Even more illuminating were his views with regard to the position of
Germany in Europe before the war began. He admitted that for years, by
the neighbour-peoples, Germany had been feared and distrusted. This, he
insisted, was not Germany's fault, but a fear and a distrust born of
envy and malice among deteriorated and decaying nations for a land
which, so far as Europe, at least, was concerned, was the mother of all
the virtues and all the great benevolent impulses of the century. He
denied that Germany had ever been overbearing or threatening; denied
that anything except jealousy could lie at the back of the general
suspicion directed against Prussia, not only by aliens but--before the
war began--by Bavaria and by Saxony as well.
"Germany," he said to me one day, "has earned the right to rule this
Hemisphere; and Germany is going to rule it! When we have conquered our
enemies, as conquer them we shall--when we have implanted among them our
own German culture, our own German institutions and our own German form
of government, which surely we also shall do--they will, in succeeding
generations, be the better and the happier for it. They will come to
know, then, that the guns of our fleets and the rifles of our soldiers
brought them blessings in disguise. Out of their present sufferings and
their future humiliations will spring up the benefits of German
civilisation.
"At first they may not want to accept our German civilisation. They will
have to accept it--at the point of the bayonet if necessary. If it is
required that these petty lesser states should be exterminated
altogether, we shall not hesitate before that task either. They are
decadents, dying now of dry rot and degeneracy; better that they should
be dead altogether than that the spread of German _Kultur_ through the
world should be checked or diverted from its course. We shall teach the
world that the individual exists for the good of the state, rather than
that the state exists for the individual."
To the miseries that had been inflicted upon Belgium, and which he
himself had had opportunity to view at first hand, he gave no heed--this
scholarly pundit-preacher of the tenets of Prussianism. With a wave of
his hand he dismissed the question of the rights and wrongs of the
German invasion of Belgium. He wasted no sympathy upon Louvain, sacked
and pillaged and burned, or upon Dinant, razed to the ground for the
most part, and with seven hundred of its male inhabitants put to death
on one slaughter-day in punitive punishment for acts of guerrilla
warfare alleged to have been committed by civilians against Germans
coming upon them in uniform.
Yet I do not think that, in most of the relations of life, he was a
cruel or even an unkind man. He merely saw Belgium through glasses made
in Germany. He explained his attitude substantially after this fashion,
as I now recall the sense and the phrasing of his words:
"What difference does it make to posterity that we have had to destroy a
few hotbeds of ignorance and shoot a few thousand undisciplined,
uneducated, turbulent persons? What difference though we may have to
continue to destroy yet more Belgian towns and shoot yet more Belgian
civilians? Ultimately the results of our operations are bound to redound
to the greater glory of the Greater German Empire, which means European
civilisation.
"My friend, do you know that nearly a quarter of the inhabitants of
Belgium are illiterates, as you would put it in English--_Unalphabets_,
as we Germans say? Well, that is true--a quarter of them can neither
read nor write. In Germany only a fractional part of one per cent of our
people are illiterate to that extent. We have taken Belgium by force of
arms and we are never going to give it up. Already it is a province of
the German Empire.
"When our lawgivers have followed our soldiers across the expanded
frontiers of our Empire; when we have made the German language the
language of annexed Belgium; when we have introduced our incomparably
superior methods into all departments of Belgian life; when we have
taught all the Belgians to speak the German tongue, and have required of
them that they do speak it--then these Belgians, as Germans, will be
better off than ever they could have been as Belgians. Never fear; we
shall know how to handle them.
"With Alsace and Lorraine we were too mild for their own good. With
Belgium we shall be stern; but we shall be just. It is the predestined
fate of Belgium that she should become a German possession and a German
territory. Geography and destiny both point the way for us, and we
Germans never turn from the duties intrusted to us by our God and our
Kaiser! We mean to teach these lesser peoples before we are through that
the individual exists for the good of the State, not, as some of them
profess to believe, that the State exists for the good of the
individual."