The Audacious War

by Clarence W. Barron

While to the outside world steadily proclaiming peace, the Kaiser was as steadily inculcating war and the principles of war into every avenue of German thought and philosophy.

The Germans are nothing if not logical and scientific. They must therefore find a reason in philosophy and in the facts of history for their national programme. Those who found these reasons and logically set them forth were hailed as the great philosophers and educators of Germany. The logic was simple. It was that all history and all progress had been made by war; that peace-loving races decayed, and finally perished, and their places were rightfully taken by the younger, braver, sturdier, and hardier fighting races.

"Let your superiority be an acceptance of hardship." "Die at the right time." "Be hard." "What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that resistance is being overcome." Nietzsche thus talked the principles of this philosophy; a something entirely apart from the principles of the Christian religion, but an absolutely philosophical, modern paganism; a worship of power, the assertions of one's individual and national self—"The Will to Power."

Treitschke taught it to the youth of Germany as applied to war,—not the necessity for defense but the justice and the righteousness of aggressive warfare. The Emperor and his court hailed these teachings with great acclaim. Chamberlain, an Englishman, printed a book to show that all good things were German; that the great Italian art-workers were German; that Christ himself was of German origin.

The teachings of Christ were repudiated by Germany, but His greatness in world leadership must be claimed for Germany. Had not all the poets given Him the German countenance and complexion, even light hair and blue eyes? The German Emperor bought presentation copies of this book by the thousand.

If you think the picture is over-drawn, get a copy of Chamberlain's
"Foundations of the Nineteenth-Century Civilization."

There are those who acclaim that all these teachings were never meant for war; that the Germans, outside of Prussia, being a phlegmatic, home-loving, non-military people, needed to have their patriotism stimulated with "war talk" and national ambitions.

Now there are those who see that it was all part of a cunning propaganda for a world-conquest; that Germany was cultivated industrially and financially to give base for military operations.

But most carefully have the business men of Germany been excluded from the war councils. I asked one of the best-informed men in the diplomatic cycles of Europe, whose business all his life has been to travel from country to country studying the languages, thought, and customs of all people, west of Asia and north of Africa: "Are the German bankers and business men to have no say in Berlin as to peace and war or the military policy of the empire?" His response was emphatic: "Not one word; they would no more be allowed expression of opinion in the inner councils of military Germany than would a rank foreigner from the farthest part of the earth. Still in Germany is the business of trade apart from the business of government."

The world may now see that the business of Germany was war from the beginning under Kaiser Wilhelm II, and that Germany was to be made great on land and sea by the sword of war hacking the way for German commerce, German tariffs, and German commercialism. The old feudal idea of trade expanded and supported by a war lord has been the idea of Germany since the pilot, Bismarck, was dropped by the young Emperor from the ship of state. War for aggression, war for business, war for German expansion, has been the scheme. That these plans were interrupted and the war precipitated sooner than expected was most fortunate for American civilization and all civilization, west of Germany.