D 515 .H85 Copy 1 THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL ROBERT JAMES HUTCHEON GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL ROBERT JAMES HUTCHEON THE BEACON PRESS 25 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts J5 16 H« Copyright 19 19 THE BEACON PRESS All rights reserved ?Cf.A5l2284 FEB 10 !9I9 FOREWORD THE following lectures were delivered in Meadville, Pa., on the live Sundays from November 17 (1918) to December 15. They were inspired by the wide public interest in the overthrow of Germany by the Allied na- tions after more than four years of terrible and uncertain warfare. Many of those who heard them felt that the speaker had succeeded in giving a well-balanced statement of the good and evil of the German system, and expressed the hope that they might be published and reach a wider audience. With the exception of half a dozen additional pages, they are published as they were spoken. The writer does not pretend to any originality nor to any personal knowledge of Germany except such as one gets from hur- ried travel. The only merit of his lectures, if they have any at all, is the effort to understand before condemning, and to set the Germany which has given such mortal offence to the world over against the older and more idealistic Germany. The lectures were delivered in the first place not to scholars but to the general public, and their usefulness in printed form will be for the general reader only. It is the writer's conviction that we owe it to our loyal Ger- man-American friends and fellow-citizens to be discrim- inating in our condemnation of their ancestral home. Our case against the Germany of the last few years is so strong that we do not weaken it, but rather strengthen it, by trying to see by what aberrations that Germany came to be. ROBERT J. HUTCHEON. Meadville;, Pa., 1919. Iv] TABLE OF CONTENTS How Fai.se: Ideas Ruinkd Germany . . . How Prosperity Ruined Germany . . . How Organization Failed Germany . . Why Education did not Save Germany . Why the Church did not Save Germany PAGE I 9 21 44 THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL HOW FALSE IDEAS RUINED GERMANY NO single mind could possibly grasp the complete sig- nificance of the mighty events which in the last few months have convulsed and changed the European world. So many races are involved, so many dynasties have been overthrown, so many new democracies have come into being, so many new social forces have been liberated, that the commentator on the great drama can do little more than utter exclamations of wonder and surprise. Events of a similar nature have occurred in the past but never on so large a scale, and never has the news of them come upon the world with such overwhelming volume and suddenness as in the last few weeks. There would be interest and value, undoubtedly, in discussing the significance of the fall of any one of the overthrown dynasties and governments, but the one that has most significance and interest is that of Germany. No other dynasty in modern Europe has been as successful, as powerful, as deeply intrenched in the life of the people, as confident of its God-given mission and its glorious destiny, as the House of Hohenzollern. For nearly five hundred years the Hohenzollerns have been masters in Berlin, Brandenburg, growing Prussia, and lately in a united Germany; during that time they have produced some of the most masterful rulers that modern Europe has known ; step by step they have built up the most powerful economic, political, educational, and military system that any ruler has ever had under his sway, and yet the last and most arrogant monarch of the whole line is now a fugitive from the country of his ancestors, the [i] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL five-hundred-year period of their reign has come to a sudden and overwhelming close, and the family name is held up to scorn and derision by the whole civilized world. No later than last March, April, and May, it seemed as though the ambition of the Hohenzollerns to rule the world was going to be realized. The arrogance, religious fanaticism, and personal egotism of the Kaiser were at their highest; the German military caste and indeed a very large proportion of the German people were experi- encing a very delirium of joy; for the moment they were at the top of the world. But six months have brought a most dramatic and terrible reversal of their fortunes. Then the name of the Hohenzollerns was one to be ap- plauded by their friends and feared by their enemies ; now scarcely any one can be found to do it reverence. It is a reversal so colossal that the imagination is overpowered by it, thinking is almost paralyzed by emotion, and speech becomes little more than stammering and stuttering. Under these circumstances I am well aware that I can- not discuss with complete objectivity and clarity the five themes on which I have undertaken to speak. But I have felt that it might be worth while to make the attempt. What I wish to do is not to hold up to your horrified gaze the sins and crimes of Germany. Rather I want to inquire how an admittedly great and capable people came to acquire the mentality out of which this war with all its horrors has issued. The easy solution of this problem with which so many are satisfied, viz., that the Germans are by nature a cruel and brutal race, will not do. In recent years the word **race" has almost lost its meaning. Of course there are distinctions between so-called races as there are distinc- tions between persons, but no races are by nature bad while other races are by nature good. Races are the product not merely of physical heredity but of environ- ment and training and social inheritance, and any race, however good its start may be, may be transformed and coarsened by a change of environment and the constant [2] HOW FALSE IDEAS RUINED GERMANY pressure of a brutalizing influence. From the point of view of race, if we allow the word to carry us back for five hundred or a thousand years, the Germans are prob- ably little better or little worse than ourselves. The an- cestors of many of us came from Germany in the fifth century a.d., if not later, and brought with them pretty much the same human nature which in Germany has re- cently blossomed in the terrible doctrine and practice of f rightfulness in war. We must not let the word "race" put us on the wrong track, or flatter ourselves that we are forever protected against similar excesses by a finer and purer racial strain. No ! the main trouble with Germany has been, not a bad ancestry, but wrong ideas ! The ruthlessness, the cruelty, the fiendish excesses, the reckless ambitions, which Ger- many has exhibited to a horrified world in the last four years have not been the product of animal nature. No animals ever indulge in such excesses. The Germans have been ruthless in this war for the same reason that religious fanatics have always been ruthless in the re- ligious wars of the past. Religion, when it has taken to the sword, has always been extremely cruel, because the doctrines for which religious people went to war upset the balance of animal instinct, blunted the natural sympathies, got inside the reason, and betrayed men against them- selves. The natural passions of human nature are raised to the nth power when men persuade themselves that in their terrible cruelties they are doing God service. Man bedevilled by frightful doctrines is far more brutal than an animal can be. It is not hard to discover some of the particular ideas that have upset the balance of the German nature, — such as the idea that might is right, that the State is above the moral law, that treaties are only scraps of paper, that the end justifies the means, etc. But it is more difficult and more necessary to formulate in clear language the general state of mind of which these ideas are natural outgrowths. The rain falls from definite and clearly out- La] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL lined clouds which we can see in the sky above us, but the clouds are formed out of general atmospheric condi- tions which the eye cannot apprehend. So definite ideas often arise out of moods of mind that are saturated with feeling and vague desire and half -blind hope and irreso- lute volition. Hence to understand Germany we must know something of the dominant mood of the German mind for the last two or three decades. Germany as a nation has been for several years back in a mood which is more or less familiar to us in a certain type of young man. Picture to yourself a young man of powerful physical structure, his muscles tingling with excess of vitality, his brain fermenting with daring ideas, his imagination seething with visions of achievement, his will clamoring for self-assertion and power. Place such a young man in an old community where life has settled down into grooves, where social relations are regulated by custom, moral and religious scruples and traditions, where the frank self-assertion of the young person is snubbed and repressed by the rebukes of the older and wiser, where the past presents itself at every turn and asks youth to sit at its feet, to imbibe its wis- dom and guide life by its experience. Can you not imagine our young man, dowered as I have described him, rising up in headlong revolt against such a community? "What care I," he cries, "for these old notions about sex- relationship ? My own passionate need sets the law for me, not the custom of the community. Why should I with my ambition for wealth and achievement limit myself by the musty old conventions of the business world? When the people around me are evidently my inferiors in energy and ambition and brain power, why should I be constantly thinking about their so-called rights and scruples? When the future, as sketched by my eager imagination, stretches out before me in such dazzling splendor and I feel in my will the power to realize it all, why should I sit at the feet of the past or pay heed to those older men who pretend to summarize and report [4] HOW FALSE IDEAS RUINED GERMANY the lessons of its experience?" "Away with it all," he sometimes cries ; '*1 will have none of it. The law of my life is found in my own desires and powers of achieve- ment. I will achieve the completest realization of my needs and capacities whosesoever's rights and scruples are trampled on. I will vent my hitherto pent-up energies on the world. I will live and enjoy and achieve. I will burst these ancient community bonds, cast off all sentimentali- ties and pieties and conventions, and be a real man to the utmost boundaries of my natural power." Now, so far as I can formulate it by an illustration, that is the mood which for some decades back has been grow- ing in Germany and which has finally issued in the im- moral ambitions and the cruel excesses of the great war. The German people 'had a sense of immense power ; daring and romantic thinkers had filled their minds with vast speculative and overreaching ideas ; for the first time in centuries they had achieved an exalted place among the nations of the earth ; their imagination was dazzled by the pictures which the Pan-Germans were painting of their future destiny; their will-to-power and to self-assertion grew more clamorous with each new success of their na- tional life. And yet, as the young man found himself a citizen of an old community which demanded respect for its rights and scruples, so this essentially young nation found itself surrounded by older nations and its actions hampered by old treaties and scruples and so-called na- tional rights. A solemn treaty prevented an invasion of Belgium. A Hague Tribunal demanded the submission of international difficulties to an International Court. The conscience of the world protested against a war for which no valid excuse could be offered. On all sides the limitless ambitions and energies of Germany were met by limits laid down by the past and by the rights and necessities of other nations. But the fever in her blood would not abate. Her brain fermented more and more with daring and romantic ideas. Reckless men like von Bernhardi tempted her ambition [5] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL by showing her what she must do to win world power. The poUticians of the more astute Bismarckian tradition died or dropped out of sight. The megalomaniac Kaiser filled the imagination of the people even more completely. Their self-delusion grew and grew until it increased al- most to the proportions of national insanity, and at last, in the summer of 19 14, the whole nation burst the bonds of reserve, hurled itself in a mad paroxysm of energy on the world, threw aside treaties and Hague conventions as so many scraps of paper, gave way to a veritable orgy of cruelty and frightfulness, challenged the older world to a colossal trial by combat, and risked all to achieve its ambition of world power. The terrible war of the last four years was not the product, as it were, of a cynical old age or of a Turkish Sultan, steeped in cruelty him- self and the heir of a tradition of cruelties centuries old. It was the product of the heady dreams of youth, of an ambition fed up on big, romantic, crazy ideas, of a sense of strength that blindly felt itself to be invincible. Perhaps no man in Germany has been talking sounder sense during the last year or so than Maximilian Harden. But this is what he said in the earlier months of the war : "One principle only is to be reckoned with — one which sums up and includes all others — force! Boast of that and scorn all twaddle! Force! that is what rings loud and clear; that is what has distinction and fascination! Force — the fist — that is everything! Let us drop our pitiable efforts to excuse Germany's action; let us cease heaping contemptible insults upon the enemy. Not against our will were we thrown into this gigantic adven- ture. It was not imposed on us by surprise. We willed it ; we were bound to will it. We do not appear before the tribunal of Europe ; we do not recognize any such jurisdiction. Our force will create a new law in Europe. It is Germany that strikes. When it shall have con- quered new fields for its genius, then the priests of all the Gods will exalt the war as blessed!" There you have just such a speech as I tried to put [6] HOW FALSE IDEAS RUINED GERMANY into the mouth of my imaginary young man a few moments ago. Nothing could express more completely the mood which has been growing up in the soul of Ger- many since 1870. Bismarck would have disowned it, eager as he was for German advancement. Only a man like the last Kaiser — vain, over-fanciful, superficial, and reckless — would have encouraged such a mood in his people. And out of that mood have grown all the doc- trines that have seemed so hateful to us in the last four years — the doctrine that might is right, that treaties are not binding if they conflict with expediency, that the State is above all law, etc. The cruelties of Germany have been just as terrible in their results as the cruelties of Turkey, but they have had a different origin. The Turk has been a murderer by trade for many centuries. The German has not. His crimes against humanity have been the result of a fanatical, nationalistic cult which for the time being has upset completely the balance of his nature. A false idea has got inside his mind and betrayed him against himself. Wherein, then, consists the essential crime of Germany and her lesson to the world for all time ? Her crime con- sists in her attempt to cast aside all the moral experience of the past, cut herself off morally from humanity, and re-establish in human life, so far as international relations are concerned, the law of the jungle, which all human civilization has striven to outgrow. That is what has made her mentality so difficult for us to understand and what has made her underestimate, so fatally to herself, the strength of the moral forces of humanity. She treated the world's respect for treaty obligations as so much hypocrisy. She was so convinced that America cared for nothing but dollars that she took the last fatal step that roused the moral nature of the American people to its depths and compelled the Government to declare war. She laughed at the conventions of the Hague Tribunal, which aimed at the humanizing of war and which she herself had signed, and declared that the German State recog- [7] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL nized no law but her own necessity. Every act of Ger- many since the war began showed that she recognized no European or human tribunal; that she believed that the old moral world was dead ; that she set aside as mean- ingless the humane ethical code of Christianity; that she proposed to make a new moral law and to begin a new kind of world on the ruins of the old. But the result has shown that Germany was mistaken. The past moral experience of humanity cannot be set aside so easily. The pieties and respectabilities and con- ventions and moralities of the past may need revision and transformation, but they cannot be cast to one side as useless and meaningless traditions. No one nation can ever be powerful enough — at least the last three months have shown that Germany has not been powerful enough — to change the deep trend of human life on this earth in the direction of co-operation, interdependence, and a universal moral law. Germany aimed at a Roman peace — a peace wherein one powerful nation disarms all other nations and keeps all the weapons in her own hands. In such a peace there is no real human interdependence, but only master and slaves. But she has achieved the very opposite of what she intended — her violence has ac- celerated the movement of humanity towards co-operation and internationalism. A League of Nations is now within sight even though its organization is yet to be achieved. The submarines, Zeppelins, and bombing planes which were to have been the weapons for the destruction of the old world and the founding of the new are being sur- rendered by their creators. The romantic overreaching dream of Germany has come to a hideous end. The es- sential soundness of the old humanities and moralities has been revindicated. Imperial Germany is a thing of the past, and henceforth its main function will be to point a moral for those young nations or young persons who dream that the world begins for the first time with them and that the old past need not be consulted or revered by those who are eagerly pressing towards the opening future. jg3 HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY MODERN Germany, which has been accurately de- scribed as '*an extended Prussia" and which was mainly the creation of Bismarck, began its dazzling but ultimately disastrous career with a background of bitter and humiliating memories. No nation can soon forget such a humiliation as Prussia suffered in the decade from 1797 to 1807. As Queen Luise said, Prussia had fallen asleep upon the laurels of Frederick the Great. Twenty years after the death of that monarch, Napoleon inflicted upon the Prussian army at Jena a defeat which was al- most equal to annihilation, for it so destroyed their morale that fortress after fortress surrendered to the French conqueror without a struggle. No less humiliating was the insolent contempt shown by Napoleon towards the House of Hohenzollern and the symbols of its great- ness. As a recent English historian tells us : "With his own hands he desecrated the tomb of Frederick the Great at Potsdam, and sent off his sword and scarf to the In- valides ; he scrawled obscene insults against the Queen Luise on the walls of her own palace ; he demolished the obelisk on the battlefield of Rossbach ; he carried off to Paris the figure of Victory from the Brandenburg gate and drove the Prussian guards like cattle down Unter den Linden." His last insult was to keep Frederick William, the Prussian king, waiting on the banks of the river Niemen, while he and the Russian Czar Alexander decided Prussia's fate in a pavilion erected on a raft moored in the middle of the river. With the reorganization of Prussia by Stein, Scharn- horst, Gneisenau and Humboldt after 1807 and the res- toration of her morale by the War of Liberation ending with the Prussian share of the glory of Waterloo, the humiliation of 1797-1807 lost something of its sting. But [9] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL success was long in coming even after the overthrow of Napoleon. Politically the Prussian kings were dominated by the masterful personality of Metternich, Austria's re- actionary leader. Economically and commercially Ger- many was the most backward country in Western Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century. "The country as a whole had not yet emerged from the agrarian stage ; the exports were mainly raw products ; the mines were almost entirely unworked; manufactures were still produced by the hand-looms and spinning-wheels of do- mestic workers. Nowhere were duties uniform. Al- together there were 67 different tariffs, embracing no less than 3,800 categories of goods." The memories and assets which Prussia took with her into the second half of the nineteenth century were there- fore not such as to flatter her vanity or stimulate her am- bition. The military glories of Frederick the Great's reign had been almost obliterated by the disasters of the Napoleonic wars. The three kings who followed him, however amiable they may have been, had won no prestige for Prussia in the outside world. The liberal movements, which had been so promising during the War of Libera- tion, lost their impetus as the years passed, and finally were overthrown in the failure of the Revolution of 1848. Before the coming of Bismarck in 1862, Prussia had achieved considerable success and influence through the Zollverein, but still the mood and disposition of her people were dominated by bitter memories, economic poverty, divided counsels, and a none too hopeful outlook for the future. This gray background must be kept clearly in view if we are to understand how Prussia's subsequent success and prosperity turned her head. Standing as we do at the close of the great war and looking at the ruins of the German Empire, we can see now that the dazzling successes of the decade from i860 to 1870 were the greatest misfortunes Germany has ever experienced, but they did not seem so at the time to the [10] HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY Germans or to any one else. Those victories were the result of no lucky accident or favorable set of circum- stances. They were the reward of the most deliberate, painstaking, and intelligent preparation. Every weapon which the able, unscrupulous, and iron-willed Bismarck could command was pressed into service — intrigue, pre- varication, appeals to selfish motives, and especially force to the uttermost. But, however honorable or dishonorable the weapons used, the end gained was so dazzling that Germany and the larger portion of the outside world along with her forgot the means and thought only of the end. We who have felt in the last few months the tremendous exalta- tion of victory, following on the heels of a terrible and soul-quaking defeat, can easily imagine how the Germans must have felt when on January i8, 1871, King William of Prussia was acclaimed German Emperor, in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. It was the one hundred and seventieth anniversary of the day on which Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, had assumed at Konigsberg the kingly crown of Prussia, and in those one hundred and seventy years Prussia had grown from two small bits of territory, one around Berlin and the other around Konigsberg, into the mightiest power in Europe. From the dizzy heights of 1871 the Prussians could look back, not merely on these one hundred and seventy years of checkered fortunes, but also, as must be carefully noted, on six years of the most successful war- fare that any country had carried on since the Napoleonic period. In 1864 they had, with the help of Austria, de- feated Denmark and wrested from her the provinces of Schlesv/ig and Holstein. In 1866 they had defeated Aus- tria in a Seven Weeks' War, ending with the overwhelm- ing victory at Sadowa, and thus secured the leadership and, as it ultimately proved, the mastery of Germany for the Hohenzollerns. Finally, in less than six months, in 1870 they overthrew and inflicted a humiliating peace upon the most brilliantly successful military nation of [11] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL modern Europe — the French. The victory of Sedan over the French in 1870, when Napoleon III and 80,000 men were taken prisoners, set the joy-bells ringing throughout all Prussia and must have taken much of the sting out of their memory of the terrible defeat which Napoleon I had inflicted on them at Jena in 1806. Now, if we keep in view the mood of mind in which Prussia entered upon this wonderful decade in her his- tory, — a mood of defeatism, surly discouragement and reactionism, — it will not be difficult for us to under- stand the effect upon Prussian mentality of these triumph- ant and unexpected successes. Whoever has visited Ber- lin and studied the monuments which celebrate these great successes can read the inmost thoughts and feelings of the people. A veritable intoxication of joy in victory utters itself in these monuments. After decades of humil- iation, unsuccess, and half -blind groping, a stupendous triumph had come to them, and, throwing aside all re- serve and restraint, they abandoned themselves to a tempest of emotion and to the glorification of force, and of themselves as the true wielders of force, the true descendants of Thor, the god of force. All that sys- tematic, collective self-praise in which Germany has in- dulged in recent decades and which seems so childish to the rest of the world, all that ''aggregated and organized egotism," as it has been called, which has shown itself stark naked and unashamed since August, 19 14, all that sense of superiority to everybody else which has been for a long time the daily atmosphere of the Prussian of- ficer, scholar, and business man, — this whole half-childish and half-diseased state of mind has grown, naturally enough, out of the abnormal mental exhilaration and the exaggerated self-consciousness which followed on the sudden and spectacular successes of the decade from i860 to 1870. The wine of success, to a people who had not tasted more than a sip of it for three generations, proved to be extremely intoxicating in its effects. But other causes for self-glorification were soon added [12] HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY to military successes. Whoever will take the trouble to compare the economic condition of Germany in 1870 with that in 1910 will become aware of a mighty transforma- tion. Never before has so large a population been in- dustrialized and thereby made immensely wealthy in so short a time. Test the development of the country in any way you like and the result will always be the same. Take population, for example. In 1871, the population of the Empire was 41,000,000; in 1890, it was 49,500,000; in 1900, it was 56,250,000; and in 191 1, it had grown to 65,000,000. In 191 2, the annual surplus of births over deaths was 839,887. Or take the growth of towns, which is always indicative of industrial development. In 1871, Germany had eight large cities of over 100,000 inhabitants ; in 1880, the num- ber was 14; in 1890, 26; in 1895, 30; in 1900, 33; in 1905, 41 ; and in 1910, 48. Of these 48, 6 had more than half a million, and 17 over a quarter of a million inhabi- tants. Or take the statistics of foreign trade. In 1880, the im- ports were valued at £141,000,000, the exports at £144,- 800,000. By 1907, the imports were £443,000,000 and the exports £356,000,000. By 19 13, the imports had increased to £534,750,000 and the exports to £495,630,000. In other words, though the population had increased by only 60 per cent., the total volume of trade had increased almost fourfold. Or, finally, take the record of shipping. **In 187 1, Ger- man shipping was 892,000 tons and her share of the mer- cantile marine of the world was 5.2 per cent. ; in 1905, she had 2,200,000 tons of shipping, representing 9.9 per cent, of the world's mercantile marine. In 191 3, her ton- nage had risen to over 5,000,000 tons and Germany had the second place in the shipping of the world." I take all these figures from W. H. Dawson's authori- tative book on Modern Germany, so that you may take them as telling an authentic story. And that story testifies to a prodigious effort and an [13] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL equally prodigious success. Apart from the United States of America, where conditions have been altogether differ- ent, the economic development of Germany in the last forty years has been the economic romance of the period, if you can apply the word "romance" to a movement which draws its strength from the instinct of acquisition, one of man's least ideal motives. Germany's ships were anchored in all the harbors, and her goods were sold in all the markets of the world. In certain important indus- tries she outdistanced all her rivals and in two or three had the world's market almost to herself. And this trade was more than a source of profit and pride to individual Germans. The German Government did everything pos- sible to foster it; the German nation felt its prestige in- creased by it ; the imagination of all Germans was fed up on the glorious story of it. Finally, to military and economic successes must be added an immense increase of Germany's prestige in the educational and musical w^orlds. She was the Mecca of students from all over the world, oriental as well as occi- dental. No one's academic culture was supposed to be complete without a year or so in Germany. Ambitious young musicians almost invariably wanted to study with a German master. The German language and German books were becoming increasingly known wherever people had any eager interest in modern civilization. All in all, the German people during the fifty years from i860 to igio achieved a success which not only dazzled their own imaginations, increased immensely their self- respect, and intensified their self-consciousness, but also bewildered the other nations of the world with amaze- ment and, to a certain extent, inspired in them a feeling of envy and a sense of fear. Now, what was the effect of all this success and pros- perity upon the mentality of Germany herself? We know how individuals have their heads turned by sudden and immense prosperity, how they become arrogant and domineering, how they gradually isolate themselves from [14] HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY their old friends through a growing sense of superiority, and how a hard worldly tone often takes the place of their old sympathy and spirituality. Is a whole nation liable to such spiritual degeneration ? The life of Germany for the last fifty years shows that it is. Consider, for example, that sense of superiority to which I have already referred. Listen to the following characteristic utterances and see if they do not speak to you of abnormality and of a megalomania on the highroad to insanity. Hear the Kaiser in 1905 : "God would never have taken such great pains with our German Fatherland and its people, if He had not been preparing us for some- thing still greater. We are the salt of the earth. The German people is the granite block on which the good God will complete his work of civilizing the world." Or hear Ludwig Woltmann : "The entire European civilization, even in Slav and Latin countries, is the work of the Teu- tonic race. The Teutons are the aristocracy of humanity. Whosoever has the characteristics of the Teutonic race is superior. The cultural value of a nation is measured by the quantity of Teutonism it contains." Or hear Fritz Bley : "We are beyond all doubt the first of all the nations of the world as warriors. We are the most capable nation in every field of science and in every branch of the fine arts. We are the best colonists, the best mariners, and even the best merchants." Or hear the notorious Cham- berlain : "The higher culture of humanity depends on the diffusion of the German language. People must learn that any one who cannot speak German is a pariah." Or hear von Bernhardi : "The Germans are the greatest civilized people known to history." Or, finally, hear the aged Berlin philosopher Lasson : "Our Emperor, our Chancel- lor, our leading men, like our people, have no equals. We are the freest people of the earth. Our might is the might of the spirit. Humaneness, gentleness, conscien- tiousness, Christianity, are our distinguishing marks." W^hat is the inner meaning of these and the hundreds of other similar utterances from distinguished Germans [15] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S AlORAL DOWNFALL that have been going the rounds of the newspapers and magazines in the last four years ? Surely they are the say- ings of men who have for the moment lost all contact with reality and the sense of perspective and proportion which generally goes with such contact. These men, how- ever great in other respects they may be, are the dupes of their own will to believe what they wish to believe. Imagination has usurped the functions of perception. They have nourished their souls so long on false and high- flown ideas that their power of self-criticism has perished. They do not see that self-praise is the mark of the child and the barbarian and that he who is really superior would never think of claiming that he is so. They have not prayed the prayer of Burns that they might see themselves as others see them. Their whole manner of thinking on general matters has been so deeply subjective, so pro- foundly inward, so vague, romantic, and speculative that they mistake their own inner wishes for outer facts and translate their desire for superiority into an objective real- ity which, they think, only the envious can deny. And when we see that this national chorus of self-praise is of comparatively recent origin, we may legitimately infer that it is the psychological product of an unwonted and colos- sal success and prosperity and will surely dwindle in vol- ume now that success and prosperity have been followed by military collapse and economic ruin. As a second psychological result of their success and prosperity, recall the well-known reaction of Modern Germany against the old idealism. During the war the spokesmen of Germany have declared ad nauseam that they were defending German idealism against Russian barbarism, French vanity and British materialism. But before the war other authoritative German spokesmen bemoaned the fact that idealism had been abandoned in the house of its so-called creators and friends. The ideas which found expression at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century in the phil- osophy of Kant, Herder, Fichte, and Hegel and in the [i6] HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY literature of Wieland, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe have little currency in Modern Germany. One thing alone is sufficient to test the standing of idealism in Modern Germany,— the degree to which the life and works of Schiller are preserved in the popular memory and mter- est. Schiller, better perhaps than any one else, represents German idealism at its best. He was as great as a man as he was as a writer. He had a passionate faith in an eternal ideal world. No more glowing picture of a romantic and popular struggle for liberty has ever been sketched than that of his Wilhelm Tell He had an ardent^ sympathy for all that was most humane and philosophically pro- found in the thought of the eighteenth century. His writ- ings, as well as the addresses of Fichte, helped to rekindle in Germany, after the period of disaster and humiliation from 1797 to 1807, a longing for a free and truly na- tional existence. A genuinely idealistic people would not let the memory of such a man die out. And yet, an able German literary critic, Ludwig Fulda, confessed a few years ago that Schiller was no longer appreciated in Germany as he had been four decades before. He says : "An extraordinary transformation has taken place in the intellectual life of Germany in politics, culture, and art; and it is easy to see how the new conditions and views in each of these domains unfavorably affect the appreciation of Schiller. Woe to everything in the Ger- many of to-day which bears the impress of ideahsm, for it is regarded as a relic of the epoch of political impotence, of the time when the Germans were as ideal- istic as the poet who came last in the division of the world." , And, as a crowning bit of evidence on this matter ot the standing of idealism in Modern Germany, hear what Dr. Fuchs says in 1912 in urging immediate war: "Who are the men whom the Germans love most ardently? Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, Marx? Oh, no! but rather Barbarossa, Frederick the Great, Blucher, Moltke, and Bismarck, the hard men of blood. It is to these men, [17] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL who sacrificed thousands of Hves, that the soul of the nation sends out its tenderest feelings and a truly adoring gratitude, because they did what we should do to-day." In these and many other similar utterances which might be c^uoted we have indisputable proof that, while Ger- many in the last fifty years has been dazzling herself and the rest of the world by her unexampled success and prosperity, she has been losing her soul. In days gone by she had been the home of a lofty idealism, an idealism that had sent mighty tides of influence over the whole modern world. But in the last three decades the leaders of intellectual life in Germany have for the most part forsaken the teaching of the great masters and becon^^ the exponents of a realism which the masters would have scornfully disowned. But the most astounding psychological result of Ger- man success and prosperity has still to be mentioned. We all know what greed is, for we have felt it in ourselves and witnessed it in the lives of others. In this new world we have known the greed of big business corporations in an aggravated form. The will-to-possess, our European critics have told us, stalks unashamed throughout our entire American life. Whether this criticism be well- founded or not, it is certainly true of us as of all peoples that the instinct of acquisition is one of the three or four strongest instincts whose impulse lies back of our daily conduct. But the will-to-possess which has found utterance in Germany in the last four years has a quality of unrestraint and shameless abandon which it has never displayed else- where on anything like so large a scale. Whoever has read the German-Swiss Grumbach's ^'Germany's Annexa- tionist Aims," as selected, translated, and arranged by J. Ellis Barker, will know how I arrive at such a judgment. We have here set forth in their own words the war-aims of the German business leaders, professors, socialists, uni- versity professors, journalists, leaders of political parties and official classes. Our magazines and newspapers have [i8] HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY made these aims known in part to their readers, but to read them consecutively, as we may, in Grumbach's book or in the more recent book of a similar character, "Out of Their Own Mouths," is to recoil with shame, horror, and fear from the revelation of how cruel and inhuman the ambition of a great people can become, when once their head has been turned by success and prosperity. They demand not merely political control of vast new territories, but the transfer of mines and industrial plants from hostile to German hands, the expropriation and de- portation of Belgian, French, and Russian landholders, and the reduction of all other inhabitants to a condition of political and industrial vassalage to Germany. Mindful of the trouble they had had with recalcitrant Poles and Alsatians, they decide to make such trouble impossible in their newly conquered territories by removing the most in- dependent portion of the population and colonizing the lands with real Germans. That which Norman Angell in his famous book "The Great Illusion" declared to be im- possible, viz., the expropriation and deportation of the people of a conquered country in the manner of the Canaanites or the Romans, many German leaders declared to be both possible and desirable. As some German critics of these war-aims (for there have been outspoken German critics) have said : "They constitute a programme for which no European precedent can be found since the migrations of the nations in the fifth and following cen- turies, when the Teutonic hordes first overran the civilized world." The lust for loot has here broken all human bounds and assumed proportions which both shock the conscience and stagger the imagination. Only a mighty people could sin on so large a scale, and only by a mighty effort can they purge themselves of the insane ambitions which success and prosperity engendered in their souls. Looking back, as we now can, from the end of the Grea" War, the whole world can see that it would have been better for Germany if the Franco-Prussian War had been a draw, for it was her spectacular success in that [19] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL war that overheated her brain and fired her soul with an overreaching ambition. And as long as the instinct of acquisition continues strong in human nature, so long will the history of Germany for the last forty years be a warn- ing to individuals and to nations. Sudden success and prosperity tend to disturb the balance of human nature, and, since the corruption of the best is always the worst, a great people, when they go astray, commit excesses of which a less powerful, a less imaginative, and a less ambitious people are incapable. [20] HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY NO type of man has been more in demand in modern times than the man with a genius for organization. The human race has become very numerous, human af- fairs are very compHcated, human enterprises have to be on a colossal scale, multitudes of men can be advan- tageously employed in one mammoth human undertak- ing, and so the individual who can organize human effort so that the work of many men fits together like the parts of a great machine is the man of the hour. No organizing genius with a gang of men could have produced Plato's "Dialogues" or Dante's "Divine Com- edy" or Shakespeare's dramas or Beethoven's symphonies or Raphael's paintings or Sir Walter Scott's novels. All such works are the product of individual spirits, working in solitude and expressing through the medium of their art their most personal reactions of thought and feeling and resolve to their experiences of life. No more could an organizing genius with a gang of men make great inventions or discover new scientific truths. Here again the intuition of the solitary, brooding, imaginative thinker is required. But when the invention has taken shape in the in- ventor's mind and the scientific truth has flashed through the imaginative reason of some Newton or Darwin or Kelvin or Lister or Mendeleeff or Pasteur, then the or- ganizing genius has his opportunity. He embodies the idea of the inventor in a machine and uses that machine to save human labor and increase production in manu- facture, industry, and transportation. He tests the truth of the scientific discoverer in wide fields of investiga- tion and by organizing research multiplies the value of the truth manyfold. The organizer is a creator of the second order, not of the first, but his work has such im- [21] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL mense practical value that in the modern world he has almost cast the inventor and creator into obscurity. To illustrate — after this country went into the war and had to do so many new and great things in a hurry, everything was at odds and ends until great organizers like Schwab and Ryan and Baruch and McAdoo were called into service. Now the classic land of method and organization in the last half-century has been Germany. Nowhere else have the worship and practice of efficiency been carried on so enthusiastically and successfully. Whatever has to be done by many men working together under careful and intelligent direction has been generally done better in Germany than anywhere else. Research in linguistics, archaeology and history, laboratory investigation in physics, chemistry, biology and psychology, the applica- tion of invention to war, industry and transportation, — for all these tasks Germany has an aptitude which no other modern nation has displayed to anything like the same degree. Those who are learned along these lines say that Germany is more successful in the application than in the discovery of principles. For example, it is contended that in the field of chemistry, where Germany has achieved such pre-eminence, none of the twenty-odd fundamental principles on which the science is based were discovered by Germans, and, again, that in the field of war-implements Germany has simply applied the in- ventions of Americans and Englishmen. But whatever be the truth in these matters, no one denies that in the field of research, investigation, and practical application the German has led the modern world. He has a patience for detail, a willingness to dig and delve in a narrow shaft, a power to work in harness, a sort of sublime in- difiference to monotony, a contentment with small gains, which have thus far been wanting in the other great peoples of to-day. We see this glorification of method and organization in Germany to whatever aspect of her life we direct our [22] HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY attention. Before August, 191 4, Germany was the most orderly, methodical, machine-like country in Europe or the world. I use the word ''machine-like" advisedly. From the point of view of their political institutions England and France have grown slowly and spontane- ously like any product of life. But Germany has been put together like the parts of a machine. As late as the end of the Napoleonic era, all Southern Germany and the Rhinelands were leagued with Napoleon against Prus- sia. As late as 1866 Bavaria, Saxony, Hesse, and Han- over were at war with Prussia. The separatist tendency which is manifesting itself so strongly in Germany to- day, in the hour of her defeat, is rooted in the fact that in 1870, when she was organized, the non-Prussian parts were not so much grafted on as clamped on to Prussia. Germany since 1870 has not been a naturally evolved and truly organic nation. She has been a po- litical and economic machine. Her parts have been well fitted together and the whole machine has been well oiled and has run with a minimum of friction; nevertheless, she has been held together by belts and bolts and screws and nails and clamps rather than by organic filaments. She has been the product, not so much of spontaneous nature, as of method, organization, logic, war, and an unscrupulous and far-seeing diplomacy. We see the same regard for method and organization in the contempt which the Germans felt for the British Empire before 1914. Their great historians and states- men had no idea that a scattered multitude of nations and peoples could be held together through a terrible war by an invisible bond of mere sentiment. They regarded the British Empire as an illogical, incoherent, decaying structure which would topple over when the storm of a great war beat upon it. They predicted freely that Can- ada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India would break away from the Empire rather than run the risk of being involved in its ruin. They saw that the British Empire had grown by chance and accident and THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL unforeseen events; that Great Britain without any spe- cial foresight or plan or design had stumbled into pos- session or control of territory all over the world; that no one systematic and logically-thought-out form of gov- ernment was in force throughout; that Britain did not attempt to impose her type of civilization on alien races, but allowed them to retain everything of their past that did not interfere with successful administration. And as they looked at the incoherent, endlessly diverse, ram- shackle Empire they honestly felt that with their love of order and method, their genius for designing plans and efficiency in carrying them out, and their habit of pro- ceeding from central and clearly-thought-out ideas, they could do far more for the civilization of the world if they possessed and administered the British colonies than Great Britain ever would. Again we see the same faith in and mastery of method and organization in the German preparation for this war. Long ago the German leaders persuaded themselves that war was inevitable, and they prepared for it in the most systematic way imaginable. They did not live from day to day as a less far-seeing people would have done, but looked far into the future and laid their plans for that far-away future. I do not mean merely that they prepared a great army and adjusted their industrial, finan- cial, agricultural, and transportation systems with a view to war. Of course they did all that, but that is the obvious thing for a government to do if it believes war to be inevitable. I refer to something less obvious. If a government is going to call upon its people to make a great sacrifice or run a great risk, it must make them feel that the cause for which they are to risk everything is worthy of the ut- most they have to give ; that is, it must prepare the people psychologically for the future. This Germany did in the most methodical manner. She filled the memories of her people with the glories of the past. The old legends and sagas and mythology, the story of Arminius who [24] HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY overcame the Romans in the Teutoburger Wald, the songs and poems commemorating the heroic deeds of the Ger- manic past, the victorious campaigns of Frederick the Great, the career of the House of HohenzoUern for five hundred years — everything out of the past that could fire the spirit of the German people with faith in the superiority and mission and great destiny of Germany was utilized in the most skilful way by those who had the education of Germany in charge. Most visitors to Berlin have doubtless laughed at the false history and the ostentatious pride in family which are revealed by the monuments of the famous Siegesallee, and no doubt from the point of view either of history or of art they deserve the laugh, but nevertheless those monuments have played their part in keeping the glories of the House of HohenzoUern before the German people and in filling the minds of the people with a sense of the greatness of Germany's past and the promise of Germany's future. And strangest of all evidences of the German use of method in preparing for this war is their doctrine of Schrecklichkeit, or frightfulness. Foreseeing the horrors of modern war, they prepared themselves for them by building up in their minds a theory concerning them. They created in their thought the belief that frightfulness has military value, that cruelty to civilian population will bring war more quickly to an end, that to inspire fear in your enemy by striking him with every conceivable weapon is ultimately more humane than to prolong the war by gentler methods, and, having conceived the doc- trine, they forced themselves, in the cases where a rein- forcing of natural cruelty was necessary, to carry it out in practice. The world has been horrified not merely that such things should be done in war, but especially that they should all be thought out, justified, and planned for in advance. The doctrine of frightfulness, no doubt, reveals an unexpected cruelty in the German nature, but it reveals just as certainly the tendency of the German mind to work out the theory of a thing first of all, and [25] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL then, having convinced itself of the logical soundness of the theory, to proceed to apply the theory in practice, un- appalled by the character of the consequences. Further instances of the German belief in and mastery of method and organization could be advanced if it were necessary. As Owen Wister showed in his little book "The Pentecost of Calamity," published early in the war, all Germany was a marvellous illustration of what method, organization and efficiency can do for the external ordering of the life and activities of a people. No traveller in Germany ever failed to observe it or to be attracted by it, unless he was psychologist enough, as most of us were not, to see beneath the smooth surface of German life down into the volcanic ambitions and lurid imaginings of the modern German soul. Now what has been the psychical result of all this worship of method and organization? It can be summed up in six words : Germany became blind to psychological values. In other words, Germany lost the key to the heart and mind of man. As W. H. Dawson, probably the most sympathetic English student of Germany in the last twenty years, puts it: '*So far as command over matter goes, the German is not merely good, but unapproachable. Any work, any function that can be performed by system, he will perform as no other man on earth. His machinery will work to perfection and the finished product will be the best of its kind — that is, the best that such machinery can produce. When, however, it comes to working with human material, the German system breaks down, for here machine-work is of little value." In these words we may find the secret of a great deal that we have been witnessing in Germany during the last forty and especially the last four years. Germany has known how to handle things, but not how to treat men and women. Things have no living will, and, once their physical and chemical laws are known, they can be manip- ulated to suit man's convenience and ambition. But hu- [26] HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY man beings are living wills. Each one is a personal centre of psychical being. Each one has desires and ambitions and hopes of a unique kind and sooner or later will resist all efforts to treat him merely as a thing. Method and organization can be applied without limit to things and animals, but inevitably break down when they are applied beyond a certain point to men and women. And it is just this breakdown that we have been wit- nessing in Prussia in the last forty years. As a ruler of alien races, whether Danes or Poles, the French of Alsace-Lorraine, or the dark peoples of their African colonies, the Prussians have made a dismal and disas- trous failure. They have not treated the men of such races as having natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but as inferior beings who exist to be governed and who should find the only happiness they really need in serving and admiring the State that gov- erns them. They cannot understand why Danes, Poles, and French resist the Prussianizing process. It has not occurred to the Prussian bureaucrats that understanding, sympathy, and conciliation might have won their Danish, Polish, and French inhabitants when repression only hardened their wills against their rulers. They have sub- jected all these races to a system of espionage, petty an- noyance, and arrogant brutality, proscribing their lan- guage, hampering them in their economic life, treating them personally (as in the Zabern incident of 1913) in a cruelly repressive way, and, as a result of it all, they are more eager to escape from the clutches of Prussia to-day than they were forty years ago. If human beings could be moulded and manipulated as things are, Prussia ought to have succeeded in Poland and Alsace-Lorraine, for no government ever tried harder to apply system and method to human life than did Prussia. But she has miserably failed, and her failure ought to teach the world once for all that such an application of organization to human life must always fail. Germany's blindness to psychological values has been [27] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL exhibited, during the last four years of war, on a more colossal scale than ever before — hard as that may be to believe for those who know how she has treated Poland and Alsace-Lorraine. The German universities in the last half-century have been the source of the world's most modern type of psychology — the much-heralded experi- mental psychology. Whatever can be learned about the soul of man by means of the machinery of the psychologi- cal laboratory Germany has known. There is scarcely a teacher of Experimental Psychology anywhere in Amer- ica, unless one of the very youngest men, who has not studied under some German professor. And yet no other nation in the last four years has shown such ignorance of real psychology as has been displayed by Germany. She has used the machine method so long and so exclu- sively that what the rest of us would simply call the in- sight of common sense has completely failed her. She failed to see that her practice of frightfulness would not frighten her enemies, but simply lash their instinct of pugnacity into fury and raise their courage to the heights of a sublime fearlessness. She did not see that Zeppelin raids on defenceless country towns, cruiser-attacks on un- fortified watering-places, submarine piracy on the high seas, the horror of the Lusitania, the judicial murders of Edith Cavell and Captain Fryatt, the bombing of hos- pitals, the torpedoing of Red Cross ships, and all the other crimes of the last four years would only drive more Britishers to the recruiting-stations and ultimately bring America into the war. What is the meaning of all this blindness to facts about human nature which were quite patent to the rest of the world? I can see no explanation of it except the one I have given. Having made themselves masters of method, organization, and efficiency, the Germans have tried to apply their system to the human world and at the end of four years of horrible crimes have found out that it will not work. The war has shown that there are forces in the human soul which cannot be evaluated [28] HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY by any machine psychology. Germany failed to reckon with the imponderable things of the human spirit. She pitted the machine against the living soul of man and now she lies crushed under the very machine in which she placed her confidence. During the last four months the world has seen the most colossal refutation of the much-preached Gospel of Efficiency that history thus far has had to record. Before the war nearly everybody was applauding Germany for her efficiency. Business men were learning her methods and preaching her system. Many universities were modelling some of their departments at least after hers. The Socialist party in America had taken its theory and platform almost in toto from her. General philosophy was leaning strongly towards a mechanistic rather than an organic theory of existence. Science and the labora- tory were beginning to dominate the more creative activi- ties of our cultural life. Big business was organizing industry with a view to efficiency of method and largeness of output rather than with a humane interest in the effects of that organization on the millions of working men and women. In a word, we were following in the footsteps of Germany as rapidly as we could. Is there not a very important warning for us, then, in the present plight of Germany ? Because she mechanized her soul through her excessive regard for and practice of method and organization, she lost touch with the deeper and invisible forces of life and became a domi- neering and repressive influence wherever she ruled over human beings. But the spirit of man nowhere willingly submitted to that rule. The alien races of her own empire — even the dark primitive races of her African colonies — protested against it. The Allied nations, in the face of terrible disasters and unspeakable losses, fought on and on and on for more than four interminable years in order to destroy it. And now her own people have cast it off as something alien to their own deepest nature. The machine as an end in itself to which the living [29] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL bodies and souls of men must be in subjection has been judged and condemned for all the world and for all time. By a mighty and tragically costly struggle the spirit of man has broken free from the strangle hold of mere mechanism and thereby given warning to all agencies, political, industrial, and religious, that may be tempted in the future to try a similar tyranny. The Great War proclaims to this and to all coming generations that men can never submit to be treated as things; that they are unique centres of spiritual life with a significance of their own ; and that all political, economic, and re- ligious systems must be tested by the degree to which they make possible the realization of unique spiritual values in human life. Just one hundred years ago (1818) Mary Wollstone- craft Shelley gave to the world her powerful but ghastly story, "Frankenstein." Its main idea, as one writer has described it, is that of the formation and vitalization, by a deep student of the secrets of nature, of an adult man endowed with the power of thought but lacking a soul, who, entering the world thus under unnatural con- ditions, becomes the terror of his species, a half-invol- untary criminal, and finally an outcast whose sole re- source is self-immolation. Since the publication of the book many a human creation or fabrication has been called a ''Frankenstein." But it remained for Germany, one hundred years after the ghastly idea was shaped by the strange art of Mrs. Shelley, to give to the world the completest illustration of it we have ever had. The leaders of Germany for many decades back have labored night and day to make their country a model of mechanical or- ganization. They have unnaturally suppressed the in- dividual soul in the process. They have treated men as though they were things and tried to fit them into moulds into which nature never intended them to go. It seemed, for a time, as though they would succeed and transform Germany permanently into a living machine, but in the last four years that living machine has become a terror [30] HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY to the human species, and after crimes unspeakable has finally turned upon its creators and at the present moment threatens to tear itself to pieces by the violence of its own passions. The illustration may not be apt in every detail, but it will serve to bring home to us the enormity of the crime of which the leaders of Germany have been guilty. Inspired by their mastery of method and organization they have tried to make a great people into a machine for the conquest of the world and the furtherance of their own vainglorious ambitions. But the machine has failed to achieve the ends they fully expected it to achieve, and now its living parts have fallen asunder and no one can tell whether they will destroy one an- other or succeed in forming themselves into a more or- ganic unity. If the fate of Russia should be the fate of Germany as well, the blame will lie at the door of the men who forced the German people into an un- natural system and by distorting human nature for so long made it incapable of that democratic organization of life which preserves the freedom of the individual while at the same time it provides instrumentalities and facilities for all kinds of co-operation with his fellows. Order is indispensable in human society and human activ- ities of all kinds, but it must be an order which main- tains and develops the powers and capacities of the in- dividual, and because Germany treated order and sys- tem as ends in themselves, to which the individual must be subjected, she looks out to-day with bewildered soul upon the ruins of her great machine and wonders what to-morrow will bring forth. 1 31] WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY OF late years many people have come to give a very high place in their system of values to education. It has seemed to them that in education was to be found the solution of most of the perplexing problems of modern so- ciety. Some of them have been confidently predicting that the church is destined to give way to the school and the preacher to the educator. It has been almost univer- sally declared that education is the fly-wheel of democ- racy. When the records of our training-camps showed a larger percentage of illiteracy than we had reckoned on, we all felt a distinct twinge of shame and humiliation. Educators in general have felt their profession honored and its importance recognized by the elevation of one of their number to the Presidency of the United States. All in all, the hour of the educator and the school seemed to have struck, for the value of education was distinctly winning an increasing recognition in the whole civilized world. To all these eager advocates of educational values the course of Germany in the last four years must have been a painful surprise and disillusionment, for in the recogni- tion of the value of education and in the actual working out of an educational programme Germany admittedly led the modern world. The number of students who went to Germany every year from all parts of the world to complete their academic education had grown into a great host. No other European country could boast of so large and constant an influx of young scholars, and no other European country exercised so large an influence on the educational ideas and systems of other countries as Germany did. Many friends of Germany believed that education would prove to be the ballast of the Empire, and that, if it came to a trial of strength between the [32] WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY jingoistic Pan-Germans and the educational forces, the latter would surely carry the day. Very few students of Germany were prepared for the enthusiastic adher- ence of the educators to the military and annexationist programme of the war party, and their defection has raised grave doubts in many minds as to the moraliz- ing and steadying value of education. ''If education has the value which we have been ascribing to it," they ask, "why didn't the education of Germany — the most educated country in the world — save her from the kind of mentality that produced the war and from the illegal and inhuman practices which accompanied her prosecu- tion of the war ?" The question which is here posed is of immense im- portance. To feel the sting of it to the quick we must recall to our minds some of the salient facts of the German educational system. So far as I can find out, Prussia has had a compulsory education for a longer period than any other country — for about one hundred and sixty years. From the end of the sixth year of life until the end of the fourteenth year, every child must attend school, and during those eight years undivided attention must be given to school work. The State controls the whole system from top to bottom and sees to it that the regulations of the school are lived up to both by teacher and pupil. Nowhere else in the world has the discipline of the public school been so severe as in Germany, for nowhere else has there been as close an affiliation between the military system and the educational system. From the moment when the child enters the public school until the moment when he leaves it he is made to feel the seriousness of the educational process, and no weak sentimentality is al- lowed to intervene to save him from the hard disci- pline of it. Moreover, those who teach and administer the school discipline have themselves to pass through a most rigor- ous training. Germany does not set untrained young girls [33] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL of seventeen or eighteen at the important task of teach- ing as we do — not even in the elementary grades. She does not allow them to teach until their theoretical training is over, and that consists of eight or ten years of con- tinuous study in a higher school and a training-college. The State has no more mercy on the teachers than on the children, and drills them so thoroughly in the subjects which they are to teach that, when they have to drill others, they know how to make their work thorough. It probably is true, as some contend, that German teachers overdrive their pupils, and that their discipline is too severe for timid children, but it cannot be said that the educational process is ever superficial, showy, or hasty, as it so often is with us. A competent English critic declares that "in every direction enterprise, thoroughness, and practical common sense characterize the German elemen- tary school system." The secondary schools are equally praiseworthy, and of these there are seven different kinds. Whoever passes the final examination in any one of these schools is likely to find some special opening into the service of the State, the rank of the service being determined by the char- acter of the educational training he has had. Scientific exactness characterizes the whole system, and the par- ents of a child know just what will become of him when they make their choice of the secondary school to which he is to be sent. The Germans do not train in a haphaz- ard way, but provide the kind of education best cal- culated to fit the pupil for the place he is to fill and the function he is to perform in his after life. This is true even more of the technical schools, which are praised by every one who has studied them. It is not merely the number of these schools that is remarkable, but their comprehensiveness as well. Not merely do technical colleges turn out each year an army of trained directors, engineers, and chemists, equipped with the last discovered secret of science and the best methods of in- dustry and manufacture, but "technical education is ap- [34] WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY plied to every occupation in which it is better for a workman to have it than to be without it." And when we turn to the universities, of which there are twenty-two in Germany, it is enough to recall the fame of these institutions throughout the world before the war began. The great majority of American uni- versity teachers have spent one or more years of study in German universities. American exchange-professors generally brought back from Germany glowing accounts of what they had seen and learned. The influence of German professors such as Harnack, Paulsen, Eucken, Ostwald, Haeckel, Wellhausen, Bousset, and scores of others was practically world-wide. All in all, it may be said without hesitation that, as an educational influence, Germany led the world: her text-books were translated into many languages ; her intellectual industry was prodig- ious, — she published more books every year than any other country; the fame of her professors and colleges encircled the globe. And yet this educated Germany, this land of bespec- tacled scholars, this country of trained investigators and profound thinkers, has been guilty of excesses both of speech and act that have bewildered her former friends all over the world. Her soldiers, who are said by one German panegyrist to carry Goethe's "Faust" and other pieces of great literature in their pockets, so well edu- cated are they, have acted on the average more cruelly and brutally than soldiers generally do. Her famous professors signed their names to documents which their own students in America have read with a stupefying surprise, so hysterical and incoherent and unbalanced are the statements and arguments contained therein. Ger- many's education has failed to keep her sane, rational, and fair-minded, or to prevent the growth in the German soul of tendencies that have brought her to ruin. What is the reason for all this? Is education inade- quate to the task of moralizing and civilizing the in- stinctive nature of man? Or was there something wrong [35] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL with the educational system of Germany in spite of its splendid organization? It is the latter question that we have before us now. From the point of view of a world eager for peace and international fellowship, it is plain that in the German system there has been too close an alliance between the school and the camp. A universal system of state ed- ucation, a universal system of military service, and an almost universal system of technical training have given the State too much power over the mind and life of the individual. We did not see this as clearly before August, 191 4, as we see it now. At that time multitudes of people were immensely impressed by the alliance in Germany between the school and the army in the service of the State. They were beginning to think that Prussia was right in regarding her army as part of her educational system. They were deeply interested in such comments as Dr. Sadler, the distinguished English school-inspector, had made concerning the German system: "Side by side with the influences of German education are to be traced the influences of German military service. The two sets of influence interact on one another and intermingle. German education impregnates the German army with science. The German army predisposes German edu- cation to ideas of organization and discipline. Military and educational discipline go hand in hand." Many in- telligent people, looking at the disorder and incompe- tence of democratic countries and feeling that discipline was democracy's greatest need, were being drawn more and rnore to the discipline, efficiency, obedience, and public order which they saw on all sides when they travelled in Germany, and which they believed to be the outcome of a close alliance between the school and the army. But the revelation which Germany has made of herself during the last four years has brought a revulsion of [36] WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY feeling and a change of mind. Since discipline, efficiency, obedience, and public order are now seen to have been only a thin crust over a volcano, since Germany herself has confirmed the teaching of Freud, a German psychol- ogist, that instincts are not destroyed because they are suppressed, but only driven down into the subconscious mind to work all kinds of havoc there, we are ready to question the moral and social utility of a close alliance be- tween the school and the camp. It is easy to put one's finger on the weak spot in the German educational system. Long ago, Coleridge, under the influence of German ideas, defined the purpose of education as "to form and train up the people of the country to obedient, free, useful, and organizable sub- jects, citizens, and patriots, living to the benefit of the State and prepared to die in its defence." That defini- tion might stand for the German conception of educa- tion to-day or at least before the war. ''Organizable subjects, living to the benefit of the State and ready to die in its defence" — these words are ominous. The thought of the individual as a unique human being, need- ing education for his own sake as well as in the interests of the State, is entirely lacking. The individual in this system is not a human unit with mental and spiritual dispositions and capacities to be quickened and evoked, but a sort of political and economic utility to be organ- ized for purposes external to himself. The school is not an agency for the development of personalities, of free beings each reacting to life in a unique way, but a gov- ernmental instrument to. be turned to governmental ac- count. External discipline is not something temporary to which the young are to be subjected until they are capable of self-control, but a permanent aspect of life from the cradle to the grave. Technical education is not merely a preparation for the earning of a decent liveli- hood and the efficient performance of the duties of life, but a weapon which the State can use to great advan- tage either in trade-competition or in the clash of war. [37] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL In a word, the German educational system omits from its theory of life the individual soul. It treats the in- dividual as though he were only a cog in a machine, a servant of the State rather than a free citizen of the State, a defender of the State rather than a living soul interested in making the most of himself and getting the best possible out of his life. If the weakness of de- mocracy is to insist on the rights of the individual and forget his duties, the weakness of Germany has been to insist on the duties and forget the rights. As she has cultivated nationalism at the expense of other nations, so she has cultivated the State at the expense of the individual. But a bird can as easily fly with one wing or an oars- man row with one oar as a State can remain sound and healthy which treats the individual as only a soldier in the army or a "hand" in the workshop and not an or- ganic part of the body politic. Education has failed Germany because she neglected human personality and made soldiers rather than citizens. With the model of the army and the up-to-date workshop before her mind, she trained her children to fit into certain grooves and moulds, forgetting that human beings are persons and not things, and must achieve self-initiation, self-control, and self-expression or else accumulate in their subcon- scious mind a mass of suppressed desires which are liable to break forth into the wild fury of war or the almost equally wild fury of Bolshevist anarchism. Persons must be educated to be persons, and not the mere tools of a non-moral State. Popular education has, no doubt, im- mense military and industrial value, but its primary pur- pose is not military or industrial, but human. Again, education has failed Germany because it has, on its higher levels at least, often lost touch with life and thereby become too highly specialized and too doctrinaire. Men have become so absorbed in one branch of study and so eager to do something new in that branch that they have lost all sense of its relative value and all [38] WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY power to see life as a whole. Instead of estimating its value by its contribution to the total life of the com- munity, they have been inclined rather to find the chief value of life in the opportunity it provides for the pur- suit of their specialty. This explains the passion with which professors of the same branch of study often wrangle over their differing theories. Men of the world who look at life from many angles and seek from life many values could not so quarrel with one another over little things. But the world of the specialist is a small world. His one chance for celebrity or preferment lies in adding to the knowledge of his department or in giving a fresh interpretation of the old knowledge. Under these circumstances that which has little real value comes to seem of immense importance in his eyes. And when a specialist, who has won distinction in some narrow specialty, undertakes to pronounce judgment, for ex- ample, on national or international politics about which he may know very little at all, he often expects to be heard with the same deference as when he speaks on matters in which he is deeply learned. That surely must be the explanation of the mass of political unwisdom which German professors poured out on the world in the first year or so of the war. Men outside Germany who had been trained in German universities, and had had immense respect for their teachers, rubbed their eyes in astonishment when they read their deliverances concerning Germany and her grievances against the rest of the world. Famous professors like Harnack and Haecket and Ostwald and Eucken wrote with a harsh note of dogmatic authority, although it was perfectly plain to their old pupils that they had not really sifted the evidence at all. Such, indeed, is always apt to be the fate of an edu- cated class which touches life at too few points and seeks from life too few values. Their learning does not add to their insight, but becomes an obsession of the mind. The older they grow, the more foolish they be- [39] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL come, for the impulses, instincts, and sentiments which keep the young ahve to the vital things in life grow feebler as the years go by and leave the scholar to the mercy of his intellectual hobby. But German education has been responsible for a worse evil than the false judgments in practical matters of pedantic professors. I am afraid we owe to Germany, for the most part, the doctrinaire spirit which has seized upon so many reformers all over the world. It is to the doctrinaire spirit that we owe the excesses of the Revolu- tion in Russia. It is the doctrinaire spirit that Germany is afraid of, now — the spirit of the irreconcilables, the bitter-enders, the out-and-outers, the spirit that refuses to compromise or to give and take or to live and let live. The doctrinaire in theory is what the fanatic is in relig- ion and the despot in government. He is like a horse with blinders on — he sees straight ahead, but not to either side. He is out to win, no matter what his victory may cost the rest of the world. Surely if the world ever needed the democratic spirit, the spirit of moderation, the pragmatic, evolutionary, experimental spirit, it needs it now, but that spirit is anathema to the doctrinaire. He is sure he is absolutely right, now and for all time, and, be- ing absolutely right, he conceives it his duty to rule, even though his government should be set up on the ruins of all the past. That is the spirit that has wrought so much havoc in Europe already and now threatens it with more. It is a German far more than a Russian or French or British product. It grows out of minds that brood over words and theories and formulas while they seldom follow the organic process of life itself, and such minds have been far more numerous in Germany than elsewhere. But the deepest reason why education failed to save Germany has yet to be stated. While the powers of the mind to perceive and associate and conceive and judge [40] WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY and reason have been systematically cultivated, while the dexterities of the hand have been carefully trained to manipulate and shape material things into the desired forms, the moral and social sensibilities have been com- paratively neglected. In a small world like ours, where human contacts are inevitably so frequent and where the interests and ambitions of classes and nations are so apt to cross and conflict, the development and refinement of the moral and social sensibilities are increasingly im- portant. Unless we are delicately aware of and thought- ful for the personalities and rights of others, we are sure, as individuals or as classes or as nations, to awaken resentment, bitterness, and strife wherever we mingle with our kind. Such problems as are perpetually arising in the Balkan States and many other similar human situa- tions are due, in part at least, not to a lack of intellectual and technical education, but to the barbarous condition of the moral and social sensibilities of the Balkan races. The war, and the jealousies already appearing among the newly liberated peoples, show us that moral education is indispensable to human welfare. That the Germans laid insufficient stress on this aspect of education in comparison with others may be easily demonstrated. Within the social system of Germany it- self three kinds of evidence might be cited, the attitude of men to women, the attitude of the officer to the private soldier, and the wearisome insistence on the use of exact titles in social intercourse. There is no need now to elab- orate any of these points. A library of books from "Elizabeth and her German Garden" to Mrs. Atherton's ''White Morning" has familiarized us with the traditional attitude of the German man to the German woman. The story of the war as told from week to week during the last four years has given us detailed evidence of the social chasm that has separated the officer from the private and of the haughty, unsympathetic, even brutal attitude of the former to the latter. Many observers have remarked on the superfluity of titles used in Germany, and on how [41] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL most people insist on receiving the exact degree of re- spect which they deem to be due to their position. But writers have not always commented on the in- ner meaning of this insistence on titles, class-distinctions, and sex-differences. Does it not mean a persistent and exaggerated craving for superiority, a lack of sympathy for the feelings of social inferiors, and a sense of satis- faction in the exercise of power over others? It all demonstrates a certain rawness and barbarity of nature due to the undeveloped condition of the moral and so- cial sensibilities. In their relations with foreigners both inside and out- side of Germany, the German people have displayed the same lack of moral and social perception and sensibility. Prof. R. T. Ely, by no means an unsympathetic critic, has illustrated and commented keenly on this fact. The conception which the German people have come to hold concerning their mission as a chosen people has made them contemptuous of other races. Their sense of mili- tary power has led to a haughty and barbarous rattling of the sabre whenever delicate diplomatic situations have developed in their relations with other nations. Their interest in international law, Prof. Ely points out, has seriously declined since they began to think of other peoples as their inferiors and their potential enemies. The influence of men like Bluntschli and Brentano, who worked for a recognition of mutual rights and obliga- tions among nations, has very rapidly waned since the Pan-Germans began to get the ear of the German public. All these considerations go to show that the educational system of Germany has not been as perfect as we once supposed it to be. The intellectual and technical side of it has been supremely efficient, but the most important aspect has been neglected. Our greatest human task seems to be, not to learn how to control and manipulate matter, but how to live together, how to control and moralize human nature, and the German educational sys- tem has no enlightenment or inspiration for us in this re- [42] WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY gard. Education failed to save Germany, because the German teacher did not see that the training, refining, and spirituaHzing of the impulses, instincts, and conative ten- dencies of the child is the supreme educational achieve- ment. [43] WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY SINCE ^August, 1914, a great many people have inter- preted the war as the supreme illustration of the failure of Christianity and its organ, the Christian Church. They seemed to think that if only the priests and clergy of the three great branches of the Christian Church had bestirred themselves and performed their function as enthusiastically as other men perform their functions in the secular life, all would have been well with Germany and the rest of the world. With such a view I have only a modicum of sym- pathy. It is perfectly true that the Christian Church is by no means as intelligent, devoted, and unselfish as it ought to be. But, on the other hand, its task is not as easy as some would have us think. Human nature in the hands of the priest and preacher is not like clay in the hands of the potter. It resists most vigorously the moralizing process. It is a great mistake to press the Biblical simile as far as some do and think of human beings as simple, easily influenced and easily guided sheep, looking eagerly about for a wise and loving shepherd to follow and obey. To take the Biblical simile as literally true would be a caricature. Human beings might be compared to the carnivorous animals as justly as to inno- cent sheep. Whoever undertakes to fashion the life of man, morally and spiritually, finds himself in conflict with three or four powerful instincts which resist the remak- ing which he desires for them. The sex-instinct, the instinct of self-assertion, the instinct of pugnacity, and the instinct of acquisition are so ancient and deep-seated that the purest religion, preached by the most devoted and untiring saints and prophets, will never find the re- moulding or saving of human beings an easy task. In the language of the street, human nature is a tough [44] WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY proposition, and it must not be taken for granted, when a nation goes wrong, that the blame is all or even for the most part to be laid at the door of the churches. Nevertheless, I think it is possible, in the case of Ger- many, to show that a good deal of the blame for the state of mind which made the war and its cruel excesses possible can be laid at the door of the church. The Christian Church is a very imperfect institution in all countries ; seldom does it voice the spiritual religion of its founder in its purity or its entirety; not infrequently it mistakes its mission altogether and transforms itself into a social club or a debating society or a semi-political party; often it loses all contact with the living present and becomes little more than a drowsy echo of the past. But, for reasons which I shall try to indicate, the Chris- tian Church in Germany, during the last century, in both its branches, has been less independent, less inspired with a sense of its mission and therefore less spiritual than elsewhere. Had the religious spirit which found expres- sion in Germany in earlier centuries in the circles of the mystics, in the Reformation under Luther, in the Pietist movement, and in the Romantic movement of which Schleiermacher was the great religious interpreter in the early nineteenth century, only continued to find ever-in- creasing expression in the Germany of the last seventy- five years, the terrible World Tragedy which has just come to an end might not have happened — at least, more powerful forces in Germany would have worked against it, or, to put it somewhat differently, the prevalent state of mind in Germany would not have been so susceptible to the militaristic and annexationist ambitions of the Gov- ernment and the Pan-German party. For we must not forget, in this moment of Germany's downfall and shame, that in happier days she made great contributions to the religious consciousness and the re- ligious institutions of the Western world. Away back in the fourteenth century Germany gave to the Christian world at least three men who have helped to keep the [45] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S AlORAL DOWNFALL emphasis of Christian people on what is inward and vital in religion — I mean the mystics Eckhart, Tauler, and the unknown author of the important book called ''Theologia Germanica." In the sixteenth century we owe the initial impulse of the Protestant Reformation to a German. No doubt Martin Luther would be a very inadequate interpreter of the Protestant spirit and the Protestant mind to-day; we are more acutely conscious than our Protestant grandfathers were of his shortcom- ings as a theological thinker, as a man of social vision, and as an exemplar of the saintly life, but for all that it was from the deep inward spiritual experience of Luther, his heroic courage, his labors as preacher, trans- lator, and writer, and his vital, powerful, and, abounding personality, that the Protestant movement received its first and determining impulse, and to Germany must go the great credit for giving birth and being to this great leader of the spiritual life of modern peoples. In the early seventeenth century Germany again put the world into her debt for another contribution to the deepening of the inner life of thought and feeling — I refer to the activities of the shoemaker mystic Jakob Bohme, from whom many modern thinkers have received very fruitful suggestions. Later on in the same century there arose in Germany a movement whose influence has been as wide almost as Christian civilization — the Pietist move- ment. Beginning with Spener and Francke and the Uni- versity of Plalle, it spread and spread until it touched, directly or indirectly, all the deeper spirits of the Prot- estant world. It inspired the zeal of Count Zinzendorf and the Moravian Brethren; a Moravian brother spoke the word that illuminated the mind and focused the will of John Wesley; John Wesley founded the Methodist Church, which became the fruitful parent of evangelical movements in other churches and of reforming zeal in circles outside the churches. In a less directly religious way it inspired other great leaders. Lessing was moved by it to his conception of an eternal gospel. Kant was [46] WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY brought up in a Pietist home, and his doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason shows distinct traces of the influence of Pietism. Herder, Jacobi, and Goethe were all touched by it, as may be seen by their emphasis on the emotional, mystical, and voluntary element' in religion. Schleiermacher is saturated with its spirit, although it is accompanied in his case by a much greater wealth of intellectual and speculative power than in its earlier exemplars. In the nineteenth century, as we shall see, this movement distinctly dwindled in Germany as compared with the Anglo-Saxon world, but its earliest manifestations were in Germany, and, while that kind of movement is possible in any Christian land, it is due to Germany to say that she has worked fruitfully and beneficially to others along this Hne. Finally, in the nineteenth century, Germany, through some of her great teachers, such as Lotze, Ritschl, Pfleid- erer, Eucken, and others, has affected very considerably the religious life of the educated classes in France, Eng- land, and America. The lofty idealism of these and other similar men, unfortunately, has never expressed itself in Germany through an organized body as the idealism of Martineau, Channing, and Parker has ex- pressed itself through the Unitarian churches, but it has been a potent influence, nevertheless, both within and without Germany. We see, then, that if religion and the Church have failed Germany in recent decades, it is not because Ger- mans have no aptitude for the deeper things in the Christian religion. Hence our problem in this lecture is this : How did a country with so rich a spiritual heri- tage come to get into the state of mind which has re- vealed itself so completely both in the national interests and ambitions before the war and in the excesses of the war itself? For it is plain now to all who have taken the trouble to read, let us say, the book called "Hurrah [47] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL and Hallelujah" by the Danish writer Prof. J. P. Bang, D.D., — a compilation of recent German sermons and articles of a religious nature, — that the virus of the New Germanism has entered into the clergy as well as into the military officers and the university professors. What has happened to the Church in Germany, that it should have lost its grip on its own spiritual inheritance ? I said in my last lecture that one weakness of the edu- cational system of Germany could be traced to a too close alliance between the school and the camp. Well, the weakness of the Church in Germany can be traced to a too close alliance between the throne and the altar. In- stead of being an organ for the spiritual development of individual men and women, the Church has become a regular state institution. The Prussian State, reaching out in all directions for agencies through which to con- trol the people, has gradually seized upon the Church and transformed it into an auxiliary to the police force. We Americans have nothing in our whole experience of church life that would help us to understand the posi- tion of the Church in Germany. Here we join our churches voluntarily and on profession of our faith ; we support them by our voluntary offerings and govern them through their organized membership or its elected representatives. The State tolerates — we might say, en- courages — religious institutions among us by the privileges it grants them, but it does not build their churches or pay their ministers or exercise any theological censorship or assume any official authority whatsoever over them. In Germany, however, the position of the Church is very different. There each State has its own established church, whether Protestant or Catholic, and in some States several mutually antagonistic churches are en- dowed. The State takes religion completely under its wing and asserts its authority in ways unheard of in America. In Protestant States the sovereign is summus episcopus. In Prussia a considerable part of the salary of the clergy comes from the public treasury. Church [48] WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY rates for the maintenance of public worship are levied on entire communities whether the people are Christians or free-thinkers, and churches are still built out of municipal funds. Not so long ago the highest court in the land forced a radical and free-thinking Municipal Council in Berlin to contribute ^5,500 towards the enlargement of a Berlin church which they had at first refused to give. The authority and influence of the Kaiser, W. H. Dawson tells us, has had more to do with the building of churches in Berlin than the piety and liberality of the people them- selves. Finally, the State not only holds the purse-strings of the Church, but supervises its teaching and public expres- sion of opinion. Through the Ministries of Public Wor- ship and the Consistories it controls the speech of the clergy and brings them to judgment for heretical utter- ances. Even as famous a man as Prof. Harnack was mildly reprimanded by the Prussian Minister of Public Worship some years ago for questioning some dogmas of the creed, and since that time two of the most success- ful pastors in Germany, Jatho and Traub, have been re- moved from their pulpits, by the same authority, on the charge of theological heresy. Now, what has been the effect of this intimate alli- ance between throne and altar? Just what might have been expected. The people in general have forsaken the Church. Except on the principal church festivals of the year — Christmas, Good Friday, Whitsuntide, the Com- memoration of the Dead, and Penance Day — the churches are practically deserted. Nowhere else in the Protestant world are the churches as empty as they are in Germany. As compared with the army and the state administrative service and the law, the ministry, as a life-calling, is re- garded as beneath notice. In other words, the Church fails to attract the sons of the so-called better elements in society. The middle classes have become quite indifferent to the subjective, pietistic elements in Christianity, and [49] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL think of the Church only as an agency to keep the masses in order. As one distinguished professor said to Prof. Ely, *'The Church is good for servant-girls." The work- ing-classes are not only indifferent, but violently hostile. They say that the Church has allowed itself to become the handmaid of the political system and therefore an instru- ment of state domination and of dynastic ambition and oppression. The Social Democrats, especially in the great cities, are loud in their opposition. In their minds and lives Christianity has been supplanted by the crassest infidelity and materialism. Their leaders are not Jesus and Paul and Luther and Schleiermacher, but Biichner and Feuerbach and Schopenhauer and Haeckel and other materialists and pessimists. In a word, the German Protestant Church has lost the deep sympathy and affec- tion of the people, and a church without the people is like a body without a soul. It is kept alive, so far as it is alive at all, only artificially by the support and encourage- ment of the Government, but an institution which is not the organ of expression for the inner spiritual life of the people is not really a Christian church. Another consequence of the close alliance of the throne and the altar is that the Church has had to align herself with the orthodox and reactionary forces of society in opposition to the progressive and reforming forces. The Christian religion, by its innermost nature, is a progres- sive and reforming agency. Its greatest names are the names of reformers, men in more or less violent opposi- tion to the spirit of their age — Jesus, Paul, St. Augustine, St. Francis, Wyclif, Savonarola, Luther, Wesley, Chan- ning, Parker, Chalmers. But the German Church has driven out that spirit because of its political entangle- ments. Its main function is no longer to deepen the inner piety of the people or to inspire them with a zeal for social betterment, but to preach resignation, obedi- ence, and submission to the powers that be. The sins which it denounces include not only the old and well known sins which the Church has always denounced, but [50] WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY the new sin of discontent and revolt against the Prussian Government. To the old dogmas which it defends vigor- ously against the criticism of the universities and the scepticism of the Social Democrats it has added the new dogma of obedience to Prussian discipline. Originating in the free, deeply pious, and earnestly reforming soul of the young Luther, the Protestant Church of Germany has of late years become only a conservative organ of the State, using the inherited authority of religious tradition and belief mainly in the interests of public order. And while the Roman Catholic Church, because of its connec- tion with the Roman Papacy, is freer from state domina- tion and more intent on the spiritual side of its func- tion, it, too, for the sake of state endowment, has accepted a large degree of state control and has lost a good deal of the spiritual power it has in America, because of the large part it is continually playing in the politics of the country through the Central, or Clerical, party. But a still more disastrous effect of the alliance of the throne and the altar is the growing insistence on the need for a national German Christianity. By its very nature Christianity is a universal religion. Paul struck its key- note long ago when he said : "There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scyth- ian, bond nor free, but Christ is all and in all." To aban- don the universalism of Christianity would be to abandon the Christian religion altogether. But that is what many German leaders have proposed to do. The national sen- timent has become so intense that the idea of racial equality in Christ's Kingdom is increasingly repugnant. Christianity must be Germanized to suit the taste of the modern German patriot. Some of the most prominent German professors have in late years pointed out a spirit- ual affinity between the fundamental ideas and practices of Mohammedanism and the German nature. Others have repudiated Christianity as a foreign importation, de- plored the fact that the imported religion had dethroned the mythology of the old Germans, and called for the [51I THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL introduction of a religion that would be more in sympathy with the German spirit. The orthodox Church of Ger- many has not repudiated the historical doctrines of the Christian Church, but it does not represent the real senti- ments and aspirations of the people. So far as there is a popular religion in Germany, that is, so far as one com- mon enthusiastic sentiment is operative in the hearts of all, it is inspired by the cult of German nationalism rather than by the pietism of Spener and Francke or the idealism of Schleiermacher and Ritschl. As German nationalism since Bismarck has increasingly found itself in conflict with the sentiment and programme of internationalism, so it has reacted from the universalism of Christianity and come to speak with more and more frequency and em- phasis of the good old German God. And as a last consequence of the alliance between the throne and the altar, the throne has become arrogant and really blasphemous through the domination of the Church and religion. The whole Christian world has been scandalized, during the period of the war, by the Kaiser's claim to the most intimate personal relations with God. Recall his famous speech to the German people : "Remember that you are the chosen people ! The Spirit of the Lord has descended on me because I am the Em- peror of the Germans, I am the instrument of the Almighty. I am his sword, his agent. Woe and death to all those who shall oppose my will ! Woe and death to those who do not believe in my mission ! Woe and death to the cowards ! Let them perish, all the enemies of the German people! God demands their destruction, God who, by my mouth, bids you to do His will." If that speech had been made by some half -crazed fanatic of the Middle Ages, it might have been inspired by some stirring of the religious consciousness. But in the mouth of the Kaiser, a man in touch with every phase of modern life, the master of the most educated people in Modern Europe, it is nothing short of blas- phemy. Such arrogance, such insane boasting, such [52] WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY familiarity with the Almighty, is possible only to a soul that has known nothing inwardly of the spirit of Jesus Christ. Christianity is synonymous with humility, with a sense of one's limitations, with a feeling of dependence on God, with a recognition of the filial relation of all men to God ; but in this speech we hear only of a false tribal God and a false tribal ethics. Through his domi- nation of the Church, the organ of the spiritual life of the people, the Kaiser's natural arrogance has been im- mensely increased. The result has been the building up in his soul of a false tribal religion ; through that religion he has brought his country into conflict with the rest of the world, and by the utter failure of his tribal am- bitions he has shown that there is no exclusively Ger- man God, but only a universal God, and that the path of progress lies, not along tribal and national, but along universal and international lines. It is impossible for us to realize the appalling desolation that must have fallen, in this hour of defeat, upon the spirit of many of the German people. Their confidence in victory has been so great and their hope for the future so high that the sudden realization of their moral and military collapse must be bitter as few human experi- ences have ever been in the history of man. In such hours of sorrow and humiliation the human spirit gener- ally has recourse to religion. Men seek in the ideal world the strength and hope which they cannot find in themselves or their social environment. Religion has always flourished most in the hour of deepest need. Therein, perhaps, lies the greatest hope for the revival in Germany of a more spiritual church and a more in- ward religion. The Church of the immediate past can hardly endure now that its protector, the dynastic State, has vanished. Bitter hardship may be in store in the immediate future for a church which has relied so much on state aid, but in the end the experience is likely to be purifying. The people may turn back from a false tribal [53] THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL religion to the more spiritual religion of their fathers. Great spiritual leaders who have been in eclipse in recent years may be listened to again. The deeper soul of the nation, pent up for the last fifty years under the hard crust of militarism, materialism, and orthodox Marxism, may break through that crust and utter itself again in a genuine piety. Defeat has its values as well as victory, and though the men and women, on whom the sorrow and shame of defeat have fallen most immediately, may never recover a vigorous and hopeful spirit, the younger generation may profit by their experience, and shape its future towards saner and more spiritual ends. Surely that ought to be the hope and desire of their bitterest enemies ! [54] LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS III llllllllllllllllllllll 021 547 196 2 # LIBRAf^Y OF CONGRESS 021 547 196 2