THE FINAL ISSUE
To come victorious out of the present ordeal--if, indeed, that be
possible with the leaders, principles, methods and strivings that
still characterize us--will not suffice to effect the triumph of our
cause. The present, momentous though it be, cannot with safety be
separated in thought or action from the future. The struggle will go
on relentlessly after this campaign until one side has worsted the
other definitively. And it is for that struggle that it behoves us to
prepare while the war is still at its height.
The Germans, true to their practice, have set us the example. Their
curious combinations for dividing the Allies while negotiating their
own schemes for reorganizing political Europe have been worked out in
almost every detail. Their projects for creating a vast and powerful
economic organization, to be known as Central Europe,[144] with its
first appendix in the Balkan Peninsula, have been carefully woven, and
will be duly embellished when the hour for unfolding them has struck.
In a word, when opportunity suddenly appears like the bridegroom of
the Gospel, the German will be found waiting, with girded loins and
trimmed lamp. He has distributed the parts of each nation in the
international drama, and if the roles cannot be taken over to-morrow,
he will wait until the day after.
[144] Cf. Friedrich Naumann, _Mitteleuropa_.
The world is henceforth no longer a field of labour for the
individual. Co-operation is the open sesame to the economic life of
the future. And co-operation means organization. Organization, then,
is the Alpha and Omega of the new era. That is the mysterious radium
which has enabled a single race to assail and hold its own against a
group of powers whose territory and population are many times greater
than its own. That race has demonstrated the quasi-omnipotence of
organized labour, and has thereby itself become almost omnipotent. On
the success or failure of its adversaries to create a like force and
rise to the same height depends the future of Europe and the British
Empire. One of the first corollaries of the new principle is the
enlargement of all great units, including political communities.
Germany and Austria, therefore, are bound, if not precisely to
coalesce in one whole, at least to co-operate and combine for their
common ends against common competitors, and thus to form the nucleus
of that federal state which is, our enemies hope, one day to be
commensurate with the continent of Europe.
At present, however satisfactory the military situation may be said to
be, the general outlook is far from bright. Our aims are impoverished,
our creative energies are clogged by prejudice, our political vision
is narrowed by party goals, and the forces inherent in the nation
which should be employed in readjusting its life to the new conditions
are being frittered away in abortive efforts to neutralize dissolvent
ideas that are sapping only those organs of our social and political
system which are already vicious or decayed. The waste of the empire's
resources has no parallel in history. Supreme confusion marks our
internal condition. Our leaders have done nothing to familiarize the
nation with the dangers that threaten it, the means by which they
should be met, or with the social and political ideas which are
destined to shape and sway the new order of things which is already
close at hand.
In the absence of constructive leaders it is for the nation itself to
make due preparation for the momentous changes in the social and
political system of Europe to which the present crisis is but the
prelude.
And although much has been spoken and written on the subject since the
war began, little permanent work has as yet been done. And there are
few signs of a radical change for the better. The confusion and
incongruousness that mark the ideas of the reformers, and the
hesitancy and conflicting interests of politicians make one dubious of
the outcome of the present contest. Almost everything essential would
appear to be still lacking to the Allies, and the nature of the coming
"peace period" is not realized, because the war is looked upon as an
isolated phenomenon which began in July 1914, and will end when
hostilities have ceased. Another belief equally misleading and
mischievous is that the Teuton race can be paralysed if not crushed,
and that for fifty or sixty years to come no revival of its energies,
no recrudescence of its morbid aggressiveness need be apprehended. If
we continue to shape our conduct on that assumption we may find
ourselves one day in a Serbonian bog from which there is no rescue.
However stringent the conditions which the Allies may be able to
impose on their enemies, there will still remain a keen, strenuous,
irrepressible race of at least a hundred and twenty millions, endowed
with rare capacities for organization, cohesion, self-sacrifice and
perseverance, whom no treaties can bind, no scruples can restrain, no
dangers intimidate. At any moment a new invention, a favourable
diplomatic combination, would suffice to move them to burst all bounds
and resume the military, naval and aerial contest anew.
Even now, while the war is still raging, they are busy with
comprehensive plans for the economic struggle which will succeed it.
Nor are they content to weave schemes. They have already begun to
carry them out. To mention but a few of the less important
enterprises, as symptoms of the German solicitude for detail, there
was a numerous gathering of railway representatives, Austrian,
Hungarian and German, in August 1915, to consider the means of
readjusting the railway service to the conditions which the peace
would usher in. Among the projects laid before the meeting and
insisted on by various financial institutions was the reconstruction
on a new basis of the Sleeping Car Company, from which Belgian capital
is to be excluded.[145]
[145] _Giornale del lavori pubblici._ Cf. also _Giornale
d'Italia_, August 22, 1915.
In Italy many of the German commercial houses are, so to say,
hibernating during the war. They merely altered their names and
substituted well-paid, friendly Italians for Germans, and the feat was
achieved. In this way the Kaiser's mercury mines of Abbadia, San
Salvatore and Corte Vecchia in Tuscany are being protected, and nobody
in Italy is under any misapprehension as to what is going on there.
They are nominally in the hands of Swiss.
One of the most successful manoeuvres by which the Germans have
already parried the strokes of their rivals in the economic struggle
is by crossing the frontiers and carrying on the contest in the
enemy's country. It was thus that, when Russia, by way of protecting
her own nascent textile industries, levied heavy duties on imports
from abroad, the Germans transported their plant and their workmen
across the border, built extensive works in Lodz which gradually grew
into a prosperous German city and rendered sterling services to the
Teuton invader during the present war. They intend to have recourse to
the same device as soon as hostilities have ceased. German trade
papers announced this to their readers and urged them to communicate
with the staff with a view to receiving information respecting ways
and means.
One Berlin trade journal--the most widely circulated in the German
capital--had recently a great headline entitled: "How to keep up
German Exportation after the War!" After a preamble enumerating the
difficulties that would be thrown in the way of exporters by the
Allies, the article went on thus: "For some years to come the means of
extricating ourselves from this cruel predicament will consist in
transporting the work of manufacturing or refining our merchandise to
a neutral country. We are now in a position to offer information and
advice on this head to those German manufacturers who are working for
exportation, and we shall endeavour to extend our action in the
future. We advise all those manufacturers who are desirous of
developing their business in this way to enter into relations with us
without delay."[146]
[146] _Zeitschrift des Handelsvertragsvereins_, March 30,
1915. Cf. also _La Gazette de Lausanne_ and _L'Idea
Nazionale_, December 5, 1915.
The device is simple, and has hitherto been efficacious. In
Switzerland the number of German firms is large and continues to
augment. They are branches of German houses, and their aim is to
further the interests of these. They mask their intentions by assuming
Swiss names and also by obtaining for their employees naturalization
papers in the little republic. How, it may be asked, do the Allies
propose to thwart these manoeuvres? They probably have not given the
matter a moment's serious consideration. A Swiss journal of
repute[147] published some time ago a characteristic letter received
by a Swiss business man from a German textile manufacturer. One
passage is worth reproducing: "The actual situation renders it
impossible for us to maintain relations with our former customers.
Hence, it is of the utmost importance for us to be informed respecting
the commercial and financial situation with a view to the resumption
of our intercourse in a lucrative form after this long interruption.
It is our intention, therefore, to have our products sold through a
Swiss branch by Swiss agents."[148]
[147] _Neue Zurcher Zeitung._
[148] _Neue Zurcher Zeitung_, also _L'Idea Nazionale_,
December 5, 1915.
With their incorrigible disposition to judge others by themselves, the
British people fancy that after the war a wave of liberalism will
sweep over Germany, demolish the strongholds of militarism there, and
reveal a pacific, level-headed nation with whom it may be possible to
hold friendly intercourse. This, to my thinking, is also a delusion.
Even if the Kaiser and his environment were dislodged from their
places, Germany's ideals, aims and strivings would remain unchanged.
But the Kaiser and his Government are minded to leave nothing to
chance. They, too, have their plans, which are simple and
comprehensive, and would appear to have escaped the notice of British
optimists. And yet they are well worth consideration. The Germans
themselves put the matter thus--
The enormous expenditure necessitated by the war will call for special
financial legislation of which the keynote will be found in
monopolies. Now, the present German Finance Minister, who is a banker
by training, intends that the monopolies to be created shall be
effected, not by the unaided resources of the State, but by its
co-operation with the interested business men and banks. On this basis
he is working at monopolies of cigarettes, life insurance and electric
power. This complex arrangement is facilitated by the machinery of the
banks and their peculiar activity. And here we touch upon one of the
main sources whence German organization after the war will draw its
vitality. It is on the operations of these financial institutions that
it behoves us to lay stress. They are so many magnetic centres which
attract nearly all the free capital of the country and then employ it
as they think fit. And one momentous consequence of this command of
money is the possession of almost unrestricted power over industrial
enterprises, present and future. For it depends on the banks to extend
these and to restrict the output of those in consonance with the
economic policy pursued by the State.
Nor should it be forgotten that the power and influence of the banks
is not limited by the amount of capital they actually possess. Over
and above this they wield all the financial force conferred by the
vast amounts deposited with them by customers. This was evidenced in
the case of the Banca Commerciale in Italy, which had a working
capital of L6,240,000 in the year 1914. Now, of that sum only 2.5 per
cent. was owned by Germans, yet the bank itself and all the industries
dependent on it were exploited by the German Board of Directors.[149]
In the Fatherland we observe the same phenomenon. All the German banks
together, excepting the hypothecary institutions, owned L195,000,000
sterling, about 44 per cent. of which belonged to the eight principal
banks of the empire.[150] Possessing only L86,050,000 of their own,
they disposed of L259,600,000 belonging to other people.
[149] Giovanni Preziosi, _La Germania alla Conquista
d'Italia_, 2d edizione, p. 150.
[150] Deutsche Bank, 248 million marks; Diskonto
Gesellschaft, 149 millions; Dresdner Bank, 261 millions;
Darmstaedter Bank, 192 millions; Berliner Handelsg. 145
millions; Commerz- u. Diskonto Bank, 100 millions;
Nationalbank, 98 millions; Mitteldeutsche Kreditbank, 69
million marks.
One effect of the establishment of groups of monopolies will be to
increase the number of persons dependent for their livelihood on the
State. It is calculated that the total, including heads of families,
will amount to tens of millions. The corn monopoly will bring in five
million farmers, heads of families, who will have to look to the State
for the amount of their yearly income. For it is evident that the
Government will be "co-operating" not with the peasants, but with the
great landed proprietors. Now, these are the men whose backing is
indispensable, and has never been wanting, to the military and court
parties who are primarily responsible for the war. Once the wages of
the workmen and the interest on capital become dependent on the State,
the entire nation is but a vast machine worked by the men in power. To
suppose that these will lend a willing ear to the demands for
political liberty which are certain to be made after the conclusion of
peace is to expect the impossible. What will probably happen is a keen
struggle between the classes and the masses for the mastery, but until
it is decided in favour of the latter, the Germany of the future will
continue to be the Germany of to-day.
In the meanwhile, the Teutons, despite their striking inferiority in
numbers and resources, have kept the Great Powers of the world at bay,
have defeated their armies, sunk their mercantile marine, occupied
their territory, drained their wealth, paralysed their trade and
deprived them of all the odds which they owed to circumstance.
Organization has thus more than made up for the seemingly overpowering
advantages possessed by the Allies at the outset. That it will
suddenly lose its worth during the remainder of the campaign is hardly
to be expected. The contingency which we may have to face, if we
continue to move at our present pace, is manifest to the observant
student of politics.
By the average man and our "leaders of men" it is hardly even
suspected. Our easy-going optimism is largely the result of
temperament and partly, too, of presumptuous confidence born of past
luck, and in especial of the relief we feel at our escape from most of
the obvious dangers that menaced us at the outset of the war. There
has been no trouble over Ireland, no rising in India, no serious
defection in South Africa, no invasion of Egypt. And we irrationally
feel that these dark clouds, having drifted harmlessly past, the
others will follow them. It was said of the Swiss in mediaeval times,
that they were kept together by the bewilderment of men and the
providence of God, confusione hominum et providentia Dei. The same
might be truly predicated of the British people of to-day.
But there is no reason for assuming that they will be thus
providentially cared for in the future. The Allies have not yet driven
the Germans out of Belgium, France, Serbia, Montenegro, Poland or
Kurland. Neither have they contrived to starve them into sueing for
peace. They talk glibly of exhausting them as though their own
resources were inexhaustible. They do well perhaps to make light of
the Zeppelins, but they pay far too little attention to the
submarines, and seem not to realize the magnitude of the losses which
these weapons have inflicted on our merchant shipping, nor to have
calculated how long it can hold out at the present rate of
destruction. Freights have increased enormously, and they have not yet
reached the highest point they are likely to attain. Imports have been
restricted, prices have gone up and taxation has increased. Time may
not be on the side of our enemies, but is it on ours? It is a fickle
ally at best, and to rely on its support is to lean on a split reed.
Optimism of the unreasoning kind prevalent in Great Britain is
unwarranted, whether we confine our view to the actual campaign or
extend it to the greater struggle of which that forms but an episode.
Taking the former case first, one is struck with certain
considerations which, without inspiring dismay, ought surely to
preserve us from that excessive self-confidence which is too often a
hindrance to fruitful exertion. The financial burden and its relation
to the limits of the allied nations' capacity to bear it is a fit
subject for meditation when we feel uplifted in self-complacency.
Doubtless it is encouraging to watch the symptoms of slow exhaustion
displaying themselves in the central empires and to speculate on the
consequences of the further fall of the German mark. But these
consequences we are too apt to exaggerate. For we misjudge the
character, the staying powers, the ideals, the psychology of the
German people. We fancy that because they have been reduced from
comfort to hardship therefore they are on the verge of collapse. We
imagine that because their commercial and industrial classes are keen
on making money and ardently desire peace, they are also ready to
purchase it by acquiescing in conditions which would dispel their
dreams of world power. We feel certain that if Prussia and all the
German States received genuine parliamentary government, the costly
ambitions of the military party would forthwith be dispelled for all
time.
It is by delusions such as these that the British people were
hoodwinked in the past, and it is by the same vain imaginings that
they may be victimized in the future. For they seem incapable of
gauging the German psyche. The two races meet each other in masks. The
apparent ingenuousness of the English-speaking Teuton is calculated to
throw the most vigilant Anglo-Saxon intelligence off its guard. We
have no psychological X-rays by which to pierce the peculiar racial
vesture in which the German soul is shrouded, nor are we endowed with
the gift of patient observation which might enable us to extract those
rays from facts. And so we stumble along, dealing with an imaginary
people whom we ourselves have created after our own image and
likeness, falling into fatal blunders and recommencing anew.
It is true that the mark has fallen, and that the German financial
fabric is in a parlous condition. But that fabric is kept from
crumbling away by the war, just as the Egyptian papyrus is preserved
so long as it does not come into contact with the air. Moreover,
common prudence should impel us to find out at what a cost to
ourselves we have reduced the value of the mark. If financial
exhaustion be among the ways in which one group of belligerents may be
made to succumb, it is wise to ask whether it is the States which have
to pay gold for their huge requirements or those which can get almost
everything they need for paper that are likely to succumb first.
The question is relevant, yet, because it has not been moved into the
foreground of discussion, there are few people who ponder on it.
Personally, I am convinced that impecuniosity and loss of credit will
never bring the Germans to their knees.
Great Britain has achieved wonders in the financial sphere during this
war, as the Allies and certain neutrals can testify. Our budgets are
monuments of the nation's spirit of self-sacrifice. But we have not
come scathless out of the ordeal. And besides our inevitable losses we
are suffering from criminal waste. No other country is so thriftless
as ours. In this respect we are a byword among the peoples of the
world. But we give no thought to the consequences. Yet the yearly
outlay on the one hand and the means of meeting it on the other hand
are calculable, and it would be well if those who rely upon Germany's
financial prostration would carefully reckon up and compare the two,
were it only for the sake of the sobering effect. On this aspect of
the problem it is needless to dwell further. It will compel close and
painful attention before the end of the campaign.
Another point to which inadequate heed has been paid, is the lack of
working men. This dearth of labour is not felt in Germany or Austria,
because they have two million prisoners and two million Poles on whom
they can draw not only for agricultural work but also for skilled
labour. And the authorities of both those empires are employing their
war prisoners very freely. Here, as everywhere else, the Teuton is
enterprising. I have seen photographs of Russians in Germany harnessed
and employed as beasts of burden. At any rate, it is no secret that
from the latter half of the year 1915 Germany and Austria were far
ahead of Great Britain, France, Russia, the United States and Japan
_combined_ in the amount of munitions they turned out every week. And
they are still ahead of them to-day. This fact, which can be verified,
has an ominous ring. What it connotes is that our enemies have no
strikes, no conscientious objectors, no fiddling with obligatory
service, industrial or military. Each man is at his country's beck and
call. Germany is free from strikers, slackers and such-like
anti-social types.
In Russia the want of working men is felt keenly. It is one of the
main elements of the sharp rise of prices there. In France, too, the
number of hands needed is very great, and the loss inflicted by their
withdrawal from the labour market is more sensible than the average
reader has any notion of. And far from being filled, these gaps are
becoming wider day by day. This shortage is a source of solicitude to
the Government of the Republic.
What it portends may readily be imagined. It certainly compels us to
qualify the cheering assertion that time is on our side. What else it
implies may be left to the imagination of the reader.
More serious still than the financial burden, or the dearth of
workmen, is the inadequacy of the mercantile marine to the needs of
the Allies in general, and of Great Britain in especial. To this
privation submarine warfare has contributed materially. And there is
not the slenderest ground for hope that the Germans will desist from
it during this campaign. On the contrary, they will intensify it. Of
the neutrals, some are too weak and others too timid to enter an
energetic protest against this violation of international law. The
freight-carrying capacity of the transports still available is less
than the British optimist realizes. How much less, it would be
unfruitful to inquire. It is enough to know that in this matter, too,
we had better seek a more helpful ally than time. Those who are most
conversant with these elements of the problem are haunted by a restive
consciousness of disappointment and apprehension.
For the power, the independence, the destinies of the Empire are
interwoven with our command of the sea. On our merchant tonnage depend
our economic life, our army and navy, everything we have and are and
hope to be. That destroyed or paralysed, nothing remains but a memory.
And the Germans are working hard and not unsuccessfully to cripple it.
During the week ending April 13, 85,000 tons of British and neutral
shipping were destroyed. Since the beginning of the submarine blockade
over 3,000,000 tons have been sent to the bottom of the sea. On an
average 50,000 tons a week are being torpedoed or mined, and our
losses tend to augment rather than diminish. Nor is that all. Not only
is our merchant tonnage being whittled down below the minimum needed
for our strict requirements, but we are also being hindered from
utilizing the transports available. And herein lies a danger the full
significance of which has not yet received proper attention. Shortage
of labour is pleaded as the reason why effective measures have not
been adopted to fill the gaps made by the enemy submarines. And labour
is inadequate because the Government eschewes industrial as well as
military compulsion. It possesses the power, but shrinks from wielding
it. To my thinking, this is one of the symptoms of that madness with
which the gods strike a nation before destroying it.
And the longer this process of--shall we call it mutual?--exhaustion
goes on, the more important grow the neutral States and the louder
sound their voices. They are like Jeshurun, who waxed fat and kicked.
Without special aptitudes for arithmetic one may calculate, with a
rough approach to accuracy, the time when the process of mutual
exhaustion will enable the neutrals to exert an absurdly
disproportionate and possibly dangerous influence over the
belligerents. That is a calculation which those optimists would do
well to make who tell us that all is well because "time is on our
side."
It is still open to us to utilize our superior resources, realize our
latent strength, and ward off the dangers that beset us. But the first
advance towards the goal must be to face the facts, behold things and
persons as they are, and apply our new-found knowledge to the work of
self-rescue. Our conception of the nature of the contest in which we
are engaged must be recast. Our demands on our national leaders--not
those now in power who only mislead--must be greatly enlarged. Truth,
however bitter, must take the place of fancy. Ideas and institutions
incongruous with the new social and political conditions must be
displaced. The nation's aims and policy should be stated boldly and
clearly, and adequate machinery set up to achieve them. In a word,
system will have to be substituted for confusion, method for
haphazard. Destitute of a great or strong man, it behoves us to
imitate our enemy and create a vast organization with branches all
over the empire. But the influence of the government ever since the
outbreak of the war has militated against all those reforms.
If these changes had been effected at the outset the story of the
present campaign would have been different from what it is. A group of
belligerents representing only 5,921,000 square kilometres of
territory and 150,199,000 inhabitants, or, say, 4 per cent. of dry
land and 9.1 per cent. of human beings, would not have held its own
for twenty-one months against a group disposing of 68,031,000 square
kilometres of territory and a population of 770,060,000, or 46 per
cent. of the land on the globe and 47 per cent. of the human race.
Providence has bestowed upon the Allies the wherewithal to attain
their legitimate ends. The Allies' leaders are frittering them away.
For the thirty years of preparation do not afford us an adequate
explanation of the Teuton superiority. The clue is to be found in the
psychological factor. Germany is wholly alive, physically,
intellectually and psychically. And she lives in the present and
future. We either drowse or vegetate in and for the past. She has the
decisive advantage of possessing organization and organizers. Therein
lies the secret of her sustained success. The Allies lack both, and
are hardly conscious of the necessity of making good the deficiency.
Therein lies their weakness. It has made itself felt throughout the
campaign and will determine the upshot of the war. And in the
politico-economic struggle that will follow the war, it is the same
psychological factor which the Allies rate so low that will decide the
final issue.
Unless we wake up to the reality and readjust our ideas and methods to
that--and of such awakening there is as yet no sure token--the outcome
of the present war will be a draw, and the final upshot of the larger
contest will be our utter defeat. No journalistic optimism, no
ministerial magniloquence can alter that. These contingencies are
already fullfronting us, as we shall soon learn to our cost, and the
people who are veiling them from the public view, however praiseworthy
their intentions may be, are leading the nation to ruin. And if we
continue to uphold our present chiefs and methods national disaster is
as inevitable as destiny. But it is well to remember that it is not
Fate that is pursuing us; it is we who are overtaking Fate.
End of Project Gutenberg's England and Germany, by Emile Joseph Dillon