I read the other day, in a quotation from a German newspaper, the highly
characteristic remark that Germany having annexed Belgium would soon
re-establish its commerce and prosperity, and that, in particular,
arrangements were already being made for introducing into the new
province the German laws for the protection of workmen.
I am quite content with that paragraph for the purpose of any
controversy about what is called German atrocity. If men I know had not
told me they had themselves seen the bayoneting of a baby; if the
most respectable refugees did not bring with them stories of burning
cottages--yes, and of burning cottagers as well; if doctors did not
report what they do report of the condition of girls in the hospitals;
if there were no facts; if there were no photographs, that one phrase I
have quoted would be quite sufficient to satisfy me that the Prussians
are tyrants; tyrants in a peculiar and almost insane sense which makes
them pre-eminent among the evil princes of the earth. The first and
most striking feature is a stupidity that rises into a sort of ghastly
innocence. The protection of workmen! Some workmen, perhaps, might have
a fancy for being protected from shrapnel; some might be glad to put up
an umbrella that would ward off things dropping from the gentle
Zeppelin in heaven upon the place beneath. Some of these discontented
proletarians have taken the same view as Vandervelde their leader, and
are now energetically engaged in protecting themselves along the line
of the Yser; I am glad to say not altogether without success. It is
probable that nearly all of the Belgian workers would, on the
whole, prefer to be protected against bombs, sabres, burning cities,
starvation, torture, and the treason of wicked kings. In short, it is
probable--it is at least possible, impious as is the idea--that they
would prefer to be protected against Germans and all they represent.
But if a Belgian workman is told that he is not to be protected against
Germans, but actually to be protected by Germans, I think he may be
excused for staring. His first impulse, I imagine, will be to ask,
“Against whom? Are there any worse people to come along?”
But apart from the hellish irony of this humanitarian idea, the question
it raises is really one of solid importance for people whose politics
are more or less like ours. There is a very urgent point in that
question, “Against whom would the Belgian workmen be protected by
the German laws?” And if we pursue it, we shall be enabled to analyse
something of that poison--very largely a Prussian poison--which has long
been working in our own commonwealth, to the enslavement of the weak
and the secret strengthening of the strong. For the Prussian armies
are, pre-eminently, the advance guard of the Servile State. I say this
scientifically, and quite apart from passion or even from preference.
I have no illusions about either Belgium or England. Both have been
stained with the soot of Capitalism and blinded with the smoke of mere
Colonial ambition; both have been caught at a disadvantage in such
modern dirt and disorder; both have come out much better than I should
have expected countries so modern and so industrial to do. But in
England and Belgium there is Capitalism mixed up with a great many other
things, strong things and things that pursue other aims; Clericalism,
for instance, and militant Socialism in Belgium; Trades Unionism and
sport and the remains of real aristocracy in England. But Prussia is
Capitalism; that is, a gradually solidifying slavery; and that majestic
unity with which she moves, dragging all the dumb Germanies after her,
is due to the fact that her Servile State is complete, while ours is
incomplete. There are not mutinies; there are not even mockeries; the
voice of national self-criticism has been extinguished forever. For this
people is already permanently cloven into a higher and a lower class:
in its industry as much as its army. Its employers are, in the strictest
and most sinister sense, captains of industry. Its proletariat is,
in the truest and most pitiable sense, an army of labour. In that
atmosphere masters bear upon them the signs that they are more than men;
and to insult an officer is death.
If anyone ask how this extreme and unmistakable subordination of the
employed to the employers is brought about, we all know the answer.
It is brought about by hunger and hardness of heart, accelerated by a
certain kind of legislation, of which we have had a good deal lately
in England, but which was almost invariably borrowed from Prussia. Mr.
Herbert Samuel’s suggestion that the poor should be able to put their
money in little boxes and not be able to get it out again is a sort
of standing symbol of all the rest. I have forgotten how the poor were
going to benefit eventually by what is for them indistinguishable from
dropping sixpence down a drain. Perhaps they were going to get it back
some day; perhaps when they could produce a hundred coupons out of the
Daily Citizen; perhaps when they got their hair cut; perhaps when they
consented to be inoculated, or trepanned, or circumcised, or something.
Germany is full of this sort of legislation; and if you asked an
innocent German, who honestly believed in it, what it was, he would
answer that it was for the protection of workmen.
And if you asked again “Their protection from what?” you would have
the whole plan and problem of the Servile State plain in front of you.
Whatever notion there is, there is no notion whatever of protecting the
employed person _from his employer_. Much less is there any idea of his
ever being anywhere except under an employer. Whatever the Capitalist
wants he gets. He may have the sense to want washed and well-fed
labourers rather than dirty and feeble ones, and the restrictions may
happen to exist in the form of laws from the Kaiser or by-laws from the
Krupps. But the Kaiser will not offend the Krupps, and the Krupps
will not offend the Kaiser. Laws of this kind, then, do not attempt to
protect workmen against the injustice of the Capitalist as the English
Trade Unions did. They do not attempt to protect workmen against the
injustice of the State as the mediaeval guilds did. Obviously they
cannot protect workmen against the foreign invader--especially when (as
in the comic case of Belgium) they are imposed by the foreign invader.
What then are such laws designed to protect workmen against? Tigers,
rattlesnakes, hyenas?
Oh, my young friends; oh, my Christian brethren, they are designed to
protect this poor person from something which to those of established
rank is more horrid than many hyenas. They are designed, my friends, to
protect a man from himself--from something that the masters of the earth
fear more than famine or war, and which Prussia especially fears as
everything fears that which would certainly be its end. They are meant
to protect a man against himself--that is, they are meant to protect a
man against his manhood.
And if anyone reminds me that there is a Socialist Party in Germany, I
reply that there isn’t.