have nothing to deny, nothing to attack. Peace is a negative thing
that no one really wants, certainly not the kind of peace of which
there is so much talking to-day, which is a kind of castrated
patriotism. Peace is not that. Peace can never be born of such
impotency. When German statesmen declare roundly that they will not
discuss the question of disarmament, they are merely saying that they
will not be traitors to their country. If the Emperor rattles the
sabre occasionally, it is because the time has not come yet, when this
German people can be allowed to forget what they have suffered from
foreign conquerors, and what they must do to protect themselves from
such a repetition of history.
When the final judgment is passed upon the Emperor, we must recall his
deep religious feeling that he is inevitably an instrument of God; his
ingrained and ineradicable method of reading history as though it were
a series of the ipse dixits of kings; his complacent neglect of how
the work of the world is done by patient labor; of how works of art
are only born of travail and tears: his obsession by that curious
psychology of kings that leads them to believe that they are somehow
different, and under other laws, as though they lived in another
dimension of space. In addition, he is a man of unusually rapid mental
machinery, of overpowering self-confidence, of great versatility, of
many advantages of training and experience, and, above all, he is
unhampered. He is answerable directly to no one, to no parliament, to
no minister, to no people. He is father, guardian, guide, school-
master, and priest, but in no sense a servant responsible to any
master save one of his own choosing.
The only wonder is that he is not insupportable. Those who have come
under the spell of his personality declare him to be the most
delightful of companions; what Germany has grown to be under his reign
of twenty-five years all the world knows, much of the world envies,
some of the world fears; what his own people think of him can best be
expressed by the statement that his supremacy was never more assured
than to-day.
I agree that no one man can be credited with the astonishing expansion
of Germany in all directions in the last thirty years; but so
interwoven are the advice and influence, the ambitions and plans, of
the German Emperor with the progress of the German people, that this
one personality shares his country's successes as no single individual
in any other country can be said to do.
Whether he likes Americans or not one can hardly know. No doubt he has
made many of them think so; and, alas, we suffer from a national
hallucination that we are liked abroad, when as a matter of fact we
are no more liked than others; and in cultured centres we are in
addition, laughed at by the careless and sneered at by the sour.
That the Kaiser is liked by Americans, both by those who have met him
and by those who have not, is, I think, indisputable. He is of the
stuff that would have made a first-rate American. He would have been a
sovereign there as he is a sovereign here. He would have enjoyed the
risks, and turmoil, and competition; he would have enjoyed the fine,
free field of endeavor, and he would have jousted with the best of us
in our tournament of life, which has trained as many knights sans peur
et sans reproche as any country in the world.
I believe in a man who takes what he thinks belongs to him, and holds
it against the world; in the man who so loves life that he keeps a
hearty appetite for it and takes long draughts of it; who is ever
ready to come back smiling for another round with the world, no matter
how hard he has been punished. I believe that God believes in the man
who believes in Him, and therefore in himself. Why should I debar a
man from my sympathy because he is a king or an emperor? I admire your
courage, Sir; I love your indiscretions; I applaud your faith in your
God, and your confidence in yourself, and your splendid service to
your country. Without you Germany would have remained a second-rate
power. Had you been what your critics pretend that they would like you
to be, Germany would have been still ruling the clouds.
Here's long life to your power, Sir, and to your possessions, and to
you! And as an Anglo-Saxon, I thank God, that all your countrymen are
not like you!
IV GERMAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE PRESS
In the days when Bismarck was welding the German states into a federal
organization and finally into an empire, he used the press to spray
his opinions, wishes, and suspicions over those he wished to instruct
or to influence. He used it, too, to threaten or to mislead his
enemies at home and abroad. The Hamburger Nachrichten was the
newspaper for which he wrote at one time, and which remained his
confidential organ, though as his power grew he used other journals
and journalists as well.
As Germany has few traditions of freedom, having rarely won liberty as
a united people, but having been beaten into national unity by her
political giants, or her robuster sovereigns, so the press before and
during Bismarck's long reign, from 1862 to 1890, was kept well in hand
by those who ruled. It is only lately that caricature, criticism, and
opposition have had freer play. That a journalist like Maximilian
Harden (a friend and confidant of Bismarck, by the way) should be
permitted to write without rebuke and without punishment that the
present Kaiser "has all the gifts except one, that of politics," marks
a new license in journalistic debate. That this same person was able,
single-handed, to bring about the exposure and downfall of a cabal of
decadent courtiers whose influence with the Emperor was deplored,
proves again how completely the German press has escaped from certain
leading-strings. A sharp criticism of the Emperor in die Post, even as
lately as 1911, excited great interest, and was looked upon as a very
daring performance.
There are some four thousand daily and more than three thousand weekly
and monthly publications in Germany to-day; but neither the press as a
whole, nor the journalists, with a few exceptions, exert the influence
in either society or politics of the press in America and in England.
As compared with Germany, one is at once impressed with the greater
number of journals and their more effective distribution at home. In
America there are 2,472 daily papers; 16,269 weeklies; and 2,769
monthlies. Tri-weekly and quarterly publications added bring the total
to 22,806. One group of 200 daily papers claim a circulation of
10,000,000, while five magazines have a total circulation of
5,000,000. It is calculated that there is a daily, a weekly, and a
monthly magazine circulated for every single family in America. Not an
unmixed blessing, by any means, when one remembers that thousands,
untrained to think and uninterested, are thus dusted with the widely
blown comments of undigested news. Editorial comment of any serious
value is, of course, impossible, and the readers are given a strange
variety of unwholesome intellectual food to gulp down, with mental
dyspepsia sure to follow, a disease which is already the curse of the
times in America, where superficiality and insincerity are leading the
social and political dance.
To carry the comparison further, there are 22,806 newspapers published
in America; 9,500 in England; 8,049 in Germany; and 6,681 in France:
or 1 for every 4,100 of the population in America; 1 for every 4,700
in Great Britain; 1 for every 7,800 in Germany, and 1 for every 5,900
in France.
That a prime minister should have been a contributor to the press, as
was Lord Salisbury; that a correspondent or editorial writer of a
newspaper should find his way into cabinet circles, into diplomacy, or
into high office in the colonies; that the editor and owner of a great
newspaper should become an ambassador to England, as in the case of
Mr. Reid, is impossible in Germany. The character of the men who take
up the profession of journalism suffers from the lack of distinction
and influence of their task. Raymond, Greeley, Dana, Laffan, Godkin,
in America, and Delane, Hutton, Lawson, and their successors, Garvin,
Strachey, Robinson, in England, are impossible products of the German
journalistic soil at present.
There have been great changes, and the place of the newspaper and the
power of the journalist is increasing rapidly, but the stale
atmosphere of censordom hangs about the press even to-day. Freedom is
too new to have bred many powerful pens or personalities, and the
inconclusive results of political arguments, written for a people who
are comparatively apathetic, lessen the enthusiasm of the political
journalist. There are not three editors in Germany who receive as much
as six thousand dollars a year, and the majority are paid from twelve
hundred to three thousand a year. This does not make for independence.
I am no believer in great wealth as an incentive to activity, but
certainly solvency makes for emancipation from the more debasing forms
of tyranny.
Several of the more popular newspapers are owned and controlled by the
Jews, and to the American, with no inborn or traditional prejudice
against the Jews as a race, it is somewhat difficult to understand the
outspoken and unconcealed suspicion and dislike of them in Germany.
There is no need to mince matters in stating that this suspicion and
dislike exist. A comedy called "The Five Frankfurters" has been given
in all the principal cities during the last year and has had a long
run in Berlin. It is a scathing caricature of certain Jewish
peculiarities of temperament and ambition.
There is even an anti-semitic party, small though it be, in the
Reichstag, while the party of the Centre, of the Conservatives and the
Agrarians, is frankly anti-semitic as well. No Jew can become an
officer in the army, no Jew is admitted to one of the German corps in
the universities, no Jew can hold office of importance in the state,
and I presume that no unbaptized Jew is received at court. I am bound
to record my personal preference for the English and American
treatment of the Jew. In England they have made a Jew their prime
minister, and in America we offer him equal opportunities with other
men, and applaud him whole-heartedly when he succeeds, and thump him
soundly with our criticism when he misbehaves. The German fears him;
we do not. We have made Jews ambassadors, they have served in our army
and navy, and not a few of them rank among our sanest and most
generous philanthropists.
To a certain extent society of the higher and official class shuts its
doors against him. One of the well-known restaurants in Berlin, until
the death of its founder, not long ago, refused admission to Jews.
I venture to say that no intelligent American stops to think whether
the Speyer brothers, or Kahn, or Schiff, or the members of the house
of Rothschild, are Jews or not, in estimating their political, social,
and philanthropic worth. Even as long ago as the close of the
fourteenth century the great strife between the princes of Germany and
the free cities ceased, in order that both might unite to plunder the
Jews.
Luther preached: "Burn their synagogues and schools; what will not
burn bury with earth that neither stone nor rubbish remain." "In like
manner break into and burn their houses." "Forbid their rabbis to
teach on pain of life and limb." "Take away all their prayer-books and
Talmuds, in which are nothing but godlessness, lies, cursing, and
swearing." In the chronicles of the time occurs frequently "Judaei
occisi, combusti."
The German comes by his dislike of the Jew through centuries of
traditional conflict, plunder, and hatred, and the very moulder of the
present German speech, Luther, was a furious offender. The Jews have
been materialists through all ages, claim the Germans: "The Jews
require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ
crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks
foolishness." It is to be in our day the battle of battles, they
claim, whether we are to be socially, morally, and politically
orientalized by this advance guard of the Orient, the Jews, or whether
we are to preserve our occidental ideals and traditions. Many more men
see the conflict, they maintain, than care to take part in it. The
money-markets of the world are ramparts that few men care to storm,
but, if the independent and the intelligent do not withstand this
semitization of our institutions, the ignorant and the degraded will
one day take the matter into their own hands, as they have done
before, and as they do to this day in some parts of Russia.
There are 600,000 Jews in Germany, 400,000 of them in Prussia and
100,000 of these in Berlin. In New York City alone there are more than
900,000. They are always strangers in our midst. They are of another
race. They have other standards and other allegiances. Perhaps we are
all of us, the most enlightened of us, provincial at bottom, we like
to know who and what our neighbors are, and whence they came; and we
dislike those who are outside our racial and social experiences, and
our moral and religious habits, and the Jew is always, everywhere, a
foreigner. At any rate, so the German maintains.
Strange as it may sound in these days, the Germans are not at heart
business men. There are more eyes with dreams in them in Germany than
in all the world besides. They work hard, they increase their
factories, their commerce, but their hearts are not in it. The Jew has
amassed an enormous part of the wealth of Germany, considering his
small proportion of the total population. The German, because he is
not at heart a trader, is an easy prey for him.
These things trouble us in America very little, and we smile cynically
at the not altogether untruthful portraits of "Potash and
Pearlmutter," and their vermin-like business methods. There is an
undercurrent of feeling in America, that the virile blood is still
there which will stop at nothing to throw off oppression, whether from
the Jew or from any one else. If we are pinched too hard financially,
if confiscation by the government or by individuals goes too far, no
laws even will restrain the violence which will break out for liberty.
So we are at peace with ourselves and with others, trusting in that
quiet might which will take governing into its own hands, at all
hazards, if the state of affairs demands it.
With the Germans it is different. No people of modern times has been
so harried and harrowed as these Germans. The Thirty Years' war left
them in such fear and poverty that even cannibalism existed, and this
was years after Massachusetts and Maryland were settled. But nothing
has tarnished their idealism. Whether as followers of Charlemagne, or
as hordes of dreamers seeking to save Christ's tomb and cradle in the
Crusades, or as intoxicated barbarians insisting that their emperor
must be crowned at Rome, or as the real torch-bearers of the
Reformation, or even now as dreamers, philosophers, musicians, and
only industrial and commercial by force of circumstances, they are,
least of all the peoples, materialists.
They have given the world lyric poetry, music, mythology, philosophy,
and these are still their souls' darlings. They entered the modern
world just as science began to marry with commerce and industry, and
so their unworn, fresh, and youthful intellectual vigor found
expression in industry. Renan writes that he owes his pleasure in
intellectual things to a long ancestry of non-thinkers, and he claims
to have inherited their stored-up mental forces. Germany is not unlike
that. Her recent industrial and intellectual activity may be the
release from bondage, of the centuries of stored-up intellectual
energy from the ''Woods of Germany.''
It is true that they are easily governed and amenable, but this is due
not wholly to the fact that they have been so long under the yoke of
rulers, or because they are of cow-like disposition, but because their
ideals are spiritual, not material. The American seeks wealth, the
Englishman power, the Frenchman notoriety, the German is satisfied
with peaceful enjoyment of music, poetry, art, and friendly and very
simple intercourse with his fellows.
Certainly I am not the man to say he is wrong, when I see how
spiritual things in my own country are cut out of the social body as
though they were annoying and dangerous appendices.
The German of this type looks down upon the spiritual and intellectual
development of other countries as far inferior to his own. Such an one
in talking to an Englishman feels that he is conversing with a
high-spirited, thoroughbred horse; to a Frenchman, as though he were a
cynical monkey; to an American, as though he were a bright youth of
sixteen.
The German considers his dealings with the intangible things of life
to be a higher form, indeed the highest form, of intellectual
employment. He is therefore racially, historically, and by temperament
jealous or contemptuous, according to his station in life, of the
cosmopolitan exchanger of the world, the Jew. He denies to him either
patriotism or originality, and looks upon him as merely a distributer,
whether in art, literature, or commerce, as an exchanger who amasses
wealth by taking toll of other men's labor, industry, and intellect.
It has not escaped the German of this temper, that the whirling gossip
and innuendoes that have lately annoyed the present party in power in
England, have had to do with three names: Isaacs, Samuels, and
Montagu, all Jews and members of the government.
German politics, German social life, and the German press cannot be
understood without this explanation. The German sees a danger to his
hardly won national life in the cosmopolitanism of the Jew; he sees a
danger to his duty-doing, simple-living, and hard-working governing
aristocracy in the tempting luxury of the recently rich Jew; and
besides these objective reasons, he is instinctively antagonistic, as
though he were born of the clouds of heaven and the Jew of the clods
of earth. This does not mean that the German is a believer, in the
orthodox sense of the word, for that he is not. He loves the things of
the mind not because he thinks of them as of divine creation, and as
showing an allegiance to a divine Creator, but because they are the
playthings of his own manufacture that amuse him most. His superiority
to other nations is that he claims to enjoy maturer toys. Not even
France is so entirely unencumbered by orthodox restraints in matters
of belief.
So far, therefore, as the German press is Jew-controlled, it is
suspected as being not German politically, domestically, or
spiritually; as not being representative, in short. It should be added
that, though this is the attitude of the great majority in Germany,
there is a small class who recognize the pioneer work that the Jew has
done. Few men are more respected there, and few have more influence
than such men as Ballin and Rathenau and others. For the very reason
that the German is an idealist the Jew has been of incomparable value
to him in the development of his industrial, commercial, and financial
affairs. Not only as a scientific financier has he helped, not only
has he provided ammunition when German industrial undertakings were
weak and stumbling, but along the lines of scientific research, as
chemists, physicists, artists -- perhaps no one stands higher than the
Jew Liebermann as a painter -- the Jew has done yeoman service to the
country in return for the high wages that he has taken. There are
Germans who recognize this, and there are in the Jewish world not a
few men to whom the doors of enlightened society are always open.
Whatever one may feel of instinctive dislike, the open-minded
observers of the historical progress of Germany, all recognize that
Germany would not be in the foremost place she now occupies in the
competitive markets of the world, if she had not had the patriotic,
intelligent, and skilful backing of her better-class Jewish citizens.
Printing was born in Germany, and the town of Augsburg had a newspaper
as early as 1505, while Berlin had a newspaper in 1617 and Hamburg in
1628. Every foreigner who knows Germany at all, knows the names of the
Koelnische Zeitung, the Lokal Anzeiger and Der Tag, Hamburger
Nachrichten, Berliner Tageblatt, Frankfurter Zeitung, and the
Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, this last the official organ of the
foreign office. The Neue Preussische Zeitung, better known by its
briefer title of Kreuz Zeitung, is a stanch conservative organ, and
for years has published the scholarly comments once a week of
Professor Shiemann, who is a political historian of distinction, and a
trusted friend of the Emperor. The Deutsche Tageszeitung is the organ
of the Agrarian League. The Reichsbote is a conservative journal and
the organ of the orthodox party in the state church. Vorwaerts is the
organ of the socialists and, whatever one may think of its politics,
one of the best-edited, as it is one of the best-written, newspapers
in Germany. The Zukunft, a weekly publication, is the personal organ
of Harden, is Harden, in fact. The Zukunft in normal years sells some
22,000 copies at 20 marks, giving an income of 440,000 marks; this
with the advertisements gives an income of say 500,000 marks. The
expenses are about 350,000 marks, leaving a net income to this daring
and accomplished journalist of 150,000 marks a year. In Germany such
an income is great wealth. The Zukunft and its success is a commentary
of value upon the appreciation of, as well as the rarity of,
independent journalism in Germany.
The Vossische Zeitung, or "Aunty Voss" as it is nicknamed, is a solid,
bourgeois sheet and moderately radical in tone. It is proper, wipes
its feet before entering the house, and may be safely left in the
servants' hall or in the school-room. Die Post represents the
conservative party politically, is welcome in rich industrial circles,
and is rather liberal in religious matters, though hostile to the
government in matters of foreign politics, and of less influence at
home than the frequent quotations from it in the British press would
lead one to suppose. The two official organs of the Catholics are the
Germania and the Volks Zeitung, of Cologne, whose editor is the
well-known Julius Bachern. The Lokal Anzeiger and the Tageblatt of
Berlin attempt, with no small degree of success, American methods, and
give out several editions a day with particular reference to the latest
news.
Leipsic, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Strasburg, Dresden, Koenigsberg,
Breslau, with its Schlessische Zeitung, and the Rhine provinces and
the steel and iron industries represented by the Rheinisch-
Westfaelischer Zeitung, and other cities and towns have local
newspapers. A good example of such little-known provincial newspapers
is the Augsburger Abendzeitung, with its first-rate reports of the
parliamentary proceedings in Bavaria and its well-edited columns. The
circulation of these journals is, from our point of view, small. The
Berliner Tageblatt in a recent issue declares its paid circulation to
have been 73,000 in 1901; 106,000 in 1905; 190,000 in 1910; and
208,000 in 1911.
The custom in Germany of eating in restaurants, of taking coffee in
the cafes, of writing one's letters and reading the newspapers there,
no doubt has much to do with the small subscription lists of German
journals of all kinds, whether daily, weekly, or monthly. The German
economizes even in these small matters. A German family, or small cafe
or restaurant, may, for a small sum, have half a dozen or more weekly
and monthly journals left, and changed each week; thus they are
circulated in a dozen places at the expense of only one copy. Where a
family of similar standing in America takes in regularly two morning
papers and an evening paper, several weekly and monthly, and perhaps
one or two foreign journals, the German family may take one morning
paper. The custom of having half a dozen newspapers served with the
morning meal, as is done in the larger houses in America and in
England, is practically unknown. Economy is one reason, indifference
is another, provincial and circumscribed interests are others.
The German has not our keen appetite for what we call news, which is
often merely surmises in bigger type. Only the very small number who
have travelled and made interests and friends for themselves out of
their own country, have any feeling of curiosity even, about the
political and social tides and currents elsewhere.