M. Maurice Millioud, an eminent member of the Faculty of the
University of Lausanne, Switzerland, has written an article of
marked breadth and penetration in which he presents a quite
novel view of the forces which, in combination, have brought
Germany to its actual position. These forces are political,
social, and economic; beneath and through them works the
subtle impulsion of a national conception of right and might
which the author sums up as the "ideology of caste." Want of
space forbids the publication of the entire article. We give
its most significant parts with such summary of those portions
which it was necessary to omit as, we trust, will enable our
readers to follow the general argument.
Humanitarians the most deeply buried in dreams yield with stupefaction
to the evidence of fact. European war was possible, since here it is,
and even a world war, for all continents are represented in the mêlée.
Millions of men on the one side or the other are ranged along battle
fronts of from 500 to 1,000 kilometers. We are witnessing a displacement
of human masses to which there is nothing comparable except the
formidable convulsions of geologic ages.
The world then was in formation. Will a new Europe, a new society, a new
humanity, take form from the prodigious shock by which our imagination
is confounded?
We can at least seek to understand what we cannot hinder.
This war was not a matter of blind fate, but had been foreseen for a
long time. What are the forces that have set the nations in movement? I
do not seek to establish responsibility. Whosoever it may be, those who
have let loose the conflict have behind them peoples of one mind. That,
perhaps, is the most surprising feature in an epoch when economic,
social, and moral interests are so interwoven from one end of the earth
to the other that the conqueror himself must suffer cruelly from the
ruin of the conquered.
The Governments have determined the day and the hour. They could not
have done it in opposition to the manifest will of the nations. Public
sentiment has seconded them. What is it then which rouses man from his
repose, impels him to desert his gains, his home, the security of a
regular life, and sends him in eager search for bloody adventures?
This problem involves different solutions because it embraces a number
of cases. Between the Russians, the French, the English, the Germans
there is a similarity of will, but not, it seems, an analogy of
sentiment. I shall undertake to analyze the case of Germany. It has
peculiar interest on account of its importance, of its definiteness, of
the comparisons to which it leads, and the reflections which it
suggests. Numerous facts easy to verify and in part recent permit us to
throw some light upon it and offer us a guarantee against hazardous
conjectures.
_Defining a caste as "a group of men bound to each other by solidarity
of functions in society," such as the Brahmins of India and the feudal
nobility, Prof. Millioud says that he will use the terms as equivalent
or nearly equivalent to a "directing class." Quoting the article from
Vorwaerts which led to the suspension of that Socialist organ and which
"admits by implication that responsibility for the war falls on
Germany," he proceeds to examine the origins of the influence of the war
party and the interests it served._
Here we must have recourse to history. In Germany the dominant class is
composed in part of an aristocracy by birth and of bourgeois
capitalists, more or less of them ennobled. The interior policy of
Germany since 1871 and even since 1866 is explained by the relations,
sometimes kindly, sometimes hostile, of these two categories of persons,
by the opposition or the conjunction of these two influences, and not
by a struggle of the dominant class against the socialistic mass. That
struggle, which is in France and is becoming in England a fact of
essential gravity, has been in Germany only a phenomenon of secondary
importance. It has determined neither the profound evolution of the
national life nor the chief decisions of the Government.
In Germany, as is known, the abolition of the ancien régime did not take
place brusquely as in France. After the revolution and the French
occupation, the noble caste recovered all its privileges. It has lost
them little by little, but not yet entirely. Even the liquidation of the
property of the feudal régime was not completed until toward 1850.
Napoleon made some sad cuts in the little sovereignties, but from 1813
to 1815 the princely families did their utmost to recover their
independence. The greater part were mediatized, but their tenacity
offered a serious obstacle up to 1871 to the establishment of German
unity.
That unity was accomplished in despite of them, by sword and fire, as
Bismarck said, that is to say, by the wars of 1866 and 1870. Care was
taken, however, not to abase them more than was strictly necessary, for
it was intended to maintain the hierarchy. What was wanted was a
monarchical unity, made from above down, and not a democratic unity
brought about by popular impulsion.
On the other hand, the smaller nobles formed, after 1820, a vast
association for the defense of their rights, the Adelskette. Moreover,
they could not be sacrificed, in the first place, because they had
rendered invaluable services in the wars of independence, they had
arisen as one man, and they had ruined themselves in sacrifices for the
national cause, they had organized the people and led it to victory,
finally because they served to restrain the high nobility whose
domination was feared. They sustained the throne against the princes,
the higher nobility against the democracy, the lesser nobility against
the higher, the two forming an intermediary class between the monarch
and the nation. That was the social conception which prevailed with
those who were working to realize the unity of Germany, so that the
nobility, lesser or higher, in default of its privileges retained its
functions.
Treitschke, in his last lessons, about 1890, called it "a political
class." For the bourgeois, he said, wealth, instruction, letters, arts.
Their part is fine enough. The nobility is apt at governing. That is its
special distinction. For a long time, in fact, the nobility has filled
alone or almost alone the great administrative, governmental, and
military posts.
Bismarck was the finished type, the representative par excellence of
this class of men. He had their intellectual and moral qualities carried
to the highest degree of superiority. But he underwent evolution after
1871, and his caste with him, under the pressure of general
circumstances.
Bismarck was a Junker, a Prussian rustic, monarchist, particularist,
agrarian and militarist. Each of his qualities is an attribute of a
mentality of caste, a very curious one, not lacking in grandeur, but
very narrow and not always adequate to the conduct of affairs.
Monarchist means anti-Parliamentarian. The fine scorn of rhetoric and
even of public discussion, a conviction that democracy will not lead to
anything beyond a display of mediocrity, that is one of the salient
features of his mind. Patriotism conceived as an attachment to personal
relations, as the service of one man, the subject, to another man, the
King, and not the service of an anonymous person, the functionary, to an
abstraction, the State, the republic, this was formerly designated by
the word faithful, (féal,) which has disappeared from our vocabulary
because it is without meaning in our present moral state.
The Junker is particularist, at least he was. The political and
administrative centralization which the Jacobins achieved in France
inspires him with horror. For him it is disorder. He sees in it nothing
but a dust heap of individuals crushed beneath a formula. Even today,
when the German accuses France of anarchy, that is what he means. He
figures to himself the nation as a vast hierarchy of liberties, an
autonomy of States within the empire, of provinces within the State, of
communes within the province, of proprietors within the commune.
Equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, of force, but
impersonal equality before the law is for him an unnatural thing, an
invention of the professors which at heart he despises.
He is agrarian and militarist, that is to say, conservative and enamored
of force. In 1830 four-fifths of the population lived by agriculture and
the landlord governed his peasants patriarchally. He kept the
conservatist spirit of a rustic, a very lively sense of authority and
the military instinct. He had scant liking for distant enterprises or
adventures. He was at once religious, warlike, and realist, knowing how
to nurse his ambitions and to confine his view to what was within reach.
Bismarck for a long time was the decided opponent of naval armaments and
colonial policy, in short, of imperialism. Even his projects for social
reform--insurance against sickness, against old age--which have been
accepted as concessions to modern ideas, were due entirely to his
monarchical and patriarchal conception of the State. He copied the
ancient decrees of Colbert as to naval personnel. He would have gone as
far as assurance against non-employment. In the dominion of the King, he
said, no one should die of hunger.
The Junker made a force of Prussia; he made Prussia itself. It was due
to him that she passed after 1815 from the form of a Polizeistaat to the
form of Kulturstaat, the latter only an expansion of the former. In
place of a watchful, regulating, and vexatious State she became an
organized State, the instructor of youth, the protector of religion, the
source of inspiration for agricultural reforms, and all great commercial
and industrial enterprises. This State was not an emanation from the
national will, but the creator of a nation, the living and moving
self-incarnation of the Hegelian "idea," that is to say, the Divine
thought.
Of all the German aristocracy the noble of Pomerania or Brandenburg, the
Prussian Junker, represented this social type most definitely. In the
south the liberal tendencies--to be exact, the memories of the French
Revolution--persisted far into the nineteenth century. But it is well
known that German unity was accomplished by military force and against
liberalism.
After 1871, and even after Sadowa, the problem of interior policy which
presented itself was that of the "Prussianization" of Germany. At one
time it seemed that Bismarck was on the point of succeeding in it. What
was that national liberal party upon which he depended for so long? It
was the old liberal party, with advanced tendencies tainted with
democratic liberalism and even with cosmopolitanism, keeping up its
relations with the intellectuals, the university men, who made so much
noise with pen and voice about 1848 and later. They dreamed of the unity
of Germany in the democratic liberty and moral hegemony of their nation,
having become in Europe the sobered heir of the French Revolution.
Under the influence of Bismarck they sacrificed to their dream of unity,
to their national dream, their liberal dream, and they secured for the
Chancellor the support of the upper bourgeoisie.
It was indeed the Prussianization of Germany, but in that spirit and in
that system contemporary German militarism would never have fructified.
It was contrary to the characteristic tendencies of a monarchical State
supported by a conservative caste, which was also particularist,
military, and agricultural. A State of this kind tends to become a
closed State.
What then happened? An event of capital importance which everybody
knows, but of which we only now begin to see the consequences. It was
the radical transformation of Germany from an agricultural to an
industrial nation. In its origin this phenomenon dates from before the
nineteenth century. By 1848 it had become perceptible. Since 1866, and
especially since 1871, it has dominated the entire social evolution of
the empire. Here, in fact, is the revolution. It partakes of the
character of a tragedy, it has overturned the conditions of life
throughout the entire German territory.
At the close of the War of Independence, four out of five Germans lived
on the land, two out of three were engaged in agriculture. By 1895 the
agricultural population was only 35.7 per cent. That, supported by
industry and commerce, kept continually increasing. In 1895 it was 50.6
per cent.
This progress of industry and trade indicates the rise of a new class of
the population, that of the capitalists. It seemed at first that their
arrival would result in a dispossession of the nobility. For example,
under the ancien régime the bourgeois could not acquire the property of
the nobles. Toward 1880, for Eastern Prussia only, 7,086 estates of
11,065 belonged to non-nobles. They could have been acquired only with
money. Capital was supplanting birth. Today even, in Prussia, five
members of the Ministry, a little more than one-third, are bourgeois not
enjoying the particle von.
The new dominant class encroached upon the ancient in two ways, by
depriving it of its clientele and by acquiring a considerable weight in
the State. "The weight of a social class" is the totality of its means
of action, which it possesses on account of its numbers, its personal
influence, its wealth, and the importance of the interests which it
represents. The clientele of the agrarian nobility was essentially the
peasants, who have continually diminished in number, the attraction of
industrial and commercial employments having caused a great migration to
the interior, to the factories, and the cities.
For many years this phenomenon has been disclosed by statistics and
pointed out by economists and sociologists, but no remedy has been
found. Today, although emigration abroad has much moderated, Germany has
not labor for its tillage. It is obliged to import farm hands and even
cereals. It no longer produces foodstuffs sufficient for its own
support.
Moreover, the peasant who remains upon the soil is freed
from the landlord, and agricultural production has become
specialized--industrialized. There is the case, for instance, of that
peasant woman who declared that she had not the time to wash her linen
and who sent it to the steam laundry at Karlsruhe. Here is not merely an
economic transformation, but a moral evolution. The agriculturist who no
longer produces in order to consume but in order to sell, and who must
live from the product of his sales, tries to produce as much as
possible. He hires foreign labor to get from it all that he can. The
impersonal relations of employer and employed replace the patriarchal
traditions. Thus the land owner finds himself caught in the mechanism of
the capitalistic system.
As to the "weight" of the new class, it increased prodigiously during
the years following the war of 1870, thanks to the millions which the
empire could invest in its industries and which allowed it to endow its
commerce and its merchant marine, to complete the network of its roads,
canals, and railways.
The law of concentration of capital was verified on this occasion in a
striking manner. In the famous years 1871 to 1874, which the Germans
call the Gründejahre, the foundation years, gigantic industrial and
commercial enterprises took a spring which seemed irresistible. A
Director of the Deutsche Bank, of the Dresdener Bank, the President of a
company for transatlantic commerce, such as the Hamburg-American Line,
or of the committee of great electric establishments, enjoyed an
influence in the councils of the State far greater than that of a Baron,
a Count, or a little mediatized Prince.
What was the aristocracy of birth going to do about it? Struggle
desperately? It took that tack at first. Bismarck ranged himself in its
support for some time. He was himself an agrarian. But he was not long
in installing paper mills on his estates at Varzin. It is said that the
Emperor himself possesses porcelain factories. A part of the nobility
for a long time tried to adapt itself to the new method of production.
It took to it awkwardly and often ended in ruin.
Freytag has described this phenomenon at its beginnings in a romance
which is a chef d'oeuvre. A part of the nobility yielded, fell into the
hands of the financiers, the money lenders, the managers of agricultural
enterprises, sold their lands, and took refuge in the great civil,
administrative and military posts. The remainder resisted as well as
they could. There was antagonism between their interests and those of
the capitalists, between the religious and particularist tendencies on
one hand and free thought and cosmopolitanism on the other. The
agrarians demanded tariff duties on agricultural products to raise the
price of their foodstuffs. The industrials wanted a low cost of living
in order to avoid the rise of wages and to compete with better advantage
for foreign markets.
Bismarck was the target for vehement opposition when he inclined toward
the party of the traders and the industrials in his colonial and tariff
policy. This evolution came about 1879. For a while the great Chancellor
was looked upon almost as a traitor.
Nevertheless, his view was just. Balancing the forces on the one hand by
those on the other, ceding protective duties first to one side and then
to the other, offsetting the advantages which he offered to one side by
the prerogatives which he accorded to the other, he finally succeeded in
reconciling them.
From this reconciliation of the two dominant classes has resulted the
extraordinary power of Germany. The bourgeois parties have from time to
time grumbled over the military appropriations, but they have always
voted them. And militarism, which is the support of the aristocracy, has
been placed at the service of capitalistic ambition. By the prestige of
force, awakening hopes here and inspiring fears there, more than once by
the help of manoeuvres of intimidation, it has become an instrument of
economic conquest.
Other combinations, other reciprocal interlacings, have taken place
which have given an exceptional and unique character to contemporary
Germany. It is a case of social psychology of extreme interest. To
describe it would require long detail. The combination of the
aristocratic and military tendency with the industrial and plutocratic
tendency, the tendency of the police spirit, the regularizing spirit of
the Kulturstaat with the individual initiative of the capitalist
_entrepreneur_, methodical habits of administration with the love of
risk characteristic of the speculator, all this constitutes imperialism,
German imperialism, distinct from every other, because to a definite
object, economic conquest, it adds another, less precise, in which the
moral satisfaction dear to aristocracy, the pleasure of dominating, the
love of displaying force, the tendency to prove one's own superiority to
one's self, play a large part.
Economic conquest has become a necessity for Germany. Transformed into
an industrial State, it no longer produces its own food. Since 1885 its
imports have exceeded its exports by 1,353,000,000 marks. Whence did
Germany derive these 1,300,000,000 marks which were needed, good year
and bad, to meet its balance of trade? It owes them to its maritime
commerce and the revenue of its capital invested abroad. Its maritime
commerce then must augment and must triumph over all competition. At
every cost it must open for itself outlets for its industrial products
in order to buy foodstuffs which it does not produce sufficiently. If
not, famine.
Let us see now how the complicated play of all these social forces and
the effect of this economic situation have been embodied in formulas,
what has been its intellectual expression.
This is no idle question, for men have always claimed to be guided by
ideas, and generally they are, but they rarely know where their ideas
come from or in what they consist. Without intellectual expression
imperialism would not have extended to all the classes of society. The
passion of economic conquest did not prevail throughout the whole of
Germany. The bourgeois in the Liberal provinces, the corps of officers,
the corps of teachers, the clergy were refractory to it. This direct
form of imperialism does not seduce them. Not everybody can see his
country and the universe through the eyes of an oligarch of high
finance. A doctrine works with power when it appeals to instincts, when
it awakens collective emotions, diverse enough in themselves, and joins
them to each other with an appearance of logical deduction. It is not
indispensable, but it is useful that it should borrow the language of
the day. In the mediaeval epoch this language was religious. Beginning
with the seventeenth century it was metaphysical. In our own time it is
a scientific language set off by Greek words.
If the German philosophies of the second half of the nineteenth century
are considered, there are not many of them that pass beyond the limit of
the school. They are honest, scholarly productions elaborated by men who
have read much, of whom some, like Wundt, are eminent specialists, but
who have not conquered either their subjects or their readers. One feels
that they are not of their century.
It is not from them, it is not from Eucken, the pleasant popularizer, it
is not from Windelbund or Ostwald that the cultivated public sought the
direction for its thought. To satisfy the need of general ideas which
was everywhere felt, associations were formed, churches with or without
God, of which a very important one was the "Monistenbund," in which
Haeckel exploited his materialism transformed into a sort of biological
pantheism.
But it was outside of the associations and outside of the school that
the flame of creative genius burned brightly. The man of the last
generation was Nietzsche. That his thought has been perverted by his
interpreters there is no doubt. They have taken this eagle who gazed
unblinded at the sun and exhibited him to the young people in all sorts
of philosophic rôles for the benefit of the industrial and military
coalition. Nietzsche depicted in lines of fire the resurrection of
heroism, his vision of the superman was that of an ardent soul, steeled
by sufferings, meditating a tragic conception of life with serenity,
and in his solitary individualism surmounting the infirmity of man and
his own by the insistent will to eternal ascension.
He was made the apostle of brute force, a sort of Messiah of the
"struggle for life." Moreover, he was soon put one side and Gobineau was
revived. He also, who if he did not have genius had wit, would have been
surprised and hardly flattered perhaps by the rôle which they made him
play. The dolichocephalic (long-skulled) blonde whom he celebrated was
not exactly the one whom we are now judging by his works, but at least
he proclaimed the superiority of the German race.
His doctrine was the centre around which were gathered a complete
ensemble of dogmas and of very diverse theories, whose connected thread
it is not easy to discover when it is searched for logically, but
appears quite distinctly when not reason, but reasons, are demanded. The
reasons are found in the need of justifying in theory the economic and
military imperialism, born as we have seen from conditions of fact and
from very practical motives.
I do not pretend that it was calculated, nor that the optimates made
express requisition of the naturalists, economists, and historians and
sociologists and moralists to provide an imperialistic philosophy for
the use of adult and normal dolichocephalous blondes. But there
certainly was a coincidence. It may have been due to the influence of
what is called a _milieu ambiant_, that of the commercial and military
party. The authors of the doctrine lived in a special atmosphere. Their
intellect was there formed--or deformed--their work consisted in
gathering facts, inventing reasonings, elaborating formulas, so as to
subject natural science, history and morality to the service of that
keen will for hegemony which was in Germany the common characteristic
and was the connecting link between the ancient and the new directing
class.
To convince one that this is so, it is enough to arrange the works of
the pan-Germanists in a series passing from the simplest to the most
complicated. The dates are of no importance. We might put at one of the
extremes the works of the Prussian General, von Bernhardi, and at the
other the gigantic lucubration of a famous pan-German zealot, a
neophite, a convert, almost a deserter, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
_Prof. Millioud examines at some length and acutely the tendencies and
teachings of von Bernhardi, now familiar to American readers, sums up
the work of the philosophers of minor rank and turns to Mr.
Chamberlain._
With Mr. Chamberlain the thesis of vital competition, the morality of
force, the judgment of history against little nations, the civilizing
mission imposed upon greater Germany by its very greatness, by its
economic, scientific and artistic superiority, everything tends to the
glorification of the German, to his duty to govern the whole world which
he feels so imperatively and which he accepts with such a noble
simplicity. His work is not easily summarized, not only because it
counts 1,379 pages and two appendices, but because all is in everything,
and everything in the universe is also in Mr. Chamberlain's book. And
the German has made everything. Not indeed the world; that he has only
remade and is about to remake. But he has a way of remaking so creative
that one might say that without him the Creator Himself would be a bit
embarrassed. He has gathered to himself alone the heritage of Greece and
Rome as far as it was worth anything. From the year 1200 to the year
1800 he founded, ripened, and saved a new civilization several times
over. The mother of our sciences and our arts, Italy, is Germanic; the
great architecture of the Middle Ages is Germanic; the true
interpretation of Christianity, the true conception of art, the true
social economy, the love of nature, the sense of individuality, the
exploration of the world and of the soul, the great reawakenings of
conscience, all the great flashes of thought are Germanic; everything is
Germanic, except you and me, perhaps; so much the worse for me and so
much the worse for you. After this book, the success of which has been
prodigious, it would truly seem that there is nothing more to say.
Germanic thought has appropriated the universe to itself. It only
remained for the German sword to complete the work. It is drawn!
I have tried to describe the modifications, or rather the successive
additions, by which the elementary themes disclosing economic,
political, and military appetites in the directing class have been
disguised as theories of biology, history, political economy, sociology,
and morality. It would take another study or another article to show how
science was perverted to such ends. The severity of methods, rigor in
the determination of facts, precision in reasoning, prudence in
generalization, serene impartiality and objectivity in verification, in
a word the scientific spirit, cannot be bent to so many pleasant
compromises without sacrificing a great part of its dignity and its
title to respect.
This has been a singular and melancholy event for those of us who have
been raised in respect for German science and in admiration for its
methods, as well as for its discoveries. Certainly, from Liebig to
Roentgen and to Behring, from Kant to Wundt, Germany has counted many
distinguished pioneers. In the matter of fecund originality, however,
and creative inspiration, Italy and France have always equaled, if not
surpassed, her. She has had no Marconi, no Pasteur or Poincaré, no
Carrel.
What we have received from her so long that it has become almost a
matter of instinct is less dazzling flashes than an equal and constant
light. And the savants, the university men who bring to us
anthropological romances, history stuffed with legends and personal
prejudices, sociology constructed in contempt of the facts!
In these later days we have seen all these joining under the guidance of
their most illustrious members to address the civilized nations in an
appeal in which by virtue of their quality as savants they undertook to
pronounce upon facts which they don't understand, to deny those which
they cannot help understanding, and solemnly to declare that it is not
true that Germany has violated the neutrality of the territory of
Belgium. For proof of this, nothing but their word of honor. Do they
take us for those young gentlemen who said to Monge, "Professor, give us
your word of honor that this theorem is true and we will excuse you from
the demonstration of it"?
Fully to explain the rôle of the intellectual savants and university men
in the formation of the ideology of caste which prevails among the
Germans it would be necessary to recite the history of instruction in
Germany, not such as Davis and Paulson have written it, but such as it
actually is under the influence of institutions and programmes--I mean
the moral history of instruction.
The great Frederick was wont to cry, "I commence by taking; afterward I
shall always have pedants enough to establish my rights." Pedants or
not, the members of the teaching corps of every grade in Germany are a
wheel of the State, their mission is to form not men, but Germans, to
inculcate the national idea. Their views have penetrated even to the
common people.
Germany receives a double education--that of the school and that of the
barracks. The spirit of these two institutions is the same, and their
influence, which has been exercised since 1848 in opposition to
humanitarian and internationalist ideas, has encountered no serious
obstacles, for it went readily with certain old instincts which it was
not difficult to reawaken and which general circumstances favored.
"Latrocinia nullam habent infamiam," said Caesar, speaking of the
Germans. Pillage brings no shame. This desire of gain, this positive and
realistic tendency is one of the motives which the brusque and
prodigious economic expansion of Germany has promoted in the most
efficient manner.
This total assimilation of a people of 70,000,000 of souls by an
aristocratic, almost a feudal, directing class, a combination of
plutocrats and militarists, is in reality a most curious phenomenon,
more than curious, in a sense grandiose, and in any case full of
suggestions and menaces.
Surrender of body and soul, confidence almost religious, enthusiastic
faith, the directing class has conquered everything within in order to
conquer everything without. Now it stakes everything upon the cast of
the dice. I have not undertaken to decide whether it is just or not. The
event will determine whether it is genius or madness.