THE GERMAN PROBLEM. AN ANSWER
"I have given this a great deal of thought. I have read a great deal
and I believe I have never known of a writer who furnished what I
should call an answer. And that is the most important thing--the
vital thing. So I have evolved a simple, natural proposal. It is the
only proposal, I think, that will remedy the evil of the German
nation--remedy the ugly situation that hangs over the careless
earth.
"We know that when young foreigners are educated in considerable
part in a country, they generally become at peace with it.
Everything, in fact, draws them to this attitude--for instance,
their excusable satisfaction in feeling that their sojourn abroad
has been a success for them instead of a failure. Any foreign
instruction makes the student more of an intelligent, cosmopolitan
sympathizer. It knits together warm acquaintances abroad. Every
Rhodes scholar is an ally of England. He goes forth bearing kindly
messages for her. I have told you how it works with our Americans
coming over here to the German universities. They nearly all become
pro-Germanic. And this is one reason why our compatriots at home
have in general such a downright admiration for what they consider
the super-excellence of the Teutons.
"But while this providing of the German education for Americans is
pulling so strong in favor of Germany, we have nothing similar in
America pulling Germany toward us and our ways. Young Germans are
not sent to the United States to study and to lead our lives and to
return home bearing good-will and good reports. They stay where they
are and become more narrowly, intrinsically Teutons--irreclaimably
Teutons. They are left with the undisputed idea that their system of
instruction is altogether the best, as proven by the spectacle of
aliens coming here for schooling. Why, then, should German lads and
misses go abroad to learn? And they don't.
"Now as long as this state of things continues, the German race will
remain a tribe in itself, and radically at loggerheads with the
world. It will be hopelessly separated, unreconciled, inimical. It
will be strange and opposed to everyone else--everything else. As
you have seen yourself, even the meanings of the most common and
essential terms are usually, to the German, the contrary of what
they are to the rest of mankind.
"How will there ever be any natural and genuine meeting of the
minds, fellowship, community of interests, under present programmes?
For centuries civilized countries have been living side by side with
the Teutons, have been pursuing education ever more zealously, and
still the German brain and character stay profoundly different from
the rest and are not understood. They are so different, in fact,
that the forces of war and destruction must be maintained as against
them and are constant irritants to thought and activity.
"My plan is this. Young German men and women should be amicably
educated abroad in very large numbers--the largest well possible.
And on a broader basis than the Cecil Rhodes scheme. In our country
they would become, from youthful association, more or less fond of
our open homes, our sense of democracy, the untrammeled
opportunities to go and to do. They would see the advantages of
these blessings--or at least their human attraction--among boys and
girls.
"Under my programme these Germans, still adolescent, will return
home and a little of this foreign education will stick. But their
children will do the same. More will stick with them. Then their
children, and still more sticking. After fifty or a hundred years
you will have a large population in Deutschland thinking and liking
and to a great extent living like their Christian and less warlike
neighbors. It will be a tremendous beneficial element introduced for
the first time into Germany. It will slowly and silently, without
friction or loss of self-respect, accomplish an internal revolution.
"Foreign education for Teuton boys and girls! That's the only final
answer I can find--the only true one. You see, a war will never
accomplish this, nor tariffs or penalties. Such agencies do not
change human nature or character or modes of existence. They
antagonize, make stubborn or resentful or malevolent. And, unlike
other races, the Germans would always remain, as they are to-day,
UNITED. This is the explanation of their World Power."
Anderson stopped as if waiting for a comment.
"It all sounds well and is a beautiful way to do it, but how is it
practicable?" asked Gard, who had listened attentively, impressed.
"How are you going to coax the Germans to enter into this? What
benefit will they see in it?"
"You are right," returned Anderson. "That's the difficulty at
present. It can't be put in operation, as I see it, unless Germany
happens to be defeated in the coming war. If she is defeated she
will, of course, be humbled and temporarily sick of fighting, and
this proposal could then be readily forced into adoption as one of
the post-war measures looking to the quickest rehabilitation of the
nation. Anything that will put it on its feet again soon will be
most welcome at that time. Meanwhile, the instruments of war, the
power to do damage, must not be left in the German's hands. As long
as he has them, he will prepare to destroy."
"But if Germany is victorious, as you seem to think she will be?"
suggested Gard.
"Oh, then nothing will work. It won't have a chance. What will there
be of all this to contemplate? Germany will be the master and its
semi-paganism will prevail. The modern Teuton tribes will begin to
level the Christian civilizations to the ground just as the Huns
leveled the Roman civilization. The Hun disposition in the German
_must_ be eradicated--_must_ be destroyed. Until this is done the
world will always have these Huns at its gates."...
* * * * *
It was now July in the year of everlasting tragedy--1914. Kirtley
must leave for home, as Villa Elsa knew. He talked over his route
with Anderson. His interest in Charlemagne made him wish to see at
Aix-la-Chapelle the great emperor's tomb, underneath which,
according to an old-time legend, the ruler still sits in his white
robes of state in his marble chair, looking forward to resurrection
to power. So the trip was mapped out through central Germany.
As the time was at hand for Gard to announce his date of setting
off, his perplexities before Frau and Elsa grew entangled. But,
happily, their knot was cut for him. Von Tielitz, who had long been
away, broke in upon the household one morning with glorious news. He
had received a commission as bandmaster in the army with fair pay.
Most unexpected. A civilian, who could make sport of the military,
summoned into the ranks! What could it mean? Something must be in
the wind.
At all events he had come to arrange to marry Elsa, and converted
the Villa into a hubbub. He was so beside himself that he appeared
ready to embrace and marry the first person he met. He was also
officious as if conducting a rehearsal. He rushed to Gard's room and
overwhelmed him with the tidings. His eye-glasses kept tumbling off.
He was upstairs and down, in the flower garden, out at the tea
table, and now and then he rushed to the Pleyel and rent the air
with its exultant chords.
The family turned the day into celebration. The wine cellar was
opened. The kitchen sent forth its hot and overflowing dishes hour
after hour until well into the evening. The marriageable Jim Deming
and Gard Kirtley were to Villa Elsa as if they had never been. Frau
proclaimed in husky sounds that she had not felt so young in thirty
years. Luckily Fräulein Wasserhaus had gone off to Brunswick to
visit a relative soon after Deming's advent, so she was not in
Wiesenstrasse to encounter this joyous climax and Gard's
preparations for his eventful journey.
Elsa acted as one overjoyed. It was what she had yearned for and
what filled the measure of her Teutonic maiden nature. On seeing her
happy like a yellow mermaid on a sunlit, blissful shore, and knowing
what Friedrich _was_ with all his talent, Gard realized she was
never for him or he for her. It had been for him a vagary, an
irresponsible venture in ethno-psychology, a poorly based confusion
of appreciation with a vague notion of duty intermingled with
sentiment.
His illness had cleared his intuitions. The unalluring defects of
the Teuton systems of love-making overshadowed his own defects as a
suitor. Elsa had been as truly foreign to him as the German habits
of eating and drinking. In thinking of her he now knew he had always
been conscious of her nation. The German woman, as he had already
learned, is sunk into her race. It swallows up her individuality. In
marrying her, one married the whole people--the German State--the
Kaiser. One became possessed not only of a help-meet but of an
aggressive political idea.
Now that Gard was a friend instead of a lover, how much easier were
his relations with Fräulein! Brooding sensitiveness and
responsibility passed into lightsomeness. The unnatural and
crankling proceeding of his trying to woo a German girl was smoothed
away into a genial indifference. The mental picture of Elsa would
remain as one that had attracted him on the wall of his German
memories. And like the hundred maids that a youth is smitten with,
she would gradually blend into the dim gallery of such pleasant
visions of Kirtley's susceptible spring-time--visions which, in all
men, fade sweetly into their manhood.
In this manner the cloud of Gard's awkward discomfort in speaking
out or acting out his answer to Frau's virile project, had melted
away before these lighted-up faces. He felt as if a fog were lifted
off his consciousness. He was glad to slip out thus easily. In the
lively jumble of robust, rejoicing realities about him, he seemed to
have emerged from the fringy edges of a daze.