machine is due to the German notion of discipline. Discipline in Germany
is based on the peculiar place assigned to the expert. Military experts
exercise in their branch an authority different in degree but not in
kind from that belonging to experts in other departments--strategy,
tactics, improvements of armament, methods of mobilization. The inexpert
soldier submits to the military expert as a person about to undergo a
necessary operation would submit to a surgeon. It is a mistake to
suppose that the Germans, a highly intelligent and educated people, are
being cowed into submission by brutal non-commissioned officers.
Brutality, when it occurs, is looked upon as exceptional and incidental
to a system on the whole approved. The Germans would never tolerate the
severe discipline to which they are subjected did they not willingly
submit to it. They regard a highly efficient army as necessary to the
safety of the Fatherland, and they are willing to leave the
responsibility for the means of securing efficiency to the experts.
During the Franco-German war, when a student in the University of
Berlin, I talked with some of the brightest of the younger men about
their military obligations, and I found that they took precisely the
view just stated. The Pomeranian peasant may submit to military
dictation in a dull, half-instinctive fashion. The flower and élite of
German intelligence submit to it no less--from conviction.
How shall we account for the unique predominance of the expert in German
life? The explanation would seem to lie in the phrase invented by a
brilliant writer of the last century, "Deutschland ist Hamlet" (Germany
is Hamlet). The Germans are a resolute people--not at all, as has been
erroneously supposed, a nation of dreamers--just as Hamlet, according to
recent criticism, was essentially of a resolute character. In the days
of the Hansa and of the Hohenstaufen the Germans cut a great figure in
oversea commerce and in war. They were great doers of deeds. The Germans
are intensely volitional, but also intensely intellectual. Hence the
native hue of resolution has sometimes been sicklied o'er by too much
thinking. The intellect of the German refuses to sanction action until
the successive steps to be taken have been worked out with logical
accuracy, and a scientific groove, so to speak, has been hollowed out
along which action can proceed. As soon as this is accomplished, the
flood of volitional impulse enters gladly into the channel prepared for
it and moves on in it with irresistible force. Bismarck represents the
active side, as the eminent philosophers of the German people represent
the side of logical construction. The two sides must be taken together
to understand German history and the tendencies prevailing in Germany
today.
Underneath it all, of course, is German sentiment, but of this we need
take no account in discussing German discipline, except in so far as
love for the Fatherland enters in to sustain the patience of the people
under the burden of their military establishment.
Discipline, or the subordination of the inexpert to the expert, likewise
accounts for certain peculiarities of the German political parties.
Prince von Bülow mentions three examples of supremely efficient
organization--the Prussian Army, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the
German Social Democracy. There are some 4,200 Socialist associations,
subject to the orders of forty-two district associations, these in turn
being ruled by the Central Committee. The working of the Social
Democratic machine is almost flawless. The discipline, it is said, is
iron.
Again, the conception of Government in Germany, unlike that which
prevails in England, France, or America, is determined by the idea of
expertness. The Government is the political expert par excellence. Its
business is to study the interests of the State as a whole. In all
matters of economic theory, of finance, of administration, of social
reform, it invokes the advice of specialists. But it is itself the
supreme political specialist. It stands high above all the political
parties. It does not depend for its existence on majorities in
Parliament. It seeks the co-operation of Parliament, but reserves to
itself the right of initiative and leadership.
The object of the above remarks is to explain, not to justify, and in
the face of much uninstructed criticism to point out the deep sources in
the nature of the German people from which spring the influences that
have molded their life. The chief objections to their system may be
summarized in the statements, that it takes too little account of the
value of the inexpert; that it tends to suppress latent spontaneity;
and, especially in the sphere of government, that it ascribes to the
expert a knowledge of the needs of the people such as no ruling class
can ever possess. And it overlooks the highest aim of political life and
activity, which is the education of the inexpert to such a point that
they may become more or less expert in understanding and promoting the
public weal.
FELIX ADLER.
[Illustration: MAURICE MAETERLINCK. _See Page_ 144]
[Illustration: EMILE BOUTROUX. _(Photo from Bain News Service.) See Page
160_]
*When Peace Is Seriously Desired*
*By Arnold Bennett.*
*From The Daily News of London.*
When peace is seriously desired in any quarter, the questions to be
discussed by the plenipotentaries will fall into three groups:
1. Those which affect all Europe.
2. Those which chiefly affect Western Europe.
3. Those which chiefly affect Eastern Europe.
The first group is, of course, the most important, both practically and
sentimentally. And the main question in it is the question of Belgium.
The original cause of the war was Germany's deliberate and advertised
bellicosity, and it might be thought that the first aim of peace would
be by some means to extinguish that bellicosity. But relative values may
change during the progress of a war, and the question of Belgium--which
means the question of the sanction of international pledges--now stands
higher in the general view than the question of disarmament. Germany has
outraged the public law of Europe, and she has followed up her outrage
with a series of the most cowardly and wanton crimes. She ought to pay,
and she ought to apologize. Only by German payment and German apology
can international law be vindicated. Germany should pay a sum large
enough to do everything that money can do toward the re-establishment of
Belgium's well-being. I have no competence to suggest the amount of the
indemnity. A hundred million pounds does not appear to me too large.
Then the apology. It may be asked: Why an apology? Would not an apology
be implied in the payment of an indemnity?
It is undeniable that Germany is now directed by hysteric stupidity
wielding a bludgeon. Granted, if you will, that half the nation is at
heart against the stupidity and the bludgeon. So much the worse for the
half. Citizens who have not had the wit to get rid of the Prussian
franchise law must accept all the consequences of their political
ineffectiveness. The peacemakers will not be able to divide Germany into
two halves.
For Potsdam a first-rate spectacular effect is needed, and that effect
would best be produced by a German national apology carried by a
diplomatic mission with ceremony to Brussels and published in all German
official papers, and emphasized by a procession of Belgian troops down
Unter den Linden. This visible abasement of German arms in front of the
Socialists of Berlin would be an invaluable aid to the breaking of
military tyranny in Prussia.
So much for the Belgium question and the sanction of international
pledges. The other question affecting the whole of Europe is the hope of
a universal limitation of armaments. But there is a particular question,
touching France, which in practice would come before that. I mean
Alsace-Lorraine. Unless Germany conquers Europe, Alsace-Lorraine should
be restored to France. A profound national sentiment, to which all
conceivable considerations of expediency or ultimate advantage are
unimportant, demands imperatively the return of the plunder. And in the
councils of the Allies, either alone or with German representatives, the
attitude of French diplomacy would be: "Is it clear about
Alsace-Lorraine? If so, we may proceed. If not, it's no use going any
further."
*Question of Armaments.*
We now come to armaments. I have seen it suggested that the destruction
of Essen, Wilhelmshaven, and Heligoland ought to be a condition of peace
with Germany. Certainly the disappearance of these phenomena would be a
gain to the world. So would the disappearance of Rosyth and Toulon. It
seems to me, however, very improbable that their destruction or
dismantling by international command would occur after hostilities have
ceased, or could usefully so occur. If the French Army on its way to
Berlin can treat the Krupp factory as the German Army on its way to
Paris treated Rheims Cathedral, well and good! In fact, most excellent!
And if the British Navy can somehow emasculate Wilhelmshaven and
Heligoland I shall not complain that its behavior has been purely
doctrinaire. But otherwise I see nothing practical in the
Essen-Wilhelmshaven-Heligoland suggestion. Nor in the project for
dethroning the Kaiser and sending him and his eldest son to settle their
differences in St. Helena! The Kaiser--happily--is not a Napoleon, nor
has he yet himself accomplished anything big enough or base enough to
merit Napoleon's fate. Any dethroning that may enliven the gray monotony
of the post-bellum era at Potsdam should and will be done by the German
soldiers themselves. Even in international politics it is futile to try
to meddle in other people's private affairs.
Disarmament in Germany can be achieved by the exercise of one principle,
and one principle only. That principle is the principle of mutuality. A
scheme in which every nation will proportionately share should be
presented to Germany, and she should be respectfully but quite firmly
asked to participate in it. There would be no sense in saying to
Germany: "You must disarm." The magic words would be: "We are going to
disarm, and so are you, whether you want to or not." As to the procedure
of disarmament--whether it shall be slow or fast, whether it shall
include destruction or be content with mere omission to renew, how the
proportions shall be decided, who shall give the signal to begin--here
are matters which I am without skill or desire to discuss. All I know
about them is that they are horribly complicated, unprecedentedly
difficult, and bursting with danger; and that they will strain the
wisdom, patience, and ingenuity of the negotiators to the very utmost.
*Three Vital Points.*
Compared to disarmament, all remaining questions whatsoever affecting
peace are simple and secondary. Indemnities for France or Russia, or
both, a Polish Kingdom, a Balkan United States, the precise number of
nations into which Austria-Hungary is to be shattered, the ownership of
the east coast of the Adriatic, even the reparation of the infamy by
which Denmark was robbed of Schleswig-Holstein--what are these but
favorable ground for the art of compromise? The vital points, at any
rate for us Westerners, are only three: Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and
disarmament. * * * Stay, there is another. It is vital to Great
Britain's reputation that she should accept nothing--neither indemnity,
nor colonies; not a single pound, not a single square mile.
Many persons, I gather, find it hard to believe that Prussia will ever
admit that she is beaten or consent to her own humiliation. Naturally
her conduct will depend upon the degree to which she is beaten. She has
admitted defeat and swallowed the leek before, though it is a long time
ago. Meanwhile she has forgotten, and her opponents seem to have
forgotten also, that though her name is Prussia she is subject to the
limitations of the human race. Out of her prodigious score off little
Denmark, her thrashing of Austria--a country which never wins a war--and
her victory over France, there grew a legend that Prussia, and therefore
Germany, was not as other nations. This legend is contrary to fact.
Every nation must yield to force--here, indeed, is Germany's
contribution to our common knowledge.
If in July, 1870, it had been prophesied that France would give up
Alsace-Lorraine and pay two hundred millions to get rid of a foreign
army of occupation, France would have protested that she would fight to
the last man and to the last franc first. But nations don't do these
things. If Germany won the present war and fulfilled her dream of
establishing an army in this island, we should yield, and we should
submit to her terms, we who have never been beaten save by our own
colonies--that is a scientific certainty. And Germany's terms would not
be amusing; in their terribleness they would outrun our poor Anglo-Saxon
imagination. Similarly, if Germany is beaten, she will bow the head, and
to precisely the extent to which she is walloped. We need not worry
about that. Were she recalcitrant we need not even murmur in her ear:
"What would you have extorted if you'd won?" A gesture of the still
uplifted sword would suffice to convince her that facts are facts.
Assuming that the tide turns not again, the chances of a thorough,
workmanlike common sense peace can only be imperiled by one thing--the
deep desire of France and of Belgium for repose and recuperation. We in
England do not know what war is. We have not lived in hell. Our plains
have not been devastated, nor our women and children shot, nor our ears
deafened by the boom of cannon, nor our cathedrals shelled, nor our land
turned into a vast and bloody hospital; and we have not experienced the
appalling terror and shame of the foe's absolute dominion in our streets
and lanes. We have suffered; we shall suffer; but our suffering is
nought and less than nought weighed against the suffering on the
Continent. Why, in the midst of a war of unparalleled horror, we grumble
if a train is late! We can talk calmly of fighting Germany to a
stand-still, even if the job takes two years, and it behooves us to talk
so, and to prepare for the task; and for myself I am convinced that we
could make good the word. But France and Belgium will not use that tone,
if Russia does. Once the German armies are across the frontiers, the
instinctive pressure in favor of peace would be enormous, and
considerations of the distant future, of the welfare of our descendants
and the progress of mankind, would count little in the scale. In that
moment, if it happily comes, our part and Russia's would be to sustain
and encourage and salve the supreme victims of fate. A tremendous factor
in our favor would be the exhaustion of Germany; and the measure of our
power and of the fear we inspire is the furious intensity of Germany's
anger against our inconvenient selves. Without us the war could not last
beyond the end of this year, and the peace would be unsatisfactory.
And even with us, insisting on our own terms of reconciliation, I do not
see how it can last over six months more on anything like the present
scale, for the Kaiser, despite his kinship with Deity, can neither
create men nor extract gold coins out of an empty hat. Military
arguments, in Germany as elsewhere, hold good only for a certain period.
*Barrie at Bay: Which Was Brown?*
*An Interview on the War.*
*From The New York Times, Oct. 1, 1914.*
As our reporter entered Sir James Barrie's hotel room by one door, the
next door softly closed. "I was alone," writes our reporter. "I sprang
into the corridor and had just time to see him fling himself down the
elevator. Then I understood what he had meant when he said on the
telephone that he would be ready for me at 10:30.
I returned thoughtfully to the room, where I found myself no longer
alone. Sir James Barrie's "man" was there; a stolid Londoner, name of
Brown, who told me he was visiting America for the first time.
"Sir James is very sorry, but has been called away," he assured me
without moving a muscle. Then he added: "But this is the pipe," and he
placed a pipe of the largest size on the table.
"The pipe he smokes?" I asked.
Brown is evidently a very truthful man, for he hesitated. "That is the
interview pipe," he explained. "When we decided to come to America, Sir
James said he would have to be interviewed, and that it would be wise to
bring something with us for the interviewers to take notice of. So he
told me to buy the biggest pipe I could find, and he practiced holding
it in his mouth in his cabin on the way across. He is very pleased with
the way the gentlemen of the press have taken notice of it."
"So that is not the pipe he really smokes?" I said, perceiving I was on
the verge of a grand discovery. "I suppose he actually smokes an
ordinary small pipe."
Again Brown hesitated, but again truth prevailed.
"He does not smoke any pipe," he said, "nor cigars, nor cigarettes; he
never smokes at all; he just puts that one in his mouth to help the
interviewers."
"It has the appearance of having been smoked," I pointed out.
"I blackened it for him," the faithful fellow replied.
"But he has written a book in praise of My Lady Nicotine."
"So I have heard," Brown said guardedly. "I think that was when he was
hard up and had to write what people wanted; but he never could abide
smoking himself. Years after he wrote the book he read it; he had quite
forgotten it, and he was so attracted by what it said about the delights
of tobacco that he tried a cigarette. But it was no good; the mere smell
disgusted him."
*Strange Forgetfulness.*
"Odd that he should forget his own book," I said.
"He forgets them all," said Brown. "There is this Peter Pan foolishness,
for instance. I have heard people talking to him about that play and
mentioning parts in it they liked, and he tried to edge them off the
subject; they think it is his shyness, but I know it is because he has
forgotten the bits they are speaking about. Before strangers call on him
I have seen him reading one of his own books hurriedly, so as to be able
to talk about it if that is their wish. But he gets mixed up, and thinks
that the little minister was married to Wendy."
"Almost looks as if he hadn't written his own works," I said.
"Almost," Brown admitted uncomfortably.
I asked a leading question. "You don't suppose," I said, "that any one
writes them for him? Such things have been. You don't write them for him
by any chance, just as you blackened the pipe, you know?"
Brown assured me stolidly that he did not. Suddenly, whether to get away
from a troublesome subject I cannot say, he vouchsafed me a startling
piece of information. "The German Kaiser was on our boat coming across,"
he said.
"Sure?" I asked, wetting my pencil.
He told me he had Sir James's word for it. There was on board, it seems,
a very small, shrunken gentleman with a pronounced waist and tiny,
turned-up mustache, who strutted along the deck trying to look fierce
and got in the other passengers' way to their annoyance until Sir James
discovered that he was the Kaiser Reduced to Life Size. After that Sir
James liked to sit with him and talk to him.
Sir James is a great admirer of the Kaiser, though he has not, like Mr.
Carnegie, had the pleasure of meeting him in society. When he read in
the papers on arriving here that the Kaiser had wept over the
destruction of Louvain, he told Brown a story. It was of a friend who
had gone to an oculist to be cured of some disease in one eye. Years
afterward he heard that the oculist's son had been killed in some Indian
war, and he called on the oculist to commiserate with him.
"You cured my eye," he said to him, "and when I read of your loss I wept
for you, Sir; I wept for you with that eye."
"Sir James," Brown explained, "is of a very sympathetic nature, and he
wondered which eye it was that the Kaiser wept with."
I asked Brown what his own views were about the war, and before replying
he pulled a paper from his pocket and scanned it. "We are strictly
neutral," he then replied.
"Is that what is written on the paper?" I asked. He admitted that Sir
James had written out for him the correct replies to possible questions.
"Why was he neutral?" I asked, and he again found the reply on the piece
of paper: "Because it is the President's wish."
*Brown Must Be Neutral.*
So anxious, I discovered, is Sir James to follow the President's bidding
that he has enjoined Brown to be neutral on all other subjects besides
the war; to express no preference on matters of food, for instance, and
always to eat oysters and clams alternately, so that there can be no
ill-feeling. Also to walk in the middle of the streets lest he should
seem to be favoring either sidewalk, and to be very cautious about
admitting that one building in New York is higher than another. I
assured him that the Woolworth Building was the highest, but he replied
politely, "that he was sure the President would prefer him to remain
neutral." I naturally asked if Sir James had given him any further
instructions as to proper behavior in America, and it seems that he had
done so. They amount, I gather, to this, that Americans have a sense of
humor which they employ, when they can, to the visitor's undoing.
"When we reach New York," Sir James seems to have told Brown in effect,
"we shall be met by reporters who will pretend that America is eager to
be instructed by us as to the causes and progress of the war; then, if
we are fools enough to think that America cannot make up its mind for
itself, we shall fall into the trap and preach to them, and all the time
they are taking down our observations they will be saying to themselves,
'Pompous asses.'
"It is a sort of game between us and the reporters. Our aim is to make
them think we are bigger than we are, and theirs is to make us smaller
than we are; and any chance we have of succeeding is to hold our
tongues, while they will probably succeed if they make us jabber. Above
all, oh, Brown, if you write to the papers giving your views of why we
are at war--and if you don't you will be the only person who
hasn't--don't be lured into slinging vulgar abuse at our opponents, lest
America takes you for another university professor."
There is, I learned, only one person in America about whom it is
impossible, even in Sir James's opinion, to preserve a neutral attitude.
This is the German Ambassador, whose splendid work for England day by
day and in every paper and to all reporters cannot, Sir James thinks, be
too cordially recognized. Brown has been told to look upon the German
Ambasador as England's greatest asset in America just now, and to hope
heartily that he will be long spared to carry on his admirable work.
Lastly, it was pleasant to find that Brown has not a spark of sympathy
with those who say that, because Germany has destroyed art treasures in
Belgium and France, the Allies should retaliate with similar rudeness if
they reach Berlin. He holds that if for any reason best known to
themselves (such as the wish for a sunnier location) the Hohenzollerns
should by and by vacate their present residence, a nice villa should be
provided for them, and that all the ancestral statues in the
Sieges-Allee should be conveyed to it intact, and perhaps put up in the
back garden. There the Junkers could drop in of an evening, on their way
home from their offices, and chat pleasantly of old times. Brown thinks
they should be allowed to retain all their iron crosses, and even given
some more, with which, after smart use of their pocket combs, they would
cut no end of a dash among the nursemaids.
As for the pipe, I was informed that it had now done its work, and I
could take it away as a keepsake. I took it, but wondered afterward at
Brown's thinking he had the right to give it me.
A disquieting feeling has since come over me that perhaps it was Sir
James I had been interviewing all the time, and Brown who had escaped
down the elevator.
*A "Credo" for Keeping Faith*
*By John Galsworthy.*
I believe in peace with all my heart. I believe that war is outrage--a
black stain on the humanity and the fame of man. I hate militarism and
the god of force. I would go any length to avoid war for material
interests, war that involved no principles, distrusting profoundly the
common meaning of the phrase "national honor."