understand, or do not care to understand, that British statesmen when
they speak in the House of Commons, or when they go to the country
asking increased appropriations for the navy, must give some reason
for their request. There is only one reason, and that is that there is
a growing navy across the North Sea, which, whether now it is or is
not a menace, may be a menace to their ship-fed island, and they must
have ships and men and guns enough to guard the sea-lanes which their
food-laden ships must sail through.
They may be awkward sometimes in their expression of this self-evident
fact, they may call their own fleet a necessity and the other fleet a
luxury, but that is a negligible question of verbal manners; the fact
remains that their fleet is, and all the world knows it is, and it is
laughable to discuss it, the prime necessity of their existence.
As long as we Christians have given up any shred of belief in
Christian ethics, as applicable to international disputes, we must
live by the law of the strongest. We do not bless the poor in spirit,
but the self-confident; we do not bless the meek, but the proud; we do
not bless the peace-makers, but those who urge us to prepare for war;
we do not bless the reviled and the persecuted and the slandered, but
those who revolt against injustice and tyranny; we do not approve the
cutting off of the right hand, but admire the mailed fist; and it is
only adding to the confusion to raise millions for war ourselves, and
then to present a handsomely bound copy of the Beatitudes to our
rivals.
I shall be wantonly misunderstood if these reflections be taken as a
criticism of Germany. This situation involves Germany in censure no
more than other nations. It is only that Germany shows herself to be
somewhat childish and peevishly provincial, in girding at an
unchangeable situation, either in South America or in the North Sea.
This is not altogether Germany's fault. She is suffering from growing
pains, and from grave internal unrest. She is only just of age as a
nation, and her constitution is so inflexible that it is a constant
source of irritation. She is governed by an autocracy, and the two
strongest parties numerically in her Reichstag are the party of the
Catholics and the party of the Socialists. She has built up a
tremendous trade on borrowed capital, and every gust of wind in the
money market makes her fidgety. Her population increases at the rate
of some 800,000 a year, but her educational system produces such a
surplus of laborers who wish to work in uniforms, or in black coats
and stiff collars, that there is a dearth of agricultural laborers,
and she imports 700,000 Hungarians, Poles, Slays, and Italians every
year to harvest her crops.
This same system of education has taught youths to think for
themselves before either the mental or moral muscles are tough enough,
with the result that she is the agnostic and materialistic nation of
Europe, and her capital the most licentious and immoral in Europe.
This is the result of secular education everywhere. Freedom of
thought, yes, but not freedom of thought any more than freedom of
morals, or freedom of manners, or political freedom, in extreme youth;
that only makes for anarchy political, mental, and moral.
There is much undigested, not to say indigestible, republicanism about
just now in China and in Portugal, for example; just as there are
materialism and agnosticism in Germany and in France, not due to
super-intellectualism but to juvenile thinking. The Chinese are just
as fit for a republic -- an actual republic is still a long way off --
as are callow German youths, and notoriety-loving French students, for
freedom to disbelieve and to destroy. No country can long survive a
majority of women teachers in the public schools, together with no
Bible and no religious teaching there. I have no prejudices favoring
orthodoxy, but I have a fairly wide experience which has given me one
article of a creed that I would go to the stake for, and that is that
it is of all crimes the worst to give freedom political, moral, or
religious to those who are unprepared for it.
Germany's taste in literature, once so natural and healthy, has become
morbid, and Sudermann and Gorky and Oscar Wilde, and the rest of the
unhealthy crew who swarm about the morgues, the dissecting-rooms, and
the houses of assignation of life, the internuntiata libidinum, the
leering conciliatrices of the dark streets, are her favorites now.
There is no surer sign of mental ill-health than a taste for lowering
literature, an appetite for this self-dissecting, this complacent,
self-contemplating form of intellectual exercise.
This is no heated assault on German culture. It is a natural phase of
development. Youthful candidates for worldliness all go through this
pornocratic stage. "The impudence of the bawd is modesty, compared
with that of the convert," writes the Marquis of Halifax. The German
professor and the German bourgeois in their Rake's Progress are only a
little more awkward, a little more heavy-handed, a little coarser in
speech, than others, that is all. The period of twenty-five years
during which I have known Germany has developed before my eyes the
concomitants of vast and rapid industrial and commercial progress, and
they are: a love of luxury, a great increase in gambling, a
materialistic tone of mind, a wide-spread increase of immorality, and
a tendency to send culture to the mint, and to the market-place to be
stamped, so that it may be readily exchanged for the means of soft
living. These internal changes account to some extent for her restless
external policy. A man's digestion has a good deal to do with the
color of the world when he looks at it. There is more yellow in life
from biliousness, than from the state of the atmosphere.
Aside from these domestic causes there is no reason why Germany should
take a sentimental or pious view of these questions of international
amity. Her own history is development by war. "Any war is a good war
when it is undertaken to increase the power of the state," said
Frederick the Great. "Nur das Volk wird eine gesicherte Stellung in
der Welt haben, das von kriegerischen Geiste erfuellt ist" ("Only that
nation will hold a safe place in the world which is imbued with a
warlike spirit") writes Germany's great military philosopher
Clausewitz.
We took Cuba and the Philippines; England took India, Hong Kong, and
Egypt; Japan took Korea and southern Manchuria; Italy took Tripoli;
France took Fez; Russia took Finland and northern Manchuria;
Austria-Hungary took Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Prussia and Germany have
a long list, including Silesia, Poland, Hanover, and Alsace-Lorraine.
Austria-Hungary tears up the Berlin treaty; France, Germany, and Spain
tear up the Algeciras treaty; Italy tears up the treaty of Paris; and
it is part of the game that we should all hold up our hands, avert our
faces, and thank God that we are not as other men are, when these
things are done. The justifications of these actions are all of the
most pious and penitent description. We were forced to do so, we say,
in order to hasten the bringing in of our own specially patented and
exclusive style of the kingdom of heaven, but outside of perhaps India
and Egypt, and the Philippines, it would be hard to find to-day any
trace of the promised kingdom. Germany, for example, had nine per
cent. of Moroccan trade, the total of Moroccan trade with all
countries only amounted to $27,500,000 a year, and she was compelled
to interfere for the protection of her traders, forsooth! The outcome
of the business, after an exciting situation lasting for months, was
that Germany got a slice of territory from France, mostly swamps,
which reaches from the Congo to the Atlantic Ocean, and reported to
be, by her own engineers, uninhabitable.
It is the pleasant formula of
polite statesmen and politicians to say, that it is a pity that
Germany came into the world competition a hundred years too late, when
the best colonies had been parcelled out among the other powers. This
is a superficial view of the case, and misses the real point of the
present envy, hatred, malice, and uncharitableness. Germany does not
want colonies, and has no ability of the proper kind, and no willing
and adventurous population to settle them, if she had. Prussia's
dealing with aborigines is a subject for comic opera.
Germany came
into the modern world as a dreamer, as a maker of melodies, as a
singer of songs, as a sort of post-graduate student in philosophy and
in theoretical, and later applied science. She introduced us to
classical philology, to modern methods of historical research, to the
comparative study of ethnic religions, to daring and scholarly
exegesis, to the study of the science of language. She discovered
Shakespeare to the English; Eduard Maetzner and Eduard Mueller, and
German scholars in the study of phonetics, have written our English
grammars and etymological dictionaries for us, and helped to lay the
foundations for knowledge of our own language. Spinoza, Kant, Hegel,
one need not mention more, attempted to pass beyond the bounds of
human experience and to formulate laws for the process;
Schleiermacher, maintaining that Christian faith is a condition of
devout feeling, a fact of inward experience, an object which may be
observed and described, had an unbounded influence in America, and
many are the ethical discourses I have listened to which owed more to
Schleiermacher than to their authors. Humboldt, Liebig, Bunsen,
Helmholtz, Johannes Mueller, Von Baer, Virchow, Koch, Diesel, even the
British and American man in the street, with little interest in such
matters, knows some of these names; while Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
are symbols of revolt, whose names are flung into an argument by many
who only know their names, but who fondly suppose that the one stands
for despair and suicide, and the other for the joy and unbridled
license of the strong man.
Reckoning by epochs, it was only yesterday
that Germany said to the world: "No more of this!"
"Hang up philosophy!
Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,
Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom,
It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more!"
Of a sudden our scholar threw off his gown and cap, and said: "I
propose to play base-ball and foot-ball with you, I propose to have a
hand in the material spoils of life, I propose to have a seat at the
banquet and to propose toasts and to be toasted!" Faust of a sudden
left his gloomy, cobwebby laboratory, flung a fine cloak over his
shoulders, stuck a dandy feather in his cap, buckled on a rapier, and
began roistering with the best of us. We sneered and smiled at first,
let us be frank and admit it. We did not think much of this new buck.
We had little fear that the professor, even if he took off his
spectacles and slippers and dressing-gown, and exchanged his pipe for
a cigarette, would cut much of a figure as a lover. He was new to the
game, we were old hands at it, but the first thing we knew he had
given the world's mistress, France, a scolding, and flung her into a
corner, a cowering heap of outraged finery; and she has only been safe
ever since in the role of a sort of mistress of England on
board-wages.
A new cock in the barn-yard is never received with great
cordiality. He must win his place and his power with his beak and his
spurs. We all of us had enough to do before this fellow came along. We
are a little jealous of him, we are all uneasier because he is about,
and he has done so well at our games, now that he has indeed hung up
philosophy, that we are not even sure that it is safe to take him on
in a serious match. We have endeavored, therefore, to keep him
occupied with his own neighbors, to whom we have extended our best
wishes and our moral backing, which is known as keeping the balance of
power in Europe.
But a new Germany has come into the world. Germany nowadays has a
large class, as have the rest of us, who belong to that increasing
number of extraordinary people who want money without even knowing how
to get on without it. The only satisfactory test of the right to
wealth is the ability to get on without it. One of modern
civilization's most dangerous pitfalls is the subversive doctrine that
all men shall have wealth, even before they have proved their ability
to do without it. Germany is gradually arriving at this puny stage of
culture, whose beginnings may be said to date from that ominous year
for culture, 1492, when Lorenzo di Medici died and Columbus discovered
America!
During all this time statesmen have insisted that there is no good
reason why Germany and England should not be on good terms; gentlemen
of various trades and professions from both countries, speaking
halting English or embarrassed German, as the case may be, cross each
other's boundaries, comment upon the beauties of the respective
countries, and overeat themselves in ponderous endeavors to appear
cordial and appreciative. Mayors and aldermen swap stories and
compliments over turtle and sherry, or over sauerkraut and
Johannisberger; bands of students visit Oxford or Heidelberg, and
there is a chorus of praise of Goethe from one side, of Shakespeare
from the other; and all the while there is an unceasing antiphonal of
grimaces and abuse in the press. Not even when Germany exports her
latest stage novelties to London, and pantomimic platitudes are
dandled under colored lights, does the turmoil of martial talk cease.
Not even Teutonic lechery, in the guise of Reinhartian art, dressed in
nothing but silence, and making faces at the British censor on the
boards of the music-halls, avails anything.
Of course all this is nuts to the irresponsible journalists, to the
manufacturers of powder, guns, and ships, and to politicians and
diplomats out of employment; but it is hard on the taxpayer, who has
no dividends from manufacturers of lethal weapons and ships, nor from
newspapers, and no notoriety from the self-imposed jobs of the
unofficial diplomats.
Perhaps of all these factors the press, in its wild gamble to make
money out of sensationalism, is most to blame. The press, for the sake
of gain, has soiled and soured the milk of human kindness by exposing
it, carelessly and unceasingly, to the pathogenic dangers of the dust
of the street and the gutter. It is wholly unfitting and always
demoralizing when the priest, the politician, and the journalist turn
their attention to private gain. Any one of these three who makes a
great fortune out of his profession is damned by that fact alone. The
only payment, beyond a living, that these three should look to is,
respect, consideration, and the honor of serving the state unselfishly
and wisely. The world will be all the happier when there are no more
Shylocks permitted in any of these professions.
Germany is autocratic, philosophical, and continental; England is
democratic, political, and insular. It is hopeless to suppose that the
great mass of the people of one country will understand the other,
and, for this is the important point, it is wholly unnecessary.
We get on best and with least friction with people whom we do not
understand in the least. A man may have known and liked people with
whose aims, opinions, employment, creeds he has the smallest sympathy.
One may mention such diverse personalities as John L. Sullivan, the
prize-fighter, Cardinal Rampolla, Mr. Roosevelt, Doctor Jameson, the
Kaiser, President Diaz of Mexico, numerous Jew financiers, Lord
Haldane the scholar-statesman, and a long list of professors, pious
priests, sportsmen, and idlers, not to speak of Hindus and
Mohammedans, Japanese and Chinese, and half a dozen Sioux chiefs. With
these gentlemen, a few of many with whom one may have been upon such
pleasant terms that they have even confided in him and trusted him
with their secrets, one may have passed many pleasant hours. It
probably never entered such a man's head to wonder whether they liked
him, and he never discussed with them the question of his liking for
them. We get on by keeping our own personalities, prejudices, and
creeds intact. There is no other way.
Other men will give even a more diverse list of friends and
acquaintances, and never for a moment dream that there is any mystery
in being friends with all. Nothing is ever gained by flattery. To the
serious man flattery in the form of sincere praise makes him more
responsible and only sadder, because he knows how much he falls below
what is expected of him, and what he expects of himself. Lip-flattery
makes a real man feel as though his sex had been mistaken, he feels as
though he had been given curling-tongs instead of a razor for his
morning toilet. These pompous flatteries that pass between Germany and
England to-day, make both sides self-conscious and a little ashamed to
write and to speak them, and to hear and applaud them.
America and England are shortly to celebrate the signing of the treaty
of Ghent, which marks a hundred years of peace between the two
nations. We have not been without opportunities to quarrel. We have
whole classes of people in America who detest England, and in England
there are not a few who do not conceal successfully their contempt for
America, but we have had peace, and since England, at the time of our
war with Spain, said "Hands off!" to the powers that wished to
interfere, there has been a great increase of friendly feeling. But
there has been little or no flattery passing back and forth. We have
sent ambassador after ambassador to England who were almost more
American than the Americans. Phelps and Lowell and Hay and Choate and
Reid were all American in name, in tradition, in their successes, and
in their way of looking at life. By their learning, their wit, and
their criticisms, by their writing and speaking, by their presentation
of the claims to greatness of our great men, by their unhesitating
avowal in public and in private of their allegiance to the ideals of
the republic they served, they have made clear the American point of
view. Above all, they have shown their pride in their own country by
acknowledging and praising the great qualities of England and the
English. There has been no fulsome flattery, no bowing the knee to
foreign idols, and what has been the result? The American ambassador
for years has been the most popular diplomatic figure in Great
Britain. An increasing number of Englishmen even, nowadays, know who
Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln were, and our understanding of
one another has grown rapidly out of this frank and manly attitude. We
were jealous and suspicious a hundred years ago, as are England and
Germany to-day, but we have changed all that by our attitude of
good-humored independence, and by eliminating altogether from our
intercourse the tainted delicacy of compliment, and the canting
endearments of the diplomatic cocotte. We have emphasized our
differences to the great benefit of the fine qualities that we have
and cherish in common.
The individual Protestant does not dislike the individual Papist, half
so much as he dislikes his neighbor in the next pew, who refuses
Sunday after Sunday to repeat the service and the creed at the same
pace as the others, and hence to "descend into Hell" with the rest of
the congregation. The Sioux chief was far more annoyed by his neighbor
of the same tribe in the next-door reservation than he was by me. The
pugilist scorned "Tug" Wilson, a brother fisticuffs sovereign, but had
no feeling against his parish priest. Theological protagonists are
notoriously bitter against one another, but we have all found many of
them amiable companions ourselves. It is the fellow next door, who
wears purple socks, or who parts his hair in the middle, or who wears
his coat-sleeves longer than our tailor cuts ours, or who eats his
soup with a noise, or who has damp hands, or talks through his nose,
who irritates us and makes us wish occasionally for the unlimited
club-using freedom of the stone age. It is your first cousin with
incurable catarrh, and a slender income who is too much with you, and
who spoils your temper, not the anarchist orator who threatens your
property and almost your life.
"What do these Germans want?" asked a distinguished cabinet minister
of me. "They want consideration," I replied, "which is the most
difficult thing in the world for the Englishman to offer anybody."
"But, you don't mean to say," he continued, "that they really want to
cut our throats on account of our bad manners?" I cannot phrase it
better, nor can I give a more illuminating illustration of the
misunderstanding. That is exactly the reason, and the paramount
reason, why nations and why individuals attempt to cut one another's
throats. Whatever the fundamental differences may have been that have
led to war between nations, the tiny spark that started the explosion
has always been some phase of rudeness or bad manners.
Counting my school-days, I can remember about a dozen personal
conflicts in which I have engaged, with pardonable pleasure. Not one
of them was a question of territory, or religious difference, or of
racial hatred; indeed, the last one was due to being shouldered in the
street when my equanimity was already disturbed by a lingering
recovery from a feverish cold.
It is, after all, the little differences that count. If politically
and socially Germany were a little more sure of herself, if she were
not ever omnia tuta timens Dido; and if England were not as ever quite
so sure of herself, I believe intercourse between them would be less
strained.
"The little gnat-like buzzings shrill,
The hurdy-gurdies of the street.
The common curses of the will--
These wrap the cerements round our feet."
The smothered voice, the tepid manner, the affected and hesitating
under-statement, of a certain middlish class of English men and women,
and, alas, their American imitators, who are striving toward their
comical interpretation of the Vere de Vere manner, are the promoters
of guffaws in private, and uneasiness in public, between nations, to a
far greater extent than the bold individualist, whose voice and
manners, good or bad, are all his own. It is these small attritions
that wear us down, and produce a sub-acid dislike between nations as
between individuals. It is these that prepare the ground for a fine
crop of misunderstandings.
But are we not to know our neighbors the English, the Germans, the
French? I for one consider that not to know German and Germany, for
example, is nowadays not to be fully educated. Most of us, however,
have had our nerves unstrung by the speeding-up process that has gone
on all over the world of late. We have lost somewhat the power to know
people and to let them alone at the same time. Goethe, one of the
coolest and wisest of men, maintains: "Certain defects are necessary
for the existence of individuality. One would not be pleased if old
friends were to lay aside certain peculiarities."
We should at least give every man as fair a chance to receive our good
opinion as we give a picture. We should put him in a good light before
we criticise him. We should take time enough to do that to other
nations, as well as to individuals. I have always had much sympathy
for a certain Roman general. He was blind, and a painter who painted
him with two large eyes, he rebuked; another painter, who painted him
in profile, he rewarded.
It is, after all, something of an art to know people, so that the
knowledge is serviceable, so that you can depict them to yourself and
to others, not as they are as opposed to you, but as they are as a
complement and help to you.
"No human quality is so well wove
In warp and woof, but there's some flaw in it;
I've known a brave man fly a shepherd's cur,
A wise man so demean himself, drivelling idiocy
Had wellnigh been ashamed on't. For your crafty,
Your worldly-wise man, he, above the rest,
Weaves his own snares so fine, he's often caught in them."