There is, of course, some reason for believing that Carlyle's ideas
resemble those of which the German policy is the expression, but there
is none if we look beyond his superficial meaning. One reason for
branding him as an advocate of German practices is his exaltation of
Frederick the Great. Frederick began his first war by seizing Silesia,
very much as Wilhelm II began the present war by seizing Belgium. As
Carlyle justified the seizing of Silesia, many people cannot see why
that does not warrant the conclusion that he would also justify the
seizure of Belgium. Such people, however, forget that the Prussia of
1740 was not even the Prussia of 1914, to say nothing of the German
Empire or the Teutonic Alliance. Carlyle would detect in Prussia a
change in spirit, but even if this cannot be established, there is
certainly no parallel between Frederick's seizure of Silesia and
Germany's attack on Belgium. In 1740, Prussia was one of the small
countries of Europe. Its population was about half that of Belgium in
1914, and its political importance was not much greater. It was situated
between militaristic France and imperialistic Austria; and its immediate
neighbors: Saxony, Bavaria, Poland, and the Scandinavian kingdoms, were
ready at any moment to profit by its misfortunes. Prussia's seizure of
Silesia was, therefore, very much as if Belgium, learning in advance of
Germany's plan of invasion, had seized German territory adjacent to its
frontiers, and used it as a buffer to defend itself. It was the case of
a small state preserving itself from the aggressions of a big neighbor
aiming at world dominion. The methods employed may not have been
technically legal, but they were justified; therefore Carlyle endorsed
them. He believed that Frederick, cynic and materialist though he admits
him to have been, nevertheless proved himself the valiant defender of
his country's right to self government. He also regarded Frederick as
the man who did most in the eighteenth century to preserve Europe from
being dominated by a lawless imperialism. The rulers of Austria, because
of their almost uninterrupted possession of the office of Holy Roman
Emperor, openly aimed at universal dominion, and never lost an
opportunity of trying to realize it by force of intrigue. France, too,
was striving for the domination of Europe, and Russia was just becoming
conspicuous for the brutality and unscrupulousness of its political
methods quite as much as for the vastness of the power it had suddenly
developed. When these facts are considered, Frederick's action must be
admitted to have been, if not in the interests of democracy, at least in
support of the principle of self-determination for which the Allies
claim to be fighting against Germany; and Carlyle's endorsement of it at
least creates the presumption that he would not sympathize with Germany,
which today, greatly extended, is playing the part of the bullying
nations he commended Frederick for thwarting.
He seems, however, to advocate autocracy, and to deride democracy, and
this would appear to put him in agreement with the kaiser and his
professorial prompters. It is true that he did deride the notion that
the decision of the majority is always right. He likewise insisted that
all the constitutionality and legality conceivable will not ensure good
government or justify incompetence or unrighteousness in power; and
that, conversely, no formal or technical irregularity disqualifies a
government which is beneficent and capable. He ridiculed the idea that
political equality is synonymous with justice, but this does not mean
that he believed in caste rule. His opposition to political equality was
inspired by no respect for inherited authority or the sanctity of
property, but was the result of a conviction that it is a crude and
materialistic way of trying to solve an immensely complicated problem by
a simple mechanical process. Not external equality, but _equity_, must
be achieved to make government effective and successful, was his
contention. Making men equal in political power, in his opinion, ensured
that the government would be dominated by the ignorance and selfishness
of the mass of men, rather than by the enlightenment and integrity of
the relatively small portion of mankind whom nature fits for leadership
by endowing them with superior moral and intellectual powers. He
believed no man entitled to authority except on the basis of character
and ability, and he was as bitterly opposed to the German scheme of
class rule as he was to the quantitative methods of the radicals. It is
entirely wrong to think that, because he denied that universal suffrage
will guarantee justice and humanity, he endorsed injustice and
oppression. He didn't care how a government was organized or what it
claimed to do, but he only inquired what it had succeeded in doing, and
by this he judged it. The results of the German policy have been
disaster for the world as well as for Germany, and he would condemn the
German government for this, without being at all concerned about its
form. He attached no importance to a government's form; all he judged by
was its spirit. He believed that a government is inevitably the
expression of the intelligence and morality of the people it represents,
and that any form is capable of proving either good or bad in operation.
Germany may be an autocracy in form, but the German people almost
unanimously endorsed the war and its enormities; so what we have is an
exhibition of the fallibility of popular judgment more than a display of
the evils of autocracy. On this point Carlyle's position is clear, while
that of the critics who accuse him of having endorsed German practices,
because he denied that the majority is always right, is much more
susceptible of being considered a justification of Kultur.
According to his interpretation of history, the case of Germany is
perfectly plain. It is simply an instance of the degeneracy that, he
claimed, inevitably follows the adoption of selfish or materialistic
ambitions. The patient industry and the steady pursuit of the practical
instead of the spectacular brought Germany to greatness, and placed vast
power in the hands of her rulers. Then those rulers were tempted to
misuse that power, and they fell. They decided to corrupt the people and
make them the instrument by which world dominion could be achieved. They
therefore cultivated the baser passions of the populace, and with
infinite thoroughness and resource, they used every agency of the
government to secure public endorsement for a policy of aggression, and
for a swash-buckling and bombastic procedure that appealed only to the
shallow and the reckless. They found this the easier because
circumstances worked with them. The Franco-Prussian War inflamed German
chauvinism and inflated German conceit to an incredible extent. The
success of the war was more the result of France's weakness than
Germany's strength, but it filled the German nation with extravagant
enthusiasm, and inspired it with blind faith in its own invincibility.
Then Germany changed from a country largely agricultural to one mainly
industrial, and wealth came to kindle in a naturally gross and sensual
people a passion for luxury, and to impart to a naturally arrogant one
the insolence of material power. The effect of the first of these things
is shown in the famous night-life of Berlin, which, before the war, was
more gross and lavish than that of any other city in the world; while
the overbearing character of the average German abroad shows how general
was the influence of the second. Thus a change has been effected in the
spirit of Germany. From a nation dull but honest, rude but sincere and
kindly, it has been transformed by bad leadership and sudden prosperity
into a people whose dominant characteristics are brutality and
mendacity. Therefore the Germany that Carlyle praised is not the Germany
that perpetrated the present war, and there is no doubt that his
attitude towards the apostles of Kultur would be the direct opposite of
what it was towards Frederick the Great and Bismarck.