presses the insulting demand of his country upon the royal gentleman
as he is walking. The King declines to see Benedetti again, and
telegraphs to Bismarck the gist of the interview. Lord Acton writes:
"He [Bismarck] drew his long pencil and altered the text, showing only
that Benedetti had presented an offensive demand, and that the King
had refused to see him. That there might be no mistake he made this
official by sending it to all the embassies and legations. Moltke
exclaimed, 'You have converted surrender into defiance.'" The altered
telegram was also sent to the Norddeutscher Allgemeine Zeitung and to
officials. It is not perhaps generally known that General Lebrun went
to Vienna in June, 1870, to discuss an alliance with Austria for an
attack on the North German Confederation in the following spring.
Bismarck knew this. This was on the 13th of July, 1870; on the 16th
the order was given to mobilize the army, on the 31st followed the
proclamation of the King to his people: "Zur Errettung des
Vaterlandes." On August the 2d, King William took command of the
German armies, and on September 1st, Napoleon handed over his sword,
and on January the 18th, 1871, King William of Prussia was proclaimed
German Emperor in the Hall of the Mirrors in the Palace at Versailles.
"It sounds so lovely what our fathers did,
And what we do is, as it was to them,
Toilsome and incomplete."
It is easy to forget in such a rapid survey of events that Bismarck
could have had any serious opposition to face as he tramped through
those eight years, from 1862 to 1870, with a kingdom on his back. It
is easy to forget that King William himself wished to abdicate in
those dark hours, when his people refused him their confidence, and
called a halt upon his endeavors to strengthen the absolutely
essential instrument for Prussia's development, the army; it is easy
to forget that even the silent and seemingly imperturbable Moltke
hesitated and wavered a little at the audacity of his comrade; it is
easy to forget the conspiracy of opposition of the three women of the
court, the Crown Princess, Frau von Blumenthal, and Frau von Gottberg,
all of English birth, and all using needles against this man
accustomed to the Schlaeger and the sword; it is easy to forget that
even Queen Victoria's influence was used against him to prevent the
reaping of the justifiable fruits of victory in 1871; it is easy to
forget what a bold throw it was to go to war with Austria, and to
array Prussia against the very German states she must later bind to
herself; it is easy to forget the dour patience of this irascible
giant with the petulant and often petty legislature with which he had
to deal.
I cannot understand how any German can criticise Bismarck, but there
are official prigs who do; little decorated bureaucrats who live their
lives out poring over papers, with an eye out for a "von" before their
bourgeois names, and as void of audacity as a sheep; men who creep up
the stairway to promotion and recognition, clinging with cautious grip
to the banisters. One sees them, their coats covered with the ceramic
insignia of their placid servitude, decorations tossed to them by the
careless hand of a master who is satisfied if they but sign his
decrees, with the i's properly dotted, and the t's unexceptionably
crossed. They are the crumply officials who melted into
defencelessness and moral decrepitude after Frederick the Great, and
again at the glance of Napoleon, and who owe the little stiffness they
have to the fact that Bismarck lived. It is one of the things a
full-blooded man is least able to bear in Germany, to hear the querulous
questioning of the great deeds of this man, whose boot-legs were
stiffer than the backbones of those who decry him.
What a splendid fellow he was!
"Give me the spirit that, on this life's rough sea,
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble and his masts do crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is -- there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law."
He was no worshipper of that flimsy culture which is, and has been for
a hundred years, an obsession of the German. He knew, none knew better
indeed, that the choicest knowledge is only mitigated ignorance. He
surprised Disraeli with his mastery of English, and Napoleon with his
fluency in French, both of which he had learned from his Huguenot
professors. The popular man, the popular book, the popular music,
picture, or play, were none of them a golden calf to him. He mastered
what he needed for his work, and pretended to no enthusiasm for
intellectualism as such. He knew that there is no real culture without
character, and that the mere aptitude for knowing and doing without
character is merely the simian cleverness that often dazzles but never
does anything of importance. "Culture!" writes Henry Morley, "the aim
of culture is to bring forth in their due season the fruits of the
earth." Any learning, any accomplishments, that do not serve a man to
bring forth the fruits of the earth in their due season are merely
mental gimcracks, flimsy toys, to admire perhaps, to play with, and to
be thrown aside as useless when duty makes its sovereign demands.
Much as Germany has done for the development of the intellectual life
of the world, she has suffered not a little from the superficial
belief still widely held that instruction, that learning, are culture.
Their Great Elector, their Frederick the Great, and their Bismarck,
should have taught them the contrary by now.
The newly crowned German Emperor left Versailles on March 7th for
Berlin, and on March 21st the first Diet of the new empire was opened,
and began the task of adapting the constitution to the altered
circumstances of the new empire.
The German Empire now consists of four kingdoms: Prussia, Bavaria,
Saxony, and Wuertemberg; of six grand duchies: Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt,
Saxe-Weimar, Oldenburg, Meeklenburg-Strelitz, and Mecklenburg-Schwerin;
of five duchies: Saxe-Meinigen, Saxe-Altenburg Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,
Brunswick, and Anhalt; of seven principalities: Schwartzburg-Sondershausen,
Schwartzburg-Rudolstadt, Waldeck, Reuss (older line),
Reuss (younger line), Lippe, and Schaumburg-Lippe; of three free
towns: Hamburg, Bremen, and Luebeck; and of one imperial province:
Alsace Lorraine.
The new empire is in a sense a continuation of the North German
Confederation. There are 25 states, the largest, Prussia, with a
population of over 40,000,000; the smallest, Schaumburg-Lippe, with a
population of a little more than 46,000 and an area of 131 square
miles.
The central or federal authority controls the army, navy, foreign
relations, railways, main roads, canals, post and telegraph, coinage,
weights and measures, copyrights, patents, and legislation over nearly
the whole field of civil and criminal law, regulation of press and
associations, imperial finance and customs tariffs, which are now the
same throughout Germany.
Bavaria still manages her own railways, and Saxony and Wuertemberg have
certain privileges and exemptions. Administration is still almost
entirely in the hands of the separate states.
The law is imperial, but the judges are appointed by the states, and
are under its authority. The supreme court of appeal (Reichsgericht)
sits at Leipsic.
The head of the executive government is the Emperor, no longer
elective but hereditary, and attached to the office of the King of
Prussia. Outside of Prussia he has little power in civil matters and
no veto on legislation. He is commander-in-chief of the army and of
the navy; foreign affairs are in his hands, and in the federal
council, or Bundesrath, he exercises a mighty influence due to
Prussia's preponderating influence and voting power. There is no
cabinet, just as there is no cabinet in Great Britain, that modern
institution being merely a legislative fiction down to this day. The
chancellor of the empire, who is also prime minister of Prussia, with
several secretaries of state, is chief minister for all imperial
affairs. The chancellor presides in the Bundesrath, and has the right
to speak in the Reichstag, and frequently does speak there. Indeed,
all his more important pronouncements are made there. The chancellor
is responsible to the Emperor alone, by whom he is nominated, and not
to the representatives of the people.
The federal council, or Bundesrath, or upper chamber of the empire,
consists of delegates appointed by and representing the rulers of the
various states. There are 58 members. Prussia has 17, Bavaria 6,
Saxony 4, Wuertemberg 4, Baden 3, Hessen 3, Mecklenburg-Schwerin 2,
Brunswick 2, and each of the other states 1.
This body meets in Berlin, sits in secret, and the delegates have no
discretion, but vote as directed by their state governments. Here it
is that Prussia, and through Prussia the Emperor, dominates. This
Bundesrath is the most powerful upper chamber in the world. With
respect to all laws concerning the army and navy, and taxation for
imperial purposes, the vote of Prussia shall decide disputes, if such
vote be cast in favor of maintaining existing arrangements. In other
words, Prussia is armed in the Bundesrath with a conservative veto! In
declaring war and making treaties, the consent of the Bundesrath is
required. The following articles also give the Bundesrath a very
complete control of the Reichstag. Article 7 reads: "The Bundesrath
shall take action upon (1) the measures to be proposed to the
Reichstag and the resolutions passed by the same; (2) the general
administrative provisions and arrangements necessary for the execution
of the imperial laws, so far as no other provision is made by law; (3)
the defects which may be discovered in the execution of the imperial
laws or of the provisions and arrangements heretofore mentioned."
The Reichstag, or lower house, is elected by universal suffrage in
electoral districts which were originally equal, but as we have noted
are far from equal now. This house has three hundred and ninety-seven
members, of whom two hundred and thirty-five are from Prussia. It sits
for five years, but may be dissolved by the Bundesrath with the
consent of the Emperor. All members of the Bundesrath, as well as the
chancellor, may speak in the Reichstag. Nor the chancellor, nor any
other executive officer, is responsible to the Reichstag, nor can be
removed by its vote, and the ministers of the Emperor are seldom or
never chosen from this body. This Reichstag is really only nominally a
portion of the governing body. It has the right to refuse to pass a
bill presented by the government, but if it does so it may be
summarily dismissed, as has happened several times, and another
election usually provides a more amenable body.
Of the various political parties in the Reichstag we have written
elsewhere. It is, perhaps, fair to say that such powerful parties as
the Socialists and the Centrum must be reckoned with by the
chancellor. He cannot actually trample upon them, nor can he disregard
wholly their wishes in framing and in carrying through legislation. It
would be going much too far in characterizing the weakness of the
Reichstag to leave that impression upon the reader. None the less it
remains true that it is the executive who rules and has the whip-hand,
and who in a grave crisis can override the representatives of the
people assembled in the Reichstag, and on more than one occasion this
has been done.
It seems highly unnecessary to announce after this description of the
imperial constitution that there is no such thing in Germany as
democratic or representative government. But this fact cannot be
proclaimed too often since in other countries it is continually
assumed that this is the case. All sorts of deductions are made, all
sorts of illustrations used, all sorts of legislative and social
lessons taught from the example of Germany, without the smallest
knowledge apparently on the part of those who make them, that Germany
to-day is no more democratic than was Turkey twenty years ago.
What can be done and what is done in Germany has no possible bearing
upon what can be done in America or in England. All analogies are
false, all illustrations futile, all examples valueless, for the one
reason that the empire of Germany is governed by one man, who declaims
his independence of the people and admits his responsibility to God
alone. This may be either a good or a bad thing. Certainly in many
matters of economical and comfortable government for the people--
witness more particularly the development and wise control of their
municipalities--they are a century ahead of us, but this is not the
question under discussion. The point is, that a compact nation under
strict centralized control, served by a trained horde of officials
with no wish for a change, and backed by a standing army of over seven
hundred thousand men, who are not only a defence against the
foreigner, but a powerful police against internal revolution, cannot
serve as a model in either its successes or failures for a democratic
country like ours. Where in Germany legislative schemes succeed easily
when this huge bureaucratic machine is behind them, they would fail
ignominiously in a country lacking this machinery, and lacking these
pitiably tame people accustomed to submission.
In France, for example, that thrifty and individualistic folk made a
complete failure of the attempt to foist contributory old-age pensions
upon them, and I doubt whether such sumptuary legislation can succeed
with us. That, however, is neither here nor there. The gist of the
matter is, that because such things succeed in Germany, gives not the
slightest reason for supposing that they will succeed with us. If this
outline of their history and this sketch of their government have done
nothing else, it must have made this clear. It may also help to show
how vapid is the talk about what the German people will or will not
do; whether they will or will not have war, for example. We shall have
war when the German Kaiser touches a button and gives an order, and
the German people will have no more to say in the matter than you and I.
III THE INDISCREET
The casual observer of life in England would find himself forced to
write of sport, even as in India he would write of caste, as in
America he would note the undue emphasis laid upon politics. In
Germany, wherever he turns, whether it be to look at the army, to
inquire about the navy, to study the constitution, or to disentangle
the web of present-day political strife; to read the figures of
commercial and industrial progress, or the results of social
legislation; to look on at the Germans at play during their yachting
week at Kiel, or their rowing contests at Frankfort, he finds himself
face to face with the Emperor.
The student visits Berlin, or Potsdam, or Wilhelmshoehe; or with a long
stride finds himself on the docks at Hamburg or Bremen, or beside the
Kiel Canal, or in Kiel harbor facing a fleet of war-ships; or he lifts
his eyes into the air to see a dirigible balloon returning from a
voyage of two hundred and fifty miles toward London over the North
Sea, and the Emperor is there. Is it the palace hidden in its
shrubbery in the country; is it the clean, broad streets and
decorations of the capital; is it a discussion of domestic politics,
or a question of foreign politics, the Emperor's hand is there. His
opinion, his influence, what he has said or has not said, are
inextricably interwoven with the woof and web of German life.
We may like him or dislike him, approve or disapprove, rejoice in
autocracy or abominate it, admire the far-reaching discipline, or
regret the iron mould in which much of German life is encased, but for
the moment all this is beside the mark. Here is a man who in a quarter
of a century has so grown into the life of a nation, the most powerful
on the continent, and one of the three most powerful in the world,
that when you touch it anywhere you touch him, and when you think of
it from any angle of thought, or describe it from any point of view,
you find yourself including him.
Personally, I should have been glad to leave this chapter unwritten. I
have no taste for the discussion and analysis of living persons, even
when they are of such historic and social importance, and of such
magnitude, that I am thus given the proverbial license of the cat. But
to write about Germany without writing about the Emperor is as
impossible as to jump away from one's own shadow. When the sun is
behind any phase or department of German life, the shadow cast is that
of Germany's Emperor.
This is not said because it is pleasing to whomsoever it may be, for
in Germany, and in much of the world outside Germany, this situation
is looked upon as unfavorable, and even deplorable; and certainly no
American can look upon it with equanimity, for it is of the essence of
his Americanism to distrust it. It is, however, so much a fact that to
neglect a discussion of this personality would be to leave even so
slight a sketch of Germany as this, hopelessly lop-sided. He so
pervades German life that to write of the Germany of the last twenty-five
years without attempting to describe William the Second, German
Emperor, would be to leave every question, institution, and problem of
the country without its master-key.
In other chapters dealing more particularly with the political
development of Germany, and with the salient characteristics, mental
and moral, of the people, we shall see how it has come about, that one
man can thus impregnate a whole nation of sixty-five millions with his
own aims and ambitions, to such an extent, that they may be said, so
to speak, to live their political, social, martial, religious, and
even their industrial, life in him. It is a phenomenon of personality
that exists nowhere else in the world to-day, and on so large a scale
and among so enlightened a people, perhaps never before in history.
Nothing has made scientific accuracy in dealing with the most
interesting and most important factors in the world, so utterly
inaccurate and misleading, as those infallibly accurate and impersonal
agents, electricity and the sun. If one were to judge a man by his
photographs, and the gossip of the press, one would be sure to know
nothing more valuable about him than that his mustache is brushed up,
and that his brows are permanently lowering. Personality is so evasive
that one may count upon it that when a machine says "There it is!"
then there it is not! You will have everything that is patent and
nothing that is pertinent.
We are forever talking and writing about the smallness of the world,
of how much better we know one another, and of how much more we should
love one another, now that we flash photographs and messages to and
fro, at a speed of leagues a second. Nothing could be more futile and
foolish. These things have emphasized our differences, they have done
nothing to realize our likeness to one another. We are as far from one
another as in the days, late in the tenth century, when they
complained in England that men learned fierceness from the Saxon of
Germany, effeminacy from the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane.
As probably the outstanding figure and best-known, superficially
known, man in the world, the German Emperor has escaped the notice of
very few people who notice anything. His likeness is everywhere, and
gossip about him is on every tongue. He is as familiar to the American
as Roosevelt, to the Englishman as Lloyd-George, to the Frenchman as
Dreyfus, to the Russian as his Czar, and to the Chinese and Japanese
as their most prominent political figure. And yet I should say that he
is comparatively little known, either externally or internally, as he
is.
It is perhaps the fate of those of most influence to be misunderstood.
Of this, I fancy, the Emperor does not complain. Indeed, those feeble
folk who complain of being misunderstood, ought to console themselves
with the thought that practically all our imperishable monuments, are
erected to the glory of those whom we condemned and criticised;
starved and stoned; burned and crucified, when we had them with us.
William II, German Emperor and King of Prussia, was born January 27,
1859, and became German Emperor June 15, 1888. He is, therefore, in
the prime of life, and looks it. His complexion and eyes are as clear
as those of an athlete, and his eyes, and his movements, and his talk
are vibrating with energy. He stands, I should guess, about five feet
eight or nine, has the figure and activity of an athletic youth of
thirty, and in his hours of friendliness is as careless in speech, as
unaffected in manner, as lacking in any suspicion of self-
consciousness, or of any desire to impress you with his importance, as
the simplest gentleman in the land.
Alas, how often this courageous and gentlemanly attitude has been
taken advantage of! I have headed this chapter The Indiscreet, and I
propose to examine these so-called indiscretions in some detail, but
for the moment I must ask: Is there any excuse for, or any social
punishment too severe for, the man who, introduced into a gentleman's
house in the guise of a gentleman, often by his own ambassador, leaves
it, to blab every detail of the conversation of his host, with the
gesticulations and exclamation points added by himself? To add a
little to his own importance, he will steal out with the
conversational forks and spoons in his pockets, and rush to a
newspaper office to tell the world that he has kept his soiled napkin
as a souvenir. The only indiscretion in such a case is when the host,
or his advisers, or gentlemen anywhere, heed the lunatic laughter of
such a social jackal.
To count one's words, to tie up one's phrases in caution, to dip each
sentence in a diplomatic antiseptic, in the company of those to whom
one has conceded hospitality, what a feeble policy! Better be brayed
to the world every day as indiscreet than that!
It is a fine quality in a man to be in love with his job. Even though
you have little sympathy with Savonarola's fierceness or Wesley's
hardness, they were burning up all the time with their allegiance to
their ideals of salvation. They served their Lord as lovers. Many men,
even kings and princes and other potentates, give the impression that
they would enjoy a holiday from their task. They seem to be harnessed
to their duties rather than possessed by them; they appear like
disillusioned husbands rather than as radiant lovers.
The German Emperor is not of that class. He loves his job. In his
first proclamation to his people he declared that he had taken over
the government "in the presence of the King of kings, promising God to
be a just and merciful prince, cultivating piety and the fear of God."
He has proclaimed himself to be, as did Frederick the Great and his
grandfather before him, the servant of his people. Certainly no one in
the German Empire works harder, and what is far more difficult and far
more self-denying, no one keeps himself fitter for his duties than he.
He eats no red meat, drinks almost no alcohol, smokes very little,
takes a very light meal at night, goes to bed early and gets up early.
He rides, walks, shoots, plays tennis, and is as much in the open air
as his duties permit.
It is not easy for the American to put side by side the attitudes of a
man, who is the autocratic master and at the same time declares
himself to be the first servant of his people. Perhaps if it is
phrased differently it will not seem so contradictory. What this
Emperor means, and what all princes who have believed in their right
to rule meant, was not that they were the servants of their people,
but the servants of their own obligations to their people, and of the
duties that followed therefrom. If in addition to this the claim is
made by the sovereign, that his right to rule is of divine origin,
then his service to his obligations becomes of the highest and most
sacred importance.