roads, sailing our yachts in the waters, eating the fruits of the
fields that have been won for us by the sweat and blood of those gone
before. Germany has no leisure for that, no doll's house as yet to
play in, and she is perhaps more fortunate than she knows.
One can understand, too, that Germany has little patience with the
confused thinking which maintains that military training only makes
soldiers and only incites to martial ambitions; when, on the contrary,
she sees every day that it makes youths better and stronger citizens,
and produces that self-respect, self-control, and cosmopolitan
sympathy which more than aught else lessen the chances of conflict.
I can vouch for it that there are fewer personal jealousies,
bickerings, quarrels in the mess-room or below decks of a war-ship, or
in a soldiers' camp or barracks, than in many church and Sunday-school
assemblies, in many club smoking-rooms, in many ladies' sewing or
reading circles. Nothing does away more surely with quarrelsomeness
than the training of men to get on together comfortably, each giving
way a little in the narrow lanes of life, so that each may pass
without moral shoving. There are no such successful schools for the
teaching of this fundamental diplomacy as the sister services, the
army and the navy.
My latest visit to Germany has converted me completely to the wisdom
of compulsory service. Nor am I merely an academic disciple. I have
had a course in it myself, and were it possible in America I should
give any boy of mine the benefit of the same training. In Germany, at
any rate, no student of the situation there would deny that, barring
Bismarck, the army has done more for the nation than any other one
factor that can be named. Soldiers and sailors train themselves, and
train others, first of all to self-control, not to war. It is a pity
that "compulsory service" has come to mean merely training to fight. In
Germany, at any rate, it means far more than that. Two generations of
Germans have been taught to take care of themselves physically without
drawing a sword.
It is rather a puzzling commentary upon the growth of democracy, that
in America and in England, where most has been conceded to the
majority, there is least inclination on their part to accept the
necessary personal burden of keeping themselves fit, not necessarily
for war, but for peace, by accepting universal and compulsory
training. The only fair law would be one demanding that no one should
be admitted to look on at a game of cricket, foot-ball, or base-ball
who could not pass a mild examination in these games, or give proof of
an equivalent training. That would be honorable democracy in the realm
of sport.
There formerly existed in Bavaria a supplementary tax on estates left
by persons who had not served in the active army. It was done away
with at the formation of the empire. There is a proposal now to vote
such an additional tax for all Germany, and a very fair tax it would
be.
I am not discussing here the question of compulsory service in
England. It is not difficult to see that part of England's army must
of necessity be a professional army, which can be sent here and there
and everywhere, and that conscription would not answer the purpose,
for compulsory conscription could hardly demand of its recruits that
they should serve in India, in Canada, or in Bermuda or Egypt, for the
length of time necessary to make their service of value. Conscription,
too, on a scale to make an army serviceable against the trained troops
of the Continent is out of the question. Therefore, so far as
compulsory service for military duty only is concerned, I see no hope
for it in England. But in a land of free men such as is, or used to
be, England, and in America, compulsory service ought to be undertaken
with pride and with pleasure, as a moral, not as a military, duty for
the salvation of the country from internal foes, and as a nucleus
around which could rally the nation as a whole in case of attack from
external foes. Patriotism among us has come to a pretty pass indeed
when the nation is divided into two classes: those growling against
the taxation of their surplus; and those with their tongues hanging
out in anticipation of, and their hands clutching for, unearned doles.
And now, the more shame to us, must be added a third class who use
public office for private profit. What if we all turned to and gave
something without being forced to do so? Where would the "Yellow
peril" and the "German menace" be then? We should have much less
exciting and inciting talk and writing if our nerves and digestions
were in better order. Nothing calms the nerves, increases confidence,
and lessens the chance of promiscuous quarrelling better than hard
work.
Even if what the German army has accomplished along these lines were
not true, there can be no freedom of political speculation or
experiment, no time to make mistakes and to retrieve the situation,
when one is surrounded on all sides by overt or potential enemies.
Germany must have a powerful army and fleet, must have a strong and
autocratic government, or she is lost. "Ohne Armee kein Deutschland."
She can permit no silly, no stupid, no excited majority to imperil her
safety as a nation. If Germany were governed as is France, where they
have had nine new governments since the beginning of the twentieth
century, and forty-four since the republic replaced the empire forty-one
years ago -- not counting six dismissals of the cabinet when the
prime minister remained -- or fifty changes of government in less than
that number of years, Germany would have lost her place on the map.
France remains only because, so far as defence is concerned, France is
France plus the British fleet.
Political geography is the sufficient reason for Germany's army and
navy. Let us be fair in these judgments and admit at once, that if
Japan were where Mexico is, and Russia where Canada is, and Germany
separated from us by a few hours' steaming, certain peace-mongers
would have been hanged long ago, and our cooing doves of peace would
have had molten tar mixed with their feathers. An Italian proverb
runs, "It is easy to scoff at a bull from a window," and we indulge in
not a little of such babyish effrontery from our safe place in the
world. Germany, on the other hand, looks out upon the world from no
such safe window-seat; she is down in the ring, and must be prepared
at all hazards to take care of herself. That is a reason, too, why
Germany offers little resistance to the ruling of an autocratic
militarism. The sailors and the stokers would rather obey captain and
officers, however they may have been chosen for them, than to be sunk
at sea; and nowadays Germany is ever on the high seas, battling hard
to protect and to increase her commerce abroad, and to protect her
huge industrial population at home. Germany can take no chances for
the moment, for only "Wer sich regiert, der ist mit Zufall fertig."
One wishes often that one's lips were not sealed, one's pen not stayed
by the imperious demands of honor, to abstain from all mention of
discoveries or conversations made under the roof of hospitality, for
nothing could well be more enlightening than a description of a chat
between the great war-lord of Germany and a leading pacifist: the one
completely equipped with knowledge of the history, temper, and
temperament of his people; the other obsessed by a fantastic
exaggeration of the power and influence of money, even in the world of
culture and international politics, and preaching his panacea in the
land, of all others, where even now mere money has the least
influence, all honor to that land!
Spinoza, the greatest of modern Jews, and the father of modern
philosophy, writes: "It is not enough to point out what ought to be;
we must also point out what can be, so that every one may receive his
due without depriving others of what is due to them." And in another
place: "Things should not be the subject of ridicule or complaint, but
should be understood." Those who know little of the history of the
development of Germany, and particularly of Prussia, cannot possibly
understand another reason for the political apathy of the Germans and
their pleased support of their army. It is this: they have been
trained in everything except self-government, in everything except
politics. Perhaps their governors know them better than we do. Their
progress has come from direction from above, not from assertion from
below. The art or arts of self-government, throughout their
development as a nation, have been forcibly omitted from their
curriculum. Every step in our national progress, on the contrary, has
been taken by the people, shoulder to shoulder, breaking their way up
and out into light and freedom. There is little or no trace of any
such movement of the people in Germany, and there is little taste for
it, and no experience to make such effort successful. We, who have
profited by the teaching of this political experience, do not realize
in the least how handicapped are the people who have not had it.
One hundred years ago half the inhabitants of Prussia were practically
in the toils of serfdom. It was only by an edict of 1807, to take
effect in 1810, that personal serfdom with its consequences,
especially the oppressive obligation of menial service, was abolished
in the Prussian monarchy. Caste extended actually to land. All land
had a certain status, from which the owners and their retainers took
their political position and rights. The edict of 1807 was in reality
a land reform bill, and gave for the first time free trade in land in
Prussia. It was vom Stein, a Bismarck born too soon, who induced
Frederick William II, King of Prussia, and grandson of the Great
Elector, to abolish serfdom, to open the civil service to all classes,
and to concede certain municipal rights to the towns. But vom Stein
was dismissed from the service of his weak-kneed sovereign on the
ground that he was an enemy of France, and was obliged to take refuge
in Russia. Like other martyrs, his efforts watered the political earth
for a fruitful harvest.
It is well to know where we are in the world's culture and striving
when we speak of other nations. What were we doing, what was the rest
of the world doing, in those days when the Hanoverian peasant's son,
Scharnhorst, and Clausewitz were about to lay the foundations of this
German army, now the most perfect machine of its kind in the world?
These were the days prepared for by Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin
Franklin, Voltaire, Rousseau; by Pitt and Louis XV, and George III;
the days of near memories of Wolfe, Montcalm, and Clive; days when
Hogarth was caricaturing London; days when the petticoats of the
Pompadour swept both India and Canada into the possession of England.
These names and the atmosphere they produce, show by comparison how
rough a fellow was this Prussia of only a hundred years ago. He had
not come into the circle of the polite or of the political world. He
was tumbling about, un-licked, untaught, inexperienced, already
forgetful of the training of the greatest school-master of the
previous century, Frederick the Great, who had made a man of him.
We were already politicians to a man in those days, and the Englishman
Pitt was map-maker, by special warrant, to all Europe.
When the Prussians were serfs politically, our House of
Representatives, in 1796, debated whether to insert in their reply to
the President's speech the remark that "this nation is the freest and
most enlightened in the world." It is true that this was at the time
when Europe was producing Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Hegel,
Fichte, Mozart, Haydn, Herschel, and about ready to introduce Walter
Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Heine, Balzac, Beethoven, and Cuvier; when
Turner was painting, Watt building the steam-engine, Napoleon in
command of the French armies, and Nelson of the British fleet; but
this bombastic babble of ours harmed nobody then, and only serves to
show what a number of intellectual serfs must have been members of
that particular House of Representatives.
We have not overcome this habit of slapdash comparative criticism, for
only the other day a distinguished American inventor left Berlin with
these words as his final message: "We have nothing to learn from
Germany." But in the nineteenth century, where does the American of
sober intelligence, if Lincoln be omitted, find a match for Bismarck
as a statesman, Heine as a wit and song-writer, Wagner, Brahms, and
Beethoven as musicians, Goethe as a man of letters and poet, the still
living influence of Lessing and Winckelmann as critics, Fichte as a
scholarly patriot, Hegel and Kant as philosophers, von Humboldt,
Liebig, Helmholtz, Bunsen, and Haeckel as scientists, Moltke and Roon
as soldiers, Ranke and Mommsen as historians, Auerbach, Spielhagen,
Sudermann, Freytag, "Fritz" Reuter, and Hauptmann as novelists and
dramatists, Krupp and Borsig as manufacturers, and the Rothschilds as
bankers? Lincoln, Lee, Sherman, Jackson, and Grant may equal these men
in their own departments, but aside from them our only superiority, and
a very questionable superiority it is, lies in our trust-and-tariff-
incubated millionaires. Let us try to see straight, if only that we may
learn and profit by the superiority of others.
These explanations that I have given, historical, political, external,
and internal, offer reasons worth pondering both why we do not
understand Germany's huge armament and why Germany looks upon it as a
necessity.
However much the expenditure on fleet and army may be disguised, the
burden is colossal. In the year 1878 the net expenditure, ordinary and
extraordinary, for purposes of defence, for army and navy and all
other military purposes whatsoever including pensions, amounted to
452,000,000 marks; in 1888, to 660,000,000 marks; in 1898, to
882,000,000 marks; and in 1908, to 1,481,000,000 marks.
The total expenses, net, of the empire in 1908 were 1,735,000,000
marks, showing that only 254,000,000 marks out of the grand total of
1,735,000,000 were spent for other than military purposes. As the army
and navy now stand at a peace strength of some 700,000 men, and as
these men are all in the prime of their working power, the loss in
wages and in productive work may be put very conservatively at
600,000,000 marks, which brings the cost of the support of the
military establishment of Germany up to 2,000,000,000 marks and more
per annum, or $500,000,000.
Many Americans were dismayed when our total national expenditure
reached the $1,000,000,000 point, and the Congress voting this
expenditure was nicknamed the "Billion-dollar Congress." What would we
say of an expenditure of half a billion dollars for defence alone!
With what admiration, too, must we regard 65,000,000 people, living in
an area one quarter smaller than Texas, on a by-no-means rich or
fertile soil, who can bear cheerfully the burden, each year, of half
our total national expenditure, merely on the military and naval
barricade which enables them to toil in peace and security.
Humanity has, indeed, made but a poor zigzag progress from the
gorilla; Christianity, just now engaged in blessing the rival banners
of warriors setting out for one another's throats, has failed
ignominiously to bring the wolf in man to baptism, when the central
state of Christian Europe must arm to the teeth one in every eighteen
of her adult male inhabitants, and spend half a billion dollars a
year, to protect herself from assault and plunder.
If the hairy, skin-clad cave-dwellers, or the man who left us the
Neanderthal skull, could have a look at us now, here in Berlin, in
many ways the centre of the most enlightened people in the world, they
would undoubtedly go mad trying to understand what we mean by the word
''progress.'' And yet we smile indulgently at the poor farmers in
Afghanistan who till their fields with a rifle slung across their
shoulders. What is Germany doing but that! And an enormously heavy
rifle it is, costing just seven times as much as all other national
expenditures together; in short, it costs seven marks of soldier to
protect every one mark of plough. I admit frankly the horror and the
absurdity of all this; but as an argument for disarmament, "it does
not lie," as the lawyers phrase it. It is a criticism, and an
unanswerable one, of our failure as human beings to enthrone reason
and to tame our passions; but it is a veritable call to arms to
protect ourselves, not a reason for not doing so. Let the
international gluttons overeat themselves till they are seriously ill;
but it would be madness to starve ourselves in the meantime, and yet
that is the grotesque logic of certain of our preachers of
disarmament.
At the moment of writing there are 1,000,000 men at each other's
throats in the Balkans, there is a revolution in Mexico, and incipient
anarchy in Central America; as an emollient to this, Great Britain is
about to present a bust of the late King Edward to the Peace Palace at
the Hague! I can imagine myself saying "Pretty pussy, nice pussy," to
the wild-cats I have shot in Nebraska and Dakota, but I should not be
here if I had; and however small my value to the world I live in, I
estimate it as worth at least a ton of wild-cats.
I am bound, however, in fairness to call the attention of the unwary
dabbler in statistics to a point of grave importance in dealing with
German finances. The German Empire, so far as expenditure and income
are concerned, is merely an office, a clearing-house so to speak, for
the states which together make up the empire. The expenses of the
empire, for example, in 1910 were $757,900,000 and of the army and
navy, including extraordinary expenditures, $314,919,325; this does
not include pensions, clerical expenses, interest, sinking-fund, and
loss of productive labor, as did the figures on a preceding page. To
the ignorant or to the malicious, who quote these figures to bolster
up a socialist or pacifist preachment, this looks as though Germany
had spent one half of her grand total on the army and navy. But this
is quite wrong. In addition to the expenditures of this imperial
clearing-house called the German Empire, there was spent by the states
$1,467,325,000: the so-called clearinghouse bearing the whole burden
of expenses for army and navy, the separate states nothing except the
per capita tax, called the matriculation tax, of some 80 pfennigs. To
make this matter still more clear, as it is a constant source of error
not only to the foreigner but to the Germans themselves, the income of
the empire for 1910 was $757,900,000, the income of all the states
$1,463,150,000, or of the empire and the states combined
$2,221,050,000. In the same way the debt of the empire in 1910 stood
at $1,224,150,000, and the debt of the states of the empire at
$3,856,325,000, or a grand total outstanding indebtedness of all
Germany of $5,080,475,000.
Of late years the imperial expenditure of Great Britain, for example,
has amounted to some $935,000,000 a year; but various local bodies
spend also some $900,000,000 a year. Some of this is cross-spending,
but the grand total amounts to some $1,500,000,000 a year.
Before writing or speaking of Germany it is well to know at least what
Germany is. To pick up a hand-book and to quote therefrom the figures
relating to the German Empire, as though these covered Germany, as is
often done, is as accurate and helpful to the inquirer, as though one
should take the figures of the New York clearing-house as accurate
descriptions of the total and detailed business of all the New York
banks and trust companies. A clearing-house is merely a piece of
machinery for the adjustment of differences between a host of debtors
and creditors. The comparative cost of the German army and navy can
only be figured properly against the income and expenditure of the
total wealth of all Germany. And all Germany is something more than
the German Empire, which in certain respects is only a book-keeper, an
adjuster of differences.
"Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?
Ist's Preussenland? Ist's Schwabenland?
Ist's wo am Rhein die Rebe blueht?
Ist's wo am Belt die Moeve zieht?
O nein! O nein! O nein!
Sein Vaterland muss groesser sein.
"Des ganze Deutschland soil es sein!
O Gott vom Himmel, sieh' darein,
Und gib uns rechten deutschen Muth;
Dass wir es lieben treu und gut!
Des soil es sein! des soil es sein!
Des ganze Deutschland soll es sein!"
The official title of the sovereign is not Emperor of Germany, or
Emperor of the Germans, but German Emperor. Thus the territorial
rights of other heads of states are safeguarded. Even the popularity
of the first Emperor, who wished to be named Emperor of Germany and
who disputed with Bismarck for hours over the question, could not
bring this about, and he was proclaimed at Versailles merely German
Emperor.
However heavy the burden of armament may be, we must be careful to put
such expenditure in its proper perspective and in its proper
relations, not only to the German Empire, which for official,
clerical, and statistical matters is quite a different entity, but to
"das ganze Deutschland." The German Empire is the clearinghouse, the
adjutant, the executive officer, the official clerk, the
representative in many social, financial, military, and diplomatic
capacities of Germany; but it is not, and never for a moment should be
confused with, what all Germans love, and what it has cost them blood
and tears and great sacrifices to bring into the circle of the
nations, the German Fatherland!
In 1910 the total funded debt of the empire amounted to 4,896,600,000
marks, and the debt in 1912 had risen to 5,396,887,801 marks. In the
six years ending March, 1911, Germany's debt increased by
$415,000,000.
In 1910 the funded debt of Germany (empire and states) was
$4,896,600,000; of France $6,905,000,000; of England $3,894,500,000,
and of Russia $4,880,750,000. It is a curious psychical and social
phenomenon that, though we are as suspicious as criminals of one
another's good faith in keeping the peace, we are veritable angels of
innocence in trusting one another financially, for back of these huge
debts we keep in ready money, that is, gold, to pay them: Germany at
the present writing $275,000,000 in the Reichsbank; France
$640,000,000 in the Bank of France; England a paltry $175,000,000 in
the Bank of England; and Russia $625,000,000 in the Bank of Russia. We
all live upon credit, an elastic moral tie which seems to be
illimitably stretchable, and both a nation's and an individual's
wealth is measured not by what he has, but by what he is, that is to
say, by his character or credit. It is startling to find how we
distrust one another along certain lines and how we trust one another
along others. The total amount of gold in these four countries would
just about pay the interest at four per cent. for two years on their
total indebtedness!
From what we have seen of the proportion of expenditure that goes to
military purposes, it cannot be denied that Germany is increasing her
liabilities at an extraordinary rate, and largely for purposes of
protection. In the last two years the interest on her increased debt
alone, at four per cent., amounts to $5,000,000; while the interest at
four per cent. upon military expenditures of all kinds amounts to the
tidy sum of $20,000,000 per annum. The German, however, faces these
facts and figures, not as a matter of choice, not as a matter of
insurance wholly, but as a hard necessity. It is what the delayed
conversion of the world is costing him, not to speak of what it costs
the rest of us. He is surrounded by enemies; he is not by nature a
fighting man; his whole industrial and commercial progress and his
amassed wealth have come from training, training, training; and he
sees no alternative, and I am bound to say that I see none either, but
a nation trained also to defence, cost what it may.