THE MENACE OF 'OUR NEIGHBOUR TO THE SOUTH'
In 1907, Russia seemed to me to be, for Americans, the most important
country in Europe. Our Department of State was no doubt informed as
to what the other countries would do in certain contingencies, for
none of our diplomatic representatives, although always working under
disadvantages not experienced by their European colleagues, had been
idle persons. But all of us who had even cursorily studied European
conditions knew that the actions of Germany would depend largely on
the attitude of Russia. It was to the interest of Emperor William to
keep Nicholas II. and the Romanoffs on the throne. He saw no other
way of dividing and conquering a country which he at once hated and
longed to control.
The Balkan situation was always burning; it was the Etna and Vesuvius
of the diplomatic world; wise men might predict eruptions, but they
were always unexpected. To most people in the United States the
Balkans seemed very far off; Bulgaria with her eyes on Macedonia, the
Tsar Ferdinand and his attempt to put his son, Boris, under the
greater Tsar, him of Russia; Rumania and her ambitions for more
freedom and more territory; Serbia, with her fears and aspirations,
appeared to be of no importance--of less interest, perhaps, than
other petty kingdoms. But at one fatal moment Austria refused to
allow Serbia to export her pigs, and we came to pay about two million
dollars an hour and to sacrifice most precious lives, much greater
things, because of the ferocious growth of this little germ of
tyranny and avarice.
Most of us have fixed ideas; if they are the result of prejudice,
they are generally bad; if they are the result of principle, that is
another question. When I went to Denmark at the request of President
Roosevelt, I had several fixed ideas, whether of prejudice or
principle I could not always distinguish. I had been brought up in a
sentiment of gratitude to Russia--she had behaved well to us in the
Civil War--and in a firm belief that her people only needed a fair
chance to become our firm friends. We must seek European markets for
our capital and our investments, and Russia offered us a free way.
Towards the end of the year 1908, the signs in Russia were more
ominous than usual. It had always seemed to me--and the impression
had come probably from long and intimate association with some very
clever diplomatists--that Russian problems, industrially and
economically, were very similar to our own, and that, in the future,
her interests would be our interests. She was in evil hands--that was
evident; Nicholas II., after the peace of Portsmouth, was not so
pleased with the action of President Roosevelt as he ought to have
been, and the arrogant clique, the bureaucrats who controlled the
Tsar, regarded us with suspicion and dislike.
At the same time, it was plain that a great part of the landed
nobility looked with hope to the United States as a nation which
ought to understand their problems and assist, with technical advice
and capital, in the solving of them. The Baltic Barons, many with
German names and not of the orthodox faith, preferred that the United
States, by the investments of her citizens in Russia, should hold a
balance between the French and the German financial influences, for
Germany was slowly beginning to control Russia financially, and
French capital meant a competition with the German interests which
might eventually mean a conflict and war. The well instructed among
the Russian people, including the estate owners whose interests were
not bureaucratic, feared war above all things. The Japanese war had
given them reason for their fears.
To my mind there were three questions of great importance for us: How
could we, with self-respect, keep on good terms with Russia? How
could we discover what Germany's intentions were? And how could we
strengthen the force of the Monroe Doctrine by acquiring, through
legitimate means, certain islands on our coasts, especially the
Gallapagos, the Danish West Indies and others which, perhaps, it
might not be discreet to mention.
While the United States seemed fixed in her policy of keeping out of
foreign entanglements, it seemed to me that the rule of conduct of a
nation, like that of an individual, cannot always be consistent with
its theories, since all intentions put into action by the party of
the first part must depend on the action and point of view of the
party of the second part. I had been largely influenced in my views
of the value of the Monroe Doctrine by the speeches and writings of
ex-President Roosevelt and Senator Lodge. It was a self-evident
truth, too, that, for the sake of democracy, for the sake of the
future of our country, the autonomy of the small nations must be
preserved. This attitude I made plain during my ten years in
Denmark; perhaps I over-accentuated it, but to this attitude I owe
the regard of the majority of the Danish people and of some of the
folk of the other Scandinavian nations.
The position taken by Germany, under Prussian influence, in Brazil
and Argentine, certain indications in our own country, which I shall
emphasise later, the intrigues as to the Bagdad Railway, and the
threats as to what Germany might do in Scandinavia in case Russia
attempted to interfere with German plans in the East, were alarming.
Then again was the hint that Denmark might be seized if Germany found
Russia in an alliance against England.
From my earliest youth, I knew many Germans whom I esteemed and
admired; but they were generally descendants of the men of 1848,
that year which saw the Hungarians defeated and the German lovers
of liberty exiled. There were others of a later time who believed,
with the Kaiser, that a German emigrant was simply a German
colonist--waiting! These people were so naïve in their Prussianism,
in their disdain for everything American, that they scarcely seemed
real! When a German waiter looked out of the hotel window in
Trafalgar Square and said, waving his napkin at the spectacle of the
congested traffic, 'When the day comes, we shall change all this,' we
Americans laughed. This was in the eighties. Yet he meant it; and
'we' have not changed all this even for the day!
The alarm was sounded in South America, but few North Americans took
it seriously, and we knew how the English accepted the German
invasions to the very doors of their homes. However, when I went to
Denmark in August 1907, deeply honoured by President Roosevelt's
outspoken confidence in me, I became aware that Prussianised Germany
might at any moment seize that little country, and that, in that
case, the Danish West Indies would be German. A pleasant prospect
when we knew that Germany regarded the Monroe Doctrine as the silly
figment of a democratic brain unversed in the real meaning of world
politics.
Again, I saw exemplified the fact that _in the eyes of the Kaiser, a
German emigrant was a German colonist_. Once a German always a
German; the ideas of the Fatherland must follow the blood, and these
ideas are one and indivisible. Consequently, no place could have been
more interesting than the capital of Denmark. Here diplomatists were
taught, made, or unmade.
Until we were forced to join in the European concert by the
acquirement of the Philippines, the post did not seem to be
important. 'You always send your diplomatists here to learn their
art,' the clever queen of Christian IX. had said to an American. It
may not have been intended as a compliment!
In the second place, Copenhagen was the centre of those new social
and political movements that are affecting the world; Denmark was
rapidly becoming Socialistic.
She, one of the oldest kingdoms in the world, presented the paradox
of being the spot in which all tendencies supposed to be
anti-monarchical were working out. She had already solved problems
incidental to the evolution of democratic ideals, which in our own
country we have only begun timidly to consider.
In the third place, Copenhagen was near the most potent country in
the world--Germany under Prussian domination. I make the distinction
between 'potency' and 'greatness.'
And, in the fourth place, it gave anybody who wanted to be 'on his
job' a good opportunity of studying the effect of German propinquity
on a small nation. Unfortunately, in 1907-8-9-10-11, no experience in
watching German methods seemed of much value to our own people or to
the English. The English who watched them critically, like Maxse, the
editor of the _National Review_ of London, were not listened to.
Perhaps these persons were too Radical and intemperate. The English
Foreign Office had, after the Vatican, the reputation of having the
best system for obtaining information in Europe, but both the English
Foreign Office and the Vatican Secretariat seemed to have suddenly
become deaf. We Americans were too much taken up with the German
_gemütlichkeit_, or scientific efficiency, to treat the Prussian
movements with anything but tolerance. The Germans had won the hearts
of some of our best men of science, who believed in them until belief
was impossible; and, with most of my countrymen, I held that a breach
of the peace in Europe seemed improbable. There was always The Hague!
The only thing left for me was to let the Germans be as _gemütlich_
as they liked, and to watch their attitude in Denmark, for on this
depended the ownership of the West Indies.
My German colleagues, Henckel-Donnersmarck, von Waldhausen, and
Brockdorff-Rantzau, were able men; and, I think, they looked on me as
a madman with a fixed idea. Count Rantzau, if he lives, will be heard
of later; he is one of the well-balanced among diplomatists. I
realised early in the game that my work must be limited to watching
Germany in her relations with Denmark. I knew what was expected of
me. I had no doubt that the United States was the greatest country in
the world in its potentialities, but I had no belief, then, in its
power to enforce its high ideals on the politics of the European
world.
In fact, it never occurred to me that our country would be called
upon to enforce them, for, unless the Imperial German Government
should take it into its head to lay hands on a country or two in
South America, it seemed to me that we might keep entirely out of
such foreign entanglements as concerned Western Europe and
Constantinople and the Balkans. If, however, there should be such
interference by France and England with the interests of Germany as
would warrant her and her active ally in attacking these countries,
Denmark and, automatically, her islands would be German. Then, we, in
self-defence, must have something to say. Secret diplomacy was
flourishing in Europe, and nothing was really clear. After the event
it is very easy to take up the rôle of the prophet, but that is not
in my line. If a man is not a genius, he cannot have the intuition of
a genius, and, while I accepted the opinions of my more experienced
colleagues, I imagined that their fears of a probable war were
exaggerated. Besides, I had been impressed by the constantly
emphasised opinion--part of the German propaganda, I now
believe--that our great enemy was Japan.
Since the year 1874, when I had been well introduced into diplomatic
circles in Washington, I had known many representatives of foreign
powers. Since those days, so well described in Madame de
Hegermann-Lindencrone's _Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life_, the German
point of view had greatly changed. It was a far cry from the days of
the easy-going Herr von Schlözer to Speck von Sternberg and efficient
Count Bernstorff, a far cry from the amicable point of view of Mr.
Poultney Bigelow taken of the young Kaiser in the eighties, and his
revised point of view in 1915. Mr. Poultney Bigelow's change from a
certain attitude of admiration, in his case with no taint of
snobbishness, was typical of that of many of my own people. I must
confess that no instructions from the State Department had prepared
me for the German echoes I heard in Denmark; but even if Treitschke
had come to the United States to air his views at the University of
Chicago, I should probably have considered them merely academic, and
have treated them as cavalierly as I had treated the speech of the
waiter in the Trafalgar Square hotel about 'changing all that.'
Nietzsche's philosophy seemed so atrocious as to be ineffective. But
we Americans, as a rule, take no system of philosophy as having any
real connection with the conduct of life, and, except in very learned
circles, his was looked on as no more part of the national life of
Germany than William James is of ours. In a little while, I
discovered that the Kaiser had imposed on the Prussians, at least, a
most practical system of philosophy, which our universities had come
to admire. I had not been long in Denmark when I realised that
Germany, in the three Scandinavian countries, was looked on either as
a powerful enemy or as a potential friend, and that she tried, above
all, to control the learned classes.
The United States hardly counted; she was too far off and seemed to
be hopelessly ignorant of the essential conditions of foreign
affairs. Her diplomacy, if it existed at all, was determined by
existing political conditions at home.
I visited Holland and Belgium; Germany loomed larger. She was bent on
commercial supremacy everywhere. One could not avoid admitting that
fact.
As to Denmark, it was piteous to see how the Danes feared the power
that never ceased to threaten them. Prussia has made her empire
possible by establishing the beginnings, in 1864, of her naval power
at the expense of Denmark. The longer I lived in Denmark the more
strongly I felt that Germany was getting ready for a short, sharp war
in which the United States of America, it seemed to me (as I was no
prophet), was not to be a factor, but Russia was.
The members of the German Legation were very sympathetic, especially
the Minister, Count Henckel-Donnersmarck. He loved Weimar; he loved
the old Germany. It was a delight to hear him talk of the real
glories of his country. His family, in the opinion of the Germans,
was so great that he could afford to do as he pleased; I rather think
he looked on the Hohenzollerns as rather _parvenus_. He was of the
school of Frederick the Noble rather than of William the Conqueror.
'Do you mind talking politics?' I asked him one day.
'It bores me,' he said, 'because there is nothing stable. My country
feels that it is being isolated. Since Algeria, in 1906, she stands
against Europe, with Austria.'
'Stands against the United States?'
'No, no; we shall always be at peace,' he said. 'Our interests are
not dissimilar; our military organisation is almost perfect. Yes, we
learned some lessons even from your Civil War, though you are not a
military people. Your country is full of our citizens.'
'_Your_ citizens, Count!'
'Ah, yes,--in Brazil and Argentine, everywhere, a German citizen is
like a Roman citizen, proud and unchanging, that is the German
citizen who understands the aims of modern Germany. _Civis Romanus
sum!_ The older ones are different; it is a question of sentiment
and memories with them. Your great German population will always keep
you out of conflict with us, though even you, who know our
literature, are at heart English--I mean politically. You cannot help
it. Your Irish blood may count, but the point of view is made by
literature. It gets into the blood. See what Homer has done for those
old savages of his. Our bankers can always manage the finances of New
York, as they manage those of London. It would be a sad day for
Germany if we should break with you; some of us know that Frederick
the Great saw your future, and believed that we always ought to be
friends. But do not imagine that your nation, great as it is, can do
anything your people wills to do. Great power, I understand, is
hidden in your country; but, as the actors say, you cannot get it
across the footlights. It is not, as Gambetta spoke of the Catholic
religion in France, a matter for export.'
'Our education,' Count Henckel-Donnersmarck resumed, 'is practical;
Goethe and Schiller mean little now to us. Bismarck has made new men
of us. I shall not live long, and I cannot say I regret it,' he said;
'and, as the lust of power becomes the rule of the world, my son must
be a new German or suffer.'
'Count Henckel,' as he preferred to be called, did not remain long in
Copenhagen; he was recalled because, it was reported, he did not
provide the Kaiser, who carefully read his ministers' reports, with a
sufficient number of details of life in Denmark.
When I took his hint and went to Germany, at Christmas--Christmas was
a divine time in the old Germany!--I found that Count Henckel was
right. Berlin was hygienic, ugly, and more offensively immoral than
Paris was once said to be.
There was an artificial rule of life. Even the lives of the boys and
girls seemed to be ordered by some unseen law. You could breathe, but
it was necessary not to consume too much oxygen at a time. That was
_verboten_; and there were cannons on the Christmas trees!