Germany in Peace Time.
Enough has been cited to give a glimpse of the better Germany in the time of this war. Let us remember, too, what she has been in peace. “After all, in our saner moments we all of us know that the Germans are a great people, with a great part in the world to play. Their boasts about their ‘culture’ are not idle boasts, and, when one comes to think of it, it is rather important to have in our midst a people that cares to boast about its culture. The Englishman is more given to complaining than boasting, and when he does boast it is certainly not about culture. As it seems to me, the Germans excel in two things—simple tenderness of sentiment and the work of patient observation. I am aware that it has for a considerable time been the mode in England to slight German literature. Personally, I consider this one of those temporary poses to which superior persons are liable. Leave out all the great names if you will—Goethe, Schiller, Heine, and the rest—and we still have the folk-songs. A nation that can produce those folk-songs has got unusual gifts for the world. And, of course, we envy the Germans their music. Of all the contemptible utterances that this war has produced (and it has produced a good many) none has been worse than the silly blathering against German music just because it is German. What have Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner got to do with the politics of the present war? Leaving the arts aside, it is quite certain that in any region where careful observation and painstaking thought are required, no one can afford to neglect Germany. Recently I was looking through May’s ‘Guide to the Roman Pottery in the York Museum.’ Among the names of those dealing with the subject of Roman pottery I suppose the best known are those of Déchelette and Dragendorff—the one French, the other German. Among the other references I found fourteen to German publications and four to English, one of the latter being merely a museum catalogue. No one can study philosophy without continual reference to German thought. Even in a subject so English as the study of Shakespeare the work of Gervinus is fundamental, and from the time of Lessing to that of Ten Brink there has been a succession of German commentators. Those of us who have worked at all at science know only too well what we owe to Germany there. It has, indeed, been at times painful to compare the mass of the German output with the comparatively thin stream of English work. Of course, there has been splendid English research, but as a people we are not lovers of knowledge, and we are specially loath to apply it. Again and again our scientific papers have been filled with diatribes against our English neglect of science, and the diatribes were needed. I remember asking a British firm of repute to construct for me a resistance ‘bridge’ of a simple kind. I explained the whole purpose of the apparatus, but when it came back to me the resistance wire was soldered down in two places to broad bands of brass. This, of course, altered the resistance and rendered the apparatus useless. A rudimentary knowledge of electricity would have made such a mistake impossible. Contrast this with the following: When I was a student a lecturer wished to prepare a rather rare compound for some work of his. We both tried for long to prepare a specimen, but failed, probably because the temperature of our furnace was not high enough. We then sent to a German firm of manufacturing chemists, and they prepared it for us at once. I remarked recently to an English scientific chemist, ‘No English firm would have done that.’ ‘Well, if you had pressed them,’ he replied, ‘they would have sent over to —— (a German firm) and then put their own label on the bottle.’ A ‘chemist’ in too many of our works has too often been a lad who has picked up some routine knowledge, but who has no more scientific equipment than a farm labourer. Contrast this with the state of things at the Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik, where as many as sixty trained chemists are employed.
“I have often thought of these things when I have heard manufacturers bewailing German competition. The war has produced many strange intellectual somersaults, and it is curious to notice how many Free Traders are now eager for the destruction, not temporarily, but permanently, of German trade. A few months ago they would have preached in season and out on the advantage to England of receiving cheap goods, they would have extolled German scientific methods, and they would (with every right) have pointed out that a customer who buys forty million pounds’ worth of our goods is scarcely one whom we should wish to destroy. All these facts remain absolutely unaltered by the war. All that has happened is that a half-ashamed jealousy is no longer ashamed, and is masquerading as patriotism so successful as to have misled the majority of our countrymen—for a time. The day of reckoning will come, and we shall not then find it any better than previously to buy dear goods to please the manufacturers. Moreover, our men of business will not have learned scientific methods by the end of the war. A publisher’s circular that I recently received appealed, on patriotic grounds, for the purchase of a book on applied science. I am not very cynical, but I confess that I distrust these trade appeals to patriotism. The true patriot does not advertise his patriotism in order to make money. In this case the work was well known and important, but it was interesting to observe that almost every one of the contributors was German, and that the rest were German-Swiss. Surely, in spite of its horror, there are many things in this contest to make the gods laugh.”[74]