German Problems and Personalities

by Charles Sarolea

XVI.—The End justifies the Means.

If the one virtue of the State is to be strong and to assert its strength, it follows that the ethics of the State cannot be the ethics of the individual. The ruler of the State is not the head of a monastery or the president of an academy of fine arts. The end must justify the means, and any means may be employed which will add to the strength of the State. It is the glory of Frederick the Great that he has always had the moral courage of brushing away conventions and scruples to achieve his object, and that he has always had the political insight and wisdom of adjusting the means to the end.

XVII.—War as the Vital Principle of Political Life.

Prussia is not, like France, the result of a thousand years of natural growth. It has no definite natural boundaries. The Prussian State is an artificial creation. It has grown and expanded through conquest. It is the Order of the Teutonic Knights, it is the warrior dynasty of the Hohenzollern, who have built up Prussian power. That purely military growth of the Prussian State is made by Treitschke into a universal rule of all political growth. According to him war always was and will remain the master-builder of national life. Other thinkers, like Joseph de Maistre, have glorified war in the name of theology. Treitschke extols it in the name of politics. War not only makes a State: it makes the citizen. The heroic virtues are warlike virtues; they are the outcome of military institutions. It is not war but peace which is the evil. Woe to the nation which allows itself to be deceived by the sentiment and cowardice of pacifists.

XVIII.—The Monarchy as the Ideal Form of Government.

War is the essential activity of the State. But in order to be strong in war, unity and concentration are essential; they are the conditions of victory. That unity may, no doubt, be achieved under any form of government. It may be achieved under a republic, as it was during the wars of the French Revolution. It may be achieved under an aristocracy, as in the case of Great Britain, which is a monarchy only in name, which, in reality, is a Parliamentary oligarchy, and which is always waging some guerilla in some outlying post of empire. But the fact remains that unity can be best achieved under a monarchic form of government, which concentrates all powers into the hands of the responsible monarch. That is why monarchy is the best form of government.

XIX.—The Aristocracy as the Mainstay of the Monarchic State.

A loyal military aristocracy like the Junkers is the mainstay of a national monarchy. An aristocratic constitution of the State is in conformity with the nature of things. Not only all military activities but all social and economic life depends on the distinction of classes, on the existence of different grades corresponding to a difference in natural endowment, in social service. The equality of man not only is an unattainable ideal, it is also an undesirable and a mischievous ideal. Suppress inequality and distinctions and honours and you suppress the main stimulus of human endeavour; you suppress that rich differentiation of social life, that generous rivalry, that noble ambition, which are the conditions of all intensive human activity.

XX.—The French Revolutionary Dogma of Equality.

The greatest danger, therefore, to the monarchic and aristocratic constitution of the State arises from the insidious advance of the French revolutionary dogma of equality. The spirit of envy is undermining the social hierarchy in every country. That mean spirit of democratic envy is as old as the democratic institution itself. Ostracism in the nobler elements of the community is as characteristic of the Greek democracy as of the French. All democracies have resented that Aristides should be called the “Just.” So far it is only the Prussian State which has escaped from the poisonous doctrine of Rousseau. But even in Prussia the progress of the Gospel according to Saint Marx is a disquieting symptom. To defend the prerogatives of the Junkers against the assaults of the Social Democracy must therefore be one of the main political concerns of a patriotic Prussian.