elements that have hastened its growth to a very remarkable degree.

Mustard seed No. 1 was carried over from the United States in the Autumn of 1887 and sown on the good ground of the late Count Tolstoy, and other noble men, whence--as results show--it spread abroad with a swiftness suggestive rather of the proverbial weed than of the fair flower its blossoming has shown it to be.

In the Autumn of 1886 Dr. Peter Semyonovitch Alexyeeff of Moscow, accompanied by his wife, sailed for Canada and the United States for the purpose of inspecting the hospitals, prisons, and elementary schools; and they came for the Winter because some parts of Canada during that season possess a climate similar to that of Central Russia, while in other parts the climates are identical. In fact, Canada is the only country in the world where the climatic conditions are at all analogous. The construction of new hospitals, the adaptation of already existing buildings for hospital use, the internal arrangement, and the perfection of their internal machinery had long been matters of deep interest to Dr. Alexyeeff.

Germany and France, with climates so different from that of Russia, could not furnish him with the information available in North America, where, in his opinion, the habits and conditions of existence--such important factors in matters connected with hospitals and invalids--also differ less from those of Russia than do the general surroundings in the countries of the Continent. After visiting the principal cities of Canada and the United States from Quebec to Vancouver, and from Boston to Washington, (some of them more than once,) Dr. Alexyeeff arrived at the conclusion that the hospitals of the United States were better built and much better administered than those of London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.

Naturally, no one could spend nine months in investigating hospitals and prisons in this country without coming in contact with the liquor problem. Moreover, Dr. Alexyeeff was a wideawake man, who took an interest not only in all matters connected with his profession, but in very many outside of it. He was, also, a man of very lofty character. His wife once wrote me concerning him somewhat as follows: "He walks, habitually, on such moral heights, in such a rarefied spiritual atmosphere, that I, the daughter of an English clergyman, reared accordingly, and myself (as you know) deeply in sympathy with it, find difficulty in following him." Obviously, he was precisely the man to appreciate the temperance movement, and to carry it to its logical conclusion. In the preface to a volume, "About America," which he published in Moscow in 1888, he writes:

Neither the wonders of wild nature in the Rocky Mountains nor the menacing might and grandeur of Niagara produce such an impression on a Russian as the success of the fight with drunkenness--the temperance movement--and the successful development, in all classes of society, of morality and the strict application of practical morals.

He did not confine himself to this brief, general statement. He wrote in praise of temperance, of prohibition, for learned Russian societies. Then he wrote a book entitled "Concerning Drunkenness." The Censor's permit to publish is dated March 29, (April 10,) 1887. It was published by the management of the magazine, Russkaya Mysl, (Russian Thought,) which may indicate that it had first appeared in that monthly as a series of articles, though I have not been able to verify the fact. The book may have been published promptly, or at least the article from the medical magazine may have been published in the cheap form (costing two or three cents) used by the semi-commercial, semi-philanthropic firm "Posrednik," which may be rendered "Middleman" or "Mediator," designed for the dissemination of good and useful reading among the masses.