study of human affairs is still in the infant class. It is a grave
danger to every state that critics, smart or shallow, with their tu
quoque weapons, their silly ridicule, their emphasis upon differences
as though they were disasters, their constant failure to recognize the
value of certain weaknesses, their stupidity in not painting great men
who happen to be blind, in profile, and their harping upon the flaws,
and their neglect of the fine texture of human qualities that are
strange to them, that these critics are not muzzled, or, if that is
impossible, disregarded.
They make it appear that amicable relations between nations are next
to impossible. If you escape one danger of offending, you are sure to
give offence in some other way, they seem to say. They are hysterical
in their self-consciousness, "as if a man did flee from a lion and a
bear met him, or went in the house and leaned his hand on the wall and
a serpent bit him." Sir Edward Grey writes on this subject: "I
sometimes think that half the difficulties of foreign policy arise
from the exceeding ingenuity of different countries in attributing
motives and intentions to the governments of each other. As far as I
can observe, the press of various countries is much more fertile in
inventing motives and intentions for the governments of the different
countries than the foreign ministers of these countries are
themselves. Foreign governments and our own government live from hand
to mouth and have fewer deep plans than people might suppose. There is
an old warning that you should not spend too much time in looking at
the dark cupboard for the black cat that is not there, and I think if
sometimes we were a little less suspicious of deep design or motive
that the affairs of the world would progress more smoothly."
The trouble lies in our undertaking the impossible, to the neglect of
the obvious and the possible. The basic fact of nationality is a
preference for our own ways, customs, and habits over those of other
people. If the Chinese and Japanese, the Servians and Albanians, the
English and the Germans liked one another as well as they like their
own, there would be no nationalism to protect or to preserve. Such
racial and traditional liking of nation for nation is impossible of
achievement. No journeyings, speechifyings, banquets, or compliments
will bring it about. On the contrary, I am not sure that it is not
these very differences which cheer us and give us a new flavor in our
pleasure in living, when we cross the Atlantic, the Channel, or the
Rhine. What we should strive for is not social and racial absorption,
but social and racial difference and distinction, with that pride in
our own which makes for patience in the understanding of others.
It is the petty, self-conscious American who hates the English, the
provincial Englishman who hates the German, the socially insecure
German who hates the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the American.
Those of us who are poised, secure, satisfied, and at bottom proud of
our race, our breeding, and our country, are neither irritable nor
irritating in the matter of international relations. We have enough to
do, and let others alone. Let us dine one another, criticise one
another in the effort to improve ourselves, praise one another where
the praise serves to establish our own ideals; but let us give up this
forced and awkward courting by banquets, deputations, and conferences.
Let us study the great art of leaving one another alone. This is a
time-hallowed doctrine. The greatest of all satirists and critics of
manners knew this secret of successful intercourse with one another.
One of the characters in the "Frogs" of Aristophanes is made to say:
"Don't come trespassing upon my mind; you have a house of your own."
Propinquity does not necessarily entail intimacy; as the world grows
smaller, more and more people think so, perhaps often enough only to
escape from themselves, a favorite form of elopement these days. Some
men are fed by solitude and starved by too much companionship, and the
same is true of nations. You cannot control others till you have
learned to control yourself, or save another till you yourself are
saved, and most of us had better be about that business.
It is England's business to know just now, and to some extent ours,
how many ships Germany is building and how many men she has in
training to man them; but it is not in the least anybody's business to
question her motives or to attempt to dictate her policy. It is our
business to shut up, and to build ships and to train men according to
our notions of what is necessary for safety in case of an explosion.
We should be about our father's business, not about our brother's
business.
It is shallow thinking and lack of knowledge of the men and women of
stranger countries, and above all that terrible itching to be doing
something, which lead to these futile excursions and this silly talk.
Can anything be more maudlin than to suppose that international
sensitiveness, that commercial rivalries, that tariff discriminations,
that territorial misunderstandings, are to be soothed and smoothed
away, by dissertations upon how much we owe to one another in matters
of culture? Think what we owe to Goethe and Lessing, to Spinoza and
Kant, to Heine and Mozart and Wagner and Beethoven, reiterates the
Englishman; think what we owe to Shakespeare and Milton, to Byron and
Shelley and Scott, to Lister and Newton, answers the German! Who can
go to war with the countrymen of Racine and Moliere and Pascal and
Montesquieu and Descartes? repeats the friend of France; and by others
are trumpeted the fraternal relations that we ought to cultivate with
the countrymen of Dante, or of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles.
This is phantom friendship, and we all know in our heart of hearts,
that we would fight any or all of them at the drop of a handkerchief,
if they hurt our feelings, ruffled our national pride, or maltreated
in a foreign land the meanest of our racial brothers. Straining after
such artificial bonds of union is as irritating as it is unreal.
Germany has few heartier admirers of Bismarck than am I; England has
few franker friends of her great gentlemen in peace and war than am I;
I have read and profited by French literature far more than from
anything America has produced; if I can write so that here and there a
brother has profited therefrom, I owe it to the Frenchmen I have
studied; but these are all nothing as compared with my heart's real
allegiances. There is a gulp in my throat when I dream of that weary,
misunderstood, but patient and humble peace-maker, who held the scales
between the millions of my own countrymen, shooting and stabbing one
another to death fifty years ago. No other man can be quite like him
to me; he remains my master of men, as is Lee my ideal of the Happy
Warrior. I understand the grim humor in his sad eyes, I love that
lined face, cut from the granite of self-control, that tamed volcano
face, seamed and scarred by the lava of his trials and his tears; I
can see how the illuminating and conciliatory anecdotes were his
relief from the pain of an aching heart; my muscles harden and my
nerves tingle as I recall the puppet politicians and fancy self-advertising
warriors who crucified him slowly. The country and the
people that Lincoln believed in, I must believe in and fight for too.
Washington was an Englishman and baptized us, but Lincoln was an
American who officiated at our first communion as a united people.
I ask no Englishman, no German, no Frenchman to agree with me, but I
ask them to leave me alone with my dead, to leave me in peace with my
living problems, to force no artificial friendships upon me, and thus
to let our respect for one another increase naturally.
Has the Englishman, has the German, no sanctuaries to be left
undisturbed; no heart-strings that are not to be fumbled at by busy
fingers; no personal dignities to be shrouded from investigations; no
sweet silences of sorrow that are barred to foreign mourners? If he
have not, then all this clamor at the doors of national privacy is
well enough; but let them remember that when nations lose their
dignity and their racial pride, there is sure to follow the squabbling
and the jealousy, the rough speech and vulgar manners, of the domestic
circle, in the same plight of spiritual shamelessness. The best that
any of us learn is to be a little more patient, a little more
charitable, a little more careful of the dignity of others in our own
homes, or abroad, and then the light goes out!
XI CONCLUSION
Criticism is temptingly easy when it consists, as it so often does, in
merely noting what is different, or what is not there. Helpful
criticism I take to be the discovery of what is there, and its
revelation, with an examination of its history, its truth, and its
value. That kind of criticism is close to creation itself, and few
there are sufficiently self-sacrificing to endow and to train
themselves to undertake it.
It makes life very complicated to think too much about it, but to take
a step further, and to attempt to apply logic to life, that way
madness lies. It is of the very essence of life that things are never
as they ought to be, but only as they can be for the time being. We
may be optimistic enough to believe that this is a good world, but it
is none the less true that unbending virtue seldom receives the
temporal rewards for which most of us are striving, and with which
alone most of us are content. We are forced to doubt, therefore, the
goodness which finds life easy and comfortable, and since we must
still at all hazards be charitable in our judgments of one another, we
become, most of us, opportunists in morals.
In dealing with the men, manners, affairs, and the soul of a stranger
people, therefore, one must use what experience, knowledge, good-humor,
and impartiality one has, without assumption of superiority,
without making high demands, and without ceasing to be at least as
opportunist as we are at home. Because things are different, they are
not necessarily better or worse, and if certain things are not there,
it is perhaps because they do not belong there. Above all, we should
refrain from applying a stern logic to the life of another country
which we never use in measuring our own.
The whole north of Germany is a flat, barren plain, with the Elbe, the
Oder, the Weser flowing west and north. The north of Germany on a
raised map looks like a vast sea-shore, and so it is. To the south a
great river, the Rhine, pierces its way from Frankfort through a
beautiful gorge in the mountains, and has its source near that of the
Danube. Barbarossa called this river, "that royal street." This sea-shore
is cultivated and populous; this river has been made a great
commercial highway. Cologne, one hundred and fifty miles from the sea,
is now a seaport; Strasburg, three hundred miles inland, can receive
boats of six hundred tons; and the tributary river, the Main, has been
deepened so that now Frankfort receives steamers from the Rhine. Three
quarters of the through trade of Holland is German water-borne trade.
Now the Dortmund-Ems canal, which is one hundred and sixty-eight miles
long, and can be used by ships of a thousand tons, gives an outlet,
via the Rhine, at Emden. All this is the work of a patient,
persistent, and economical people working under great natural
disadvantages.
As compared with America this is an unfruitful land, and, as I have
noted, surrounded on all sides by powerful enemies. In 1902 Traugott
Mueller estimated the value of Germany's production of wheat, potatoes,
vegetables--the products of the gardens and the fields, in short--at
$605,000,000; the production of beef, mutton, pork at $669,500,000; of
the dairies at $406,000,000; of cotton, sugar, alcohol, wine, and wood
at $322,000,000; or a total of $2,002,000,000. The United States is
seventeen times as large, but by no means seventeen times as
productive.
Germany, again, is divided into a number of states, all, with the
exception of Prussia, with its population of 40,000,000 out of the
total of 65,000,000, comparatively small. These states are not merely
divided by legal and geographical lines, but by traditions, different
ruling families, religion, tastes, habits, and manners, and even
geologically. Bernhard Cotta, writing of Germany, says: "Geologically
there is a Spain, an England, a Sweden, a Russia, a France, but no
Germany." They are different individuals, not different members of the
same family. They have been cemented together by coercion.
Over this whole country for three hundred years have swept all the
fighting men of Europe. Until 1870 it was a tournament ground for the
Swedes, Russians, French, Dutch, Belgians, Italians, Hungarians,
English, and the various German states. It was shot over, till it is a
wonder that there are any young birds, not to speak of old cocks and
hens left, to begin with over again.
A feature of the political situation, which scarcely enters into
political calculations in America, is the sharp division between
Protestants and Catholics, with a political party of Catholics
numbering one fourth of the total members, in the Reichstag. In 1905
there were 37,646,852 Protestants and 22,109,644 Catholics in Germany,
the Roman Catholics being in a majority in Baden, Bavaria, and
Alsace-Lorraine. In the past these religious differences have entailed
all the most repulsive features of war, waged to the point of
extermination. "Lieber Rom als Liberal," is still a punning war-cry
marking the dislike of Rome and the fear of Socialism.
With us religion has become largely an organized attempt, using
charity as patronage, to reconcile piety and plenty, with the result
that with the exception of the Catholic Church dealing with the lately
arrived immigrants, and the Methodists and Baptists dealing with the
ignorant masses, black and white, in the South, religion in the sense
of an organized church has little hold upon the people, especially in
the large cities.
In America the indifference to religion is the result of suspicion.
The congregations are too largely black-coated and white-collared, and
the lay officers of the churches much too solemnly sleek and serenely
solvent to attract the weak, the unfortunate, the sorrowing, and the
sinner. The mere appearance of the congregation in a prosperous
Protestant church in an American city is a mockery of Christianity.
Any man who preaches to men who can own a seat in God's house is a
craven opportunist. Until the doors of the churches are open all the
week, and the seats in the churches free, to claim that the Christ is
there is little short of blasphemy. It is no wonder that those who
need Him most, never dream of seeking for Him in these ecclesiastical
clubs.
In Germany half-baked thinking, following upon, and as the result of,
the barracks and corporal methods of education, have turned the
Protestant population from the churches. The slovenly and patchy
omniscience of the partly educated, leads them to believe that they
know enough not to believe. Renan, though a doubter himself, saw the
weakness of this form of disbelief when he wrote: "There are in
reality but few people who have a right not to believe in
Christianity."
The people living upon this ethnographical chess-board have been for
centuries rather tribal than national, and are still rather
philosophical than political, rather idealistic than practical, rather
dreamy than adventurous. To organize this population for self-support
and self-defence, to ignore differences, racial and religious, to
stamp out the jealousies of small rulers, required severe measures,
and we are all learning to-day that democracies are seldom severe with
themselves. A tyrannical autocracy, led by the Great Elector,
Frederick the Great, and Bismarck, produced from this welter of
discord the astonishing results of to-day.
We have to-day, in an area of 208,780 square miles, 5,604 square miles
representing the lately conquered territory of Alsace-Lorraine, a
population of 64,903,423, of whom 1,028,560 are subjects of foreign
powers. To defend this area there are to be, according to figures
estimated even as this volume goes to press, a million men under arms
in the army and navy. Their enormous progress in trade, in industry,
in shipbuilding, is set out in full in every year-book, for the
curious to ponder. In so short a time, on so poor a soil, in such a
restricted space, with such a past of distress and disaster, and
dealing with such conflicting interests, a like success in nation-building
is unparalleled.
Industrial and martial beehive though it would seem to be, there are
provided for the native and the foreigner feasts of music, of art, and
of study that cost little. There are quiet streams, lovely, lonely
walks, and quaint towns that are nests of archaeological interest. In
Weimar, in Stuttgart, in Schwerin, in Duesseldorf, in Karlsruhe, not to
mention Munich, Leipsic, Dresden, Berlin, Frankfort, Hamburg, there
are centres of culture. The best that the mind of man creates is still
spread out there as of yore for whomsoever will to partake, but ever
in less abundance and with less enthusiasm. And these names are a mere
fraction of the number of such places.
The rivalries between the states is now to a large extent an elevating
rivalry of culture, dotting the map of Germany with resting-places for
the curious, the scholarly, or the sentimental traveller. You may have
plain living and high thinking in scores of the cities and towns of
Germany, and you will be considered neither an outcast nor an
eccentric; indeed, you will find no small part of the population your
companions.
You may stroll for miles on the banks of that tiny stream the
Zschopau, and expect to see sprites and nymphs, so hidden are its
windings; and where in all the world will a handkerchief cover an Ulm,
an Augsburg, a Rothenburg, Ansbach, Nuremberg, Wuerzburg, with their
wealth of associations?
The Fugger family, of Augsburg, tell us again that there is nothing
new in the world. Five hundred years ago they were millionaires. One
of these Fuggers had a voice even in the election of Charles V, and we
are still hard at it trying to keep our Fuggers from meddling in
politics. Another Fugger, Marcus by name, wrote a capital book on the
horse in the sixteenth century, and at the last horse-show at Olympia,
in 1912, a Fugger came over from Germany and took away the first prize
for officers' chargers. So far flung was their fame as money-lenders
that usury was called "Fuggerei"!
Heirs of great houses got out of hand then as now, and Duke Albert III
of Bavaria married Agnes Bernauer, the barber's daughter, and even the
Archduke Ferdinand of Austria ran off with Fraeulein Welser. One
citizen of Augsburg fitted out a squadron to take possession of
Venezuela, which had been given him by the Emperor Charles V. For some
reason the squadron did not sail; Lord Salisbury and President
Cleveland could have told this adventurous Augsburger that he was
better off at home!
Bishop Boniface, of Wuerzburg, was an Englishman, and his father was a
wheelwright. He put cart-wheels in his coat-of-arms, and they have
remained to this day in the arms of the town, a fine reminder to
snobbery that ancestry only explains, it cannot exalt.
"Pigmies are pigmies still, though perch'd on Alps,
And pyramids are pyramids in vales."
The atmosphere in these towns is one of repose. They are still wise
enough to know that the miraculous improvements in speed brought about
by steam and electricity have not shortened the journey of the soul to
heaven by one second. They know that Socrates on a donkey really goes
faster than Solly Goldberg in his sixty-horse-power motor-car. They
are suspicious of the new cosmopolitan creed, that successful
advertising endows a man with eternal life. Countless political quacks
have been caricatured, advertised, and cinematographed into
familiarity, but wise men still read Plato and Aristotle. The penny
press has not convinced them that popularity is immortality; they
recognize popularity as merely glory paid in pennies. They partake to
some extent of the patience of the Oriental. They suspect, as most men
of wide intellectual experience do, that the man who cannot wait must
be a coward at bottom, afraid of himself, or of the world, or of God.
This is wholly true of many Germans, despite the clang of arms, the
noise of steam-hammers, the shrieking locomotives, the puffing
steamers, the clinking of their gold, and the shouting of their
pedlers, now scattered all over the world. It is this combination, in
the same small area, of noise and repose; of political subserviency at
home and sabre-rattling abroad; of close organization at home and
colonizing inefficiency abroad; of moral and intellectual freedom, one
might almost call it moral and intellectual anarchy these days, and at
the same time submission to a domestic and social tyranny unknown to
us, that makes even a timid author feel that he is discovering the
Germans to his countrymen, so little do they know of this side of
German life.
They are not at all what the Americans and the English
think they are. They want peace, and we think they want war. The huge
armaments are intended to frighten us, just as were the grotesquely
ugly masks of the Chinese warriors. They intend to frighten us all
with their 850,000 soldiers, their great fleet, their air-ships and
aeroplanes, and when they go to Agadir again they hope to be able to
stay there till their demands are granted. They are the last comers
into the society of nations and they mean to insist upon recognition.
But this demand is an artificial one so far as the great mass of
Germans is concerned. It is the Prussian conqueror, and the small
class, officer, official and royal, representing that conqueror, who
are determined upon this course. They have unified Germany, they have
made the laws and forced obedience to them; and the heavily taxed,
hard-driven, politically powerless people are helpless.
Nowhere has socialistic legislation been so cunningly and skilfully
used for the enslavement of the people. No small part of every man's
wages is paid to him in insurance; insurance for unemployment, for
accident, sickness, and old age. There is but faint hope of saving
enough to buy one's freedom, and if the slave runs away he leaves, of
course, all the premiums he has paid in the hands of his master. A
general uprising is guarded against by a redoubtable force of
officials, officers, and soldiers, whose very existence depends upon
their defence of and upholding of the state under its present laws and
rulers.
Our grandfathers and fathers, some of them, talked and read of Saint-Simon,
of Fourier, Robert Owen, Maurice Kingsley, and the Brook Farm
experiment, and believed, no doubt, that the dawn of the twentieth
century would have extracted at least some balm from these theories
for the healing of our social woes. They would rub their eyes in
amazement were they to awake in 1912 to find more armed men, more
ships of war, more fighting, more strikes and trade disputes, than
ever before. Above all, they would be puzzled to find the nation which
is most advanced in the application of the theory of state socialism
with the largest army, the heaviest taxation, and the second most
formidable fleet.