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GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 AN AMERICAN INTERPRETATION 
 
 BY 
 
 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1915 
 
,4 
 1?> 
 
 coptright, 1915, by 
 Chaklks Scribner's Sons 
 
 Published February, 1915 
 
 FEB 25 1915 
 
 ©CI.A391881 
 Oft , 
 
 'K^ 
 
TO MY MOTHER 
 IN DEEPEST GRATITUDE 
 
Acknowledgment is hereby made to the Review of 
 Reviews, the North American Review, and Scribner's 
 Magazine for kind permission to reprint, with 
 alterations, four of the chapters in this volume. 
 
PAGE 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. Germany at Bay 1 
 
 II. The Two Germanys 30 
 
 III. German Militarism and Democracy . . 45 
 
 IV. The Propaganda in America 74 
 
 V. The Kaiser and the War 104 
 
 VI. Imperialism and the German Parties . . 126 
 
 VII. The United States and the Peace Treaty 157 
 
I 
 
 GERMANY AT BAY 
 
 A WONDERFUL quiet, certainty, and 
 determination unto death are character- 
 istic of all Germany to-day, and even 
 with all the sorrow we are undergoing we deeply 
 feel the greatness of these times. God bless 
 our arms!" No other phrase that has crossed 
 the ocean more completely states the German 
 frame of mind when the mobilization was over 
 and the empire could catch its breath and re- 
 alize that by the most sudden, as well as the 
 most violent, of convulsions the Germany and 
 Europe of yesterday had gone forever — that 
 the whole world had changed overnight. 
 
 The writer, a woman of rank and position, 
 had but just parted, dry-eyed, from her husband 
 and sixteen soldier relatives of a family which 
 boasts of having had no civilians among its 
 members since 1700. She had no word of re- 
 gret; only a prayer that she might keep her 
 
2 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 self-control and be found worthy of a crisis 
 which had revealed the entire nation so united 
 and determined as to wipe out in a moment all 
 differences of rank, religion, and party. To de- 
 scribe that hour of self-abnegation and self- 
 sacrifice many a gifted writer and man of affairs 
 has found himself utterly at a loss. The thrill 
 and the uplift born of its whole-souled devotion 
 wrenched the populace loose from the purely 
 personal considerations of life and stirred them 
 with all the enthusiasm which comes from a 
 readiness to die for a common cause. The 
 psychology of the crowd was at its noblest 
 height. Even the foreign spectators caught in 
 the sudden swirl of vast, loosened reservoirs of 
 national feeling found it impossible to observe, 
 save with awe, conviction, and deep emotion, 
 this profoundly impressive transformation of a 
 people. 
 
 To the Germans their cause is just, their con- 
 science clear. No such outburst of lofty en- 
 thusiasm for Kaiser and country would have 
 been possible had there been anywhere as seri- 
 ous doubts as troubled, in England, Charles 
 Trevelyan, Ramsay MacDonald, John Burns, 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 3 
 
 and Lord Morley. As the facts were presented 
 to the German people there seemed to be no 
 question that their war-lord, who had kept the 
 peace for the twenty -six years of his reign, had 
 in this emergency stood for peace until the last 
 moment, moving only when Russian perfidy 
 compelled him to. It was necessary to strike j 
 first, even as a football team seeks to "get the 
 jump*' upon its opponents, for if Russia or 
 France were to deliver a blow while German 
 mobihzation was under way and incomplete, 
 the country would be in the position of an old- 
 time frigate raked by a broadside when "taken 
 aback" and helpless. The public actually trem- 
 bled lest the Kaiser hold off too long, and when 
 he moved he seemed to them of Olympian 
 stature. His language, bombastic as it may 
 have appeared abroad, was pitched to the key- 
 note of the hour; one heard for the first time 
 praise of him as unser lieber, guter Kaiser. He 
 stood for the whole people when he opened the 
 war session of the Reichstag and, with his great 
 sense of dramatic values, called upon its leaders 
 to come forward and place their hands in his — 
 even the Socialists, whom he had dubbed trai- 
 
4 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 tors to the country in a speech at the Krupp 
 works but a few years before. All this at the 
 very moment that battahons in every town and 
 city were marching, singing, to the front and 
 Von Emmich's divisions, without waiting for 
 siege-guns or reservists, were victoriously as- 
 saulting Liege. 
 
 With this profound belief in the righteousness 
 of its cause, the nation went to war joyously 
 exalted, wondering at itself and its power. Its 
 leaders had hoped, they said, that the nation 
 was strong and sound and firmly welded to- 
 gether in all classes by the bands of union forged 
 under the stress of 1870-71. They knew it 
 now to be true. They had not been sure that 
 what is considered a decadent age had not af- 
 fected the rugged virtues; that prosperity, 
 material and scientific success, had not some- 
 what palsied the ability to think in terms of the 
 nation. The wonderful response of the people 
 filled all doubters with joy. Not only was it 
 unnecessary to drive a single conscript to the 
 ranks, but two millions of men who for one 
 reason or another had escaped military service, 
 or had passed beyond it by reason of age, vol- 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 5 
 
 unteered, begging to be sent to the front. It 
 is no wonder that the national motto, '^GoU 
 Mit Uns," was translated by Kaiser and people 
 into that positive aflSrmation of the aid of the 
 Deity which has so offended the world's on- 
 lookers. 
 
 Yet, when the nation gazed abroad in this 
 moment of lofty exaltation and found that 
 Italy, her ally, held back; that Belgium also 
 flung herself into the struggle with absolute de- 
 votion in order to protect her territory; that 
 England joined the enemies to east and west; 
 that Japan, who had learned her military art 
 from Germany, obeyed the orders of England 
 to come to her rescue in the East; that the 
 sentiment of the United States and other neu- 
 tral nations was wholly against her — it was 
 then that a feeling of absolute incredulity gave 
 way to absolute anger. It was the English 
 upon whom the waves of their wrath broke pri- 
 marily. They had cut the cables connecting 
 Germany with the outside world; they it was 
 who spread abroad the false stories that Liege 
 held out until August 17 and that the Germans 
 were guilty of acts of brutality. It was Eng-| 
 
6 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 land who told but half the story in her White 
 Paper. It was England whose abstention from 
 the war Sir Edward Grey had been ready to 
 put up for German bidding until, driven into 
 a corner, he refused to name his final price. 
 
 The English thus appeared before the Ger- 
 man nation as traitorous to its civilization and 
 culture, because its statesmen had so often de- 
 scribed their people as "cousins across the 
 Channel"; because there had existed the warm- 
 est cordiality and co-operation between the sci- 
 entific and learned men of both countries; be- 
 cause they were of kindred racial stock and in 
 their ideals nearer to one another than to France 
 or Spain or to the Slavic power to the east. As 
 the Germans analyzed the situation, their joint 
 type of civilization was threatened with com- 
 plete submergence by the brutal Russian forces 
 which England had opposed at every turn since 
 the Crimean War, against whose aspirations in 
 the Near East the England of Gladstone had 
 set itself like the Rock of Gibraltar; the Russia 
 whose institutions are the exact opposite of 
 those of liberal England; the hands of whose 
 Romanoffs have reeked with the blood not only 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 7 
 
 of its Jews but of all Russians who sought liberty. 
 Whatever may have been the theories of the 
 Bernhardis and the extreme militarists, the Ger- 
 man people as a whole felt such a kinship to the 
 British, with whom their royal family is so closely 
 allied, that it was almost like a stab in the back 
 from a brother when England declared war. 
 
 Did the English, all Germany asked, not 
 comprehend that it was their battle which she 
 was fighting.? To Germany, Austria was well 
 within her rights in sending the ultimatum; its 
 language was no harsher than the circumstances 
 warranted. In moving to avenge the archduke, 
 Austria did no more, as Ambassador von Bern- 
 storff puts it, than the United States would have 
 if emissaries of Huerta had murdered the Vice- 
 President of the United States. Russia should 
 have allowed Austria to punish Servia, not only 
 for the murder at Sarajevo, but for years of open 
 anti-Austrian agitation bent on despoiling her 
 of her provinces; that Russia moved proved to 
 many a German that Russia herself was behind 
 the Servian agitation; that Servia was merely 
 the Czar's cat's-paw. When Russia acted Ger- 
 many was compelled to follow for two reasons: 
 
8 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 her honor as an ally was as much involved as 
 England's was engaged to France by the secret 
 understanding, and she could not permit mobili- 
 zation on her boundary, since her chief hope 
 was to dispose of France before the Russian 
 masses could be drawn up at her frontier. The 
 possibility of war on two frontiers has never 
 been lost sight of in Berlin; there has not been 
 a day since 1880 that the German General Staff 
 has not studied and restudied its plan for de- 
 fending the nation against a simultaneous 
 French and Russian attack; there has not been 
 a day during this period that the German army 
 has not been confident of its ability to de- 
 feat both enemies. But to defeat them and 
 England, too ? It cannot be denied that for 
 the moment even military Germany was stag- 
 gered. 
 
 But only for a moment. Then, with a quick 
 "The more enemies the more honor," the nation 
 pressed on, easily persuading itself that the real 
 underlying issue was not only Russia's position 
 — testified to in the White Paper by Sir Edward 
 Grey-c— that Austrian domination of Servia 
 would be intolerable to her, but Russia's deter- 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 9 
 
 mination to undermine first Austria and then 
 Germany for her own aggrandizement. For a 
 few days the air was full of this cry of Slavic 
 peril, that Germany stood alone against the 
 Huns — as Western culture had once fought to 
 keep the Turks out of Europe — until the ques- 
 tion of Belgian neutrahty thrust this into the 
 background. That some Germans realize that 
 her moral position would be far stronger to-day 
 had she left Belgium untouched is deducible 
 not merely from the chancellor's confession that 
 she had violated a law of nations; it is admitted 
 frankly by a few, like Professor Paul Natorp, 
 of the University of Marburg. Yet even he 
 has convinced himself, like all Germany, that 
 the French would have marched in with the 
 consent of England and of Belgium herself if 
 the Germans had not; they are the more certain 
 of this now that the Germans have found the 
 telltale papers in Brussels showing that the 
 British were plotting with the Belgians what 
 they should do if Belgium were invaded. That 
 French troops and officers were actually cross- 
 ing the boundaries when the Germans were, 
 and that some were already in Liege, Namur, 
 
10 GERMANY ElMBATTLED 
 
 and Antwerp, is believed from one corner of 
 Germany to another. 
 
 But, even if this were to be disproved, the 
 Germans as a whole are behind the chancellor 
 in his belief that to invade Belgium was justi- 
 fied by that direst necessity that knows no law. 
 It was the only way to protect their own unforti- 
 fied Belgian frontier. Why could not the Bel- 
 gians have realized this and spared themselves 
 all that they have suffered, by letting the Ger- 
 mans march quietly through .f* The Kaiser's 
 troops would have disturbed or injured no man; 
 they would have made good any injury done and 
 paid handsomely as they went. For the rest 
 of the world to cry out against what happened 
 as a result of Belgian folly, in the manner that 
 it has, passeth understanding from their point 
 of view. For England to protest seems to Ger- 
 many the height of hypocrisy. England stand- 
 ing for the rights of small nations — the same 
 England that wiped out the Boer republics; 
 that consented shamefully to Russia's crushing 
 out of Persia; that connived at France's swallow- 
 ing of Morocco when the ink on the treaty of 
 Algeciras guaranteeing Moroccan integrity was 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 11 
 
 scarcely dry ! Merely to state the case against 
 "perfidious Albion" was to prove its shameless- 
 ness. 
 
 Hence the Germans have convinced them- 
 selves that England's seizing on Belgian neu- 
 trality as a reason for war was but the hollowest 
 of shams. Everything that is now disclosed 
 but proves in Berlin a long-planned conspiracy 
 to ruin Germany because of her success in the 
 world. It is envy that is at the bottom of it all, 
 a wicked, criminal envy because German ships 
 are filling the seas and German commerce is 
 growing by leaps and bounds and her merchants 
 are capturing the marts of the world hitherto 
 the private property of John Bull. It is all so 
 clear and plain that Germany could not under- 
 stand why the rest of the world could not see 
 it, too. "But wait," she cried, "until the Ger- 
 man side gets out to the rest of the world, then 
 its moral opinion will turn to our aid." Mean- 
 while, the question of Belgian neutrality went 
 into the background like the Slavic peril; the 
 stake was now the preserving of German Kultur 
 (not culture, but civilization) from all the world, 
 if need be. 
 
12 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 II 
 
 German Kultur ! What this means is the 
 riddle of the hour to many who honestly seek 
 to fathom the Teuton point of view. Is there 
 a German "culture" or civilization superior to 
 any other? And is that Kultur typified by 
 autocratic Prussian militarism which slashes 
 lame cobblers and bends the nation to its own 
 imperious will? Is it typified by the Kaiser in 
 his war-lord moods, as when he bade the Ger- 
 man troops departing for China carve their way 
 to Pekin with ferocity? "I have," he said, "to 
 re-establish peace with the sword and take ven- 
 geance in a manner never before seen by the 
 world. . . . The German flag has been insulted 
 and the German Empire treated with contempt. 
 This demands exemplary punishment and ven- 
 geance. ... If you close with the enemy, re- 
 member this: Spare nobody. Make no prison- 
 ers. Use your weapons so that for a thousand 
 years hence no Chinaman will dare look askance 
 at any German. Open the way for civilization 
 once more." 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 13 
 
 Or when he speaks of divine right, preaches 
 the doctrine that might makes right, and de- 
 nounces three milHons of his countrymen as 
 traitors because they wish to reconstitute the 
 nation? Does it mean the Germany of the 
 university professors Hke Treitschke, who de- 
 mand not only that Germany shall have "her 
 place in the sun" but that she shall aggressively 
 fight for it; the professors who dream of over- 
 sea dominion, of making Germany the Rome of 
 the twentieth century, who are so certain of the 
 superiority of what they consider German civi- 
 lization as to be ready to impose it upon all the 
 world? 
 
 Or does this word Kultur stand for that other 
 Germany that all the world has come to love 
 and praise, the Germany of kindliness and 
 friendliness, of learned men to whom tens of 
 thousands of Americans owe a never-ending 
 gratitude; the Germany of poetry and music, 
 with her rare love of nature; the Germany of 
 humanitarian ideals that has led all the world 
 in her efforts to solve social problems, ele- 
 vated civic administration to the rank of a sci- 
 ence and builded the city beautiful, while caring 
 
14 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 for her poor and her aged under laws all advanced 
 nations are copying? 
 
 To Germany herself what her Kultur stands 
 for is the spirit behind both of these divergent 
 Germany s, but not that which produces auto- 
 cratic or militarist excesses; for it signifies the 
 supreme expression of her life as a nation — 
 the youngest of nations. In her brief existence 
 she has made more positive contributions to 
 knowledge and world-advancement than any 
 other nation in the same period. At all times 
 Kultur stands for wonderful discipline not only 
 in the army but in party, church, and state, to- 
 gether with equally marvellous efficiency. To 
 this must be added an idealism amazing in a 
 practical people which worships the expert and 
 has wedded industry to science. On the one 
 hand there is a deep, warm sentimentalism and 
 on the other a union of minute knowledge and 
 of comprehensive grasp of fundamental prin- 
 ciples. Finally, there must not be denied as 
 another component part a growing belief in the 
 necessity and glory of armaments; a demand 
 that the nation be allowed to play a role as a 
 world-power even as Spain and England in their 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 15 
 
 times. Something of a composite like this it is 
 which Germany is defending to-day as her con- 
 tribution to civihzation, as even more worthy of 
 preservation than the precise framework of gov- 
 ernment under which her citizens live; for it 
 men and women are giving freely of all that is 
 most precious to them. 
 
 But as they give they suddenly find them- 
 selves portrayed as barbarians, as savages with- 
 out reverence for the very things that play so 
 deep a part in their lives, and they are aghast. 
 How is it that they can be so misunderstood? 
 Is all the world poisoned against them.^^ Can 
 such frightful lies triumph? They read them 
 on every hand — the crassest falsities, chiefly 
 from English sources, since London is not only 
 the greatest financial exchange but the world's 
 clearing-house for news. They, a united people, 
 learn from the English press that the Kaiser 
 had deliberately ordered every Socialist member 
 of the Reichstag shot; that Socialist mobs were 
 shot down in the streets of Berlin; that the 
 people who rose in patriotic exaltation never 
 equalled in modern times were driven unwill- 
 ingly to the front ! Their Kaiser, beloved by 
 
16 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 great multitudes, is portrayed as a wholesale 
 murderer who plunged all Europe into bloody- 
 war when he could have prevented it; they 
 themselves are pictured as slaves of a military 
 cabal which plans the subjugation of France 
 and England, the destruction of liberalism and 
 the governing of Europe by an intolerable iron 
 rule. They are told abroad that their soldiers 
 are vandals who violate women, mutilate little 
 children, murder in cold blood, and not merely 
 destroy private property but priceless works of 
 art never to be replaced — the common herit- 
 age of mankind. In brief, they are accused of 
 the very things of which they accuse, under 
 oath, the invading Russians who in one East 
 Prussian district alone are charged with three 
 hundred and fifty murders of non-combatant 
 men and women and children. 
 
 The world, they suddenly find, believes any- 
 thing of them — of them who have gone forth 
 to war in the spirit of the crusader, not hirelings, 
 like the British regulars, but a most democratic 
 army of the people, united with a new spirit of 
 brotherliness to their comrades in the ranks from 
 all walks in life, from princes to 'prentices. 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 17 
 
 There are fathers and brothers, yes, grandfa- 
 thers, in every regiment, men of years, position, 
 title, learning, and high standing in every com- 
 pany, drawn together, not for plunder, not by 
 lust of war, but to save their country, and all 
 bound together by a discipline never approached 
 by any other army. And of these it is said that 
 they are like the Sioux Indians! Nothing to 
 Germans could be worse than these slanders 
 save what they themselves tell of the Belgians, 
 of furies in skirts putting out with corkscrews 
 the eyes of helpless German wounded and pour- 
 ing boiling water upon them; of ununiformed 
 citizens shooting out of cellars and from attic 
 windows, and rising treacherously, as at Lou- 
 vain, when led by priests and professors. Noth- 
 ing surprises them more than that any one 
 should look upon the burning of Louvain as any- 
 thing but a just punishment for acts directly 
 contrary to the laws of war. When their own 
 villages have been shot to pieces and burned 
 by Russians without its creating an outcry in 
 America, they cannot see why the burning of 
 Belgian villages, the natural result of shelling 
 troops out of them, should seem anything else 
 
18 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 than an ordinary incident of war, the hell that 
 is war that they, under their Prussian generals, 
 propose to make so terrible a hell by legitimate 
 severity that their enemies will soon submit. 
 
 The fact that the Belgians lied to all the world 
 about Liege, and similar misrepresentations, the 
 Germans are ready to bear with as part of the 
 game. But not the calumnies of their troops, 
 as if they were Bulgarians or Serbs or Greek 
 marauders. That is the last straw, and the head- 
 lines, ''Wir Barhareriy' "Wir Unmenschen," now 
 appearing in the German press over records 
 of British and French prisoners' appreciation of 
 their kindly treatment, testify to the hurt in- 
 flicted. And so we have the German professors 
 spurning their British decorations and academic 
 honors, and the terrible prospect that between 
 these two Teuton nations, which ought to be 
 the best of friends, there will exist at the end of 
 the war, whatever the outcome, a bitterness 
 and a hatred beside which the latent hostility 
 of French and Germans since 1870 will seem 
 mere childish irritation. The Germans simply 
 cannot understand when they hear that Eng- 
 lishmen of German names are changing them 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 19 
 
 because, as in one recorded case, they say that, 
 the Germans have been carrying on war "con-j 
 trary to every dictate of humanity." 
 
 Conscious of their rectitude, clear as to the 
 injury done them, certain of the triumph of 
 their arms, their faces are now turned to the 
 neutrals, but particularly to the great North 
 American republic where dwell so many of 
 German birth. With German love of thorough- 
 ness and system they have formed committees 
 for the purpose of presenting the truth abroad. 
 They have showered every attention upon re- 
 turning Americans in the passionate belief that 
 they will be ambassadors of good will and re- 
 porters of the right. Citizens everywhere are 
 besought for names of friends or relatives in 
 America to whom literature may be sent, in 
 full faith that the United States, so ill treated 
 by Great Britain in 1776, 1812, and during the 
 Civil War, will particularly express its horror at 
 the policy which has sent against their Kultur 
 hordes of black, brown, and yellow troops from 
 Africa, India, and Asia. 
 
m GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 III 
 
 It may, therefore, be about the hardest blow 
 of all when Germany realizes that her represen- 
 tations of the facts as she sees them, and her 
 contentions, have from the first been freely 
 printed in the American press, together with the 
 views of Dernburg, Mtinsterberg, Francke, Von 
 Jagemann, Kuhnemann, Burgess, Sloane, Bid- 
 der, Hexamer, and Ambassador Bernstorff, but 
 that the American public as a whole continues 
 unconvinced. The United States remains firm 
 in its belief that the responsibility for this ter- 
 rible misfortune which has overtaken humanity 
 rests primarily with Austria and next with the 
 Kaiser. "The final help," says the London 
 Times, "is the mighty duty of America." What 
 Germany, in its eagerness for that "final help," 
 does not yet appreciate is that the unfavorable 
 American judgment was based on consideration 
 of the facts, and particularly of those relating 
 to the invasion of Belgium. Our good opinion 
 was forfeited by Germany when the Kaiser re- 
 jected Sir Edward Grey's offers to assure peace, 
 when the "scrap-of -paper" incident occurred. 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 21 
 
 and when the imperial chancellor exalted the 
 law of necessity above the law of nations. 
 
 Berlin must learn that this judgment cannot 
 be altered either by fuller appreciation of that 
 thrilling uprising of the Kaiser's subjects or of 
 their unanimous belief in the justice of their 
 cause or of their readiness to die for it. There 
 are plenty of American men and women who 
 recall the wonderful rallying about Lincoln in 
 1861. "Who that saw it," wrote James Russell 
 Lowell, "will ever forget that enthusiasm of 
 loyalty for the flag, and for what the flag sym- 
 bolized, which twenty-six years ago swept all 
 the country's forces of thought and sentiment, 
 of memory and hope, into the grasp of its over- 
 mastering torrent .f*" In France to-day we are 
 witnessing a less-exploited but similarly moving 
 uprising of the people, actuated by the profound 
 belief that it is the very existence of France 
 which is being fought for as well as the "giving 
 to the whole world liberty to breathe, to think, 
 to progress." But waves of national sentiment, 
 however they may bring tears to the eyes and 
 quicken the heart's beat, prove nothing in them- 
 selves. 
 
22 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 The same is true of the question of the atroci- 
 ties. If the United States did or did not be- 
 lieve all of them, or believed none of them — 
 even if it approved and did not profoundly 
 disapprove the dropping of bombs without 
 warning into defenseless cities, the exacting of 
 ransoms, the holding of unarmed citizens as 
 hostages, t.he burning of cities in revenge for in- 
 dividual treachery — its final opinion would not 
 be affected by the presence or absence of these 
 horrible phases of war. War, it knows, lets 
 loose every evil passion, inflicts every pain and 
 torture known to man. But all of this, as 
 thoughtful Germany must soon come to see, 
 can have nothing whatever to do with the fun- 
 damental moral issues involved, the right and 
 wrong of the struggle, any more than does the 
 question of England's consistency or her atti- 
 tude in the past toward the Boer republics, 
 Persia, and Morocco, or our own "water-cure" 
 torturing in the Philippines. Regret that the 
 German name is at present under a cloud the 
 United States will; but no amount of evidence 
 that these accusations are slanderous will achieve 
 the real purpose of the German propaganda in 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 23 
 
 America — the turning of the United States 
 against the Allies. 
 
 In the South African war American sympa- 
 thies were chiefly with the Boers; in the Man- 
 churian campaign overwhelmingly against Rus- 
 sia. If sentiment to-day favors the Allies, it 
 is plainly not because of any thick-and-thin 
 friendship for England or for the Czar's despotic 
 government. As a matter of fact, had France 
 and England violated Belgian neutrality and 
 entered Germany by her unfortified frontier, 
 American public sentiment would have felt just 
 as outraged by the wrong done by Frenchmen 
 and Englishmen. The truth is that the Ger- 
 man General Staff knew that the easiest road 
 into France lay through Belgium, and they took 
 it. But one may pay too high a price even for 
 the easiest road, and the price paid by Germany 
 was war with Belgium, England, and Japan, 
 and the final forfeiture of public opinion every- 
 where. The laying waste of Belgium, be it a 
 legitimate incident of war or not, has stirred 
 the world to its utmost depths. Americans 
 cannot but believe, as they pour out sympathy 
 and aid to this stricken people, that it was 
 
24 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 wickedly unnecessary, and have, therefore, but 
 restricted patience for German appeals. 
 
 The sober second thought in Germany, of 
 which one finds traces in Professor Natorp's 
 articles, can but reflect ere long upon the infi- 
 nitely stronger position Germany would be in, 
 even were the steps leading to the conflict the 
 same, had it fought a defensive war. Many 
 defeats will probably be necessary to shatter 
 German faith in the divine wisdom of its Gen- 
 eral Staff, whose oJBScers had decided for years 
 past that the best policy was that quick over- 
 whelming of France which so nearly succeeded. 
 The time must come, however, when Germans 
 will wish with all their hearts that by keeping 
 out of Belgium they had saved themselves three 
 or four opponents and thereby held in some 
 degree the sympathy of the United States. 
 The position of the German and Allied armies 
 at this writing shows a truth we had begun to 
 suspect by the close of our Civil War, that well- 
 trained troops behind breastworks are a better 
 means of defense than the best forts. No one 
 can be foimd to believe that if Germany's sol- 
 dier millions had merely lined their own fron- 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 25 
 
 tiers and waged a defensive campaign behind 
 forts, or trenches where there were no forts, 
 France and Russia, fighting alone, could have 
 made headway against her. The horrible losses 
 of the raid into France would have been avoided 
 and the control of the sea would indubitably be 
 hers. There would have been no charges of van- 
 dalism or soldier misconduct to combat and to 
 deplore. Plainly a Bismarck was needed, not 
 only on the diplomatic side, but on the military 
 side as well. Upon the General Staff the blame 
 for this utterly mistaken policy will eventually 
 rest. 
 
 By this it is not meant to imply that even in 
 this supposititious case Americans would have 
 been altogether on the side of Germany. For 
 all our recent imperialistic excursions into Cen- 
 tral and South America and the Philippines, 
 despite our dangerously large navy, the spirit of 
 our people is still as opposed to great military es- 
 tablishments as in the first days of the Republic. 
 As ex-President Eliot has put it: "The reliance 
 on military force as the foundation of true na- 
 tional greatness seems to thinking Americans 
 erroneous, and in the long run degrading to 
 
m GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 a Christian nation." It is probably true, as 
 German speakers contend, that Bernhardi's 
 book no more represents the real heart and 
 mind of Germany than the vaporings of Con- 
 gressman Hobson and the belligerent tracts of 
 the pseudo-*' Lieutenant-General" Homer Lea 
 really reflect the sentiment of the common peo- 
 ple of America. To accept the teachings of 
 books like these is to admit that mankind is 
 well along on its return to the stone age. But 
 every military system produces men who wor- 
 ship war as war, believe it to be the normal 
 state of man, and assert that there is no safety 
 for any people but to make a soldier of every 
 citizen. The German army has them in 
 plenty, and, however democratic it may be in 
 its ranks, it is controlled by a clique of profes- 
 sional soldiers who, standing quite apart from 
 the aspirations of the plain people, have, as 
 now appears, made great strides toward domi- 
 nating the nobler Germany and giving to its 
 foreign policy an aggressive jingo note. Victory 
 now would enormously strengthen the hands of 
 the Treitschkes and Bernhardis, with whom the 
 Crown Prince seems in such complete sympathy. 
 
GERMANY AT BAY 27 
 
 No one can confute this merely by asserting 
 that this is not a war of the Kaiser but of the 
 whole German people, or by pointing out that 
 in the haste to serve the Fatherland the two 
 Germanys are now as one. In war-time there 
 is always the demand that all differences of 
 opinion be sunk and consciences stifled. 
 
 No true friend of Germany in the United 
 States can wish for her any success that will 
 convince the masses of her people that true na- 
 tional greatness depends solely on military 
 power. To do so means positive infidehty to 
 our own institutions — and to humanity. If 
 there are those who preach this doctrine that 
 true national worth is measured by the relative 
 perfection of a military machine and the num- 
 ber of battleships, they sojourn among us but 
 are not of us. They are ignorant as to a chief 
 teaching of the Republic; they are grossly un- 
 true to the Germans of '48 who fled to us when 
 the Prussian mihtarists blew to pieces that noble 
 uprising and ended that brave if hopeless de- 
 mand for true democracy. Whether the Ger- 
 mans, bUnded by the Sturm und Drang they are 
 now passing through, can perceive it or not. 
 
28 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 German victory would spell the strengthening 
 of absolutism everywhere and of its bond-servant 
 militarism. It would mean the subordination 
 of the nobler Germany to the reactionary. It 
 would mean not a Germany to be beloved and 
 honored of all thinking men, but a Germany to 
 be feared and dreaded, with all liberal tenden- 
 cies crushed within her. Her chief aspiration 
 would then, perhaps, be fresh territories to con- 
 quer and certainly more and more sacrifices for 
 the military machine. Against this possibility 
 Americans must protest the louder the more 
 they are indebted to Germany, the more they 
 admire her, the more they pity her, the greater 
 the anguish they feel that the very existence of 
 this nation of Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, 
 and all the rest of its really great men has been 
 recklessly staked in a war utterly unnecessary, 
 about whose real causes no man is clear. The 
 more he loves Germany the more the real Ameri- 
 can must pray that she be saved from the dan- 
 gerous forces within her which are threatening 
 to overwhelm what is best in her. She must be 
 shown that what is going on to-day is a denial 
 of Christianity and nothing else. Her splen- 
 
GERMANY AT BAY £9 
 
 did abilities, her powers of organization, her 
 sentiment, her ideaHsm, the world needs for the 
 prevention of wars and not for the deification 
 of the war spirit. 
 
 Americans who believe in self-government 
 and democracy can take but one stand against 
 absolutism and arbitrary power. They trust 
 that as a result of this war thrones will every- 
 where come crashing to the ground. In Ger- 
 many we must hope for a reawakening of the 
 spirit of 1848 which will recognize at least 
 wherein lies the great power of the United States 
 in this hour. It rests not in the number of our 
 battleships nor in the size of our army, but in 
 our moral power; in the vigor of our demo- 
 cratic institutions, in the fact that this country 
 loves justice, truth, and right; that the judg- 
 ments of its common people are, in the long run, 
 profoundly wise; that that judgment to-day is 
 swayed neither by entangling alliances, nor by 
 the lust of conquest, nor by the blasphemous 
 doctrine that God is on the side of the largest 
 battalions. If America is to-day, in this world 
 crisis, the court of last instance, it is judging 
 honestly on the facts and the facts alone. 
 
II 
 
 THE TWO GERMANYS 
 
 WHAT attitude conscientious German- 
 Americans should take toward the 
 war of nations was from the first a 
 cause of no end of heart-break. For one thing, 
 there was no Carl Schurz to lead the way in 
 this emergency by one of those clear-cut ethical 
 analyses with which he did so much to sim- 
 plify and to clarify diflScult political problems 
 for our countrymen of German birth or par- 
 entage, as well as for native Americans, plenty 
 of whom, for one reason or another, find them- 
 selves in debt to German learning or German 
 kindliness. Should they imitate the bulk of the 
 German-American multitudes who are shout- 
 ing, "Germany, right or wrong!" and waive 
 all effort to place the blame by some such con- 
 science salve as the phrase, "The Kaiser has 
 sources of information not open to the public, 
 and knew he had to strike or be overwhelmed" ? 
 
 30 
 
THE TWO GERMANYS 31 
 
 There are plenty of other reasons given in 
 defense of the Kaiser, as we have seen. He is a 
 new St. George slaying the Slavic dragon. He 
 himself — so it is solemnly alleged — is respon- 
 sible for those extraordinary conquests on the 
 seas and in the marts of the world which have 
 aroused British jealousy, and he must be trusted 
 to know how to protect what he has created, 
 and how to insure still greater conquests of 
 trade. Is he not the true protector of Ger- 
 many's faith in herself, of her intellectual as- 
 pirations, and of the superb idealism of his peo- 
 ple? Is it not patent that every man's hand 
 has been raised against Germany because, as 
 the Kaiser puts it, God has been with her — she 
 has prospered exceedingly and the wicked now 
 rejoice that evil days have come upon her? 
 And should not German-Americans rally to her 
 support even though they are loyal to the United 
 States, even though her diplomacy has been at 
 fault — even if the mistake in attacking Bel- 
 gium was a terrible one? Right or wrong, 
 should not one stand up for the Fatherland at 
 this distance, just as the masses are called upon 
 to in every country when it plunges into war? 
 
32 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 What intensifies the diflSculty of the thought- 
 ful German-American is that there are those 
 two Germanys to whose blending are due her 
 Kultur and the animating spirit of the nation. 
 However much some may deny, in view of the 
 attitude of the German professors and the sub- 
 mission to the war-craze of the Social-Demo- 
 crats, that there are two Germanys, they exist 
 none the less, even though temporarily welded 
 together by the war, and they will be in evi- 
 dence whatever the outcome. In a recent Ger- 
 man gathering in New York there was but one 
 voice of indignation at the aspersions upon 
 Germany and her motives; suddenly in a lull 
 a voice was heard to say: "But when it's all 
 over we must drive out our Junker'' That 
 one word stands for the reactionary forces in 
 the empire, for those who believe in the divine 
 right of rulers, in the mailed fist, in government 
 by aristocracy, in might as against right, and 
 have taught the doctrine that peace can only 
 be assured if all the nations be armed to the 
 teeth. Its adherents are those who see in the 
 Waffenrock a garment before which the public 
 must bow. They uphold the officers who run 
 
THE TWO GERMANYS 33 
 
 civilians through at some fancied insult, and 
 applaud those wearers of the uniform who re- 
 sort to the duel, long since outlawed by the en- 
 lightened sentiment of the world. The Junker 
 and their allies among the privileged are the 
 Germans who intrench in power the ennobled 
 and enriched classes; who are without trust in 
 the people and are utterly opposed to the ex- 
 tension of democracy, relying for aid upon a 
 subservient bureaucracy. It is they who de- 
 mand protective tariffs, who place such diffi- 
 culties in the way of free importation of food as 
 to make it practically impossible for thousands 
 upon thousands of Germans to taste any meat 
 save horseflesh. They are the all-powerful sup- 
 porters of the Prussian Government in its re- 
 fusal to remove the inequalities among voters 
 within its electorate — against which one hun- 
 dred thousand Prussians protested two years 
 ago on a single day — for they are in power by 
 reason of those inequalities. 
 
 Incidentally they are of the type that gives 
 so much offense to the rest of the world. They 
 are arrogant and supercilious, and frankly with- 
 out faith in anything save the power of the 
 
34 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 sword. It is they who have dictated the for- 
 eign pohcy which has made friends of prac- 
 tically nobody. It is they who, under Bis- 
 marck's leadership, originally entered in 1882 
 the game of taking the lands of backward races, 
 in which all their neighbors and we ourselves 
 have indulged. It is they who give the utterly 
 false impression that all Germany has been 
 bent on conquering where it could. It is they 
 who make a large part of the world forget that 
 the Germans are among the most lovable, use- 
 ful, and enhghtened of peoples; that they are 
 bound to us Americans by ties that ought to 
 be indissoluble. Have they not enriched our 
 blood .f^ Did they not come to us by the hun- 
 dred thousand, fleeing from home because of a 
 noble ideahsm which they transferred to our 
 country, pledging their faith with their blood 
 upon our battle-fields of civil strife — but always 
 on the side of the Union and human liberty.'^ 
 Surely no German-American who really believes 
 in republican institutions and popular govern- 
 ment can uphold this imperialistic Germany. 
 
 There is a Germany other than that of the 
 Junker, totally different, infinitely nobler. It is 
 
THE TWO GERMANYS 35 
 
 the Germany of great souls, with its thinkers, its 
 teachers, its scientists, its civic administrators, 
 its poets, its glorious musicians, its philosophers, 
 and its ideahsts. From them hosts of our teach- 
 ers, our professional men without number, and 
 others in every rank of life have drawn their 
 most cherished inspirations. To her we owe in 
 considerable measure our university develop- 
 ment; from her came in large degree the impetus 
 toward good civic government which has been 
 one of the glories of our American progress in 
 the last two decades. From this Germany 
 Lloyd George has plagiarized those plans for 
 the improvement of the welfare of the masses 
 which have made him at once the best-beloved 
 and best-hated man in Great Britain. 
 
 In the civic care of her own this Germany has 
 led the world, with all to do her reverence. She 
 has known best how to build the city beauti- 
 ful, and made good and progressive government 
 the birthright of all her urban dwellers. In no 
 other nation hasJ science in the same degree be- 
 come the partner of commerce and of industry. 
 Nowhere else has there been a keener intellectual 
 freedom among those whose lives are dedicated 
 
36 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 to the pursuit of truth, or to the instruction of 
 the young. Nowhere has there been a greater 
 reverence for the aristocracy of intellect, or as 
 generous a recognition of its achievements. 
 To sit at the feet of its inspired teachers, men 
 and women have come from all quarters of the 
 globe, knowing that in a hundred fields this 
 Germany leads the world. 
 
 And it is this Germany which to-day lies 
 prostrate before us. It is this Germany which 
 is being slaughtered, whatever the reason or 
 the excuse for the war. On behalf of this Ger- 
 many any really enlightened ruler must have 
 stood for peace against the world, no matter 
 who might be mobilizing, or where — at least 
 until attacked, and her soil clearly invaded. 
 To the support of this kingdom of the soul the 
 whole intellectual world would have risen — it 
 did in "England — had the Kaiser but cried out 
 its need and asked for allies to defend, and not 
 to break, the peace. For it any one who real- 
 ized its moral grandeur and worth ought to have 
 been willing to abdicate rather than to plunge 
 it into the abyss, the hell of war. 
 
 But there it lies to be ravaged by its defenders 
 
THE TWO GERMANYS 37 
 
 and its enemies at will. For it there can be no 
 victory, whoever wins. Let there be no mis- 
 take about that, whatever one hears about the 
 glorious courage of her soldiers, and their pos- 
 sible conquests. It is not only the laws which 
 are silent between arms; all intellectual and spir- 
 itual activities cease when men's sole thoughts 
 are to kill, to destroy, to immolate, to make a 
 mockery of Christianity. A whole generation 
 is being wiped out; the flower of the land be- 
 tween the ages of nineteen and twenty -four is to 
 be sacrificed by a despotic ruler's decision; per- 
 haps another Goethe, a Schumann, a Helm- 
 holtz, are to be cut off in their youth; all the 
 talents these boys possess are certain to go for 
 naught. Those who survive are to be brutal- 
 ized by the most frightful spectacle of human 
 carnage the world has ever seen — by a sudden 
 reversion to barbarism. If the troops of the 
 Kaiser prove to be the better drilled and led 
 so as to kill the greater number of their fellow 
 human beings, intellectual Germany will not 
 profit but will suffer thereby. 
 
 It is not merely that her spiritual growth has 
 been checked, and that the pursuit of knowledge 
 
38 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 IS at an end. A terrible blow has been struck 
 at Germany as the seat of wisdom. Interna- 
 tional bonds of infinite worth have been sun- 
 dered not to be reunited for decades to come; 
 the Germany of calm, scientific reasoning has 
 been submerged by the mad rush into a war in 
 which the Kaiser has staked the empire itself, 
 as well as every achievement of the nation- 
 builders of 1870, and of those who have erected 
 the great commercial edifice which has been 
 the wonder of the world. If there have been 
 envy and jealousy among the other nations, 
 will not these feelings give way to helpless rage, 
 to permanent enmity, if the greatest of military 
 machines should triumph? Will not there be 
 another Napoleon only a shade less dangerous 
 than the overlord of a century ago, to inspire 
 distrust and to court another Waterloo .^^ And 
 if Germany is conquered and lies prostrate in 
 sackcloth and ashes, what endless humiliation 
 will be hers ! What dreams of revenge upon 
 all the world may not then fill the minds of 
 those who, in such a spirit of exaltation, set out 
 to humble their sister nations to East and West ? 
 Is it not certain that, whatever the outcome. 
 
THE TWO GERMANYS 39 
 
 Germany will for decades be among the most 
 hated of nations? Worst of all, every reac- 
 tionary element in the German Empire, every 
 privileged class, every believer in the divine right 
 of the few who have obtained power, will profit. 
 Here is precisely where a chief wickedness of 
 the war lies. More than four millions of Ger- 
 man citizens are afiihated with the Social- 
 Democratic party. These "traitors" now have 
 been forced into the ranks, but the evils against 
 which they protested bulk as large to them, 
 their devotion to their cause is the same. 
 They have fought autocracy at every turn, 
 only to be bound and dehvered now by the old 
 snares, the old teachings that one's country 
 must be upheld in war-time; that it is proper | ; 
 to commit murder if one but murders by whole- 
 sale — teachings that are to-day doing their 
 antichristian work in England, France, Rus- 
 sia, and Austria as well. It is the Junker, the 
 grasping landlords, the insolent tariff barons, a 
 bigoted Catholic clergy as in Bavaria, and the 
 military and the aristocratic castes who do 
 more to recruit the Socialist party than all their 
 own leaders combined. Whether one be oneself 
 
40 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 a Socialist or not, for their democratic striv- 
 ings America must have complete sympathy. 
 What have they to gain by this war save the 
 privilege of additional military service if Ger- 
 many wins, and greater and greater tax bur- 
 dens ? 
 
 For them the war spells so obviously the 
 checking of their cause as to make many won- 
 der if this foreseeable fact was not one of the 
 motives of those who welcomed it and brought 
 it on. Let no one be deceived by the super- 
 ficial assertion that as Germany rose to imperial 
 riches and greatness after the war of 1870-71 
 so she will rise still further as a result of this 
 one. The earlier struggle was but child's play 
 compared with this, while there were economic 
 forces at work which, together with the final 
 abolition of customs and trade barriers between 
 the states of the empire, accounted for that 
 great growth after 1871, but cannot come to 
 the rescue now. A foreign war — how often 
 has it not come to the aid of endangered forces 
 of privilege even when not deliberately sought? 
 How often has it not weakened and checked 
 the onslaughts of liberalism.'* 
 
THE TWO GERMANYS 41 
 
 Will it long avail to tell the dissenting Ger- 
 mans that the Slavic peril must be combated; 
 that in this world-war Destiny speaks and that 
 it had to come sooner or later? Doctor Lieb- 
 knecht's daring revolt in the Reichstag seems 
 to indicate that it will not. Are they not inevi- 
 tably to count the cost when the slaughter is 
 over? Will they not more than ever cling to 
 the party of "treason" which dictates that such 
 things shall not be? Will they not turn to 
 any one who teaches that it shall be taken out 
 of the hands of one man or a group of men to 
 say whether a nation shall return to barbarism 
 and slay the best that is in it? If they do not, 
 then will the obsession of this frightful struggle 
 have taken a deeper hold than can be believed 
 to-day. Surely the German masses must be 
 utterly blinded if they do not ask themselves 
 more than ever whether it is because of a gov- 
 ernment by the few that such national catas- 
 trophes are possible; whether it is not in spite 
 of such autocratic government, however benev- 
 olent and however efficient along certain civic 
 and military lines it may be, that the liberal, 
 the cultured Germany of to-day is what it is. 
 
42 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 What might it not be if its intellectual freedom 
 were to be typical of the freedom of the masses ? 
 How much greater might not be the spiritual 
 kingdom which it has built for itself under these 
 conditions? How much happier would be the 
 masses of the people ! 
 
 The masses of the Kaiser's empire ! To them 
 surely the sympathy of the world must go out 
 as to the poor Belgians who have died before 
 the invaders without knowing why, realizing 
 only that a hell of shot and shell had burst 
 without warning upon them as lightning from 
 the sky. On the heads of the German masses 
 lies not the blood-guilt. They come from smil- 
 ing homes, from the castled hills of Thuringia, 
 the vine-clad banks of the Rhine, the plains of 
 Prussia, the poppied fields of Bavaria. They 
 and their kind have been rising steadily against 
 fearful odds, helped on by favorable social 
 legislation, held back by the heavy taxes im- 
 posed by the military Moloch, and by their 
 three years of army service; hampered in the 
 cities by grinding poverty and checked every- 
 where by iron castes. Their villages have just 
 begun to grow, to give signs of a development 
 
THE TWO GERMANYS 43 
 
 corresponding to that of the cities; to the peas- 
 ants have come at least the harbingers of social 
 justice; something of the prosperity of the na- 
 tion was beginning to be theirs. But now the 
 mother of every able-bodied son must know her 
 boy is upon the firing-line to destroy the sons 
 of some other mother — because the "Triple" 
 Alliance demanded it. For these solid peasants, 
 the backbone of the country, war can bring 
 nothing save woe and debt. 
 *^For a German- American whose heart goes 
 back to the country that gave him or his fathers 
 birth, there should be no difficulty in deciding 
 where his sympathies should lie. Sorrow as he 
 must for the German masses, if he places reason 
 above emotion and sympathy, he can but with- 
 hold his support from the Kaiser who made no 
 better than a dicer's oath the solemn promise 
 of the empire to respect the neutrality of Bel- 
 gium. If he has owed anything to the great 
 minds of Germany, her men of peace, of knowl- 
 edge, science, and art, let him now pay the 
 debt of being true to their ideals, however far 
 some groups of them may be drifting from their 
 anchorages, deluded by false visions of glory 
 
44 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 and of what constitutes genuine national no- 
 bility. He might well remember that Goethe 
 himseK faced a German army, when it had 
 been beaten by ragged French republicans, to 
 assure it that then and there a new epoch had 
 begun. Another new epoch has begun for 
 Germany; the fates have grievous days in 
 store for her. However difficult it may be, the 
 German-American must think out for himself 
 what is going to be best for Germany in the 
 long run, and ask whether victory by force of 
 arms would not injure the ideal he holds for the 
 Fatherland far more than would a chastening 
 defeat. If he does this conscientiously from 
 the American and the republican view-point, 
 there should be but one answer. 
 
Ill 
 
 GERMAN MILITARISM AND 
 DEMOCRACY 
 
 NINETY-THREE German savants who 
 pledged their honor and reputation to 
 the truth of their statements have re- 
 cently declared that German militarism is one 
 and indivisible with German culture. "With- 
 out it," they said, "our culture would long since 
 have been wiped off the earth." From many 
 other German sources come denials that Ger- 
 many's mihtarism is a menace to the peace of 
 Europe or to anybody else. It is defended, 
 moreover, not only as a cultural but as a demo- 
 cratic institution. Germans are to-day thank- 
 ing God for their militarism, on the ground that 
 but for it Napoleon would never have been 
 humbled and the German Empire would never 
 have come to pass; that to its extent and thor- 
 oughness alone Germany owes her safety at 
 
 45 
 
46 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 this hour, when she is beset by the troops of 
 nearly half the world, but has thus far carried 
 on the war almost entirely on other people's 
 soil. It is therefore worth while for Ameri- 
 cans to examine this German institution care- 
 fully, particularly as we are already being told 
 by certain soothsayers that the war convicts 
 England of folly in not having resorted to uni- 
 versal conscription, and places upon us the duty 
 of still greater military burdens, since by some 
 occult reasoning it is apparent to them that if 
 Germany wins we are to be the next victims 
 of her aggrandizing ambition. 
 
 Like the nation itself, the German army is 
 curiously two-sided, for it is both a democracy 
 and an autocracy, but with the autocracy on 
 top. It is a democracy because within its regi- 
 ments are men of every rank and caste, of every 
 grade of learning and every degree of poverty 
 and wealth. It is democratic because it is com- 
 pulsory and because it spares none. No amount 
 of " pull " or power can free a German from his 
 year or more of service; if he escapes, it is be- 
 cause the army's draft for the year when he 
 becomes liable for service is so large that all 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 47 
 
 cannot be cared for in the existing organizations, 
 or because some physical disability insures his 
 exemption. Thus, when the call to arms came 
 on the 4th of August it was literally an uprising 
 of the people. The great wave of emotion which 
 exalted the whole nation gained its impetus be- 
 cause men of every class went forth, singing, to 
 die. Barriers of all kinds were levelled; in the 
 enthusiasm of that tremendous hour, caste and 
 rank were, for the moment, forgotten. The en- 
 tire citizenship was drawn together by the lev- 
 elling influence of devotion to a single cause. 
 For the moment all Germany was a democracy, 
 and democratic were the forces which stormed 
 Liege, and swept like irresistible gray-green 
 waves of the sea through Brussels, until they 
 were nearly in sight of the defenses of Paris. 
 
 In the trenches to-day lie side by side, as 
 common soldiers or non-commissioned officers, 
 men who have made their mark in the field of 
 learning, or science, or business, or the skilled 
 professions. Some reserve regiments would seem 
 to be a cross-section of the population. One 
 of its lieutenants may be of humble origin, a 
 minor official, let us say, in the Dresdner Bank; 
 
48 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 serving with him may be a reserve lieutenant 
 who drafted last year one of the most important 
 bills ever laid before the Reichstag. A reserve 
 non-commissioned officer who reports to them 
 may be a survivor of the twenty-six Socialist 
 deputies to the Reichstag who found the call of 
 conventional patriotism far more compelling 
 than the peace principles of their party. A 
 lieutenant next to them may bear the plebeian 
 name of Wilhelm Muller, yet be one of the 
 ablest junior officials of the Colonial Office, for 
 the moment bedfellow with a police officer of 
 Berlin who has exchanged the pursuit of crim- 
 inals for the pursuit of the French. Next in 
 line may be a university professor of distinction, 
 a painter for whom great things are prophesied, 
 a musician of note, and with them may be serv- 
 ing apprentices, laborers, street-cleaners, con- 
 ductors, hod-carriers — men from every humble 
 and honorable walk in life. It is reported that 
 the Kaiser recently met a soldier of the Landwehr 
 driving a lot of hogs, whose presence on the road 
 stopped the royal motor. To the Kaiser's de- 
 light, when he asked the spectacled herdsman 
 whether he was a farmer in time of peace, he 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 49 
 
 answered: "No, your Majesty, I am a professor 
 in the University of Tubingen." 
 
 There is similarly no discrimination among 
 regiments when war is on; as far as this the 
 General Staff's democracy extends. Whatever 
 the prestige of a regiment in peace times, 
 whether it be the Garde du Corps, the crack 
 cavalry regiment, or the Death's Head Hussars, 
 until lately commanded by the Crown Prince, 
 or one of the Imperial Infantry Guards, it meets 
 with no other consideration than that of the 
 most plebeian infantry regiment when the fight- 
 ing is under way. It makes no difference if 
 every officer in it is of ancient and noble hneage. 
 The Guards are reported to have been among the 
 heaviest losers in the present war, precisely as 
 at St. Privat in 1870, when five battalions lost 
 every officer, and were fighting under their ser- 
 geants when the day was won. It is just the 
 same with the Kaiser's younger sons; they have 
 gone into the actual welter of battle exactly 
 as if offspring of the humblest Westphalian 
 peasant, Prince Joachim being wounded by 
 shrapnel and Prince Oscar collapsing from ex- 
 haustion and heart weakness after a charge at 
 
50 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 the head of his regiment against Turcos, whose 
 bullets laid low most of his regimental officers. 
 The Crown Prince may be safe by reason of 
 his being the nominal commander of an army, 
 but his brothers are alive to-day only by the 
 fortunes of war. Not unnaturally the German 
 press has drawn biting contrasts between the 
 sons of the Kaiser and the Prince of Wales, who, 
 it was officially announced in England, was at 
 twenty not sufficiently trained as a soldier to 
 go to the front until three and a half months 
 of war had passed. That the privilege of dying 
 as the German General Staff wills belongs to 
 princes as much as to anybody else is attested 
 by the death of Lieutenant-General Frederick 
 Prince of Saxe-Meiningen, a brother-in-law of 
 the Kaiser's sister, and of other notables. 
 
 But the brief for the democracy of the Ger- 
 man army does not end here. It enforces, so 
 its adherents claim, a fine standard of personal 
 conduct, of physical vigor, and of loyalty to 
 King and country throughout the nation. The 
 army takes the humblest conscript, however 
 ignorant and lacking in self-respect, and turns 
 him out a decent, healthy citizen with a fine 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 51 
 
 physique, excellent carriage, inured to heavy 
 burdens, long marches, and absolute obedience. 
 If he is a dull clodhopper from a Polish province, 
 unable to speak German, the recruit is taught 
 his King's language and how to write it; he 
 learns, as Kipling puts it, to "wash behind his 
 ears," how to eat, how to walk, how to keep 
 himself scrupulously neat, and how to think for 
 himself. 
 
 The great lesson of subordination to au- 
 thority is thus learned, and in many cases self- 
 restraint, as a result of methods which are 
 applied just as rigorously to the son of a million- 
 aire or of an aristocrat. The natural German 
 love of outdoors and of exercise in the open is 
 intensified by service with the colors; a genuine 
 comradeship with men in all walks of life springs 
 up, and with it comes the ability to feel as a 
 German, to think in terms of the nation, whose 
 patriotic songs one and all sing as they march, 
 for singing is a wise requirement of the German 
 military training. Certainly, as the English 
 military reports have so generously attested, 
 this training teaches men to face certain death 
 for the Fatherland with a devotion never sur- 
 
52 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 passed by Occidentals and equalling the stoical 
 and fatalistic pursuance of death by Orientals. 
 Again, the wonderful thoroughness of the mili- 
 tary machine leaves its impress upon all who 
 are for a time of its cogs, and to it is attributed 
 some of that unequalled efficiency of the Ger- 
 mans to which the nation owes its extraordinary 
 national rise and prosperity. The army is, in 
 other words, regarded as a vital part of the 
 great German system of education. 
 
 If this were all, to be said of German mili- 
 tarism, its case would be, perhaps, won. Eng- 
 land and the United States might then be 
 tempted to add a similar course to their 
 educational system. But there is the other 
 side. 
 
 It is hard to conceive of a closer corporation 
 or a more autocratic body than the German 
 General Staff; it is the army to which it gives 
 the dominating note. It is a group of aggres- 
 sive, hard-working, exceptionally able officers, 
 envied by soldiers all over the world because 
 the nation does as they tell it. In 1913, when 
 they demanded one hundred and forty thousand 
 more men, the war minister acted as their spokes- 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 53 
 
 man, and the Reichstag hardly questioned; the 
 bulk of the Socialists, foreshadowing their deser- 
 tion of their peace principles, acquiesced by a 
 cowardly approval or dodged by a refusal to 
 vote. For the first time, after this vote the tax- 
 gatherer knocked at German doors not to take 
 a share of the income, but some of the citizens' 
 capital, and no one protested. To question 
 the General Staff would be like questioning the 
 Deity, a fact which explains why, the General 
 Staff having declared that it was essential to 
 invade Belgium, nobody in all Germany doubts 
 that decision. One may start controversies 
 over sacred theology in the Kaiser's domains, 
 but not one as to the all-embracing wisdom of 
 the General Staff, for on that there have never 
 been two opinions since 1866 up to the time of 
 this writing. When the deadly forty-two-centi- 
 metre guns were planned, the Grosser General- 
 stab asked the Reichstag for a large appropria- 
 tion and obtained it without disclosing in any 
 degree the purpose for which it was asked. It 
 was enough that the war minister declared 
 the Generalstdb must have it for a purpose too 
 secret and too important to be intrusted to 
 
54 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 the Reichstag committee on army estimates or 
 to any but the inner ring of the army. 
 
 It is that inner ring which settles the fate of 
 an officer after he has reached colonel's rank. 
 Let one be overslaughed and he resigns at once. 
 Let him blunder in the manoeuvres and his 
 *' papers" go forward promptly; the General 
 Staff sees to that. Physical efficiency is in- 
 sisted upon as well as mental. An officer may 
 be as dissipated as he pleases but^he must be 
 on hand with a clear head for the five-o'clock 
 spring and summer march-out of his regiment. 
 His habits and customs may be deserving of 
 all sorts of censure, but if he studies diligently, 
 passes his examinations well, has good efficiency 
 reports, and is altogether ein schneidiger Offizier 
 his superiors will say nothing. There is no age 
 limit as in our army, as is evidenced by the 
 prevalence of men approaching seventy in high 
 positions to-day. Thus, Generals von Kluck, 
 von Hansen, and von Billow are sixty-eight; 
 Generals von Moltke and von Emmich, the 
 latter the capturer of Liege, are sixty-six; and 
 Field-Marshal von Hindenburg is sixty-seven. 
 But to hold their positions men like these must 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 55 
 
 be vigorous physically and mentally, agreeable 
 to the General Staff, and absolute upholders of 
 the existing military traditions and order. 
 
 By this we do not mean that each general 
 must be a follower of Bernhardi. Many of the 
 German generals probably never saw his book 
 nor even heard of it. But they must subscribe 
 fervently to the overbearing pretensions of the 
 military clique, to the autocratic attitude of the 
 army toward the civilian and the nation. They 
 must carry themselves as members of an exalted 
 caste whose adoration of their uniform borders 
 on pagan worship. Take the case of Colo- 
 nel von Renter, who commanded the Ninety- 
 ninth Infantry, stationed at Zabern, in Alsace, 
 and was acquitted in January of last year (1914) 
 of the charges of illegal assumption of the ex- 
 ecutive power, illegal imprisonment of civilians, 
 and the invasion of private houses in order to 
 make arrests. This was at the time when his 
 young oflScers, whom one could hardly accuse of 
 being democratic in spirit, were sabring or per- 
 secuting the civilians, who were driven almost 
 to revolt by the overbearing arrogance of the 
 military. Colonel von Renter himself openly 
 
56 CtEr:\l\xy embattled 
 
 and aggressively stated on his trial that if 
 matters had gone any farther he would have 
 turned his machine-guns, which stood ready in 
 the courtyard of the barracks, on the populace. 
 ''Blood may flow," he had threatened at the 
 crucial moment, ''for we are protecting the 
 prestige and the honor of the whole army and 
 the ^avelv shaken authoritv of the govern- 
 ment."' ''I was convinced that om- govern- 
 ment was allowing its reins to drag on the 
 ground,"" he told the court, and so, iu the name 
 of autocracy, he assured the pubhc prosecutor 
 that "jurisprudence ends here," and declared 
 martial law. 
 
 A court of high officers sustained Colonel von 
 Renter and his subordinates on the ground that 
 a decree issued by the King of Prussia in 1820 
 — not a law — gave the mihtarj' the right to 
 inter^-ene, without waiting for a request from 
 civil authoritv, if thev deemed the time had 
 come to act. More than that, the army ex- 
 pressly upheld the arrogant acts of the officers, 
 for whom the judge-advocate never asked more 
 than a week's or three days' imprisonment as 
 punishment I Colonel von Reuter is reported 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 O i 
 
 to have won the Iron Cross; and the young 
 officer who sabred the lame cobbler of Zabern 
 is also at the front, but not, let us trust, in the 
 name of democracy. In defending Colonel von 
 Renter, the minister of war. General von Fal- 
 kenhayn, who has been acting as chief of staff 
 during the recent temporan^ illness of General 
 von Moltke, declared that, while the colonel 
 might have exceeded his authority at times, 
 his acts, nevertheless, saved his officers from the 
 necessity of running their swords through the 
 insulting ci\'iHans m order to protect the honor 
 of the "Kaiser's Coat." This coat — hardly a 
 democratic garment — thus ine^^tably recalls 
 Gessler's hat; the General Staff means that 
 there shall be no \^tal difference between the 
 deference asked of Wilhehn Tell and that which 
 the German ci^^ihan owes to the "gay coat" of 
 the mihtaiy. Officers have frequently been ap- 
 plauded and acquitted, or at most imprisoned 
 in a fortress for a few weeks, for stabbing ci\'il- 
 ians or kiUing them in duels that are against 
 the law but are often forced upon officers by 
 decrees of the regimental courts of honor, whose 
 ideals of conduct are direct inheritances from 
 
58 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 the days of Frederick the Great. If the full 
 story of these courts of honor could be written, 
 it would astound people everywhere. 
 
 In brief, the army is a narrow caste with pro- 
 fessional ideals of a bygone time, scrupulously 
 maintained in the face of modern progress by 
 the ruling clique. From its highest officers, 
 its General Staff, its Crown Prince, as well as 
 its Kaiser, the army takes its tone as a bulwark 
 of the privileged classes, to whom anything that 
 smacks of democracy is anathema. It is the 
 chief pillar of the great landlords, the Junker, 
 and the aristocrats, as it is ' of the throne. 
 When the Reichstag passed a vote of censure 
 on the government because of the Zabem affair, 
 an almost unheard-of thing, the government 
 simply ignored the vote. Doubtless the im- 
 perial chancellor and General von Falkenhayn, 
 the censured ministers, smile to-day if they 
 think of this incident, and reflect how com- 
 pletely the war has placed the Reichstag, the 
 Social-Democrats, and all the rest of the civil- 
 ians in their power. There being no responsible 
 ministry to fall in Germany, the fate of the na-* 
 tion has rested — less than a year after their 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 59 
 
 censure by the national parliament — in their 
 and the Kaiser's hands. As for the Kaiser and 
 the Crown Prince, who pubHcly upheld Colonel 
 von Reuter, they may for the moment be demo- 
 crats, but the only reason why they do not fear 
 the Social-Democrats, whom a few years ago 
 the Kaiser denounced as traitors to the country, 
 is the existence of the army. General von Fal- 
 kenhayn declared in the Reichstag, in Decem- 
 ber, 1913, that "without the army not a stone 
 of the Reichstag building would remain in 
 place." Is there any doubt that this demo- 
 cratic organization of eight hundred thousand 
 men would close the doors of the Reichstag if 
 the Kaiser so ordered.^ Did not the grand- 
 fathers of those now in the trenches in the Im- 
 perial Guard regiments crush out the repub- 
 lican uprising in 1848 ? 
 
 In this anti-democratic tendency the German 
 army is not different from any other. The 
 same trend toward caste and autocracy is no- 
 ticeable, to greater or less degree, in every army; 
 even a study of the social hfe of our American 
 navy would prove this. If England creates a 
 great standing army the same phenomena will 
 
60 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 be still more manifest than in her present 
 regular force, which has been about the most 
 undemocratic machine thinkable. The social, 
 court, and petticoat influences that controlled 
 the British service down to the Boer War have 
 been known of all informed men. It took this 
 present war, with its overwhelming need for of- 
 ficers, to break down the barriers of caste erected 
 against the common soldier. Lord Kitchener 
 did an unheard-of thing recently when he ad- 
 vanced one hundred and twenty -five sergeants 
 and corporals to lieutenancies in a single issue 
 of the official Gazette, yet no one would describe 
 Lord Kitchener as an apostle of democracy. The 
 nature of an army and its very organization are 
 undemocratic ; the whole basis is a hierarchy with 
 the power centring in one head. 
 
 Of course, the autocratic nature of an army 
 is not affected by the bourgeois antecedents of 
 some of its officers. In Germany a man of 
 plainest hneage, be he a good soldier, can rise 
 to high rank. Of the active officers prior to 
 the outbreak of war, 5.3 per cent were the sons 
 of minor officials or of non-commissioned officers; 
 that is, they came of families with no particular 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 61 
 
 social position. A number of the German 
 corps commanders are to-day commoners who 
 do not write von before their names. But they 
 must have inherited or married means in order 
 to hold their present positions, since German 
 officers cannot live on their pay. To no regi- 
 ment can an officer be appointed until he has 
 been voted on by his future comrades, just as 
 if he were entering a select club. This may 
 make for harmony and for efficiency, but he 
 would be rash who would assert that it smacked 
 of democracy. Of the rest of the corps of officers, 
 as it existed at the beginning of 1914, 9.7 per 
 cent were sons of large landed proprietors, while 
 Q%.5 were sons of army officers, of civihan offi- 
 cials, of judges, and of members of the learned 
 professions. Only 15.1 per cent were sons of 
 business men; the remainder, comprising Q.S per 
 cent, represented a varied group of occupations. 
 Of course, many regiments are wholly closed 
 to men without title. The bourgeois officers go 
 to the least desirable regiments, and Jews are, 
 of course, quite good enough to be reserve 
 officers, and serve as Kannonenf utter, whenever 
 the General Staff pleases. But none hitherto 
 
62 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 have been regimental oflBcers, and none have 
 risen to high rank in the staff departments to 
 which they have been admitted as officers. Yet 
 these are not the only undemocratic discrimina- 
 tions. Such newspapers as the Jewish Frank- 
 furter Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt, as well 
 as the Sociahst Vorwdrts — the Frankfurter and 
 the Tageblatt are now unreservedly upholding 
 the war and the army — have in the past filled 
 columns upon columns with discreet criticisms 
 of the mihtary. WTien the army increase was 
 voted last year certain Sociahsts took the oppor- 
 tunity to criticise the favoritism in regulations 
 shown to the Imperial Guards. Of course, they 
 accompHshed nothing. Why should the Gen- 
 eral Staff pay attention to mere members of the 
 Reichstag, and Sociahsts at that.^^ In a demo- 
 cratic organization criticism of the organization 
 is permitted; none is tolerated in the German 
 army. When an exceptionally able mihtary 
 critic of the Berliner Tageblatt^ Colonel Gadke, 
 a retired officer, undertook to criticise the serv- 
 ice, the mihtary authorities tried to deprive 
 him of his right to sign as "former colonel" of 
 an artillery regiment. That he is not figuring 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 63 
 
 as a correspondent or critic now jhas perhaps 
 some connection with this incident. Any effort 
 to effect reforms in the army is certain to en- 
 counter grave obstacles. Did not the late Gen- 
 eral Bronsart von Schellendorf , one of the ablest 
 war ministers Germany has had, fail utterly in 
 1893-96, despite his high oflSce, in his effort to 
 reform the army's court procedure and system 
 of punishments ? 
 
 If there is any atmosphere in which democ- 
 racy does not flourish it is that of a Continental 
 barracks. German discipHne is unyielding as 
 iron. The power of the officer is absolute and 
 that of the non-commissioned officer Httle less 
 so. The men in the ranks change completely 
 every three years, but the non-commissioned 
 officers are usually professional soldiers for a 
 long term, who know the ropes well. The condi- 
 tions are such that brutal ones among them can 
 make existence a hell for any man they do not 
 Hke. Just as it is hard to prevent some hazing 
 at West Point, so there is always some in the 
 German barracks. It is often almost impossi- 
 ble to checkmate brutality among the non- 
 commissioned officers, because the presumption 
 
64 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 is always in favor of authority; so there are 
 occasionally suicides in the barracks, frequently 
 desertions, and sometimes trials of men finally 
 caught in ill-treating subordinates. When Rosa 
 Luxemburg, the fiery Sociahst orator, declared 
 at Freiburg last year (1914), in speaking of the 
 case of a horribly abused soldier at Metz, "It 
 is certainly one of those dramas which are 
 enacted day in and day out in German bar- 
 racks, although the groans of the actors seldom 
 reach our ears," General von Falkenhayn, as 
 war minister, prosecuted the "Red Rosa" for 
 libelling the army. The case was promptly 
 dropped when her counsel announced that they 
 proposed to call one thousand and thirty eye- 
 witnesses to such wrong-doing, mostly in the 
 form of "slaps in the face, punches and kicks, 
 beating with sheathed sabres and bayonets, 
 with riding- whips and harness straps; forcible 
 jamming of ill-set helmets on the wearer's head; 
 compulsory baths in icy water, followed by 
 scrubbing down with scrub-brushes until the 
 blood ran; compulsory squatting in muscle- 
 straining attitudes until the victim collapsed or 
 wept for pain; unreasonable fatigue drill, and 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 65 
 
 so on. There were also abundant cases of ab- 
 surd and humiliating punishments inflicted by 
 non-commissioned officers, such as turning the 
 men out of bed and making them cHmb to the 
 top of cupboards or sweep out the dormitory 
 with tooth-brushes." Now, single men in bar- 
 racks are never plaster saints, as Kipling, the 
 exalter of British militarism and hater of Ger- 
 man militarism, has made quite clear to us. 
 Sporadic cases of abuse happen in our own 
 American barracks; but no one will, it is to be 
 hoped, assert that in this phase of its existence 
 the German army even faintly suggests a de- 
 mocracy. 
 
 This army has had its Dreyfus case, too, 
 though the victim was not an officer, but a 
 Sergeant Martin who on a second trial was 
 found guilty, on circumstantial evidence, of 
 killing his captain. The two civilian members 
 of the court found him not guilty; the prose- 
 cutor asked only for imprisonment, but the 
 military judges pronounced the death sentence 
 in addition to imprisonment. They felt they 
 must uphold their caste, right or wrong. A 
 lieutenant stationed at Memel was found to 
 
66 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 have beaten a soldier so severely with a sword 
 that his victim had to be dropped from the 
 military service, compensated, and pensioned 
 for injuries "incident to the service." Not that 
 the other type of oflficer is lacking. As the 
 writ-er knows by personal experience, there are 
 plenty of kindly, gifted, and charming oflScers 
 who are neither fire-eaters nor war-worshippers, 
 who write no jingo books and do not subscribe 
 to Bernhardi. They despise the intrigues, the 
 narrowness, and frequent immorality of the 
 small garrison, and the dissipation of life in the 
 big cities. They recognize the antiquated char- 
 acter of the code of honor, but they are helpless 
 to change it, and as they grow older the more 
 ready they are to think an intense militarism 
 the normal condition of society. If there are 
 many officers of this type, particularly in the 
 South German armies, the trend is, however, 
 toward the overbearing arrogance of the Von 
 Reuters, which is again merely saying that mili- 
 tarism unchecked and unsubordinated to civilian 
 control will run to excesses everywhere* ^.The 
 note of Bernhardi has been more and more often 
 heard with the cry that war is the natural state 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 67 
 
 of man and that the German army is for war. 
 It is quite possible that the Kaiser, in the last 
 moments before the war, was overborne against 
 his better judgment by the General Staff clique 
 with which he is surrounded, and signed the 
 fatal order practically under compulsion. But 
 there were thousands of his offi-cers who went 
 to the war exulting that the time had come at 
 last when their years of devoted study and 
 ceaseless training, unsurpassed in its compre- 
 hensiveness and its intensity, were to give way 
 to the practical application of all they had 
 learned as to man-killing. 
 
 The spirit of arrogance and aristocracy so 
 characteristic of the extreme Prussian militarists 
 has penetrated even further than into the South 
 German armies. It has made itself felt in civil 
 life in increasing measure, as is only natural. 
 When men, by reason of the coat they wear, 
 deem themselves sacrosanct and especially priv- 
 ileged, they are bound to have imitators in 
 plenty, not only among those subordinated to 
 them, but those whose garments are of the un- 
 uniformed multitude. The aggressive tone of the 
 typical lieutenant is quickly caught, and so is his 
 
68 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 total lack of consideration for others. For in- 
 stance, the rules of his caste make it impossible 
 for him to carry a bundle or a bag for his wife, 
 so she must lug it by his side, and there are many 
 similarly odd customs. The habits of officers 
 of the fashionable regiments do not help a young 
 officer to a real respect for womankind, and the 
 frequent marriage-a-la-mode for money to pay 
 debts, or to support one's station in military 
 life, does not tend toward morality or happiness. 
 If he escape these perils, the young officer is in 
 danger of becoming the conceited or silly snob 
 whom the Fliegende Blatter satirizes so perfectly. 
 No one has yet, however, measured the whole 
 effect of these tendencies upon the German 
 nation. The roughness and the coarseness of 
 the barracks and the supercilious attitude of the 
 officers as a class are without doubt in part re- 
 sponsible for the arrogance and bad manners 
 which are so often noticed by foreigners in 
 G-erman travellers, and are freely deprecated 
 by the more refined and thoughtful Germans. 
 One meets Americans and English in numbers 
 abroad who can also be trying indeed; no 
 country, alas, has a monopoly of purse-proud 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 69 
 
 travelling nouveaux riches or vulgar vacation- 
 trippers; but many observers of Germany dur- 
 ing the last three decades have been struck with 
 the fact that German bad manners often go 
 hand in hand with an assumption of superiority 
 which is extremely trying, and may properly 
 be connected with a similar military manner 
 that an American often finds utterly unbear- 
 able. Among the masses, upon whom the three- 
 year military service does have some excellent 
 effects, their schooling under the overbearing 
 non-commissioned officers is often to be traced 
 by the spread among them of the unpleasant 
 traits of the barracks. It may even be asked 
 whether certain unsparing, roughshod methods 
 of the nation's soldiers in Belgium, as well as 
 the many offensive utterances in the press 
 which have made so many Americans rub their 
 eyes and say, "This is not the Germany that 
 I knew years ago," are not due to a subconscious 
 influence of the military spirit. Certainly, un- 
 checked military authority invariably leads to 
 an arrogant and tyrannical spirit which may be 
 more or less inseparable from the military caste 
 with its sharp social distinctions and clearly 
 
70 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 divided grades. Our own American army has 
 often had to bear with precisely this sort of 
 charge, and the allegation that it falls far be- 
 hind the French in its lack of democracy and a 
 due consideration by the officers for the en- 
 listed men has also been made at times. 
 
 As for Germany, it may well be asked whether 
 an army which by its very existence creates 
 fear and militaristic rivalry, which forever talks 
 war, can be either a democratic force or, in the 
 long run, a sound educational influence. As an 
 educational system it may have certain merits, 
 but even German professors would hardly deny 
 that it is bought at a heavy cost to the school 
 system of the empire, and, lately, to the univer- 
 sity world, for some of the greatest schools of 
 learning find themselves hampered and pinched. 
 If there are underpaid common-school teachers 
 anywhere, they live in Germany, and particu- 
 larly in Bavaria. The genteel poverty of these 
 men who have to exist upon their pay is one of 
 the great tragedies of life under the Kaiser. 
 But the economic waste of the army is a chief 
 stumbling-block to any betterment in their con- 
 dition, precisely as the millions it costs prevent 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 71 
 
 reforms in many other directions. It would 
 seem as if it would be better to have the Krupps 
 earn less than twelve or fourteen per cent per 
 annum and the school-teachers a little more. 
 It would be better to be less eflScient as a nation 
 to the extent that that eflBciency is created by 
 the army, and for the masses to be happier, 
 with a consequent decrease of a million or so 
 in the Social-Democratic voters. As long as 
 they can roll up four millions of votes and still 
 protest against militarism, even though swept 
 off their feet in war-time, all cannot be well with 
 a culture founded on military force. That their 
 voices and many others will again be uplifted to 
 protest against war and armies when peace re- 
 turns, is the one thing that is certain about this 
 war. 
 
 In no such military and bureaucratic atmos- 
 phere as exists in Germany does democracy 
 thrive ! Instead, we have the tradition that as 
 the German Empire is the army's creation so 
 the nation's future is dependent wholly upon it. 
 Imitating the ninety-three savants, three thou- 
 sand German teachers in universities and schools 
 of technology have put their names to the 
 
72 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 statement that there is no other spirit in the 
 army save that of the nation; that the spirit of 
 German knowledge and mihtarism are the same; 
 that the German army and the German univer- 
 sities are identical in their aspirations, since 
 both are devoted to science. They, too, ap- 
 parently cannot understand that a culture 
 which exists only by reason of the arms behind 
 it is no more a normal, healthy growth than is 
 an industry artificially created by a protective 
 tariff, and kept alive solely by receiving part 
 or all of its profits by the favor of a treasury. 
 They belie their own culture, because it is a free 
 growth while service in the army is compulsory, 
 and compulsory service of the German type may 
 be universal but it is not democratic. Again, 
 this sudden assertion that Germany is wholly 
 dependent upon her army for safety is the his- 
 toric argument of decadent peoples relying en- 
 tirely upon mercenaries. Is the German de- 
 mocracy of intellect so without any sources of 
 strength within itself that it cannot flourish 
 save by grace of the militarists.^ We believe 
 that when the present Rausch (intoxication) of 
 the German people is at an end their intellectual 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 73 
 
 leaders will be the first to deny this interdepend- 
 ence of their realm with another so material- 
 istic, so mediaeval, so autocratic, with such bar- 
 barous aims as conquest by blood and iron and 
 man-killing by the hundred thousand. 
 
IV 
 
 THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 
 
 FOR all Americans who have sat at the feet 
 of Germany's great teachers and profited 
 by their wisdom, there is no more sorrow- 
 ful side to the war than the injury she has done 
 to herself as a seat of learning. It seems almost 
 incredible that it is precisely the German teach- 
 ers who are producing a most unpleasant im- 
 pression on this side of the water in their efforts 
 to win American public opinion for their cause, 
 but such is the case. Nowhere is there any 
 evidence of a desire on their part to undertake 
 an unbiassed investigation of facts; nowhere 
 proof of a philosophical examination of recent 
 occurrences. Logic is thrown to the winds. 
 We are treated to a flood of rhetoric and of un- 
 supported statements. The assertions of the 
 Allies are flung away as unbelievable, because 
 they are from the Allies; the assumption being 
 that the Germans alone are capable of telling 
 
 74 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 75 
 
 the truth in this crisis, and that from the rest 
 of the world there comes nothing but falsehood. 
 This failure to deal with the fundamental moral 
 questions from a detached, ethical point of 
 view may be the inevitable result of the wave 
 of patriotism that has swept over Germany, 
 but it is none the less amazing. The world had 
 a right to expect better things, even if it could 
 not hope for calmness in such a national crisis. 
 Was it not from the German universities that 
 we of the United States learned everything we 
 know as to the laboratory method of inquiry 
 in scientific, economic, and historical fields? 
 Does not that presuppose a cold assembling of 
 all the facts prior to the forming of a judgment ? 
 And has not every German professor heretofore 
 been dedicated to the pursuit of truth uninflu- 
 enced by emotion, without regard to the injury 
 which thereby may inure to any preconceived 
 theory, and without consideration of the cher- 
 ished opinions of the unthinking mass ? 
 
 Some of the professors who have rushed into 
 print to defend Germany's cause have done her 
 quite as much harm as the enemy. Take, for 
 instance, the appeal "To the Civilized World," 
 
76 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 published by ninety-three German savants. 
 Some of the most distinguished names in Ger- 
 many are signed to it — Eucken, Haeckel, 
 Fulda, Humperdinck, Sudermann, Hauptmann, 
 Lamprecht, Kaulbach, Dorpfeld — every one 
 notable in his field. Yet the appeal itself is 
 discreditable to their intelligence, and certain 
 to react against their cause, and this quite 
 aside from the fact that the English in which 
 it is couched is grotesque. Their statement is 
 marked by a total absence of logic. Thus they 
 state that "it is not true that we trespassed 
 in neutral Belgium. It has been proved that 
 France and England had resolved on such a 
 trespass, and it has likewise been proved that 
 Belgium had agreed to their doing so. It 
 would have been suicide on our part not to 
 have been beforehand." 
 
 Here, in the first sentence they deny what 
 they admit in the last. As for their assertions 
 in regard to France and England, no proof 
 whatever is offered, or has been offered, from 
 any source. The worst that has been proved 
 is the fact that England and France had planned 
 how they would act if Germany did precisely 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 77 
 
 what she has done. To say that it was a viola- 
 tion of neutrahty for England and France to 
 plot in advance how, if necessary, they would 
 perform the duties put upon them by the treaty 
 establishing Belgian neutrality is to offend the 
 intelligence. More than that, it appears from 
 a letter of Baron Griendl, for years Belgian am- 
 bassador at Berlin, to the Belgian foreign min- 
 ister that in 1911 Belgium was planning how to 
 resist England if she should be the first to vio- 
 late Belgian territory. But granting, for the 
 sake of argument, that the professors' conten- 
 tion is true, what does it boil down to.^ That 
 Germany violated a law because some one else 
 was going to. If anybody was going to murder 
 Belgian neutrality, she was going to be first at 
 the job. What a shocking position for moral- 
 ists, for teachers of ethics and religion, to as- 
 sume ! They had much better fall back openly 
 upon the highwayman's argument used by the 
 German chancellor that he preferred the law 
 of necessity to that laid down in a "mere scrap 
 of paper." 
 
 This attempt to justify a wrong by facts dis- 
 covered after the wrong was committed, is only 
 
78 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 a little less amazing than some of the excuses 
 given for it immediately after the attack upon 
 Liege. Then it was first alleged that fifty 
 automobile loads of French officers crossed into 
 Belgium before any German troops entered; 
 next that German cargo-ships had been held up 
 by the Belgians; next it was declared that 
 French aeroplanes had violated Belgian sover- 
 eignty; and then it was asserted in round terms 
 that among the prisoners taken in the forts at 
 Liege and Namur were officers and men of vari- 
 ous French regiments, who had evidently been 
 there prior to the declaration of war. The 
 number and position of these men vary with 
 every telling; but while we have had photo- 
 graphs of British dum-dum bullets, and of the 
 letter of a British colonel confessing his use of 
 these forbidden missiles, we have had no photo- 
 graphs of these particular French soldiers. No 
 list of the officers thus found in guilty relation- 
 ship to the Belgian forts has been forthcoming; 
 in brief, no official proof has been vouchsafed. 
 It has not even been included among the wrong- 
 doings of the Allies which have been officially 
 called to the attention of the President of the 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 79 
 
 United States by Ambassador von Bernstorff 
 and his imperial master. Yet the ninety-three 
 German savants do not hesitate to assert, upon 
 their honor, that there was no breach of neu- 
 trahty whatever. The world may rub its eyes 
 if it pleases, but there was no neutrality to 
 breach; if the world did not know this before 
 the present time, then the world was far behind 
 the all-knowing German General Staff. That 
 the ninety-three professors thereby deliberately 
 contradict the German chancellor's statement 
 that there was a violation of the law of nations 
 is merely so much the worse for the chancellor, 
 who doubtless spoke in hot haste without pre- 
 vious professorial consultation. 
 
 Next, the ninety-three professors insist that 
 the Allies are attacking not German militarism 
 but German civilization, which exists only by 
 reason of the bayonets with which it bristles. 
 What are we to think of all the German teach- 
 ings of philosophy and ethics and religion if 
 this be true .? What kind of civilization is that 
 which rests only upon force, and how valuable 
 is it going to be in the long run ? "Have faith 
 in us," the appeal concludes — faith that they 
 
80 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 will recover their senses. Faith, yes; but how 
 can one have faith in their judgments here- 
 after ? It would be easy to cite many similarly 
 astonishing utterances from professors, in which 
 men of international reputation accept as facts 
 matters for which no proof whatever is offered 
 or can be offered. Were they to carry on their 
 teaching or their scientific researches in any 
 such manner they would be promptly expelled 
 from their chairs.* But it is not only the Ger- 
 man professors at home who are hurting their 
 cause in the eyes of Americans. There is on 
 this side of the Atlantic Professor Mtinsterberg, 
 a useful friend to the Allies, if unconsciously so, 
 and there is his Harvard confrere, Professor 
 Kuno Francke. Only a few years ago the latter 
 was writing books showing a complete hostility 
 to Kaiser, bureaucracy, and militarism. Now 
 Germany in his eyes is almost beyond criticism. 
 I Professor Eugen Kuhnemann, an exchange 
 professor from Breslau, asserted in an address 
 in Boston, in September, that Germany ought 
 
 * Proof of this is to be found in Prof. Karl Lamprecht's recent ad- 
 dress in Berlin, in which he said that with the beginning of the war 
 "the whole world was informed that the Germans are very fine fel- 
 lows; in this correspondence-competition the professors took the palm. 
 The result was dreadful; not only was there nothing gained, but much 
 harm was done." 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 81 
 
 not to have violated Belgian territory, but had 
 to do it. This called forth laughter from his 
 audience, and a pointed remark from the chair- 
 man as to the professor's irrationality. To this 
 the agile professor genially replied that "Amer- 
 icans did not seem to understand that life was 
 always irrational " ! That Americans could only 
 hope to understand Germany if we were situated 
 in America as Germany is in Europe, was an- 
 other of his contentions. Germany, declared 
 Professor Kuhnemann, is "very much satisfied 
 with the state civilization has reached within her 
 country"; and he added: "German mihtarism is 
 the concentrated power of self-defense against a 
 world of enemies." If it is true that Germany 
 as a whole was menaced by enemies, it was 
 certainly not true of her learned men. Never 
 was there a group of savants who had won so 
 many men's affections and gratitude in every 
 country in the world as had German university 
 teachers prior to the 1st of August, 1914. If 
 there were only enemies confronting their coun- 
 try, it would seem as if a scientific inquiry into 
 what classes of Germans, or what national pol- 
 icies, were rousing such dangerous antipathies, 
 might long ago have been in order. 
 
82 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 Fortunately, there are some signs that the 
 excesses of this furor of the intellectuals have 
 begun to cause a reaction at home. Thus the 
 BerUn Tageblatt speaks of it as a "war neurosis" 
 {Krieg's Neurose), and affirms that it is every- 
 where "assuming serious proportions." "The 
 injury," it adds, "that it does in the camps of 
 our foes does not concern us, but we should 
 gladly see its effects in our own house dimin- 
 ished." It also remarks that, while the victims 
 of this disease in hostile lands — and it cites the 
 cases of many sorely afflicted in Switzerland, 
 Italy, Portugal, Russia, England, and France — 
 are careful not to hurt the feelings of neutral 
 states, the German sufferers from the epidemic 
 seem to go out of their way to deliver their 
 blows "on the stomachs of neutrals," with the 
 result that they are increasing the enormous 
 difficulties with which Germany is confronted. 
 Some of the German so-called intellectual lead- 
 ers have, it declares, "less political insight than 
 the youngest attache of a legation. . . . They 
 forget too easily that the welfare of our soldiers, 
 and the power to see the war through, depend 
 upon a hundred preliminary conditions of ma- 
 terial worth, and that in this bitterly earnest 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 83 
 
 battle no means of aid can be spared and no 
 friendship is to be treated as negligible." Then 
 it admonishes the nation to seek better political 
 knowledge, and it answers those of its fellow 
 countrymen who cannot go to the front and ask 
 what they can do to bridge over the agony of 
 this terrible time with the single word: "Learn." 
 It is praiseworthy advice. 
 
 But with the German Gelehrtenwelt thus swept 
 from its moorings, it was, of course, impossible 
 to expect anything else from the press, or from 
 those volunteer societies "for spreading abroad 
 the truth about Germany," and the official 
 bodies which are mailing to every ascertainable 
 address printed matter exposing EngHsh mis- 
 representations and presenting their holy cause 
 as they see it. The systematic way in which 
 this propaganda has been carried on is charac- 
 teristically German, but in its execution it has 
 lacked accuracy, good judgment, and correct 
 form. Special editions of newspapers in Ger- 
 man and English containing official despatches 
 and summaries of the news of the war up to the 
 time of pubHcation have been of great value. 
 This cannot be said of such publications as 
 "The Truth about Germany," a pamphlet 
 
84 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 which has burdened the mail in repeated edi- 
 tions, and has even been placed on sale upon 
 our news-stands, besides having been reprinted 
 in full by one of our New York dailies. 
 
 It contains much that is true about Germany 
 and much that is false, or that conveys false 
 impressions about the war and its origin. Again 
 we have outright assertions of happenings and 
 motives, without a shadow of proof to support 
 them. Thus, we learn that Servia was on the 
 point of accepting Austria's demands, "when 
 there arrived a despatch from St. Petersburg, 
 and Servia mobilized," the fact being, of course, 
 that Servia did agree to everything which 
 Austria demanded except two conditions, which 
 it offered to submit to arbitration, but that 
 Austria at once declared the war for which her 
 militarists had so long been thirsting. Again, 
 there appeared the flat falsehood that Great 
 Britain "asked that Germany should allow 
 French and Belgian troops to form on Belgian 
 territory for a march against our [the German] 
 frontier." The familiar, unsupported charge 
 that England encouraged the war likewise ap- 
 pears. It is with such stuff that the German 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 85 
 
 public has been fed, and returning American 
 travellers regaled; it is such stujff that has over- 
 burdened our mails — with complete lack of 
 appreciation of the fact that the American is a 
 reasoning animal who recognizes a logical ab- 
 surdity when he sees one, and knows the differ- 
 ence between a substantiated fact and an asser- 
 tion. 
 
 And always this deluge of pro-German litera- 
 ture flows on, as if the German side were not 
 getting a hearing in the American press. In 
 the sixth month of the war letters are still 
 coming from prominent Germans, men and 
 women of affairs and of international experience, 
 which are based on the assumption that, as the 
 German cables were cut, America is seeing only 
 through British spectacles. But, as already 
 pointed out, the German cause has had numer- 
 ous advocates, of whom the ablest is unquestion- 
 ably Doctor Bernhard Dernburg, the former 
 minister of colonies, whose years of residence in 
 New York as a young man have apparently 
 made him understand the best method of ap- 
 pealing to the American public. But besides 
 these spokesmen, besides the tons of specially 
 
86 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 prepared literature which have been poured in 
 upon us, the mails have brought letters and 
 newspapers with amazing regularity and as- 
 tounding profusion. Every stay-at-home in 
 Germany with a friend in the United States has 
 felt it a patriotic duty to write to that friend. 
 Meanwhile, the circulation of our German news- 
 papers, like the Staats-Zeitung, has everywhere 
 gone up by leaps and bounds; they are being sold 
 on the streets as never before; so, also, in New 
 York, has been the Berliner Tageblatt. And 
 all are being bought by thousands who favor 
 the Allies, for the express purpose of hearing 
 both sides, '\^^lat our German friends still 
 cannot seem to realize, and what will bear repe- 
 tition here, is that American pubhc opinion 
 was not made up by reports of outrages by 
 German troops, or as a result of the stupid and 
 even disgraceful falsifications and suppressions 
 of the British censors — against whom not only 
 the Germans but the newspapers of America 
 have a just grievance; that it was not formed 
 by emotion or by a hereditary affection for 
 England, but by a calm study of the facts. No 
 fair-minded person can contend to-day that the 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 87 
 
 American attitude is due to ignorance or to de- 
 ception from any source. 
 
 In view of all this, American friends of Ger- 
 many may well ask themselves whether the 
 time has not come to found, on this side of the 
 water, societies for the spreading of the real 
 truth about Germany — "facts concerning the 
 war" — not, however, for action within the 
 United States, but in Germany. There is abun- 
 dant material for such a propaganda, and there 
 is nothing in the situation which would prevent 
 its being presented in an entirely helpful and 
 friendly spirit. Thus, it might be suggested that 
 a nation in arms, in the excitement of such a 
 national calamity, is never in the frame of mind 
 to render impartial judgments upon its own 
 acts. If examples of this were needed, it would 
 be simple enough to point to the unreasoning 
 excitement of the bulk of the American people 
 and their yellow- journal inciters to war in the 
 period, in 1898, between the blowing up of the 
 Maine and the declaration of hostilities, and to 
 show how our public opinion in regard to the 
 Philippines underwent a remarkable chastening 
 after the delirious days of May, 1898, when the 
 
88 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 country was dazzled by the thought that the 
 sun would thenceforth never set on the American 
 flag. Similarly, the exaltation of the French 
 nation in 1870, with its full belief in the justice 
 of its cause, underwent a complete transforma- 
 tion when victory failed to perch upon its ban- 
 ners. It will be hard, of course, to induce Ger- 
 many to apply any lessons to herself from the 
 experience of others, for, as Professor Kuhne- 
 mann indicates, she is so self-satisfied, so cer- 
 tain that her Kultur surpasses any other, that 
 she may feel it beneath her to think that she 
 might profit by lessons drawn from abroad. 
 Nevertheless, the effort is worth making. Al- 
 ready the German press and soldiers are begin- 
 ning to admit that they held a totally erroneous 
 view of their English soldier antagonists, the 
 despised English "hirelings"; that they under- 
 estimated the strength of the Russians and the 
 ability of their leaders. As the evident miscal- 
 culations of the German General Staff and their 
 country's diplomatic blunders begin to dawn 
 upon them, their minds may be opened a little 
 to arguments and facts which make against 
 their contentions. 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 89 
 
 Even now, however, a genuine service would 
 be rendered if there could be brought to Ger- 
 many's attention the simple facts of her own 
 censorship, with its refusal to permit criticism 
 of the powers that be. Few Germans seem to 
 know that their own diplomatic despatches were 
 not always printed in full, but appeared as edited 
 by the authorities. So far as has been ascer- 
 tained, no German publication of the complete 
 English and French documents has been at- 
 tempted; the public has learned of them almost 
 wholly through partisan comments by their own 
 editors. Thus, the writer has been unable to 
 discover in the German papers to which he has 
 had access any fair discussion or publication of 
 Belgium's official statement of her side of the 
 case, and the documents bearing thereon. Of 
 all the literature of the war, nothing is more 
 impressive and convincing than this. But the 
 New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, for one, made haste 
 to abridge and bury it in an inconspicuous place. 
 True, it might be waved aside upon the familiar 
 assumption that all else is lies save what is 
 German or Austrian ; yet we cannot but believe 
 that, if there is anything left whatever of the 
 
90 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 old German devotion to scientific truth, its 
 perusal must at least recall to the reader's 
 mind that there are two sides to every case. 
 
 It would certainly do no German any harm 
 to-day if he should learn that on the 29th of 
 April, 1913, Herr von Jagow, Secretary of State, 
 declared at the meeting of the Budget Com- 
 mittee of the Reichstag: "Belgium's neutrality 
 is provided for by international convention, and 
 Germany is determined to respect those con- 
 ventions." He might also read that on August 
 2, 1914, the German minister at Brussels, Herr 
 von Below-Selaske, stated to the Belgian min- 
 ister for foreign affairs that he had not been in- 
 structed to make an official communication, 
 "but that we (the Belgian Government) knew 
 his personal opinion as to the feelings of security 
 which we had the right to entertain toward our 
 eastern neighbors." "I at once replied," said 
 the Belgian minister, "that we knew their in- 
 tentions, as indicated in numerous previous 
 conversations, did not allow us to doubt their 
 perfect correctness toward Belgium." Yet on 
 the same date, the same German minister at 
 Brussels presented the German ultimatum which 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 91 
 
 resulted in the violation of Belgian neutral- 
 ity ! 
 
 It would also not be amiss for those Germans 
 who ponder over the failure of the neutral na- 
 tions to sympathize with Germany, to read once 
 more the telegraan of the Kaiser to the King of 
 England, of August 1, 1914, in which the Kaiser 
 says: "The troops on my frontier are in the act 
 of being stopped by telegraph and telephone 
 from crossing into France.''^ The significance of 
 this to American readers lies in the Kaiser's 
 astounding admission that mobilization against 
 France meant immediate invasion of France 
 before any declaration of war. Had this fact 
 been publicly known or really understood in 
 Germany, it ought surely to have prevented 
 the repeated assertions that France began the 
 war by sending her aviators over German terri- 
 tory, by the entrance of armed patrols, a sudden 
 attack in Lorraine, etc. For it is evident from 
 the Kaiser's own words that long-prepared 
 orders to invade French soil sent some of his 
 troops onto it the instant the first order to 
 mobilize appeared. Whether those troops did 
 any damage or not, or reached French territory 
 
92 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 or not, before war was declared, is unimportant. 
 The intent to rush right onto French soil before 
 peace was officially ended is here admitted. It 
 is thoroughly in keeping with the conversation 
 of General von Moltke, in May, 1913, reported 
 by the French ambassador to Berlin, that "we 
 [the Germans] must begin war without waiting, 
 in order brutally to crush all resistance." This 
 has been denied in Germany, but it is in keep- 
 ing with the attitude of leading militarists, and 
 was, perhaps, one of the bits of evidence that 
 led Italy to reject outright Germany's claim that 
 Italy must come to her aid because she had been 
 attacked. At any rate, the German propagan- 
 dists who seek to conquer hostile American opin- 
 ion must find some way of getting around the 
 Kaiser's despatch. Its revelation of what Ger- 
 man mobilization really meant does, however, in 
 some degree explain why it was that the Kaiser 
 and his military associates were so alarmed by 
 the mere fact of Russian mobilization. 
 
 The German public could never have learned 
 from *'The Truth about Germany" what it 
 probably does not clearly understand to-day, 
 that the Kaiser's government sent ultimata to 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 98 
 
 Paris and to Petrograd on the very day upon 
 which Russia had offered to "maintain a wait- 
 ing attitude" if Austria would "stay the march 
 of her troops" into Servia, and permit the Great 
 Powers to examine what satisfaction Servia 
 could give to Austro-Hungary "without injury 
 to her rights as a sovereign state and to her in- 
 dependence." Americans certainly have had to 
 learn of this from other than German sources. 
 Would it not be a fitting return for the earnest 
 efforts made to cure us of our ignorance if an 
 American truth society should circulate this 
 widely in Germany.^ 
 
 Again, without wishing to be critical or to 
 injure anybody, such a society might be of 
 value by reminding the German pubHc that, ex- 
 cellent as its press is, it has nevertheless been 
 guilty of that tendency to print falsities which 
 is an inevitable accompaniment of war. The 
 mere existence of a rigid censorship puts a 
 premium upon rumor and scandalous accusa- 
 tions against the enemy, of which both sides 
 have been victims in this war. Did not an 
 official German despatch report the British 
 army surrounded.? Has not the increase and 
 
94 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 decrease in the number of Russian prisoners in 
 Germany presented a mathematical puzzle ? 
 As for the prophecies and reports in regard to 
 events in South Africa, Ireland, India, Egypt, 
 and the Caucasus, to say nothing of Turkey, 
 and the Holy War, a compilation of these would 
 make sorry reading to-day even if it be ad- 
 mitted — as it must be in all fairness — that 
 the news of the German press and German 
 official despatches have proved, as a whole, 
 more reliable than those of Russia, or France, 
 or England. But it is emphatically a case of 
 the pot calling the kettle black; a vast amount 
 of misinformation has everywhere seen the hght 
 — which makes our proposed American propa- 
 ganda in Germany all the more inviting. 
 
 One of the first tasks would have to be the 
 refuting of the long article published m the 
 Vossische Zeitung by Doctor Ludwig Stein, en- 
 titled "The Change of Opinion in America." 
 In this extraordinary screed he maintains that 
 there has been a complete reversal of our judg- 
 ment upon the war, thanks to the pro-German 
 propaganda of Doctor Dernburg and others, 
 and to Count von Bernstorff's capture of the 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 95 
 
 worst of our American journalists — with whom 
 not even a sorely tried ambassador ought, be it 
 said in passing, to associate. Our American 
 society would have to seek to make it clear 
 that this sort of misinformation does infinite 
 harm when reprinted in America because it pro- 
 duces the impression that German publicists 
 are quite untrustworthy. Similarly, our Ameri- 
 can society would have to explain early in its 
 propaganda that efforts to make Americans 
 understand that Bernhardi's book was known 
 only to a handful of readers, that it was almost 
 wholly unknown in university circles, and is 
 to-day not to be found in many important 
 German libraries, are gravely handicapped by 
 such a speech as that recently made by the 
 commanding general in Hamburg, Major-Gen- 
 eral von Roehl. Speaking under the statue of 
 Kaiser Wilhelm I, and, he said, exactly in the 
 spirit of the great Kaiser's grandson, Wilhelm 
 II, he declared: *'We shall not again sheathe 
 our sharp and just sword until the last of our 
 enemies recognizes that only one people has 
 the right to play a leading part in the political 
 world, and that people is the German people." 
 
96 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 When Americans read this they not unnaturally 
 feel that while this may be largely soldier brag- 
 gadocio, the ineffable nonsense which is an in- 
 evitable accompaniment of militarism gone mad, 
 it nevertheless bears out those who assert that, 
 if Bernhardiism is but little known in German 
 academic circles, it has permeated the German 
 army and insidiously affected the leaders of 
 political thought to a greater extent than any- 
 body had realized until the explosion came. 
 
 If General von Roehl is to be dismissed merely 
 as a military blockhead, like some of our Amer- 
 ican talking generals, Professor Ernst Haeckel 
 cannot be thus waved away. Our American 
 society for informing Germany could have no 
 more pressing duty than to make German edi- 
 tors understand that Professor Haeckel injures 
 not merely his own high and international re- 
 pute, but that of all Germany as well, when he 
 calmly sets down this programme as his view of 
 what steps Germany should take to "reorganize 
 Europe on Teutonic lines" when victory is hers: 
 
 "1. The crushing of the English tyranny. 
 
 "2. The invasion of Great Britain and the 
 occupation of London. 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 97 
 
 "3. The division of Belgium. The largest 
 portion, from Ostend to Antwerp in the west, to 
 be a confederated German state; the northern 
 part to be given to Holland; the southeastern 
 part to be given to Luxemburg, which thus en- 
 larged becomes also a confederated German 
 state. 
 
 "4. A large number of the British colonies 
 and the Congo Free State to go to Germany. 
 
 "5. France to surrender to Germany some of 
 her northeastern frontier provinces. 
 
 "6. Russia to be rendered impotent by the 
 reconstitution, under Austrian auspices, of the 
 kingdom of Poland. 
 
 "7. The German provinces of the Baltic to 
 be returned to the German Empire. 
 
 "8. Finland, united with Sweden, to become 
 an independent kingdom." 
 
 Our proposed society could not be too earnest 
 in impressing upon its German listeners that 
 when such a programme, with its cold-blooded 
 division of Belgium, is published over here it 
 strikes fire from every honest American heart, 
 however inconsistently — or consistently — the 
 head above that heart may view our holding 
 
98 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 the Philippines despite the protests of the Fil- 
 ipino people. 
 
 Next, our society for spreading the truth 
 abroad could point out to German leaders of 
 thought that the very furor of their foreign 
 propaganda bespeaks genuine provincialism; 
 that it is as dangerous to defend too much as 
 to protest too much. The very certainty of 
 their own superiority which they voice also sug- 
 gests the desirability of a nearer view and a 
 keener understanding of other people's Kultur. 
 To Americans it inevitably recalls the boasting 
 of the Confederates in 1861, and their loud and 
 truculent assertions that the culture of their 
 aristocracy of wealth and land founded upon 
 slave labor was superior to any the world had 
 ever seen. German glorification of their own 
 greatness if anything surpasses that 1861 out- 
 burst of self-praise. One usually sound thinker 
 insists: "We are morally and intellectually 
 superior beyond all comparison as to our organi- 
 zations and institutions. . . . We Germans 
 have no friends anywhere, because we are ef- 
 ficient and morally superior to all.'' Then we 
 have the Kreuz Zeitung, the organ of the mili- 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 99 
 
 tary, saying that "The world can be revitalized, 
 society ennobled and refined, only through the 
 German spirit. The world must for its own 
 salvation be Germanized." 
 
 Just as the Germans are coming to change 
 their opinion about their British antagonists, so 
 did the Confederates speedily forget their early 
 boasts that one Rebel could account for six 
 Yankees. As the Confederates, equally cer- 
 tain of the justice of their cause, and equally 
 united, came to face the world in 1865 with a 
 new point of view, and without their early be- 
 lief in their own superiority because of King 
 Cotton, so must the German point of view 
 undergo a radical sea change before this great 
 struggle ends. It would be quite as proper for 
 our society for spreading the truth to prepare 
 the way for this in Germany by judicious his- 
 torical parallels, as it is for Germans to en- 
 deavor to convince Americans that it is right 
 for a great nation to trample under foot another 
 people because in her judgment her welfare 
 demands that the weaker shall pay the price. 
 
 Thus one might point out indefinitely the 
 tempting opportunity which would loom up 
 
100 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 before our proposed organization. For years 
 to come — if the war should last long — it 
 would have subjects galore. The least of its 
 tasks would be to point out to our Teuton 
 brethren that it aids their case not at all to con- 
 vict Great Britain of hypocrisy, as Treitschke 
 endeavors to do, or any one else of inconsistency. 
 No one who really beheves in liberty will par- 
 don England for her treatment of the Boers, or 
 her shameless connivance at the violating of 
 Persia. But guilty humanity moves forward to 
 higher ideals by fits and starts; to the neutral 
 world the devotion of the British people to the 
 idealistic defense of Belgium, which has been 
 assumed by her ministers as the real cause of 
 the war, seems something to be acclaimed. The 
 peace treaty may, of course, show that this as- 
 serted cause cloaks for England's rulers merely 
 a sordid desire to crush down their most danger- 
 ous trade rival, as the Germans contend. But 
 meanwhile the outsider must take it at its face 
 value when he sees millions of British citizens 
 ready to give up their lives unselfishly in behalf 
 of this principle of the sacredness of the existence 
 of small nations, and must assume that here- 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 101 
 
 after the weaker countries will at least be safe 
 frora British lust of land. Even a sudden Brit- 
 ish conversion is better than no conversion at 
 all; however the Germans may rail, the neutral 
 world is not disposed to cavil at the spectacle 
 of a great nation, whatever its past, ready to 
 bleed near to death, if need be, that a smaller 
 may live. 
 
 Then, some one in Germany ought to direct 
 German attention to the case of France. She 
 has found it necessary to initiate no propaganda 
 abroad in behalf of her soldiery, her motives, or 
 her policy. Not for an hour has her President 
 had to worry as to what the neutral world would 
 think of her. It regrets, of course, that so 
 great a nation was compelled to war merely be- 
 cause of an accursed treaty with as autocratic 
 a power as Russia — with which the real soul 
 of France can have no genuine spiritual com- 
 munion. But the onlookers abroad know that 
 France has borne herself with rare dignity and 
 restraint; that her moral position is clearer and 
 more shining than that of any other of the com- 
 batants; that she has revealed a fortitude in 
 defeat and a resoluteness to succeed in the end 
 
102 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 which, together with unexpected qualities of 
 self-control, command the admiration of all 
 who behold with unprejudiced eyes. The na- 
 tion of Lafayette, of De Grasse, of Rocham- 
 beau, has lived up to its very best. 
 
 An American society which attempted to say 
 this might just now have a rather sorry time in 
 Germany. It could at least certify that Maxi- 
 milian Harden comes close to the truth when, 
 in giving up the effort to win over Americans 
 to his country's cause, he admits that we are 
 well informed as to the German arguments, but 
 cannot be convinced because we cannot think 
 like Germans. It would note with regret that 
 the Deutsche Tageszeitung thus wrongly counsels 
 its countrymen: "We, however, do not need to 
 regard the public opinion of the world. In the 
 last instance, the German people, united with 
 the Emperor, are alone competent to decide the 
 correctness of Germany's cause," for it would 
 be its duty to point out that no country is strong 
 enough to-day to do without the favorable 
 opinion of all mankind. As for Herr Harden, 
 perhaps he, too, may yet see that if Americans 
 cannot think like Germans just now, it is be- 
 
THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 103 
 
 cause their love of fair play, their historic sym- 
 pathy for those who battle for liberty, yes, their 
 institutions, forbid. 
 
V 
 
 THE KAISER AND THE WAR 
 
 FEW masters of nations have been as 
 heartily abused or as highly praised as 
 the Kaiser. In this respect he invites 
 comparison with the first Napoleon; in the case 
 of both emperors the extremes of praise and 
 blame have been unjust. Americans, on the 
 whole, have been rather disposed to patronize 
 the Kaiser. Thus, one of our captains of in- 
 dustry assured the head of the HohenzoUern 
 that he would go well in tandem with Theodore 
 Roosevelt. When the Kaiser quickly asked, 
 "Which would be the wheel-horse.^" the mag- 
 nate was trapped and at a loss to answer. An 
 entertaining magazine writer condescendingly 
 assured us that the Kaiser *'is of the stuff that 
 would have made a first-rate American," and 
 "the real Kaiser" has been done for us more 
 than once, usually with a liberal percentage of 
 error, not unmixed with considerable respect 
 
 104 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 105 
 
 for his achievements. The average American 
 is apt to consider that a king is necessarily a 
 mere lay figure; hence the surprise one notes 
 when one of our countrymen has come into con- 
 tact with the Kaiser and found him to be not 
 merely a wearer of innumerable uniforms, and 
 an egotistical defender of the divine rights of 
 sovereigns, but a many-sided man of ability as 
 remarkable as the contradictions in his char- 
 acter, his words, and his conduct. 
 
 Extraordinary has been the development of 
 his personality by reason of his responsibilities 
 and his powers. This is not always the case 
 with commoners or with royalty, as the present 
 Czar of Russia proves quite well enough. When 
 the Kaiser ascended the throne, after the 
 tragically brief reign and still more tragic death 
 of his father, few outside of the Prince's imme- 
 diate entourage suspected the latent possibilities 
 of his mind, or the inherent force of his charac- 
 ter. Until his father's illness the possibility 
 of his succession had seemed so remote that few 
 thought it worth while to pay much attention 
 to the Prince of Prussia, just become Crown 
 Prince. Those men in public life who had 
 
106 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 studied him feared him, because of some im- 
 periahstic speeches which are recalled now to 
 show that his callow, eldest son is rightfully the 
 heir of his own boyish point of view. There 
 was as much dread lest he plunge Germany into 
 war when he ascended the throne as there was 
 similar fear in certain circles in America when 
 the assassin's bullet made Mr. Roosevelt Presi- 
 dent. In both instances the fear was not justi- 
 fied. Mr. Roosevelt kept the peace, and so did 
 the Kaiser for twenty-six years of his reign. 
 
 No one who was not in Germany at the time 
 can fully appreciate the shock to the entire 
 country when Bismarck was dismissed like a 
 lackey, as Bismarck himself put it. That the 
 Kaiser was able to live this down and so win 
 the affections of his people that this is not laid 
 up against him any longer, must be regarded as 
 perhaps his greatest personal achievement; for 
 at the time it seemed like laying ruthless hands 
 upon what was most sacred in the life of the 
 young nation, or turning it adrift on uncharted 
 seas for which there was no pilot, since the 
 public had somehow come to feel that this dis- 
 missed pilot was going to live on forever. Yet 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 107 
 
 this was not the only time the Kaiser offended. 
 He seemed unstable and constitutionally rest- 
 less; striving after the new and the untried, 
 seeking to govern entirely in his own way, and 
 bent continually on ratthng his sabre. It is a 
 long distance from that to the present day, 
 when he is pictured as a conservative, as the 
 greatest friend of peace among modern monarchs. 
 And yet the transformation has gone on under 
 our very eyes these last twenty years. 
 
 If the Kaiser indeed proved to be a friend of 
 peace until put to the supreme test, he has 
 never outgrown a duality of character as marked 
 as that of his nation. This duality, Prince von 
 Billow asserts, explains "many a curious phe- 
 nomenon in the present, as in the past," both 
 in the life of the country and of its individual 
 citizens. Thus the Kaiser may follow up a re- 
 actionary, autocratic outburst with a speech 
 both enlightened and constructive. He is at 
 one moment a War Lord in utterance, garbed 
 like Lohengrin, and in the next a civilian deeply 
 concerned with the industrial development of 
 his state. He sets his face against any democ- 
 racy in the army, and — until now — against 
 
108 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 the reception of Jews as oflBcers in any but staff 
 positions, and at the same time selects the Jew 
 Bernhard Dernburg to be the first imperial 
 minister of his race, and makes almost an inti- 
 mate of Herr Ballin, the brilliant head of the 
 Hamburg-American Line. He is broad enough 
 to permit officers to drink his health in water, 
 and to become total abstainers if they choose, 
 but too narrow to stamp out duelling among 
 them. He is mediaeval one moment, and abreast 
 of the times the next. One month may see him 
 guilty of a dangerous political indiscretion and 
 the next find him showing tact and skill in a 
 political situation affecting the nation alone. 
 
 Nor are the contradictions of his acts limited 
 to domestic affairs. He was the man who or- 
 dered his Pekin-bound troops to wage ferocious 
 war upon the Chinese; who was quite ready to 
 seize Kiau-Chau, and to legitimize the transac- 
 tion by a long-term "lease," which the landlord 
 did not draw and did not want, and had no 
 option but to sign. He was quite willing to put 
 his blood-and-iron policy into force in German 
 Southwest Africa. He was as ready to have 
 his generals drive thirty thousand Herreros out 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 109 
 
 in the desert, there to die of thirst and starva- 
 tion, as he was to crush Belgium when she lay 
 in his path, if thereby German civihzation and 
 Kultur could be maintained in that far-off, hope- 
 less and hapless African colony. Yet this mas- 
 ter of contrasts could send his telegram to Presi- 
 dent Kruger voicing the very general condemna- 
 tion of British aggression in South Africa. Effi- 
 cient in administration at home in most ways, 
 he and his advisers have been singularly ineffi- 
 cient abroad; not, as is now alleged on their 
 behalf, because their diplomats were so honest 
 and guileless as constantly to be outtrumped, 
 and in 1914 to be wholly overreached, but be- 
 cause of disregard of other people's feehngs, 
 because of such dangerous rudeness as marked 
 the conduct of Admiral von Diederichs at 
 Manila in 1898, because too much Prussian 
 arrogance was often allowed to slip into the 
 tone of diplomatic correspondence, and for still 
 other reasons dwelt on elsewhere. So there are 
 Germans in plenty to agree with the Berliner 
 Tageblatt that this is the time for them to say 
 nothing about the Kaiser's diplomats and diplo- 
 macy. Only the visit of Prince Henry to the 
 
no GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 United States stands out as particularly credit- 
 able to the Kaiser's sense of the fitness of things 
 abroad, which so often serves him well in home 
 affairs. 
 
 Nevertheless, during the years of his rule the 
 Kaiser has steadily grown more and more pop- 
 ular as he has become more conservative in his 
 personality. This is partly because of his dra- 
 matic skill,* and partly because of his ability to 
 play on almost every one of the many strings 
 that lead to the hearts of his people. The army 
 is devoted to him as its War Lord, even though 
 its superior oflBcers are not all convinced that 
 he is a great strategist. The church people 
 reverence him because of his blameless private 
 life, the simplicity and purity of his family 
 circle, and his religious faith and constant refer- 
 ences to the Almighty in his public utterances. 
 He won the hearts of all fathers and mothers by 
 his exquisite speech at the wedding of his daugh- 
 ter two years ago — a masterpiece of felicitous 
 expression, pervaded by a note of deep affection, 
 
 * Baron Fritz von Holstein, for sixteen years the real power behind 
 the throne in the German foreign office, is said to have once remarked 
 caustically that his Majesty " takes a dramatic result for a political 
 success." 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 111 
 
 and imbued with real appreciation of the true 
 values of Hfe. The commercial world looks up 
 to him, not because he has been solely respon- 
 sible for the nation's wonderful economic devel- 
 opment, as some would have it, for that would 
 have come to pass if he had ruled only one year, 
 but because he has identified himself with all 
 its interests, and has sought to further the mar- 
 vellous wave of development which was coming 
 in on a rising tide when he assumed the reins. 
 For the first time, its leaders have been sought 
 by a Kaiser. Capitalists, too, are pleased with 
 the policy of the state in regard to the great 
 combinations approximating to our trusts; they 
 have no such criticisms of their government as 
 have had some of ours during the necessary 
 period of reorganization and control by legis- 
 lative enactment through which we in America 
 have just passed. 
 
 The literary, artistic, and musical worlds do 
 not take the Kaiser's own creations seriously, 
 but they see in him a sympathetic friend, a wise 
 royal patron, even though he may have the 
 poorest taste when it comes to sculptures of his 
 ancestors. The Junker, the great landowners. 
 
112 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 and the aristocrats find him wholly satisfactory 
 because of his stubborn refusal to countenance 
 any radical or liberal tendencies, his opposi- 
 tion to the Social-Democrats, and his upholding 
 of unjust Prussian suffrage laws — defended as 
 a necessary safeguard to prevent the Social- 
 Democrats from capturing Prussia. The aris- 
 tocrats who come to Berlin for their brief season 
 of six weeks rejoice in the Emperor's rigid up- 
 holding of the historic ceremonial of the court, 
 and his deference to caste, even though he ad- 
 mits commercial men to the intimacy of his 
 yacht. 
 
 Imperialistic professors and statesmen find 
 themselves in fullest accord with his views as to 
 the empire's expansion and his creation of a 
 fleet, if only to "protect our oversea trade," as 
 the phrase has run. Officialdom, which is the 
 greatest caste in Germany next to the army, is 
 wholly imbued with the idea that the Kaiser is 
 the ideal ruler. So far from hurting him, his 
 deliberately spectacular methods have helped 
 not a little, precisely as his interest in sports 
 and sailing has captured the younger genera- 
 tion, and helped to give athletics as rapid and 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 113 
 
 wide a growth in twenty-five years as that of 
 any of the great industries, whose expansion 
 has partaken of the phenomenal. President 
 Roosevelt showed how the masses like a ruler 
 who "does things every minute." The Ger- 
 mans are tremendously taken by a ruler who 
 cruises to the north in the summer and has a 
 villa at Corfu during the winter; who sails his 
 own racing yacht, commands the fleet he has 
 created, and leads impossible cavalry charges 
 in peace manoeuvres — all the while dabbling 
 in the arts and sciences. They have long since 
 forgotten that witticism which early in Wil- 
 helm the Second's reign described his grand- 
 father, his father, and himself as the "greise 
 Kaiser," the "weise Kaiser," and the "reise 
 Kaiser" (the aged Kaiser, the wise Kaiser, and 
 the travelling Kaiser). 
 
 Prince von Bulow complains because the Ger- 
 mans, whenever they have found an intellectual 
 formula or a system for anything, insist "with 
 obstinate perseverance on fitting realities into 
 the system." Truly, the Kaiser has made his 
 type of ruler a reality to his people, and they 
 have so readily fitted him into their system that 
 
114 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 they applauded him even when he declared to 
 some recruits that by the oath they were taking 
 "you are pledged to give your Hves to me.'* In 
 this they see nothing inconsistent with the prog- 
 ress and aims of what is in many matters of 
 government the most advanced of states. Nor 
 do they resent his incessant use of the personal 
 pronoun in describing things which are the na- 
 tion's, such as its army and its navy. Surely, 
 there could be no greater contrast than that 
 between the first and the second Emperor Wil- 
 liam, yet the difference in their conceptions of 
 what the headship of the nation means is, per- 
 haps, a true measure of the nation's own de- 
 velopment during the last quarter of a century. 
 It is this very mixture of medisevaUsm, miUtary 
 and civil, with progress which has brought the 
 present catastrophe upon Germany. 
 
 But the bulk of the Germans only see that in 
 his person the Kaiser reflects their own efficiency 
 and many of their own ideals. Whereas they 
 would have been startled in 1888 at the pros- 
 pect of a ruler of the type into which their Em- 
 peror has developed, they find him now just the 
 right representative for the nation and its world- 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 115 
 
 power aspirations. They are, moreover, flat- 
 tered by the interest or admiration he excites 
 abroad, and the attention he attracts every- 
 where. When they hear that as a side issue to 
 the business of managing the empire he is a very 
 successful business man in private enterprises, 
 and learn that he has extraordinary, if undevel- 
 oped, mechanical talent, they take that much 
 additional pride in him. They know him, more- 
 over, to be a man of unusual charm, when he 
 unbends, and of great personal power, with 
 keen wits, a real sense of humor, and incessant 
 mental activity. They rejoice in his executive 
 ability, and his rare capacity for consecutive 
 labor; no loafer or idler is he, but a man who 
 despatches easily and promptly masses of work. 
 When he is seen in pubHc he makes a most 
 pleasing impression upon his own subjects and 
 upon the foreigners he meets (as is clearly evi- 
 denced by the way most of our exchange pro- 
 fessors have succumbed to his charms), for he 
 is by no means overbearing, and he readily in- 
 terests himself in the doings of the varied types 
 of men who come into contact with him, and 
 adopts the manner and speech the occasion re- 
 
116 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 quires. Indeed, the bombastic speeches which 
 he addresses to his soldiers and sailors are just 
 what such an audience wishes to hear. In 
 brief, the whole country likes to be bossed by 
 so interesting and brilliant a personality, just as 
 Americans for similar reasons tolerated doings 
 and sayings in Mr. Roosevelt while in office that 
 would have ruined any President who was less 
 entertaining, less energetic, less vital. 
 
 Outside of the Socialists and the Radicals, 
 few seem to be able to resist the Kaiser's vigor 
 and charm, or to stop to analyze and inquire 
 whither his political philosophy and his auto- 
 cratic theory of governing are leading the coun- 
 try. No one else, of course, paints him as such 
 an unspeakable wretch as have the British news- 
 papers, which are repeating, after a century, 
 their falsifications about the first Napoleon; 
 or believes such abominable libels about the 
 Kaiser's sons as that they have robbed, after 
 the manner of common thieves, the castles in 
 which they have sojourned in France. But 
 there were Germans in plenty prior to the out- 
 break of this war who did dissent from the 
 Kaiser's policies, like the hundreds of thousands 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 117 
 
 of Germans who vote the Social-Democratic 
 ticket because there is no other effective medium 
 of protest. They vote thereby against the Jun- 
 ker, against mihtarism, against the protective 
 tariff, and the obstacles which, put in the way 
 of the free importation of food, increase the cost 
 of living for the struggling masses and enrich the 
 prosperous Agrarians; but they do not thereby 
 necessarily favor the theories of Marx. They 
 seek for better conditions of life; to them rightly 
 their country is not the ideal nation so many 
 have painted it, and they do not like the type 
 of autocrat the Kaiser represents. They do not 
 forget or overlook the numerous trials for lese- 
 majeste; they believe in the right of a nation 
 to choose its own rulers, and they deplore the 
 absence of a responsible ministry. To such as 
 these the Kaiser, with all his attractiveness, 
 makes little appeal; they even regard him only 
 as the chief ally of those who are intrenched in 
 privilege and in caste; who would run the gov- 
 ernment to suit their own selfish interests, who 
 are happy in the consciousness that them the 
 Kaiser will not offend. 
 
 Indeed, as an ardent reformer the Kaiser 
 
118 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 shines not at all. The remarkable social and 
 pension legislation which has been enacted since 
 Bismarck planned it in order to offset the spread 
 of socialism, has come to pass, not in spite of 
 the Kaiser, but without his taking any particu- 
 lar interest in it. Never has he expressed any 
 genuine sympathy for the common people; they 
 were created for him to govern in his wisdom, 
 and this he is ready to do if they will be good 
 and not vote for Social-Democrats. Mr. Price 
 Collier wrote of the Kaiser's "complacent neglect 
 of how the work of the world is done by patient 
 labor; of how the works of art are only born of 
 travail and tears." He has had no grand vizier 
 to take him on night strolls and show him how 
 the masses of his people live, and how many of 
 them often starve. The ''acrid smell of the 
 homes of the poor" has never offended his nos- 
 trils. They are but pawns to man his ships 
 and fill his regiments, while he dwells on high 
 to play with masterly skill the role of the ruler 
 who owes obedience to no one, neither to 
 Reichstag nor to people. It is picturesque, it is 
 grand, it is done with artistic attention to de- 
 tails, it gives to the nation a wonderfully paint- 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 119 
 
 able head; but it leads nowhere, for it is directly 
 contrary to that democratic current of the ages 
 which flows on over kings of blood and kings of 
 privilege ahke, and is certain to relegate them 
 all eventually to the limbo of the outworn. 
 
 When the war broke out, to many, in the 
 first flush of a passionate sense of the injustice 
 done to Germany herself by permitting her to 
 take to wholesale murdering, it seemed as if 
 this terrible crime against humanity must end 
 one dynasty after another. Yet for the mo- 
 ment, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the 
 Kaiser stands higher in the esteem and affec- 
 tion of his subjects than ever. They are united 
 and determined; they have buried all griev- 
 ances and dislikes and healed all differences for 
 the hour. They turn to the Kaiser in the firm 
 belief that his commanding abilities will find 
 the way out; they are as content to die for him 
 personally as for the state he dominates. Did 
 not the crews of the lost German ships go down 
 to death cheering for his Majesty with the same 
 enthusiasm as for the empire ? Are not the two 
 million volunteers quite ready to take him at 
 his word that their lives belong to him to throw 
 
120 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 away as he sees fit? Doubtless were he not 
 so deeply concerned with the outcome of it all, 
 did not heavier cares weigh upon him to-day 
 than upon any other human being, he might 
 rejoice that, for the moment, in authority and, 
 in the good will of the people he stands at the 
 highest possible pinnacle. Socialists, Radicals, 
 Liberals, Clericals, all who have cavilled in the 
 past are for the nonce silenced; the Reichstag 
 exists, as he would have it, merely to record his 
 decrees. For the hour he is supreme. Whether 
 it is or is not true that he was forced to the war 
 by an ultimatum from his General Staff, and 
 was then overcome by emotion and a realiza- 
 tion of the frightful significance of the step he 
 had taken, when one simple sentence from him 
 would have preserved the peace of Europe, he 
 holds in his hands to-day the immediate fate 
 of his empire. There is no time now for duality 
 of personality for him, or for his subjects; 
 theirs can only be the role of fighting men. 
 
 But when it is all over, what then? If it is 
 to be victory, or a deadlock because of mutual 
 exhaustion and inability of one side to conquer 
 the other, the Kaiser's star will stand high in 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 121 
 
 the constellations. Not that there will be no 
 murmurs of discontent; the democratic tend- 
 encies of the age will still have to be reckoned 
 with, for they cannot be stilled for long. 
 There are numerous Germans who insist to-day 
 that their country can never again take a less 
 exalted attitude toward its problems than that 
 which it has assumed toward the crisis that now 
 confronts it. What they call the ennobling of 
 the nation by its readiness to sacrifice all, will, 
 they declare, never be wholly lost; it will be 
 impossible, they aver, for Germans ever to 
 think parochially again. The Kaiser, too, was 
 absolutely sincere when, in the spell of that 
 momentous hour, he shook hands with the 
 Social-Democratic leaders and said that party 
 considerations would never again weigh with 
 him. But he and they have spoken in an hour 
 of spiritual intoxication. When they awake it 
 will be to a realization that with the advent of 
 a successful or an unsuccessful peace will come 
 a rebirth of the old schisms and issues; that the 
 Social-Democrats will appear as black as ever 
 to the lords of privilege, and vice versa. If 
 Germany escapes a period of gross corruption, 
 
122 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 of rank materialism, of lowered vitality, of gen- 
 uine decadence, such as followed hard upon the 
 heels of our idealistic war for the preservation 
 of the American Union, she cannot avoid a 
 coarsening of the nation's entire jQbre, for that 
 is inevitable when a country goes through such 
 physical horrors and suffering. When the sa- 
 credness of human life, upon which foundation 
 every state is founded in time of peace, is so 
 utterly disregarded, so basely violated, there 
 can be no return to the older ideal save at a 
 high price. 
 
 Beyond question, if the Kaiser triumphs it 
 means a setback to every liberal democratic 
 movement. War inevitably retards reforms 
 wherever it is fought; the economic waste 
 presses so heavily that a nation's shaken ener- 
 gies are usually absorbed for years in making 
 good the losses. Then we may count upon 
 declarations by autocracy and aristocracy that 
 their militaristic policies triumphed, that the 
 mailed fist on sea and land alone saved the 
 country from completest disaster. Again, there 
 is nothing in the Kaiser's record to lead any one 
 to hope that if he wins he will seek to reward 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 123 
 
 the nation for its courage, steadfastness, and 
 sacrifices by turning toward liberalism. But if 
 he loses there will be a different story; only the 
 defeat of the empire will afford hope that there 
 will be rapid progress toward democratization, 
 toward a responsible ministry, toward equality at 
 the ballot-box in Prussia, toward elective rulers, 
 toward the overthrow of the false gods of mili- 
 tarism and imperialism. Disaster will mean 
 the real test of the Kaiser's greatness as it meant 
 a supreme test of the spiritual qualities of both 
 the Napoleons, to which neither of them reacted. 
 For human nature is so constituted that the 
 public will begin to question and to find fault 
 with its ruler if matters should go wrong. Then 
 we should definitely learn if there are really 
 great moral qualities and true spiritual leader- 
 ship in the Kaiser; whether there is hidden in 
 him any of that unshakable faith in the com- 
 mon people which exalted Lincoln in the hour of 
 darkness. Surely without Lincoln's sympathy 
 for and understanding of the masses he could 
 never have led them through years of defeat 
 and discouragement to final triumph. Can a 
 ruler who is as far removed from the great 
 
124 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 majority of his subjects as the Kaiser do as 
 well? Time will perhaps tell. Will he shrink 
 in defeat like the American who has most re- 
 sembled him? Whether he does or does not, 
 we shall be witnessing in the next few years, 
 because of the war, still another phase of the 
 fascinating mental and spiritual development 
 of this extraordinary man, who in his own per- 
 son has done more than any other ruler to re- 
 vive the fading glories of royalty. When one 
 looks at the other kings, him at Petrograd, at 
 London, at Belgrade, at Vienna, and rates their 
 mental caHbre, ponders on what they stand for, 
 and sums up the good and the evil of their 
 reigns, one cannot but feel that this Kaiser 
 shines by contrast, for all his faults, for all his 
 imperfect development which the war may do 
 much to round out. 
 
 He bulks still larger if we but regard the size 
 of the men with whom he is surrounded. Com- 
 pare Von Bethmann-HoUweg and Bismarck one 
 cannot; the 1914 Von Moltke appears to re- 
 semble the 1870 Von Moltke only in name. 
 The more one considers the court at Berlin, 
 the greater does the Kaiser's stature appear. 
 
THE KAISER AND THE WAR 125 
 
 If his grandfather's simple, far from brilliant 
 mentality drew men of great power to his side 
 to be the real governors of Germany and the 
 true arbiters of her fate, his grandson's dominant 
 personality has attracted to him, particularly of 
 late, no men of powers to match his own. He 
 remains, when all is said and done, a vigorous, 
 keen, stimulating, vital person, vibrating with 
 power, at this hour confronted with a problem 
 the solution of which is big with his own fate, 
 that of his throne, and of his subjects. 
 
VI 
 
 IMPERIALISM AND THE GERMAN 
 PARTIES 
 
 NATURALLY there are deeper causes 
 than the Kaiser's ability and popu- 
 larity, or the nation's amazing pros- 
 perity, to account for Germany's readiness to 
 live on under a government which is neither 
 truly representative nor democratic. If David 
 Starr Jordan goes to extremes when he says 
 that her political ideals "hark back to the six- 
 teenth century" and that "a great nation which 
 its own people do not control is a nation without 
 a government," it is nonetheless true that the 
 German tendency to-day is away from govern- 
 ment by numbers, and that one looks in vain 
 between the Conservatives and Socialists for a 
 really effective radical group with Hberal ideals. 
 The failure of the National Liberals to stand as 
 a great reform party has been chiefly respon- 
 sible for the accession to the Social-Democratic 
 
 126 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 127 
 
 ranks of those who vote its ticket without being 
 converts to its doctrines. There was a time 
 some years ago when it appeared as if men Hke 
 Ludwig Bamberger, Eugen Richter, Heinrich 
 Rickert, Georg von Siemens, and Theodor 
 Earth were to be the leaders of a truly Liberal 
 party. They were statesmen who talked a lan- 
 guage which liberal Americans, seeking to free 
 their countrymen from the shackles of privilege, 
 could understand as well as the English disciples 
 of the Manchester school. Indeed, their polit- 
 ical ideals were largely those of Cobden, Bright, 
 and Gladstone. 
 
 It could never have been said of Germany, 
 had they become powerful factors in its parlia- 
 mentary life, as it is being alleged to-day, that 
 there exists an "irreconcilable antagonism of 
 the two conceptions of hfe" — the German and 
 the American. Herr Harden would have been 
 far less hkely to write of the inability of the two 
 nations to think ahke. This radical group was 
 also profoundly influenced by American ideals 
 with which Barth found himself in deepest 
 sympathy because of a knowledge and appre- 
 ciation of American institutions second only 
 
128 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 to that of James Bryce. These radicals stood 
 in varying degrees for friendly international 
 relations and labored for peace; they opposed 
 Agrarian aggressions as they did the severe 
 Bismarckian laws against the Socialists. They 
 were earnest free-traders, opposing all protect- 
 ive tariffs, as they did all duties on foodstuffs. 
 While believing in fair and liberal treatment 
 for the Social-Democrats, they vigorously op- 
 posed their views, just as Barth led in denoun- 
 cing the efforts to conquer the unconquerable 
 Danes and Poles whom fate has placed under 
 the Prussian eagle. There was nothing imperial- 
 istic about them and it is difficult to think that 
 if they had lived until the present crisis they 
 would not have been desperately unhappy over 
 Germany's plight to-day and her drift away 
 from the pacific, democratic ideals for which | 
 
 they contended. For example, as Von Billow 
 admits, Eugen Richter very nearly defeated 
 the army legislation asked by Count von 
 Caprivi, whose demand for seventy batteries 
 and 18,000 men seems modest indeed in the 
 light of subsequent developments. Altogether 
 they were a group so able as to exercise an in- 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 129 
 
 fluence far out of proportion to their numbers; 
 yet their followers have been ground between 
 the misnamed National Liberals and the Con- 
 servatives on the one hand, and the Social- 
 Democrats on the other. In Bismarck's time 
 all his great power was thrown against the 
 Radicals, often to their personal financial loss. 
 Individually he counted them among his most 
 dangerous opponents. As for the National 
 Liberals, they years ago threw away their chance 
 to become a really strong reform party. In 
 many respects they are but a shade less con- 
 servative than the Conservatives. Independent 
 radical spirits they attract not at all. In 1912 
 at the Reichstag elections the Liberals and 
 Radicals cast 3,227,846 votes as against 7,401,- 
 825 cast for all the other parties. If they could 
 but pull together and unite on a truly liberal 
 and progressive platform, they could obviously 
 exercise an enormous influence on German po- 
 litical life. 
 
 As the years went by, the enlightened radi- 
 cal leaders disappeared one by one, and the 
 development of the paradoxical modern Ger- 
 many continued. Thanks to mihtarism on the 
 
130 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 one hand, with its constant teaching of com- 
 plete submission to the authority of the state, 
 and to the mistaken Social-Democratic policies 
 and teachings on the other, the Agrarian, 
 Clerical, and capitalistic forces before whom 
 the government bends the knee have had 
 things their own way. The Socialists have 
 really aided the Kaiser from one point of view, 
 for their theory that the state should do and be 
 all has helped him to strengthen and increase 
 his tremendously centralized and militaristic 
 authority over his people. Dr. Michael Sadler, 
 the vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds, 
 is one of the comparatively few foreign observers 
 to perceive that for Germany this has meant a 
 deadening of independent moral judgments and 
 shrewd political observation by "an excessive 
 use of state authority and by too persistent an 
 appeal to national self-interest." Intense cen- 
 tralization of power has defeated the advocates 
 of a decentralized authority. "Militarism gave 
 Germany discipline. Industrialism, helped by 
 discipline, gave her wealth. The doctrine of 
 the state secured general obedience and a cer- 
 tain form of self-sacrifice. And by this combina- 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 131 
 
 tion of good and evil modern Germany grew 
 very rich and very strong." 
 
 Prince von Biilow has said of his great prede- 
 cessor, Bismarck, that "his rule can only serve 
 as a precedent for a strong, determined, and 
 even ruthless government." But Bismarck was 
 a cynical intriguer as well as a man of blood and 
 iron. If there was anything he would refrain 
 from doing — falsifying documents, purchasing 
 politicians, and corrupting the press — it would 
 be hard to name it. Being without principle 
 or scruple, he was naturally one of those poli- 
 ticians who think it the height of statesmanship 
 to steal from the other man's theories whenever 
 one's rival seems to be striking a popular chord. 
 With his nature, his firm belief in the neces- 
 sity of an autocratic state intrusting complete 
 power to the Kaiser he had created, a liberal 
 policy such as that of Richter was out of the 
 question. He turned his attention to the So- 
 cialists, to beat them at their own game, and 
 laid the foundations for that monarchical so- 
 cialism which has often won praise abroad be- 
 cause of its apparent devotion to the general 
 welfare. The state administration of railroads. 
 
132 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 telegraphs, telephones, and of many mines and 
 forests, its speculation in lands, its care of the 
 aged, disabled, and unemployed, the former 
 through compulsion of the employers, were 
 nearly all the outgrowth of Bismarck's deter- 
 mination to filch the clothes of his opponents 
 and to use what he considered was available 
 in Socialism to fortify the state against the com- 
 plete demands of the Socialists. Friendly en- 
 couragement of the Kartels, the German equiva- 
 lent for our trusts, was but a natural step for so 
 materialistic a state as Bismarck left. 
 
 Yet, as so often happens, these particular com- 
 promises have not only not resulted in the de- 
 sired checking of the Social-Democratic party, 
 but have actually witnessed its growth from 
 124,700 votes in 1871 to 4,250,329 in 1912. In 
 the five years from 1907 to 1912 it grew at the 
 rate of 200,000 a year. It is as interesting to 
 guess what Bismarck would have said to this 
 as it is impossible to refrain from the thought 
 that the government may find a certain com- 
 pensation for the existing war in its diversion 
 of public thought from internal to external 
 affairs. Certainly, with the terrible human 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 133 
 
 losses now going on, and the war-time rallying 
 to the support of the Kaiser, it is perfectly safe 
 to say that there will not be 200,000 Sociahst 
 accessions in 1915. Prince von Bulow, who is 
 a much more authoritative and skilful exponent 
 of the modern imperialistic Germany than the 
 Bernhardis and Treitschkes, will surely be of 
 this view, for he has laid down the rule that a 
 vigorous national pohcy is the very best defense 
 against the Social-Democratic movement — "a 
 pohcy which brings the best powers of the na- 
 tion into play; which supports and strengthens 
 the middle classes, already numerous and ever 
 increasing in number, the vast majority of 
 whom steadily uphold the monarchy and the 
 state. . . . The idea of the nation as such 
 must again and again be emphasized by dealing 
 with national problems, so that this idea may 
 continue to move, to unite and to separate 
 parties. . . . The danger must be faced and 
 met with a great and comprehensive national 
 policy. ..." What could please him better 
 than a foreign conflict if it can but be success- 
 fully carried on ? 
 
 Thus the Social-Democrats, the only great, 
 
134 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 vital, radical force in German politics, are likely 
 to suffer doubly from the war: first, through 
 the temporary ending of all agitation and the 
 changed public attitude toward domestic af- 
 fairs; and secondly, because of their own in- 
 consistent policy toward the war. It is true 
 that when the party in its annual conclaves 
 has voted on the question of a general strike 
 in case of war, the proposal has been rejected. 
 Nevertheless, it was felt that, if the menace 
 of war came, they would exert a tremendous 
 pacific influence at home and abroad. This 
 conflict came too suddenly for that, but it was 
 still believed that Socialists on both sides would 
 refuse to take part in the fighting, or at least 
 record their abhorrence by voting against it. 
 But the deadly poison of compromise had en- 
 tered the veins of the German brothers of the 
 Socialist faith when they voted to increase and 
 support the army, precisely as the same spirit 
 of compromise with those who believe in a 
 large army and navy has palsied the effective- 
 ness of our American peace societies. Had 
 even a few of the German followers of Marx 
 possessed sufficient courage and conviction to 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 135 
 
 go to jail for their pacific beliefs, or to face a 
 firing squad, if need be, their cause would have 
 been advanced the world over. Now it is suf- 
 fering proportionately everywhere; in all coun- 
 tries the Socialists are being tainted with in- 
 sincerity, with being without the courage of 
 their convictions. In Germany, Liebknecht 
 alone has dared to refuse to vote for a war 
 credit, and for this he may be punished ere 
 these words appear in type; for, as Von Billow 
 has declared, the Social-Democrats are as thor- 
 oughly disciplined as any other body in the 
 Kaiser's empire — to which fact he attributes 
 their formidableness. It is obvious, surely, 
 that the Social-Democrats will have gained 
 nothing and have lost much by the war, which 
 they can hardly criticise successfully after hav- 
 ing voted to support it and after having taken 
 part in it. It must be a wide-spread cause of 
 regret that what seemed like one of the most 
 hopeful forces for peace is now bound and de- 
 livered. 
 
 The trouble was that there was nobody 
 among the German Socialists to speak out 
 hke Romain RoUand in France and to point 
 
136 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 out to them the error of their present position: 
 that by holding aloof from their country's bat- 
 tles they will merely bring upon themselves 
 the whip of the Russian autocracy and that 
 social organization of England which, in foreign 
 eyes, grinds down her poor. With rare elo- 
 quence Rolland wrote: 
 
 "You Socialists on both sides claim to be de- 
 fending liberty against tyranny — French lib- 
 erty against the Kaiser, German liberty against 
 the Czar. Would you defend one despotism 
 against another? Unite and make war on both. 
 There was no reason for war between the West- 
 ern nations; French, English, and German, we 
 are all brothers and do not hate one another. 
 The war-preaching press is envenomed by a 
 minority, a minority vitally interested in main- 
 taining these hatreds, but our peoples, I know, 
 ask for peace and liberty and that alone. . . . 
 Who has brought these plagues upon them, 
 brought them to the desperate alternative of 
 overwhelming their adversary or dying ? None 
 other than their governments, on whom, in my 
 opinion, the guilt rests; the three rapacious 
 eagles, the three empires, the tortuous policy 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 137 
 
 of the house of Austria, the ravenous greed of 
 Russia, the brutahty of Prussia. The worst 
 enemy of each nation is not without but within 
 its frontiers, and none has the courage to fight 
 against it." 
 
 Had German Socialism but spoken with as 
 clear a note, how vastly strengthened would be 
 its position to-day ! 
 
 If this blunder cannot now be undone, it is 
 interesting to note that Dr. Albert Sudekum, 
 the Social-Democratic leader and the member of 
 the Reichstag who is perhaps best informed as 
 to conditions in the United States, in a recent 
 lecture in BerHn on "The War and the Ger- 
 man Laboring Man," served notice on the 
 prominent government officials in his audience 
 that his party would ask, when peace is re- 
 stored, a good many rewards for their patriotism 
 as attested by their military services and sac- 
 rifices. He called for such a "mobilization" 
 after the war, in matters of law and education, 
 together with a reform of the Constitution, as 
 will give the masses a far larger share in their 
 government and their administration. 
 
 Should this come about, it ought to be at the 
 
138 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 expense of the Clericals and Conservatives (the 
 upper millstone for the Radicals), whose po- 
 sition will surely be strengthened if the Kaiser 
 wins. It is true that when it comes to questions 
 of national defense there are no Catholics and 
 no Protestants. Religious prejudices as affect- 
 ing these two churches are not tolerated in the 
 army, however powerful racial dishkes may be. 
 There are no Protestant or Catholic regiments 
 as such. But in the country as a whole the 
 influence of Rome presses severely in more 
 quarters than one, and the Clerical party is a 
 religious party, however it may deny the fact. 
 Bavaria, a Clerical kingdom, lags in some re- 
 spects well behind the other German states. 
 In brief, the Centre is the party of reaction or 
 of standing still. In the nation its programme 
 is for rehgious teaching in the schools, for a 
 compulsory religious marriage, for protective 
 tariffs, and for the strongly centralized state. 
 It has for years formed a sohd block of approxi- 
 mately one hundred votes in the Reichstag, 
 usually cast on the side of the government, but 
 at times in opposition, in order to obtain party 
 advantage or by reason of a political bargain. 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 139 
 
 In one such case, in 1906, when the Reichstag 
 refused to vote the emergency estimates for 
 the army then fighting in Southwest Africa, the 
 Centre actually struck hands for the moment 
 with their sworn enemies the Social-Democrats. 
 Von Billow dissolved the Reichstag on the 
 ground that a refusal to vote the men and sup- 
 plies the Kaiser asked was an intolerable inva- 
 sion of his constitutional rights as supreme war- 
 lord. The Centre gained three votes in the 
 ensuing election, the Social-Democrats meeting 
 with a veritable, but totally unexpected, dis- 
 aster. 
 
 While Von Bulow was ever ready to accept 
 the historic support of the throne by the Cler- 
 icals when it was to be had, he now feels that 
 there are "many weighty reasons why a rehg- 
 ious party should not wield such extraordinary 
 and decisive influence in polities as was the 
 case for many years in this country. The 
 Centre is and will remain a party held together 
 by religious views, however subtly opinion in 
 Cologne and Berlin may argue about the idea 
 of a religious party." One of these weighty 
 reasons is probably a recognition of the fact that 
 
140 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 logically a church like the Roman Cathohc must 
 be more concerned with international poUty than 
 national. The trend of the church is in the op- 
 posite direction from the intense national idea 
 toward which the Germany of to-day has been 
 steered. Imperiahstic materiahsts of the Von 
 Bulow-Treitschke type cannot, moreover, view 
 with satisfaction the control in Rome, a foreign 
 city, of a great German church which numbers 
 one-third of the citizens of the nation. Then 
 there are the historic encounters between the 
 Centre and the federal government in BerHn 
 which show pretty clearly that there is always 
 the possibiHty of a conflict between them, that 
 is, between the wishes of the papacy at Rome 
 and the controlling powers in Berlin. 
 
 Hence the German Imperialists have felt that, 
 however much the Centre might lean toward 
 conservatism and the support of the throne, it 
 would sooner or later be a serious stumbling- 
 block in their way. Von Biilow was the more 
 ready, therefore, in 1907 to turn to Liberals and 
 Radicals for his majority. The latter fell 
 readily into his nationaHstic trap and were 
 soon compromising themselves from the stand- 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 141 
 
 point of consistency and principle by voting for 
 the great armaments, quite forgetting how bril- 
 liantly Rickert had opposed them a few years 
 before. In consequence Von Biilow was able to 
 point triumphantly to the spectacle of all the 
 middle-class parties hned up for militarism and 
 for that world-imperiaHsm which, as now ap- 
 pears, was the logical outcome of the national- 
 istic propaganda. At the beginning of the fate- 
 ful year 1914 Von Bulow could even write in 
 his own justification: *'The national questions of 
 the empire have ceased to be a subject of anx- 
 iety in home poHtics." But, confidently as he 
 and others may hope to find the power of the 
 church of Rome in Germany weakened by the 
 tremendous outburst of national feeHng due to 
 the war, it is by no means certain that they 
 will find their hopes realized. The Centre, 
 which could gain seats in the bitter campaign 
 of 1906, when it was taunted with an unpa- 
 triotic failure to support a German army under 
 fire — freely portrayed as tantamount to trea- 
 son — is the party least Hkely to be affected by 
 the war, however desirable might be a decrease 
 of its power. It appears to be practically un- 
 
142 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 shakable in its intrenched position by any 
 upheaval whether due to domestic or foreign 
 causes — at least unless its South German 
 strongholds are affected by some far-reaching 
 wave of liberalism and reform. If the reasons 
 given above for the natural aloofness of the 
 Centre from the nationalistic policy are sound, 
 future chancellors will still have to reckon with 
 its lukewarmness, as did Von Bulow. 
 
 As for the Conservatives and the favored 
 minority of privilege-holders they represent, 
 what more natural than for these overlords to 
 turn from imperialistic exploitation and domi- 
 nation at home to imperialistic schemes abroad ? 
 They, too, have recognized in their appeal 
 to national pride, ambition, and cupidity, an 
 excellent means of combating the advocates 
 of social revolution. They have asserted that 
 colonies were necessary to protect their over- 
 seas trade and to provide for their surplus pop- 
 ulation. But emigration dropped from 220,902 
 in 1881 to the insignificant figure of 19,883 in 
 1908. Those who maintain, therefore, that 
 Germany must have territory to which to over- 
 flow can justify themselves only by reference 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 143 
 
 to a distant future. If the German steamship 
 lines had had to depend upon German emi- 
 grants for support, they must long since have 
 failed; even to South America — Brazil and 
 the Argentine — about which our American 
 jingoes have shown such hypocritical concern, 
 lest there be a violation of the Monroe Doc- 
 trine, the German emigration is, of late, abso- 
 lutely nil. There has been too great prosperity 
 at home and too rapid industrial expansion. 
 Then, the German is not a successful colonist; 
 he is as overbearing and unjust in governing the 
 natives that come under his sway as our South- 
 erners are in their treatment of the negro masses 
 upon whose manual labor their prosperity is 
 founded. Ruthless Prussian methods are ap- 
 plied abroad as if they were the only standards 
 of government; as if there were no possibility 
 that forms and methods of administration might 
 have to be changed in different climates with 
 different human beings. As a result there have 
 been bloody rebellions in the largest colonies. 
 It is a kind of poetic justice, therefore, which 
 sends native troops against the Germans. The 
 spirits of the slaughtered and starved Herreros 
 
144 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 may perhaps be rejoicing at the sight in about 
 the same measure as the Germans are horrified 
 that their Kultur is being assailed by what they 
 are pleased to call "mongrel races." 
 
 Still another fact shows the falsity of the 
 German imperialist contention as to the neces- 
 sity of colonies. Each year several hundred 
 thousand Italian, Russian, Polish, and Hunga- 
 rian workmen cross into Germany to harvest 
 the crops. They in part, therefore, take the 
 place of the 860,000 Germans who are drawn 
 off from industrial employments because of the 
 compulsory military service. At almost all 
 times it is possible to see in South Germany 
 Italians working on large public enterprises pre- 
 cisely as they are doing the heavy work in the 
 eastern States of America. In other words, the 
 expansion of German industry which is so ap- 
 parent by contrast the minute one crosses the 
 Alsacian border, when bound from France east- 
 ward, has far outrun the natural expansion of 
 the population, and this is true despite the over- 
 crowding and the poverty of the masses in the 
 cities. But, if it were not true, it is still a fact 
 that the Germans are untempted by the oppor- 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 145 
 
 tunities in their colonies, as Doctor Dernburg, 
 the best colonial minister they have had, well 
 knows. In some of the smaller colonies the 
 total German population is practically the 
 official one. Never was there so clear a case 
 of acquisition for acquisition's sake as this of 
 the German colonies. Until the early eighties 
 Germany lived in complete happiness without 
 thought of one. Then the idea came to Bis- 
 marck that Germany must be in the fashion, 
 and so the grabbing of other people's lands 
 began, in slavish imitation of France and Eng- 
 land. As one who was in Berlin when the first 
 "German Africans" arrived there, the writer 
 well recalls what elaborate official efforts were 
 made to rouse the public to enthusiasm over this 
 first plunge into an oversea venture, which was 
 part of Bismarck's deliberate propaganda to 
 arouse national pride and solidarity among the 
 German states then unified but a dozen years. 
 
 As for the argument that Germany must have 
 colonies as coaling stations for her war-ships 
 and refuges for her merchantmen in the event 
 of hostilities, the war has shown that for her 
 the only safe harbors abroad are neutral ones. 
 
146 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 Her navy, which, it was insisted, was necessary 
 to protect her commerce, has failed to do so, 
 and despite the daring and dash of the Karls- 
 ruhe , the Emden, and a few others, the injury 
 inflicted by her commerce-destroyers is a mere 
 trifle when compared with the British loss in 
 exports and imports in the first five months of 
 the struggle due solely to the dislocation of 
 trade by the war. This commerce-protecting 
 argument has done good service in Germany for 
 the imperialists, but if there had been no great 
 merchant fleet to warrant it, another reason 
 for this naval expansion would have been found, 
 precisely as our American imperialists have 
 found other excuses for our unduly large "de- 
 fensive" navy. The mischief done to Germany 
 by the upbuilding of its fleet will one day, we 
 trust, be set forth by some sound German his- 
 torian, after the bitterness of the present con- 
 flict has passed away. He will show how its 
 upbuilding increased the size of the French, 
 British, and United States fleets; how it gave 
 chauvinists everywhere the opportunity to rouse 
 suspicion and passion against Germany, and 
 how its existence helped to draw Great Britain 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 147 
 
 into the catastrophe of 1914. He will recall 
 to his readers the fact that Germany's coasts 
 needed no fleet to protect them in 1870. 
 
 Judging by the masterly inactivity of the 
 French and Russian fleets thus far, those coasts 
 would have been safe enough under the protec- 
 tion of their guns and mines had France and 
 Russia been Germany's only enemies. Up to 
 the present time there has been nothing in the 
 progress of the naval war to prove that Ger- 
 many has gained anything of real moment by 
 her fleet. The war will be decided on land, 
 and thus far the Kaiser's navy has weakened 
 its opponents scarcely at all; it has simply fed 
 German pride by proving that Germany's offi- 
 cers and men are no less excellent seamen, and 
 perhaps even more daring, than England's; that 
 they can fight and die with supreme courage and 
 complete readiness to sacrifice all, even when 
 the odds are overwhelming. The development 
 of the German fleet has, indeed, had a tragic 
 effect upon the fortunes of the nation, if only 
 because of the uneasiness and antagonism it has 
 created in Great Britain, Germany's natural 
 ally. 
 
148 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 If it be asserted that this is England's fault, 
 that the danger to her swollen navalism was 
 really what aroused her to strike, and that she 
 has no natural right to a monopoly of sea-power, 
 our answer is that it is difficult to see how Ger- 
 many has benefited in any w^ay by her fleet to 
 offset the anxieties it created, justly or unjustly, 
 not only in England, but in France and the 
 United States. The writer holds no brief what- 
 ever for the British navy, but no one can point 
 to any injury done to Germany's sea trade since 
 the foundation of the empire by reason of the 
 preponderance of British war-ships. In the face 
 of it the German merchant fleet has grown year 
 by year with amazing celerity, because of the 
 enterprise and far-sightedness of her merchants, 
 the skill of her ship-builders, the character and 
 abihty of her seamen. No subsidies have been 
 needed, and no colonies either, for this wonderful 
 expansion, and no selfish appeals to national 
 cupidity or national pride. Her battle fleet 
 has helped not at all, for her conquest of the 
 sea has in fact been due to the same thrift, 
 scientific management, and industry that ac- 
 count for her success ashore. The war fleet, it 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 149 
 
 must be repeated, has burdened Germany be- 
 cause of the fears and prejudices it caused; 
 but this is, of course, the very contrary of the 
 teachings of the nationahsts and imperiaUsts. 
 
 Unfortunately for Germany, as has been 
 pointed out, her diplomacy has often marred her 
 efforts to essay the role of a world-power. Her 
 diplomatic corps has been too rigid and too nar- 
 row, too exclusively aristocratic, too little rep- 
 resentative of the best in the nation, and too 
 prone to adopt the bureaucratic tone. It still 
 appears to be actuated by the old idea that 
 the diplomat is the personal representative and 
 agent of the monarch and of nobody else. In- 
 telligent Germans frankly envy the French for- 
 eign service, in which a man of talents may 
 rise to the highest posts without having to seek 
 the favor of an exclusive, autocratic court. 
 They have seen much good in our American 
 diplomatic system, or, better, lack of system. 
 For if it sometimes leads to our being misrep- 
 resented abroad by men lacking in experience, 
 knowledge, good manners, and refinement, it 
 at least brings men of varying types to the 
 front — business men, journaUsts, lawyers, pol- 
 
150 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 iticians, and not mere bureaucrats of a pecul- 
 iarly narrow tradition. True, these professional 
 diplomats are supposed to be broadened by 
 residence in all quarters of the globe; yet, as a 
 writer in the Deutsche Rundschau has recently 
 pointed out, the German bureaucracy, although 
 "the most reliable and best in the world, must 
 fail in the foreign service, because the training 
 is rigid, inflexible, and precisely the same as for 
 administrative duties at home." Others may 
 not agree with him that German diplomacy has 
 been "too correct" and too much controlled by 
 a narrow judicial point of view. But his asser- 
 tion that it is small-calibred and that it smacks 
 too much of the petty bureaucratic, i. e., is too 
 '' assessorenhafty" is not likely to be gainsaid 
 by those who know. As a result, he says, the 
 German meets everywhere he goes with "a 
 failure to understand him or a disUke tinged 
 with hatred." This writer is frank to say that 
 this state of affairs cannot be explained away 
 by asserting that German success is Germany's 
 only crime; the responsibiHty, he insists, lies 
 not all with the other nations. 
 The truth surely is that Germany's inner 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 151 
 
 social and political development has not kept 
 pace with the expansion of her foreign trade 
 and her international interests, with the result, 
 as we have seen, that those international rela- 
 tions have been bunglingly handled for do- 
 mestic political purposes or for a world-policy 
 injurious to the nation. This cannot be empha- 
 sized too strongly, and when to it be added that 
 the men who are trusted to interpret Germany's 
 national aspirations abroad are not representa- 
 tive of the aspirations of the bulk of the people, 
 or even of her commercial interests, the reasons 
 for dissatisfaction with her foreign service are 
 plain. The press repeatedly sins when it comes 
 to dealing with foreign affairs; at least, it has 
 a rare faculty for supporting the wrong side. 
 Thus, in the Spanish-American War, in uphold- 
 ing Spain it made absolutely no allowance for 
 the altruistic and unselfish motives which ac- 
 tuated the bulk of the American people; it 
 failed to distinguish that, however badly a sec- 
 tion of our press, politicians, and public might 
 behave, there was at bottom no ulterior purpose. 
 Recollections of German tactlessness at Ma- 
 nila and elsewhere rankle in this country to 
 
152 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 Germany's detriment to-day. In the settle- 
 ment of the Chinese war she ahenated Japan 
 and angered England, with the resultant Anglo- 
 Japanese alliance now so fateful to her. When 
 England made advances, Germany rebuffed her, 
 because at that particular moment she cared 
 more for her friendship with Russia, the net 
 result being that Russia, France, and England 
 became allies. All of which recalls the saying 
 of Friedrich Wilhelm IV that "the army has in 
 every case had to make good the blunders of 
 our diplomacy"; that it may succeed in doing 
 so now must surely be the fervent wish of many 
 thousands of Germans to-day. 
 
 Even when, as in Moroccan affairs, Germany 
 was tactically correct, her diplomats have not 
 known how to utilize their situation to the full- 
 est advantage, or how to present their case so 
 as to make the best possible impression on the 
 rest of the world. It is impossible to-day to 
 foresee any better relations for her with the 
 other members of the family of nations until 
 responsible parliamentary government is estab- 
 lished with control over foreign affairs and with 
 the powers of the Kaiser curtailed. 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 153 
 
 The same thing is true of the Russian au- 
 tocracy to-day. England, for instance, is very 
 happy to have Russia help her, but trust her 
 she does not. It all comes back to the fact 
 that in our present political development an 
 unchecked monarchy is a far greater danger 
 to the peace of the world than is a democracy. 
 How soon is this going to be realized by the 
 German masses? How soon will they see that 
 the best way to master the seas and supply the 
 needs of the outside world is the pacific way, 
 the way of free and friendly trade without the 
 threat of army and navy ? How soon will they 
 realize the harm that this threat has worked in 
 the past; that their altogether admirable con- 
 quest of foreign marts has been used as a blind 
 by those who would cure internal ills not by 
 genuine reforms, but by playing one party off 
 against another and confusing all by chauvin- 
 istic appeals,^ Upon the speed with which 
 these questions are answered would seem to 
 depend the progress of internal reform in Ger- 
 many, for which her well-wishers look so ea- 
 gerly. 
 
 By its very nature war checks reasoning; yet 
 
154 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 the hour will come when Germany's political 
 leaders, her men and women of conscience, will 
 sit down with one another to judge the past 
 and to count the costs of the war. They will 
 find their country bereaved and in mourning for 
 an incredible number of needlessly wasted souls, 
 with scarcely a family unseared by some bitter, 
 bitter loss. By the side of this impoverish- 
 ment, materialistic things pale, but how great 
 will be the money debt to face them, to coun- 
 teract and offset years and years of arduous, 
 penurious labor, of thrift, of self-denial ! The 
 Hves of all who survive will be profoundly af- 
 fected and altered. Cherished ambitions will 
 have come to naught; for thousands of parents 
 who will have sacrificed not one but two and 
 three sons the skies will be clouded forever. 
 No sunlight will again penetrate the darkened 
 chambers of their hearts. Men and women by 
 tens of thousands will have passed overnight 
 from riches and competence to poverty. The 
 misery of the poor will handicap them more than 
 ever, particularly if, in addition to the debt of 
 the war, they must again take up the burden 
 of supporting 860,000 men in unproductive labor 
 
IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 155 
 
 to prepare for another such massacre of inno- 
 cents — for such it is. All this at the bidding 
 of an uncontrolled imperialism ! 
 
 Will not the masses, if they but reason about 
 it, be tempted to pray that their enemies may 
 have the power to punish them by sinking their 
 fleet, by levelling their forts, by forbidding 
 them to arm again ? Will they not, failing that, 
 take it upon themselves to arrange their affairs 
 and recast their institutions that the like of 
 this most diabolical of catastrophes shall never 
 occur again? Will they not insist upon their 
 reckoning with the "national idea," recogniz- 
 ing it as an autocratic device to confuse issues 
 and parties? Will there not be raised up now 
 a Gambetta; some real champion of the people, 
 unhampered by the fallacies of Socialism, to lead 
 with a constructive, but radical, programme? 
 For him Germany has long been waiting, per- 
 haps even now in vain. But there is a wonder- 
 ful need for such a one to point the true way 
 to national greatness; to overcome the falla- 
 cies of professors and princes; to show what is 
 the true spiritual way to conquer the world, to 
 call up once more the spirit of the old, beloved 
 
156 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 Germany, self-contained, lovable, devoted to 
 liberal thought as to freedom from cant and 
 dogma, a menace to nobody, revered every- 
 where for her sciences, her knowledge, and the 
 wisdom of her teachings. 
 
 Perhaps only one thing is certain: the polit- 
 ical Germany of yesterday has gone forever. 
 It is beyond recall, whatever the check or the 
 gain to the things of the spirit, or whither the 
 current of democracy shall flow which now stirs 
 so sluggishly the political deeps of what is the 
 Kaiser's empire, but must some day be his 
 people's. 
 
VII 
 
 THE UNITED STATES AND THE 
 PEACE TREATY 
 
 ^T this writing many Americans are chaf- 
 /■\ ing at President Wilson's policy of neu- 
 trality. They would have the United 
 States officially voice its protest against the 
 violation of Belgium. Was it not a signatory 
 with Germany to that convention of the Second 
 Hague Conference which forbade belligerents 
 to move troops across the territory of a neutral 
 power? Shall the United States remain silent 
 while Germany makes of these solemn Hague 
 treaties mere scraps of paper? Ought this 
 country not to hasten the end of the war by 
 letting Germany feel the full weight of our 
 government's indignation at this breach of 
 faith? Some, like ex-President Eliot, urge that 
 we participate in the war in order that blood- 
 shed cease at an early date and that the victory 
 
 157 
 
158 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 be so decisive as to make out of the question a 
 Waterloo a few years hence. 
 
 Against this President Wilson has wisely set 
 himself like flint. It is of the utmost impor- 
 tance to all the combatants that the greatest 
 of the remaining neutral nations should keep its 
 poise and be free from the bias inevitable if it 
 should take sides by diplomatic action or by 
 active participation in the war. Both sides 
 have appealed to the head of this country to 
 judge the alleged illegal war-acts of their ene- 
 mies — a striking proof that they have felt the 
 need of an unprejudiced international tribunal 
 before which to plead. Both sides have thus 
 admitted the dominating moral position of the 
 United States. There appears to be general 
 agreement that it will be President Wilson's 
 task to initiate the peace proceedings when 
 there has been butchery enough. Returning 
 travellers report that President Wilson's repu- 
 tation abroad has grown immeasurably since 
 the war began. British newspapers have dwelt 
 with satisfaction on that passage in his annual 
 message to Congress in which he so eloquently 
 says that "We are the champions of peace and 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 159 
 
 of concord. And we should be very jealous of 
 this distinction which we have sought to earn. 
 Just now we should be particularly jealous of 
 it because it is our dearest present hope that 
 this character and reputation may, presently, in 
 God's providence, bring us an opportunity such 
 as has seldom been vouchsafed any nation, the 
 opportunity to counsel and obtain peace in 
 the world and reconciliation and healing settle- 
 ment of many a matter that has cooled and in- 
 terrupted the friendship of nations," If there 
 has been some serious irritation by reason of 
 Mr. Wilson's firm and just protest against the 
 British policy in regard to neutral vessels, there 
 Js every prospect that the friendly tone of the 
 American communication and of the British an- 
 swer will permit a speedy and satisfactory set- 
 tlement of the entire matter without any grave 
 disturbance of the amicable relations previously 
 existing. 
 
 Aside from this incident, there is satisfaction 
 abroad with the attitude taken by our govern- 
 ment up to this time — even in Germany; if 
 there are some English newspapers which would 
 have us pull their chestnuts out of the fire, and 
 
160 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 some German which would have us legislate to 
 forbid the sale of arms and military supplies to 
 England, as we stopped the exports to Mexico, 
 they all admit that there is no criticism to be 
 made of the pohcy of the President or his of- 
 ficial acts. There is not the slightest insinuation 
 that we have failed in any respect in our duty 
 as a neutral under the existing laws; Secretary 
 Bryan's statement to Senator Stone must prove 
 this to all who are unbiassed. This, together 
 with the prevaiHng belief that there is in the 
 White House a man of the exceptional stature 
 needed for the wonderful opportunity looming 
 up before him, makes it of the utmost impor- 
 tance that Mr. Wilson should not abate a single 
 jot from the pohcy of neutrality he has marked 
 out for himself and the country. 
 
 We are in all the better position to serve be- 
 cause the President has passed no judgment 
 upon the allegations of German atrocities in 
 Belgium, and has so wisely declared that these 
 are matters to be decided not in hot but in cold 
 blood. Among our public, too, there is a grow- 
 ing consciousness that few of these stories of 
 atrocities can be supported, as our returning 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 161 
 
 American war correspondents have testified. 
 The counter-allegations of similar brutalities 
 by French, Russians, Servians, Germans, and 
 Austrians against each other ought to make 
 Americans reahze how frightful are the cruelty 
 and destruction inseparable from war, and how 
 greatly a curious war-hysteria has distorted the 
 vision and the statements of those who undergo 
 the terror of modern carnage. When officers 
 and men of unquestioned courage are actually 
 being driven insane on both sides by the hor- 
 rors they witness, it is not surprising that we 
 have to deal with the wildest allegations, which, 
 if true, would prove that human nature breaks 
 down utterly with the first shots. The people 
 of the United States will unsparingly blame 
 those who are wantonly guilty when the facts 
 are established; meanwhile, if the press is an 
 index, they are more and more following the 
 President's example and reserving judgment. 
 
 Great, doubtless, would be the service ren- 
 dered to the Allies if the United States should 
 fling itself into the war. Far greater is the 
 service which it can perform if it holds not 
 only our historic but our moral position intact. 
 
162 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 "This," Mr. Wilson wrote, "is the time above 
 all others when we should wish and resolve to 
 keep our strength by seK-possession." For us 
 to rush either into the war or into extensive 
 preparations for war would be not merely to tie 
 the President's hands, to deprive him of his 
 position of vantage, but to rob the nation of its 
 vast moral prestige, for it would be the very 
 reverse of keeping our strength and self-pos- 
 session. And the goal is not merely the extend- 
 ing of our good offices and the offering of a navy- 
 yard building for the plenipotentiaries to occupy, 
 as Mr. Roosevelt was able to do for Russia and 
 Japan. It is no distortion of the President's 
 just quoted words to see in them a desire to use 
 our great influence in the direction of such a 
 disposition of the question of armaments as to 
 make impossible a recurrence of this cataclysm 
 with its horrible sum total of misery. That 
 this country has suffered so gravely because of 
 the war in its role of innocent bystander, and 
 that it is, as the President says, honestly de- 
 sirous of itself keeping out of the maelstrom of 
 militarism, are other reasons that assure it a 
 position of commanding importance provided 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 163 
 
 that the President remains a friend to all parties 
 until the end. For him to attempt to achieve 
 his great aim with Congress voting a larger 
 army and navy and many new battleships 
 would be out of the question. "You ask us to 
 disarm," would be the answer, "when you are 
 arming as never before. What sinister motive 
 dictates the suggestion?" Should the Presi- 
 dent take sides, the moral leadership would fall 
 to some one else, or, in the absence of any other 
 powerful neutral executive, would be lacking 
 altogether. 
 
 How grave this would be is apparent if one 
 considers that all hope of the world's return to 
 sanity rests upon the coming peace conference. 
 What shall it avail humanity if a hateful Prus- 
 sian militarism be smashed only to leave in its 
 place a more hateful and dangerous Russian 
 mihtarism and an even more dominating British 
 navalism? Where will be the gain if the Con- 
 tinent remains armed precisely as before save 
 that Germany's wings are clipped ? What hope 
 of lasting peace will there be if the mihtarists 
 are to continue to dominate in the counsels of 
 state .^ How long can so unnatural an alliance 
 
164 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 as that of reactionary Russia and liberal Eng- 
 land last if there is a return to the old system 
 of checks and balances, of secret and open al- 
 liances, with the power to make war in the 
 hands of a few who have supreme authority 
 over great military machines ? Everybody now 
 agrees that this war must have come, sooner or 
 later, because the militarism of Europe made it 
 inevitable. How soon will another come if it is 
 left practically intact ? 
 
 It is the curse of the whole military business 
 that, whether it be German, or French, or 
 Russian, or American, it inevitably breeds a 
 powerful military propaganda. Its advocates 
 talk it, think it, prepare for it, urge it, glory 
 in it, insist that blood-letting must come every 
 now and then, and, in Europe, have trained 
 whole peoples to their belief. The psycho- 
 logical effect of all of this false teaching is ines- 
 timable, and it is not to be measured by the 
 numbers engaged in it; a few men of Lord 
 Roberts's standing, assuming expert knowl- 
 edge not possessed by any one else, may do 
 incalculable harm. It is beyond all question 
 that the Austrian mihtary party sought war 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 165 
 
 with Servia not once, but three times, and 
 finally brought it about, thanks to the arch- 
 duke's assassination. Its members, and the 
 rank and file of the army, were exultingly cer- 
 tain that war was at hand in 1912. "Es lebe 
 der Krieg!" was the toast, and bitter was their 
 disappointment that their old Kaiser held them 
 in check during the Balkan wars. It was not 
 German militarism that was the extreme dan- 
 ger point then but the Austrian, with the others 
 not far behind, the Austrians solemnly prating 
 that armies are the best insurance against war 
 when they were doing their utmost to bring 
 it on. They differ but in degrees. And is the 
 world, when this war is over, to continue their 
 policy, which at best spells economic ruin, with 
 the United States perhaps following suit.? If 
 so, the men who are being maimed and are 
 dying by the hundred thousand in the prime of 
 their manhood are suffering and perishing in 
 vain. 
 
 Again, what more glorious opportunity could 
 there be than this offers for that moral lead- 
 ership of the world which in some respects has 
 always been America's ? Indubitably, we shall 
 
166 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 hear warnings that for Mr. Wilson to do any- 
 thing beyond providing a meeting-place for 
 peace plenipotentiaries may lead to dangerous 
 entanglements; that it is our business to stand 
 aloof and mind our own affairs lest we be drawn 
 into some international agreement of the kind 
 against which Washington in his far-seeing wis- 
 dom warned us so earnestly and so wisely. 
 But wisely to exercise our moral influence will 
 mean nothing of the kind. Already we have 
 been deeply affected by the war; we have been 
 drawn into it spiritually by our sympathies, 
 economically through our suffering and through 
 the contributions of our granaries, our arms, 
 and our powder factories; politically because 
 of the appeals to us to act as judge of wrong- 
 doing. Shall the most extraordinary chance to 
 lead the world back to the natural, peaceful 
 status of man be allowed to slip by with no 
 effort on our part? It is unthinkable, if there 
 is any imagination left in the White House; if 
 there is any response there to an overwhelming 
 moral appeal. We know there is. 
 
 Here is a straightforward practical under- 
 taking on behalf of peace to stir every man not 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 167 
 
 war-mad. Never was there a better vantage- 
 ground for attacking the whole vicious system, 
 because some of the oldest militaristic shibbo- 
 leths have been shown to be utterly baseless. 
 That hoary old falsehood that armies make 
 for peace is as exploded now as is the assertion 
 that training in arms alone keeps a nation from 
 rotting out, from becoming craven and flabby. 
 Hereafter militarism is in the open, to be de- 
 fended, if at all, on the grounds that nobody is 
 to be trusted; that mankind has not advanced 
 during the centuries; that there is no way for 
 any nation to Hve save with rifle on hip; that 
 there is nothing in morahty or national honor 
 or Christianity. If militarism is to continue 
 to exist, we must be frankly brutal, frankly 
 cynical, and here in peaceful America we shall 
 be urged by some fellow citizens to make the 
 business of preparing to kill other peoples the 
 supreme business of the nation. The world, in 
 other words, is to defeat Prussian Bernhardiism, 
 but is itself to be conquered by his doctrines 
 — even the most peace-loving of democracies, 
 safeguarded by two oceans; the democracy 
 which came into being partly because of a 
 
168 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 profound hatred of a standing army of its own 
 folk which menaced its freedom of poHtical 
 growth. Are we calmly to assent to this teach- 
 ing of cynics, or are we to seize the opportu- 
 nity practically and seriously to contend with 
 these forces which menace the happiness of the 
 world ? 
 
 Surely the President of the United States who 
 failed to profit by the unique international po- 
 sition which presents itself would be recreant 
 to this trust and to our national traditions. It 
 is not meant by this that the President should 
 take an aggressive attitude and insist that 
 American commissioners shall thrust their legs 
 under the table of peace. Active participa- 
 tion, if permitted, might easily be a fatal mis- 
 take; direct action, unless the opportunity 
 comes just in the right way, might prove more 
 hurtful than helpful. But behind the Presi- 
 dent stands the sound, generous, and united 
 public opinion of the American people, and 
 that can be focussed and expressed when the 
 hour comes. How to make it tell is the Presi- 
 dent's task; it cannot be impossible when the 
 belligerents have already besought us to exert 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 169 
 
 it. Failure, of course, may be the President's 
 lot. The bitter hatreds being aroused may end 
 the possibility of even his good offices; but 
 emphatically this is a case where not failure 
 but low aim will be the crime. The oppor- 
 tunity is to serve not merely America and the 
 belligerents, but all mankind. 
 
 "For the finer spirits of Europe there are 
 two dweUing-places," RoUand has written; "our 
 earthly fatherland, and that other City of 
 God. Of the one we are the guests, of the 
 other the builders. To the one let us give our 
 lives and our faithful hearts; but neither fam- 
 ily, friend, nor fatherland, nor aught that we 
 love, has power over the spirit, which is the 
 light. It is our duty to rise above tempests, 
 and thrust aside the clouds which threaten to 
 obscure it; to build higher and stronger, dom- 
 inating the injustice and hatred of nations, the 
 walls of that city wherein the souls of the 
 whole world may assemble." If this is Eu- 
 rope's duty it is still more that of the United 
 States, to whom has suddenly come the spiritual 
 and moral leadership of the world. It is for 
 us to build higher and stronger than any one 
 
170 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 else; not only to dominate injustice and hatred 
 in other nations, but those in our own hearts. 
 The people of this country would hail as an- 
 other Lincoln a President who could translate 
 into action their ardent desire to render this 
 service in this spirit and to give expression to 
 our own pacific aims; to extend that "final 
 help" of which the London Times wrote. By 
 the side of this, of what importance is a formal 
 declaration that the United States views with 
 regret the violation of Belgian neutraHty? All 
 the world knows that it does; to record it 
 officially would be to antagonize two great na- 
 tions and to tie our hands for the "final help." 
 But it is precisely for those two offending 
 nations that the United States ought to step 
 into the breach. The victors, if victors the Al- 
 lies prove to be, must needs be checked, unless 
 smouldering animosities like those left by the 
 peace of 1871 and the annexation of Alsace- 
 Lorraine are to rankle for another forty years, 
 then to burst into flames again. Aheady in 
 England they are beginning to see this. Men 
 of hght and leading are protesting that Ger- 
 many must not be degraded; that all talk of 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 171 
 
 rending her limb from limb is as absurd as to 
 speak of wiping her off the map. The "Union 
 of Democratic Control" has been founded, one 
 of the objects of which is to influence the terms 
 of peace so that at least no province or terri- 
 tory shall be torn from its present allegiance, 
 except by the consent of the people, duly regis- 
 tered by a fair vote. 
 
 Prominent writers like Professor Sidney Webb 
 are voicing humane sentiments at public meet- 
 ings, such as: "HumiHation is the most expen- 
 sive luxury in which any victor can indulge, 
 because it does not pay." Mr. Webb declares 
 that it would involve "an enormous loss to 
 the world if the war should end with Europe 
 armed to the teeth, or if the enemy were left 
 in a state of furious hatred." Others are even 
 questioning the wisdom of a great indemnity, 
 and are asking if the moral effect is not more 
 advantageous to the nation paying the in- 
 demnity than to that receiving it — a question 
 which inevitably recalls the French experience 
 in paying the 1871 indemnity which Germany 
 fancied would cripple her rival for years to 
 come. Indeed, as eminent an authority as 
 
172 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 Hans Blum insists that the indemnity so un- 
 settled German finance in the years after the 
 war and until 1880 as actually to have been a 
 grave injury to the recipients. As for the moral 
 effects, surely the injury done to Germany in 
 the opinion of the rest of the world by her 
 forced levies upon Belgian cities far outweighs 
 the benefit of the actual sums received, which 
 are at best trifling compared with what this war 
 is costing her in a single week. 
 
 Still other far-sighted Englishmen are much 
 less concerned with the terms of peace than 
 with doing away with the political conditions 
 which make such a catastrophe possible. They 
 desire no more secret British diplomacy; they 
 would broaden the basis of the English diplo- 
 matic service so that it shall not hereafter be 
 restricted to graduates of Eton or Christ Church 
 and those possessed of four hundred pounds a 
 year. They would make it impossible here- 
 after for a split Cabinet to plunge Great Britain 
 into war without taking a vote in Parliament, 
 if not one of the people. Surely, if enlightened 
 sentiment like this can make itself heard in 
 England even in war times, when no one is sup- 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 173 
 
 posed to think save in accordance with the 
 wishes of the Cabinet, and then only with a 
 bloodthirsty Berserker desire to inflict untold 
 injury upon the enemy, advances in kind from 
 the United States would strike a responsive 
 chord. 
 
 By the time the war ends we shall hear little 
 or nothing of the talk of destroying Germany, 
 and in that country there should speedily be 
 an end of the nonsense that Germany is now 
 fighting for her very existence. If history has 
 taught anything, it is that a people with a 
 strong individuality cannot be wiped out. Po- 
 land has proved that: divided into three parts 
 it yet Hves in tongue, in character, in the hearts 
 of its people; and may, for all one can foresee, 
 be on the verge of its restoration as a poHtical 
 entity. Were Germany to be divided up among 
 the AUies it could as httle be conquered. That 
 which is sound and good in its Kultur would 
 survive, no matter how great the difliculties. 
 The German spirit — that part of it which all 
 the world admires— -is unconquerable; it can 
 no more be destroyed than matter, which the 
 scientists tell us^ is indestructible. Norman 
 
174 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 Angell has shown beyond dispute that in the 
 modern economic organization of society no 
 nation profits by conquest of territory. The 
 United States has gained nothing by holding 
 the Philippines, save an administrative burden 
 costly in more ways than one. It has acquired 
 no trade advantages which would not inure to 
 it if it hauled down its flag and let the Filipinos 
 govern themselves. So Germany, if she suc- 
 ceeds in holding Belgium, cannot hope to make 
 Germans of the Belgians. They have been for 
 a century trying to compel the Polish Prussians 
 to become German Prussians — without suc- 
 cess. They have fought some successful wars 
 during that period, but they have lost every 
 battle against the Polish language. The Flem- 
 ish would equally survive under German rule 
 as it has outlived the vicissitudes of the cen- 
 turies. How the Germans have failed to win 
 the affection of the captured French provinces 
 is apparent to every student of the situation. 
 Why should not every effort, therefore, be 
 directed toward avoiding these old pitfalls and 
 making a peace which shall advance humanity 
 and not retard its spiritual development? 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 175 
 
 It is only the statesmen, the small ruling 
 cliques, who, apart from the masses of the people, 
 fail to appreciate this — who cKng to the old 
 shibboleths and still lust for conquests. The 
 masses of no people seek the lands of others. 
 Surplus populations do not by any means all go 
 to colonies, when colonies there are. There has 
 been nothing more striking about this entire 
 war than the discovery of the multitudes of 
 Germans who lived in France and England, and 
 of the French and English who lived in Ger- 
 many. Thousands of them refused to go even 
 after war was declared, notably in Germany. 
 That was their home despite their technical 
 British nationality, and there they wanted to 
 stay in peace, and there the men are in con- 
 centration camps to-day, owing to the un- 
 generous policy of the English Government. 
 What would happen to German and Italian 
 multitudes in the United States if we should go 
 to war with Germany or Italy, it is not easy to 
 foresee. This is one of the effective, but quiet 
 and unsuspected, ways in which economic and 
 social forces are gradually breaking down in- 
 ternational boundaries and hastening the day 
 
176 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 of a world-federation. It is one of the factors 
 which make ridiculous the fire-eaters' asser- 
 tion that Germany if conquered will be humbled 
 in the dust. There is too little real enmity 
 between the warring peoples, between the men 
 in the ranks, who respect each other's prowess, 
 to make this possible. All the greater should 
 be the pressure from all neutral lands against 
 any attempt to strike down her misled people. 
 
 American opinion, particularly, must be di- 
 rected toward safeguarding the best interests 
 of Germany when the war ends, for the claims 
 of her people upon us cannot be denied, how- 
 ever we may reprobate her participation in the 
 struggle or the policies of her General Staff. 
 This will be the time to show how deep-seated 
 is the friendship between the two nations, and 
 to"prove that we remember how German brain 
 and brawn have helped to make this country what 
 it is. German axes have hewn the pioneer's 
 way through many a forest. In whole sections 
 they alone till the soil. Everywhere they rank 
 among the most industrious and law-abiding; 
 few are either agitators or enemies of the ex- 
 isting order, so that there is wide-spread regret 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 177 
 
 that no more of them are coming to us. In our 
 national crises they have stood fast, taking 
 military service for ideahstic reasons — thou- 
 sands even who had not begun to master the 
 EngHsh language. They are bone of our bone 
 and sinew of our sinew. They have enriched 
 our national life; what we owe to them for the 
 development of art and music is incalculable. 
 But if there were not a single German-born cit- 
 izen among us, our debt to the intellect and the 
 heart of Germany itself is such that this coun- 
 try could not be ungenerous or unjust to it in 
 its hour of distress, whatever its wrong-doing. 
 As Carl Schurz once put it: "The friendship 
 between the United States and Germany is as 
 old as the republic itself. It has remained 
 unbroken because it was demanded by all con- 
 siderations of interest, of civilization, and of 
 international good will. There is between the 
 two nations not the slightest occasion for dis- 
 cord." 
 
 Nothing makes friendships whether between 
 individuals or nations as does generosity. The 
 United States, which set the noblest example of 
 forgiveness and of leniency ever seen in deal- 
 
178 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 ing with its rebels of 1861-65, can prove that this 
 is the poHcy which makes best for concord and 
 amity. Had the scaffold taken its toll after 
 Appomattox, no such speedy reunion as we have 
 witnessed would have been seen. If that pol- 
 icy of forgiveness was possible in the heat and 
 bitterness of our civil strife, when treason was 
 rife, after the murder of the nation's best-be- 
 loved executive, the Englishmen who are already 
 working for a future friendship between their 
 country and the Kaiser's are eminently justified 
 in their aim. Prussian militarism is a disease 
 to be eradicated; the whole aggressive attitude 
 of the ruHng Germans who to-day embody the 
 nation is the inevitable result of their milita- 
 rism and autocracy, combined with the bad 
 manners of a nouveau riche nation which has 
 grown wealthy overnight. Our own country, 
 if Dickens, Trollope, Harriet Martineau, and 
 other travellers are to be trusted, went through 
 a period of similar rudeness coupled with a 
 similar egotism, until awakened by the Civil 
 War. As it outgrew this state, so must embat- 
 tled Germany hers. The point is that there is 
 in German Kultur, that is, in her spirit, her 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 179 
 
 steadfastness, in the homely virtues and indus- 
 try of the masses of her people, the frequent 
 inspiration of her men of learning, her artists 
 and musicians, in her reverence for the achieve- 
 ments of the intellect, much that is priceless 
 for all humanity, and this must be preserved. 
 Every nation makes some such vital original 
 contributions to the credit side of the world's 
 vast bank-account. England makes hers, and 
 so does France, and so, too, through her dem- 
 ocratic institutions, the absence of caste, the 
 freedom of her people to think freely, to labor, 
 to rise in the social scale as they please, does our 
 own United States. From that credit total the 
 world is not rich enough to spare a part. 
 
 Our country in this pregnant hour has an- 
 other duty. It is to reaflBrm to itself bravely 
 and proudly the fundamental things for which 
 the nation stands. Theoretically, we do not 
 believe in kings any more than in standing 
 armies. Yet there has been noticeable a tend- 
 ency among us to look upon kings and kaisers 
 and courts with a different eye from that of our 
 fathers. Some of us have not only taken kindly 
 to aristocracies, but have been eager to crook 
 
180 GERMANY EMBATTLED 
 
 the knee to royalty. It is a pleasant after-din- 
 ner babble to discourse of the evils of universal 
 suffrage; even to lament, if tilings go not to 
 our taste, that there is not a permanent, stable 
 head at Washington. How else are we to have 
 the kind of efficiency that is Germany's.^ Or 
 as good city government.'^ After all, there is 
 Httle difference, the argument runs, whether you 
 have a king or not; one's Uberties are about as 
 unfettered in England or Germany as in the 
 United States. So we have graduated from the 
 days when our fathers had such a hatred of 
 royalty as to lead hosts of them to tear their 
 families up by the roots and transplant them 
 across the ocean; as to make our Fourth of July 
 orators return with stale, but useful, reitera- 
 tion to the fact that we are all kings; that we 
 owe allegiance to no man; that we change our 
 rulers as suits us and beUeve in no such non- 
 sense as the divine right of anybody to decide 
 the fate and destiny of the masses of his coun- 
 trymen. 
 
 It is thus a wonderful opportunity to set 
 forth the value of our repubhcan institutions. 
 Not that we beHeve them perfect: our Presi- 
 
THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 181 
 
 dent by himself, and our Congress, can involve 
 the nation in war, ruin the hopes and aspira- 
 tions of a generation, and plunge it into misery 
 and grief without the consent of those so in- 
 jured. But we can at least point to the mil- 
 lions who have flocked to us from abroad and 
 their happiness under our flag, the eagerness 
 with which they seek our citizenship, the pas- 
 sionate loyalty that a Carl Schurz, a Jacob Riis, 
 or a Mary Antin brings to our institutions, and 
 claim for those institutions that, more nearly 
 than any others, they satisfy the human long- 
 ing for equahty of opportunity and equaHty in 
 government. We have no reason to blush for 
 them, but every reason to be proud. If there 
 is any cause for which Americans are justified 
 in proselyting, it is that of a repubHcan form of 
 government. Liberty is still enhghtening the 
 world; the American flag still stands for the 
 greatest achievement in self-government in re- 
 corded times. All the more should this repub- 
 Hc add to its long list of contributions to the 
 welfare and progress of all mankind the mag- 
 nificent one of leading the way to universal and 
 permanent peace. 
 

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