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GERMANY AND THE GERMANS
FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW
GERMANY AND THE GERMANS FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW
BY PRICE COLLIER
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK 1913
Copyright, 1913, by Charles Scribner's Sons
Published May, 1913
To MY WIFE KATHARINE whose deserving far outstrips my giving
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
INTRODUCTION
I. THE CRADLE OF MODERN GERMANY
II. FREDERICK THE GREAT TO BISMARCK
III. THE INDISCREET
IV. GERMAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE PRESS
V. BERLIN
VI. "A LAND OF DAMNED PROFESSORS"
VII. THE DISTAFF SIDE
VIII. "OHNE ARMEE KEIN DEUTSCHLAND"
IX. GERMAN PROBLEMS
X. "FROM ENVY, HATRED, AND MALICE"
XI. CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
The first printed suggestion that America should be called America
came from a German. Martin Waldseemueller, of Freiburg, in his
Cosmographiae Introductio, published in 1507, wrote: "I do not see why
any one may justly forbid it to be named after Americus, its
discoverer, a man of sagacious mind, Amerige, that is the land of
Americus or America, since both Europe and Asia derived their names
from women."
The first complete ship-load of Germans left Gravesend July the 24th,
1683, and arrived in Philadelphia October the 6th, 1683. They settled
in Germantown, or, as it was then called, on account of the poverty of
the settlers, Armentown.
Up to within the last few years the majority of our settlers have been
Teutonic in blood and Protestant in religion. The English, Dutch,
Swedes, Germans, Scotch-Irish, who settled in America, were all, less
than two thousand years ago, one Germanic race from the country
surrounding the North Sea.
Since 1820 more than 5,200,000 Germans have settled in America. This
immigration of Germans has practically ceased, and it is a serious
loss to America, for it has been replaced by a much less desirable
type of settler. In 1882 western Europe sent us 563,174 settlers, or
87 per cent., while southern and eastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey
sent 83,637, or 13 per cent. In 1905 western Europe sent 215,863, or
21.7 per cent., and southern and eastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey,
808,856, or 78.9 per cent. of our new population. In 1910 there were
8,282,618 white persons of German origin in the United States;
2,501,181 were born in Germany; 3,911,847 were born in the United
States, both of whose parents were born in Germany; 1,869,590 were
born in the United States, one parent born in the United States and
one in Germany.
Not only have we been enriched by this mass of sober and industrious
people in the past, but Peter Muehlenberg, Christopher Ludwig, Steuben,
John Kalb, George Herkimer, and later Francis Lieber, Carl Schurz,
Sigel, Osterhaus, Abraham Jacobi, Herman Ridder, Oswald Ottendorfer,
Adolphus Busch, Isidor, Nathan, and Oscar Straus, Jacob Schiff, Otto
Kahn, Frederick Weyerheuser, Charles P. Steinmetz, Claus Spreckels,
Hugo Muensterberg, and a catalogue of others, have been leaders in
finance, in industry, in war, in politics, in educational and
philanthropic enterprises, and in patriotism.
The framework of our republican institutions, as I have tried to
outline in this volume, came from the "Woods of Germany." Professor H.
A. L. Fisher, of Oxford, writes: "European republicanism, which ever
since the French Revolution has been in the main a phenomenon of the
Latin races, was a creature of Teutonic civilization in the age of the
sea-beggars and the Roundheads. The half-Latin city of Geneva was the
source of that stream of democratic opinion in church and state,
which, flowing to England under Queen Elizabeth, was repelled by
persecution to Holland, and thence directed to the continent of North
America."
In these later days Goethe, in a letter to Eckermann, prophesied the
building of the Panama Canal by the Americans, and also the prodigious
growth of the United States toward the West.
In a private collection in New York, is an autograph letter of George
Washington to Frederick the Great, asking that Frederick should use
his influence to protect that French friend of America, Lafayette.
In Schiller's house in Weimar there still hangs an engraving of the
battle of Bunker Hill, by Mueller, a German, and a friend of the poet.
Bismarck's intimate friend as a student at Goettingen, and the man of
whom he spoke with warm affection all his life, was the American
historian Motley.
The German soldiers in our Civil War were numbered by the thousands.
We have many ties with Germany, quite enough, indeed, to make a bare
enumeration of them a sufficient introduction to this volume.
On more than one occasion of late I have been introduced in places,
and to persons where a slight picture of what I was to meet when the
doors were thrown open was of great help to me. I was told beforehand
something of the history, traditions, the forms and ceremonies, and
even something of the weaknesses and peculiarities of the society, the
persons, and the personages. I am not so wise a guide as some of my
sponsors have been, but it is something of the kind that I have wished
and planned to do for my countrymen. I have tried to make this book,
not a guidebook, certainly not a history; rather, in the words of
Bacon, "grains of salt, which will rather give an appetite than offend
with satiety," a sketch, in short, of what is on the other side of the
great doors when the announcer speaks your name and you enter Germany.
GERMANY AND THE GERMANS
FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW
GERMANY AND THE GERMANS FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW
I THE CRADLE OF MODERN GERMANY
Eighty-one years before the discovery of America, seventy-two years
before Luther was born, and forty-one years before the discovery of
printing, in the year 1411, the Emperor Sigismund, the betrayer of
Huss, transferred the Mark of Brandenburg to his faithful vassal and
cousin, Frederick, sixth Burgrave of Nuremberg. Nuremberg was at one
time one of the great trading towns between Germany, Venice, and the
East, and the home later of Hans Sachs. Frederick was the lineal
descendant of Conrad of Hohenzollern, the first Burgrave of Nuremberg,
who lived in the days of Frederick Barbarossa (1152-1189); and this
Conrad is the twenty-fifth lineal ancestor of Emperor William II of
Germany. It is interesting to remember in this connection that when we
count back our progenitors to the twenty-first generation they number
something over two millions. When we trace an ancestry so far,
therefore, we must know something of the multitude from which the
individual is descended, if we are to gather anything of value
concerning his racial characteristics. The solace of all genealogical
investigation is the infallible discovery, that the greatest among us
began in a small way.
If you paddle up the Elbe and the Havel from Hamburg to Potsdam, you
will find yourself in the territory conquered from the heathen Wends
in the days of Henry I, the Fowler (918-935), which was the cradle of
what is now the German Empire.
The Emperor Sigismund, who was often embarrassed financially by reason
of his wars and journeyings had borrowed some four hundred thousand
gold florins from Frederick, and it was in settlement of this debt
that he mortgaged the territory of Brandenburg, and on the 8th of
April, 1417, the ceremony of enfeoffment was performed at Constance,
by which the House of Hohenzollern became possessed of this territory,
and was thereafter included among the great electorates having a vote
in the election of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
It was Henricus Auceps, or Henry the Fowler, (so called because the
envoys sent to offer him the crown, found him on his estates in the
Hartz Mountains among his falcons), who fought off the Danes in the
northwest, and the Slavonians, or Wends, in the northeast, and the
Hungarians in the southeast, and established frontier posts or marks
for permanent protection against their ravages. These marks, or
marches, which were boundary lines, were governed by markgrafs or
marquises, and finally gave the name of marks to the territory itself.
The word is historically familiar from its still later use in noting
the old boundaries between England and Scotland, and England and
Wales, which are still called marks.
Henry the Fowler was also called Henry "the City Builder." After the
death of the last of the Charlemagne line of rulers, the Franks
elected Conrad, Duke of Franconia, to succeed to the throne, and he on
his death-bed advised his people to choose Henry of Saxony to succeed,
for the times were stormy and the country needed a strong ruler. The
Hungarians in the southeast, and the Wends, the old Slavonic
population of Poland, were pillaging and harrying more and more
successfully, and the more successfully the more impudently. Henry
began the building of strong-walled, deep-moated cities along his
frontier, and made one, drawn by lot, out of every ten families of the
countryside, go to live in these fortified towns. Their rulers were
burgraves, or city counts. Titles now so largely ornamental were then
descriptive of duties and responsibilities.
In the light of their future greatness, it is well to take note of
these two frontier counties, or marches. The first, called the
Northern March, or March of Brandenburg, was the religious centre of
the Slays, and was situated in the midst of forests and marshes just
beyond the Elbe. This March of Brandenburg was won from the Slays in
the first instance by the Saxons and Franks of the Saxon plain. When
the burgrave, Frederick of Hohenzollern, came to take possession of
his new territory he was received with the jesting remark: "Were it to
rain burgraves for a whole year, we should not allow them to grow in
the march." But Frederick's soldiers and money, and his Nuremberg
jewels, as his cannon were called, ended by gaining complete control,
a control in more powerful hands to-day than ever before.
The second, called the Eastern or Austrian March, was situated in the
basin of the Danube. These two great states were formed in lands that
had ceased to be German and had become Slav or Finnish territory. The
fighting appetite of the German tribes, and the spirit of chivalry
later, which had drawn men in other days in France to the East, in
Spain against the Moors, in Normandy against England, were offered an
opportunity and an outlet in Germany, by forays and fighting against
the Finns and Slays.
Out of the conquest and settlement of these territories grew, what we
know to-day, as the German Empire and the Austrian Empire. Out of
their margraves, who were at first sentinel officers guarding the
outer boundaries of the empire, and mere nominees of the Emperor, have
developed the Emperor of Germany and the Emperor of Austria, the one
ruling over the most powerful nation, the other the head of the most
exclusive court, in Europe.
When a man becomes a power in the world, these days, our first impulse
is to ask about his ancestry. Who were his father and his mother; what
and who were his grandfathers and grandmothers, and who were their
forebears. Where did they come from, what was the climate; did they
live by the sea, or in the mountains, or in the plains. We are at once
hot on the trail of his success. Be he an American, we wish to know
whether his people came from Holland, from France, from England, or
from Belgium; where did they settle, in New England, in New York, or
in the South. We no longer accept ability as a miracle, but
investigate it as an evolution. If the man be great enough, cities vie
with each other to claim him as their child; he acquires an Homeric
versatility in cradles.
Whatever one may think of William II of Germany, he is just now the
predominating figure in Europe, if not in the world. This must be our
excuse for a word or two concerning the race from which came his
twenty-fifth lineal ancestor.
It is exactly five hundred years since his present empire was founded
in the sandy plains about the Elbe, and a thousand years before that
brings us to the dim dawn of any historical knowledge whatever about
the Germans. When the Cimbrians and Teutonians came into contact with
the Romans, in 113 B. C., is the beginning of all things for these
people. In that year the inhabitants of the north of Italy awoke one
morning to find a swarm of blue-eyed, light-haired, long-limbed
strangers coming down from the Alps upon them. The younger and more
light-hearted warriors came tobogganing down the snow-covered
mountain-sides on their shields. They had been crowded out of what is
now Switzerland, and called themselves, though they were much alike in
appearance, the Cimbri and the Teutones. They defeated the Roman
armies sent against them, and, turning to the south and west, went on
their way along the north shores of the Mediterranean into what is now
France. They had no history of their own. Tacitus writes that they
could neither read nor write: "Literarum secreta viri pariter ac
feminae ignorant." Very little is to be found concerning them in the
Roman writers. The books of Pliny which treated of this time are lost.
It was toward the middle of the century before Christ that Caesar
advanced to the frontier of what may be called Germany. He met and
conquered there these men of the blood who were to conquer Rome, and
to carry on the name under the title of the Holy Roman Empire. Caesar
met the ancestors of those who were to be Caesars, and with an eye on
Roman politics, wrote the "Commentaries," which were really
autobiographical messages, with the Germans as a text and an excuse.
Tacitus, born just about one hundred years after the death of Caesar,
and who had access to the lost works of Pliny, was a moralist
historian and a warm friend of the Germans. Over their shoulders he
rapped the manners and morals of his own countrymen. "Vice is not
treated by the Germans" (German, the etymologists say, is composed of
Ger, meaning spear or lance, and Man, meaning chief or lord; Deutsch,
or Teutsch, comes from the Gothic word Thiudu, meaning nation, and a
Deutscher, or Teutscher, meant one belonging to the nation), he tells
his countrymen, "as a subject of raillery, nor is the profligacy of
corrupting and being corrupted called the fashion of the age." With
Rooseveltian enthusiasm he writes that the Germans consider it a crime
"to set limits to population, by rearing up only a certain number of
children and destroying the rest."
The republicanism of Europe and America had its roots in this Teutonic
civilization. "No man dictates to the assembly; he may persuade but
cannot command. When anything is advanced not agreeable to the people,
they reject it with a general murmur. If the proposition pleases, they
brandish their javelins. This is their highest and most honorable mark
of applause; they assent in a military manner, and praise by the sound
of their arms," continues our author.
The great historian of the Roman historians, and of Rome, Gibbon,
lends his authority to this praise of Tacitus in the sentence: "The
most civilized nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of
Germany; and in the rude institutions of those barbarians we may still
distinguish the original principles of our present laws and manners."
Rome, which was not only a city, a nation, an empire, but a religion;
Rome, which replied to a suggestion that the people of Latium should
be admitted to citizenship, "Thou hast heard, O Jupiter, the impious
words that have come from this man's mouth. Canst thou tolerate, O
Jupiter, that a foreigner should come to sit in the sacred temple as a
senator, as a consul?" Rome welcomed later the barbarians from the
woods of Germany not only as citizens and consuls, but as emperors;
and their descendants rule the world.
It was no Capuan training that finally distilled itself in a
Charlemagne, an Otho, a Luther, a Frederick the Great, and a Bismarck;
in an Alfred, a William the Conqueror, a Cromwell, a Clive, a Rhodes,
or a Gordon; in a Washington, a Lincoln, a Grant, a Jackson, and a
Lee.
Beyond the certified beyond, we see dimly through the mists of
history, hosts of men marching, ever marching from the east, spreading
some toward Norway and Sweden, some skirting the Baltic Sea to the
south; driving their cattle before them, and learning the arts of
peace and war, and self-government, from the harsh school-masters of
pressing needs and tyrannical circumstances, the only teachers that
confer degrees of permanent value. They become fishermen and small
landholders in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. "Jeudi," or Jupiter's day,
becomes their god Thor's day, or Thursday; "Mardi," or Mars's day, is
their Tiu's day, or Tuesday; "Mercredi," or Mercury's day, is Odin's
or Woden's day, or Wednesday.
These men trained to solitude in small bands, owing to the
geographical exigencies of their northern country, become the founders
of the particularist or individualistic nations, Great Britain and the
United States among others. Those who had gone south, driven by
pressure from behind, follow the Danube to the north and west, find
the Rhine, and push on into what is now southwestern Europe.
It is worth noting that the Rhine and the Danube have their sources
near together, and form a line of water from the North Sea to the
Black Sea, a significant line in Europe from the beginning down to
this day. This line of water divides not only lands but nations,
manners, customs, and even speech, and what we call the North, and
what we call the South, may be said to be, with negligible exceptions,
what is north and what is south of those two rivers. It is and always
has been the Mason and Dixon's line of Europe.
All of these peoples mould their institutions, from the habits and
customs forced upon them by their surroundings. The members of the
tribe of the Suevi, now Swabians, were not allowed to hold fixed
landed possessions, but were forced to exchange with each other from
time to time, so that no one should become wedded to the soil and grow
rich thereby. Readers of history will remember, that Lycurgus
attempted similar legislation among the Spartans, hoping thus to keep
them simple and hardy, and fit for war.
How many hundreds of years, these various tribes were working out
their rude political and domestic laws, no man knows. The imaginative
historian pushes his way through the mists, and sees that the tribes
who lived in the Scandinavian peninsula were forced by their cramped
territory to become fishermen and sailors, and cultivators of small
areas of land, accustomed therefore to rule themselves in small
groups, and hence independent and markedly individualist. Such
historians divide even these rude tribes sharply between the
patriarchal and the particularist. The particularist commune developed
from the estate which was self-sufficient, isolated, and independent.
When they were associated together it was for special and limited
purposes, so that independence might be infringed upon to the least
possible extent. The patriarchal commune, on the other hand, proceeded
from the communal family which provided everything for everybody. It
was a general and compulsory partnership, monopolizing every kind of
business that might arise. The particularist group then, and their
moral and political descendants now, strive to organize public
authority, and public life in such a way, that they are distinctly
subordinate to private and individual independence. In the one the
Emperor is the father of the family -- the Russian Emperor is still
called "Little Father" -- the independence of each member of the family
is swallowed up in the complete authority of the head of the national
family; in the other the president, or constitutional king, is the
executive servant of independent citizens, to whom he owes as much
allegiance as they owe to him.
In Saxony, to-day, more than ninety per cent. of the agricultural
population are independent peasant proprietors, and the most admirable
and successful agriculturists in the world. It is said indeed that the
Curia Regis, which is the Latinized form of the Witenagemote, or
assembly of wise men, of the Norman and Angevin kings, is the
foundation of the common law of England, and the common law of England
is the law of more than half of the civilized world.
Whatever the varieties and distinctions of government anywhere in the
world, these two differences are the fundamental and basic
differences, upon which all forms of government have been built up and
developed.
In the one, everything so far as possible is begun and carried on by
individual initiative; in the other the state gradually takes control
of all enterprise. The philosophy of the one is based upon the saying:
love one another; the political philosophy of the other is based upon
the assumption that men are not brethren, but beasts and mechanical
toys, who can only be governed by legislation and the police. The
ideal of the one is the good Samaritan, the ideal of the other is the
tax-collector. The one depends upon the wine and oil of sympathy and
human brotherhood; the other claims that the right to an iron bed in a
hospital, and the services of a state-paid and indifferent physician,
are "refreshing fruit," as though sympathy and consideration, which
are what our weaker brethren most need, could be distilled from taxes!
It is claimed for these Teutonic tribes, that those of them which
drifted down from the Scandinavian peninsula, are the blood and moral
ancestors of the particularist nations now in the ascendant in the
world. The love of independent self-government, born of the
geographical necessities of the situation, stamped itself upon these
people so indelibly, that Englishmen and Americans bear the seal to
this day. This change from the patriarchal to the particularist family
took place in this German race, and took place not in those who came
from the Baltic plain, but in those who came from the Saxon plain.
The tribes from the Baltic plain, the Goths, for example, merely
overran the Roman civilization, spread over it; drowned it in superior
numbers, and with superior valor; but it was the Germans from the
Scandinavian peninsula who conquered Rome, and conquered her not by
force alone, but by offering to the world a superior social and
political organization. It was to this branch of the German race that
Varus lost his legions, at the place where the Ems has its source, at
the foot of the Teutoburger Wald. Charlemagne was of these, and his
name Karl, or Kerl, or peasant, and the fact that his title is the
only one in the world compounded of greatness and the people in equal
measure, is the pith of what the Germans brought to leaven the whole
political world. He made the common man so great, that the world has
consented to his unique and superlative baptismal title of Karl the
Great, or Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne.
The pivotal fact to be remembered is that these German tribes saved
Europe by their love of liberty, and by their virility, from the
decadence of an orientalized Rome. Rome, and all Rome meant, was not
destroyed by these ancestors of ours; on the contrary, they saved what
was best worth saving from the decline and fall of Rome, and made out
of it with their own vigorous laws a new world, the modern western
world. Great Britain, Germany, and the United States are not descended
from Egypt, Greece, or Rome, but from "those barbarians who issued
from the woods of Germany."
Every school-boy should be taught that Rome died of a disease
contracted from contact with the Oriental, the Syrian, the Jew, the
Greek, the riffraff of the eastern and southern shores of the
Mediterranean; who, by the way, make up the bulk of the immigration
into America at this time. Rome was an incurable invalid long before
the Germans took control of the western world and saved it.
When the Roman Emperor Augustus died, in 14 A. D., to be succeeded by
Tiberius, the Roman Empire was bounded on the north and east by the
Rhine, the Danube, the Black Sea and its southern territory, and
Syria; by all the known country from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean
in northern Africa on the south; and by the Atlantic Ocean as far
north as the river Elbe on the west. Five hundred years later, about
500 A. D., the Barbarians, as they were called, had thrust aside the
Roman Empire. The Saxons controlled the southern and eastern coasts of
England; the Franks were rulers in the whole country from the Loire to
the Elbe; south of them the Visigoths ruled Spain; Italy and all the
country to the north and east of the Adriatic, as far as the Danube,
were in the hands of the Ostrogoths. The Roman Empire had been pushed
to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, with its capital at
Constantinople.
In another three hundred years, or in 800 A. D., the king of one of
these German tribes revived the title of Roman Emperor, was crowned by
the Pope, Leo III, and governed Europe as Charlemagne. His banner with
the double-headed eagle, representing the two empires of Germany and
Rome, is the standard of Germany to-day. Charles Martel, who led the
West against the East, defeating the Arabs in the country between what
is now Tours and Poitiers, was Charlemagne's grandfather. What is now
western Europe, became the home and the consolidated kingdom of the
German tribes who had drifted down from the west of the Baltic, and
into the Saxon plain. They had become masters in this territory: after
victories over the Mongolian tribes, and the Huns under Attila, who
had conquered and plundered as far as Strasburg, Worms, and Treves,
and were finally defeated near what is now Chalons; after driving off
the Arabs under Charles the Hammer (732); after imposing their rule
upon the Roman Empire, the remains of which cowered in Constantinople,
where the Ottoman Turk took even that from it in 1453, which date may
well be taken as marking the beginning of modern history, and became
themselves thereafter one of the first powers in Christian Europe; a
power which is now, in 1912, the quarrel ground of the Western powers.
These are Brobdingnagian strides through history, to reach the days of
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Froissart, and the first
translation of the Bible into a vulgar tongue by Wickliffe, to the
days when Lorenzo de Medici breathed Greece into Europe, and the
feeling for beauty changed from invalidism to convalescence; to the
days when cannon were first used, printing invented, America
discovered, and the man Luther, who gave the Germans their present
language by his translation of the Bible, and who delivered us from
papal tyranny, born; and Agincourt, and Joan of Arc, are picturesque
and poignant features of the historical landscape.
These rude German tribes had been welded by hardship and warfare, into
compact and self-governing bodies. These loosely bound masses of men,
women, and children, straggling down to find room and food, are now,
in 1400 A. D., France, England, Austria, Germany, Scotland, and Spain.
The same spirit and vigor that roamed the coasts all the way from
Sweden and Norway to the mouth of the Thames, and to the Rhine, the
Seine, and to the Straits of Gibraltar, are abroad again, landing on
the shores of America, circumnavigating Africa, and bringing home
tales of Indians in the west, and Indians in the east. This virile
stock that had been hammered and hewn was now to be polished; and in
Italy, France, England, and Germany grew up a passion for translating
the rough mythology, and the fierce fancy of the north, into painting,
building, poetry, and music.
France, Germany, England, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, too, grew
out of these German tribes, who poured down from the territory roughly
included between the Rhine, the North Sea, the Oder, and the Danube.
As we know these countries to-day, the definite thing about them is
their difference. You cross the channel in fifty minutes from Dover to
Calais, you cross the Rhine in five minutes, and the peoples seem
thousands of miles apart. "How did it happen," asks Voltaire, "that,
setting out from the same point of departure, the governments of
England and of France arrived at nearly the same time, at results as
dissimilar as the constitution of Venice is unlike that of Morocco?"
One might ask as well how it happened, that the speech of one German
invasion mixing itself with Latin became French, of another Spanish,
of another Portuguese, of another Italian, of another English. These
are interesting inquiries, and in regard to the former it is not
difficult to see, that men grew to be governed differently, according
as the geographical exigencies of their homes were different, and as
they occupied themselves differently.
The observant traveller in the United States, may see for himself what
differences even a few years of differing climate, and circumstances,
and custom will produce. The inhabitants of Charleston, South
Carolina, are evidently and visibly different from those in Davenport,
Iowa. Two towns of similar size and wealth, Salisbury, Maryland, and
Hingham, Massachusetts, are almost as different, except in speech, and
even in speech the accent is perceptibly different even to the
careless listener, as though Salisbury were in the south of France,
and Hingham in the north of Germany. These changes and differences are
only inexplicable, to those who will not see the ethnographical
miracles taking place under their noses. Look at the mongrel crowd on
Fifth Avenue at midday, and remember what was there only fifty years
ago, and the differentiation which has taken place in Europe due to
climate, intermarriage, laws, and customs seems easy to trace and to
explain.
The fishermen and tillers of the soil in the Scandinavian peninsula,
afterward the settlers in the Saxon plain and in England, recognized
him who ruled over their settled place of abode as king; while roaming
bands of fighting men would naturally attach themselves to the head of
the tribe, as the leader in war, and recognize him as king. As late as
the death of Charlemagne, when his powerful grip relaxed, the tribes
of Germans, for they were little more even then, fell apart again.
Another family like that of Pepin arose under Robert the Strong, and
under Hugue Capet (987) acquired the title of Kings of France. The
monarchy grew out of the weakening of feudalism, and feudalism had
been the gradual setting, in law and custom, of a way of living
together, of these detached tribes and clans, and their chiefs.
A powerful warrior was rewarded with a horse, a spear; later, when
territory was conquered and the tribe settled down, land was given as
a reward. Land, however, does not die like a horse, or wear out and
get broken like a spear, and the problem arises after the death of the
owner, as to who is his rightful heir. Does it revert to the giver,
the chief of the tribe, or does it go to the children of the owner?
Some men are strong enough to keep their land, to add to it, to
control those living upon it, and such a one becomes a feudal ruler in
a small way himself. He becomes a duke, a dux or leader, a count, a
margrave, a baron, and a few such powerful men stand by one another
against the king. A Charlemagne, a William the Conqueror, a Louis XIV
is strong enough to rule them and keep them in order for a time. Out
of these conditions grow limited monarchies or absolute monarchies and
national nobilities.
More than any other one factor, the Crusades broke up feudalism. The
great noble, impelled by a sense of religious duty, or by a love of
adventure, arms himself and his followers, and starts on years of
journeyings to the Holy Land. Ready money is needed above all else.
Lands are mortgaged, and the money-lender and the merchant buy lands,
houses, and eventually power, and buy them cheap. The returning nobles
find their affairs in disarray, their fields cultivated by new owners,
towns and cities grow up that are as strong or stronger than the
castle. Before the Crusades no roturier, or mere tiller of the soil,
could hold a fief, but the demand for money was so great that fiefs
were bought and sold, and Philippe Auguste (1180) solved the problem
by a law, declaring that when the king invested a man with a
sufficient holding of land or fief, he became ipso facto a noble. This
is the same common-sense policy which led Sir Robert Peel to declare,
that any man with an income of $50,000 a year had a right to a
peerage. There can be no aristocracy except of the powerful, which
lasts. The difference to-day is seen in the puppet nobility of
Austria, Italy, Spain, and Germany as compared with the nobility of
England, which is not a nobility of birth or of tradition, but of the
powerful: brewers and bankers, and statesmen and lawyers, and leaders
of public opinion, covering their humble past with ermine, and
crowning their achievements with coronets.
The Crusades brought about as great a shifting of the balance of
power, as did later the rise of the rich merchants, industrials, and
nabobs in England. As the power of the nobles decreased, the central
power or the power of the kings increased; increased indeed, and
lasted, down to the greatest crusade of all, when democracy organized
itself, and marched to the redemption of the rights of man as man,
without regard to his previous condition of servitude.
During the thousand years between the time when we first hear of the
German tribes, in 113 B. C., and the year 1411, which marks the
beginnings of what is now the Prussian monarchy, customs were becoming
habits, and habits were becoming laws, and the political and social
origins of the life of our day were being beaten into shape, by the
exigencies of living together of these tribes in the woods of Germany.
There it was that the essence of democracy was distilled. Democracy,
Demos, the crowd, the people, the nation, were already, in the woods
of Germany, the court of last resort. They growled dissent, and they
gave assent with the brandishing of their weapons, javelins, or
ballots. They were called together but seldom, and between the
meetings of the assembly, the executive work, the judicial work, the
punishing of offenders, was left to a chosen few; left to those who by
their control over themselves, their control over their families,
their control over their neighbors, seemed best qualified to exercise
the delegated control of all.
The chief aim of their organized government, such as it was, seems to
have been to leave themselves free to go about their private business,
with as little interference from the demands of public business as
possible. The chief concern of each one was to secure his right to
mind his own business, under certain safeguards provided by all. If
those delegated to govern became autocratic, or evil-doers, or used
their power for self-advancement or self-enrichment, they were
speedily brought to book. The philosophy of government, then, was to
make men free to go about their private business. That the time might
come when politics would be the absorbing business of all, dictating
the hours and wages of men under the earth, and reaching up to the
institution of a recall for the angel Gabriel, and a referendum for
the Day of Judgment, was undreamed of. The chiefs of the clans, the
chiefs of the tribes, the kings of the Germans, and finally the
emperors were all elective. The divine right of kings is a purely
modern development. The descendants of these German tribes in England,
elected their king in the days of William the Conqueror even, and as
late as 1689 the Commons of England voted that King James had
abdicated, and that the throne was vacant!
The so-called mayors of the palace, who became kings, were in their
day representatives of the landholders, delegates of the people, who
advised the king and aided in commanding the armies. These hereditary
mayors of the palace drifted into ever greater and greater control,
until they became hereditary kings. The title was only hereditary,
however, because it was convenient that one man of experience in an
office should be succeeded by another educated to, and familiar with,
the same experiences and duties, and this system of heredity continues
down to this day in business, and in many professions and so long as
there is freedom to oust the incompetent, it is a good system. There
can never be any real progress until the sons take over the
accumulated wisdom and experience of the fathers; if this is not done,
then each one must begin for himself all over again. The hereditary
principle is sound enough, so long as there is freedom of decapitation
in cases of tyranny or folly.
There has continued all through the history of those of the blood of
the German tribes, whether in Germany, England, America, Norway,
Sweden, or Denmark, the sound doctrine that ability may at any time
take the place of the rights of birth. Power, or command, or
leadership by heredity is looked upon as a convenience, not as an
unimpeachable right.
Charlemagne (742-814), a descendant of a mayor of the palace who had
become king by virtue of ability, swept all Europe under his sway by
reason of his transcendent powers as a warrior and administrator. He
did for the first time for Europe what Akbar did in his day for India.
In forty-five years he headed fifty-three campaigns against all sorts
of enemies. He fought the Saxons, the Danes, the Slays, the Arabs, the
Greeks, and the Bretons. What is now France, Germany, Belgium,
Holland, Switzerland, Spain, and most of Italy were under his
kingship. He was a student, an architect, a bridge-builder, though he
could neither read nor write, and even began a canal which was to
connect the Danube and the Rhine, and thus the German Ocean, with the
Black Sea. He is one of many monuments to the futility of technical
education and mere book-learning.
The Pope, roughly handled, because negligently protected, by the Roman
emperors, turns to Charlemagne, and on Christmas Day (800) places a
crown upon his head, and proclaims him "Caesar Augustus" and
"Christianissimus Rex." The empire of Rome is to be born again with
this virile German warrior at its head. Just a thousand years later,
another insists that he has succeeded to the title by right of
conquest, and gives his baby son the title of "King of Rome," and just
a thousand years after the death of Charlemagne, in 814, Napoleon
retires to Elba. There is a witchery about Rome even to-day, and an
emperor still sits imprisoned there, claiming for himself the right to
rule the spiritual and intellectual world: "sedet, eternumque sedebit
Infelix Theseus."
Louis, called "the Pious," because the latter part of his life was
spent in mourning his outrageous betrayal, mutilation, and murder of
his own nephew, whose rivalry he feared, succeeded his father,
Charlemagne. He was succeeded again by his three sons, Lothair, Pepin,
and Louis by his first wife, and Charles, who was his favorite son, by
his second wife. He had already divided the great heritage left him by
Charlemagne between his three sons Lothair, Pepin, and Louis; but now
he wished to make another division into four parts, to make room for,
and to give a kingdom to, his son Charles by his second wife. The
three elder sons revolt against their father, and his last years are
spent in vain attempts to reconcile his quarrelsome children. At his
death war breaks out. Pepin dies, leaving, however, a son Pepin to
inherit his kingdom of Aquitaine. Louis and Charles attempt to take
his kingdom from him, his uncle Lothair defends him, and at the great
battle of Fontenay (841) Louis and Charles defeat Lothair. Lothair
gains the adherence of the Saxons, and Charles and Louis at the head
of their armies confirm their alliance, and at Strasburg the two
armies take the oath of allegiance: the followers of Louis took the
oath in German, the followers of Charles in French, and this oath, the
words of which are still preserved, is the earliest specimen of the
French language in existence.
In 843 another treaty signed at Verdun, between the two brothers
Lothair and Louis and their half-brother Charles, separated for the
first time the Netherlands, the Rhine country, Burgundy, and Italy,
which became the portion of Lothair; all Germany east of this
territory, which went to Louis; and all the territory to the west of
it, which went to Charles. Germany and France, therefore, by the
Treaty of Verdun in 843, became distinct kingdoms, and modern
geography in Europe is born.
From the death of Henry the Fowler, in 936, down to the nomination of
Frederick I of Bavaria, sixth Burgrave of Nuremberg, to be Margrave of
Brandenburg, in 1411, the history of the particular Germany we are
studying is swallowed up in the history of these German tribes of
central Europe and of the Holy Roman Empire. It is in these years of
the seven Crusades, from 1095 to the last in 1248; of Frederick
Barbarossa; of the centuries-long quarrel between the Welfs, or
Guelphs, and the Waiblingers, or Ghibellines, which were for years in
Italy, and are still in Germany, political parties; of the Hanseatic
League of the cities to protect commerce from the piracies of a
disordered and unruled country; of the Dane and the Norman descents
upon the coasts of France, Germany, and England, and of their burning,
killing, and carrying into captivity; of the Saracens scouring the
Mediterranean coasts and sacking Rome itself; of the Wends and Czechs,
Hungarian bands who dashed in upon the eastern frontiers of the now
helpless and amorphous empire of Charlemagne, all the way from the
Baltic to the Danube; of the quarrel between Henry IV and that Jupiter
Ecclesiasticus, Hildebrand, or Gregory VII, who has left us his
biography in the single phrase, "To go to Canossa"; of Genghis Khan
and his Mongol hordes; of the long fight between popes and emperors
over the right of investiture; of Rudolph of Hapsburg; of the throwing
off of their allegiance to the Empire of the Kings of Burgundy,
Poland, Hungary, and Denmark; of the settlement of the question of the
legal right to elect the emperor by Charles IV, who fixed the power in
the persons of seven rulers: the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine
of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margraf of Brandenburg, and the
three Archbishops of Mayence, Treves, and Cologne; of the independence
of the great cities of northern Italy; of Otto the Great, whose first
wife was a granddaughter of Alfred the Great, and who was the real
founder of the Holy Roman Empire, in the sense that a German prince
rules over both Germany and Italy with the approval of the Pope, and
in the sense that he, a duke of Saxony, appropriates the western
empire (962), goes to Rome, delivers the Pope, subdues Italy, and
fixes the imperial crown in the name and nation of Germany; of the
beginning of that hope of a world-church and a world-state, of a
universal church and a universal kingdom, which took form in what is
known as the Holy Roman Empire; of that greatest of all forgeries, the
Donation of Constantine by the monk Isidor, discovered and revealed by
Cardinal Nicolaus, of Cura, in which it is pretended that Constantine
handed over Rome to the Pope and his successors forever, with all the
power and privileges of the Caesars, and of the effects of this, the
most successful lie ever told in the world, during the seven hundred
years it was believed: it is in these years of turbulence and change
that one must trace the threads of history, from the first appearance
of the Germans, down to the time when what is now Prussia became a
frontier post of the empire under the rule of a Hohenzollern.
It is, perhaps, of all periods in history, the most interesting to
Americans, for then and there our civilization was born. Writing of
the conquest of the British Isles by the Germans, J. R. Green says:
"What strikes us at once in the new England is this, that it was the
one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In other
lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they were equally conquered
by German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still
remained Roman." The roots of our civilization, are to be dug for in
those days when the German peoples met the imperialism and the
Christianity of Rome, and absorbed and renewed them. The Roman Empire,
tottering on a foundation of, it is said, as many as fifty million
slaves -- even a poor man would have ten slaves, a rich man ten or
twenty thousand -- and overrun with the mongrel races from Syria,
Greece, and Africa, and hiding away the remnants of its power in the
Orient, became in a few centuries an easy prey to our ancestors "of
the stern blue eyes, the ruddy hair, the large and robust bodies."
"Caerula quis stupuit lumina? flavam
Caesariem, et madido torquentem cornua cirro?
Nempe quod haec illis natura est omnibus una,"
writes Juvenal of their resemblance to one another.
By the year 1411 long strides had been made toward other forms of
social, political, religious, and commercial life, due to the German
grip upon Europe. Dante, whose grandmother was a Goth, was not only a
poet but a fighter for freedom, taking a leading part in the struggle
of the Bianchi against the Neri and Pope Boniface, was born in 1265
and died in 1321; Francis of Assisi, born in 1182, not only
represented a democratic influence in the church, but led the earliest
revolt against the despotism of money; the movement to found cities
and to league cities together for the furtherance of trade and
industry, and thus to give rights to whole classes of people hitherto
browbeaten by church or state or both, began in Italy; and the
alliance of the cities of the Rhine, and the Hansa League, date from
the beginning of the thirteenth century; the discovery of how to make
paper dates from this time, and printing followed; the revolt of the
Albigenses against priestly dominance which drenched the south of
France in blood began in the twelfth century; slavery disappeared
except in Spain; Wycliffe, born in 1324, translated the Gospels, threw
off his allegiance to the papacy, and suffered the cheap vengeance of
having his body exhumed and its ashes scattered in the river Swift;
Aquinas and Duns Scotus delivered philosophy from the tyranny of
theology; Roger Bacon (1214) practically introduced the study of
natural science; Magna Charta was signed in 1215; Marco Polo, whose
statue I have seen among those of the gods, in a certain Chinese
temple, began his travels in the thirteenth century; the university of
Bologna was founded before 1200 for the untrammelled study of medicine
and philosophy; Abelard, who died in 1142, represented, to put it
pithily, the spirit of free inquiry in matters theological, and
lectured to thousands in Paris. What do these men and movements mean?
I am wofully wrong in my ethnographical calculations if these things
do not mean, that the people of whom Tacitus wrote, "No man dictates
to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command," were shaping and
moulding the life of Europe, with their passionate love of individual
liberty, with their sturdy insistence upon the right of men to think
and work without arbitrary interference. Out of this furnace came
constitutional government in England, and republican government in
America. We owe the origins of our political life to the influence of
these German tribes, with their love of individual freedom and their
stern hatred of meddlesome rulers, or a meddlesome state or
legislature.
Germany had no literature at this time. When Froissart was writing
French history, and Joinville his delightful chronicles; when Chaucer
and Wycliffe were gayly and gravely making play with the monks and
priests, the only names known in Germany were those of the mystics,
Eckhart and Tauler. When the time came, however, Germany was defiantly
individualist in Luther, and Protestantism was thoroughly German. It
was not from tales of the great, not from knighthood, chivalry, or
their roving singer champions, that German literature came; but from
the fables and satires of the people, from Hans Sachs and from the
Luther translation of the Bible. This is roughly the setting of
civilization, in which the first Hohenzollerns found themselves when
they took over the Mark of Brandenburg, in the early years of the
fifteenth century.