Since the outbreak of the war the pamphlet literature in the countries of
the Entente has been full of citations from German political writers. In
England, in particular, the names and works of Bernhardi and of Treitschke
have become more familiar than they appear to have been in Germany prior to
the war. This method of selecting for polemical purposes certain tendencies
of sentiment and theory, and ignoring all others, is one which could be
applied, with damaging results, to any country in the world. Mr. Angell has
shown in his "Prussianism in England" how it might be applied to ourselves;
and a German, no doubt, into whose hands that book might fall would draw
conclusions about public opinion here similar to those which we have drawn
about public opinion in Germany. There is jingoism in all countries, as
there is pacifism in all countries. Nevertheless, I think it is true to
say that the jingoism of Germany has been peculiar both in its intensity
and in its character. This special quality appears to be due both to the
temperament and to the recent history of the German nation. The Germans are
romantic, as the French are impulsive, the English sentimental, and the
Russians religious. There is some real meaning in these generalisations.
They are easily to be felt when one comes into contact with a nation,
though they may be hard to establish or define. When I say that the Germans
are romantic, I mean that they do not easily or willingly see things as
they are. Their temperament is like a medium of coloured glass. It
magnifies, distorts, conceals, transmutes. And this is as true when their
intellectual attitude is realistic as when it is idealistic. In the Germany
of the past, the Germany of small States, to which all non-Germans look
back with such sympathy and such regret, their thinkers and poets were
inspired by grandiose intellectual abstractions. They saw ideas, like gods,
moving the world, and actual men and women, actual events and things, were
but the passing symbols of these supernatural powers; 1866 and 1870 ended
all that. The unification of Germany, in the way we have discussed,
diverted all their interest from speculation about the universe, life, and
mankind, to the material interests of their new country. Germany became the
preoccupation of all Germans. From abstractions they turned with a new
intoxication to what they conceived to be the concrete. Entering thus late
upon the stage of national politics, they devoted themselves, with their
accustomed thoroughness, to learning and bettering what they conceived
to be the principles and the practice which had given success to other
nations. In this quest no scruples should deter them, no sentimentality
hamper, no universal ideals distract. Yet this, after all, was but German
romanticism assuming another form. The objects, it is true, were different.
"Actuality" had taken the place of ideals, Germany of Humanity. But by
the German vision the new objects were no less distorted than the old.
In dealing with "Real-politik" (which is the German translation of
Machiavellianism), with "expansion," with "survival of the fittest,"
and all the other shibboleths of world-policy, their outlook remained
as absolute and abstract as before, as contemptuous of temperament and
measure, as blind to those compromises and qualifications, those decencies,
so to speak, of nature, by which reality is constituted. The Germans now
saw men instead of gods, but they saw them as trees walking.
German imperialism, then, while it involves the same intellectual
presuppositions, the same confusions, the same erroneous arguments, the
same short-sighted ambitions, as the imperialism of other countries,
exhibits them all in an extreme degree. All peoples admire themselves. But
the self-adoration of Germans is so naive, so frank, so unqualified, as to
seem sheerly ridiculous to more experienced nations.[1] The English and the
French, too, believe their civilization to be the best in the world. But
English common-sense and French sanity would prevent them from announcing
to other peoples that they proposed to conquer them, morally or materially,
for their good. All Jingoes admire and desire war. But nowhere else in the
modern world is to be found such a debauch of "romantic" enthusiasm, such
a wilful blindness to all the realities of war, as Germany has manifested
both before and since the outbreak of this world-catastrophe. A reader
of German newspapers and tracts gets at last a feeling of nausea at the
very words _Wir Deutsche_, followed by the eternal _Helden, Heldenthum,
Heldenthat_, and is inclined to thank God if he indeed belong to a nation
sane enough to be composed of _Händler_.
The very antithesis between _Helden_ (heroes) and _Händler_ (hucksters),
with which all Germany is ringing, is an illustration of the romantic
quality that vitiates their intelligence. In spite of the fact that they
are one of the greatest trading and manufacturing nations of the world, and
that precisely the fear of losing their trade and markets has been, as they
constantly assert, a chief cause that has driven them to war, they speak
as though Germany were a kind of knight-errant, innocent of all material
ambitions, wandering through the world in the pure, disinterested service
of God and man. On the other hand, because England is a great commercial
Power, they suppose that no Englishman lives for anything but profit.
Because they themselves have conscription, and have to fight or be shot,
they infer that every German is a noble warrior. Because the English
volunteer, they assume that they only volunteer for their pay. Germany,
to them, is a hero clad in white armour, magnanimous, long-suffering, and
invincible. Other nations are little seedy figures in black coats, inspired
exclusively by hatred and jealousy of the noble German, incapable of a
generous emotion or an honourable act, and destined, by the judgment of
history, to be saved, if they can be saved at all, by the great soul and
dominating intellect of the Teuton.
It is in this intoxicating atmosphere of temperament and mood that
the ideas and ambitions of German imperialists work and move. They are
essentially the same as those of imperialists in other countries. Their
philosophy of history assumes an endless series of wars, due to the
inevitable expansion of rival States. Their ethics means a belief in force
and a disbelief in everything else. Their science is a crude misapplication
of Darwinism, combined with invincible ignorance of the true bearings of
science upon life, and especially of those facts and deductions about
biological heredity which, once they are understood, will make it plain
that war degrades the stock of all nations, victorious and vanquished
alike, and that the decline of civilizations is far more plausibly to be
attributed to this cause than to the moral decadence of which history
is always ready, after the event, to accuse the defeated Power. One
peculiarity, perhaps, there is in the outlook of German imperialism,
and that is its emphasis on an unintelligible and unreal abstraction of
"race." Germans, it is thought, are by biological quality the salt of
the earth. Every really great man in Europe, since the break-up of the
Roman Empire, has been a German, even though it might appear, at first
sight, to an uninstructed observer, that he was an Italian or a Frenchman
or a Spaniard. Not all Germans, however, are, they hold, as yet included
in the German Empire, or even in the German-Austrian combination. The
Flemish are Germans, the Dutch are Germans, the English even are Germans,
or were before the war had made them, in Germany's eyes, the offscouring
of mankind. Thus, a great task lies before the German Empire: on the one
hand, to bring within its fold the German stocks that have strayed from
it in the wanderings of history; on the other, to reduce under German
authority those other stocks that are not worthy to share directly in the
citizenship of the Fatherland. The dreams of conquest which are the real
essence of all imperialism are thus supported in Germany by arguments
peculiar to Germans. But the arguments put forward are not the real
determinants of the attitude. The attitude, in any country, whatever it
may be called, rests at bottom on sheer national vanity. It is the belief
in the inherent superiority of one's own civilization, and the desire to
extend it, by force if need be, throughout the world. It matters little
what arguments in its support this passion to dominate may garner from
that twilight region in which the advanced guard of science is labouring
patiently to comprehend Nature and mankind. Men take from the treasury of
truth what they are able to take. And what imperialists take is a mirror
to their own ambition and pride.
Now, as to the ambitions of this German jingoism there is no manner of
doubt. Germans are nothing if not frank. And this kind of German does
want to conquer and annex, not only outside Europe but within it. We must
not, however, infer that the whole of Germany has been infected with this
virus. The summary I have set down in the last few pages represents the
impression made on an unsympathetic mind by the literature of Pangermanism.
Emerging from such reading--and it is the principal reading of German
origin which has been offered to the British public since the war--there
is a momentary illusion, "That is Germany!" Of course it is not, any more
than the _Morning Post_ or the _National Review_ is England. Germans, in
fact, during recent years have taken a prominent place in pacifism as well
as in imperialism. Men like Schücking and Quidde and Fried are at least as
well known as men like Treitschke and Bernhardi. Opinion in Germany, as in
every other country, has been various and conflicting. And the pacific
tendencies have been better organized, if not more active, there than
elsewhere, for they have been associated with the huge and disciplined
forces of the Social-Democrats. Indeed, the mass of the people, left
alone, is everywhere pacific. I do not forget the very important fact
that German education, elementary and higher, has been deliberately
directed to inculcate patriotic feeling, that the doctrine of armed
force as the highest manifestation of the State has been industriously
propagated by the authorities, and that the unification of Germany by
force has given to the cult of force a meaning and a popularity probably
unknown in any other country. But in most men, for good or for evil, the
lessons of education can be quickly obliterated by the experience of life.
In particular, the mass of the people everywhere, face to face with the
necessities of existence, knowing what it is to work and to struggle, to
co-operate and to compete, to suffer and to relieve suffering, though they
may be less well-informed than the instructed classes, are also less liable
to obsession by abstractions. They see little, but they see it straight.
And though, being men, with the long animal inheritance of men behind them,
their passions may be roused by any cry of battle, though they are the
fore-ordained dupes of those who direct the policy of nations, yet it is
not their initiative that originates wars. They do not desire conquest,
they do not trouble about "race" or chatter about the "survival of the
fittest." It is their own needs, which are also the vital needs of society,
that preoccupy their thoughts; and it is real goods that direct and inspire
their genuine idealism.
We must, then, disabuse ourselves of the notion so naturally produced by
reading, and especially by reading in time of war, that the German Jingoes
are typical of Germany. They are there, they are a force, they have to be
reckoned with. But exactly how great a force? Exactly how influential on
policy? That is a question which I imagine can only be answered by guesses.
Would the reader, for instance, undertake to estimate the influence during
the last fifteen years on British policy and opinion of the imperialist
minority in this country? No two men, I think, would agree about it. And
few men would agree with themselves from one day or one week to another.
We are reduced to conjecture. But the conjectures of some people are of
more value than those of others, for they are based on a wider converse.
I think it therefore not without importance to recall to the reader the
accounts of the state of opinion in Germany given by well-qualified foreign
observers in the years immediately preceding the war.
[Footnote 1: As I write I come across the following, cited from a book of
songs composed for German combatants under the title "Der deutsche Zorn":--
Wir sind die Meister aller Welt
In allen ernsten Dingen,
* * * * *
Was Man als fremd euch höchlichst preist
Um eurer Einfalt Willen,
Ist deutschen Ursprungs allermeist,
Und trägt nur fremde Hüllen.]