A scrap of paper

by Emile Joseph Dillon

By
Dr. E. J. DILLON

Third Edition.

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
MCMXIV

INTRODUCTORY

“Just for a word—neutrality, a word which in war-time had so often been disregarded—just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going to make war.” Such was the significant comment of the German Chancellor on Great Britain’s determination to uphold the neutrality of Belgium. A scrap of paper! This phrase, applied to a binding treaty, is destined to stick like a Nessus’ shirt to the memory of its author, his imperial inspirer, and their country until such time as the militarism which originated it has been consumed without residue. It is a Satanic sneer hurled with fell purpose into a world of civilized human beings. No such powerful dissolvent of organized society has been devised since men first began to aggregate. The primal source of the inner cohesive force which holds the elements of society together is faith in the plighted word. Destroy that and you have withdrawn the cement from the structure, which will forthwith crumble away. But this prospect does not dismay the Prussian. He is ready to face and adjust it to his needs. He would substitute for this inner cohesion the outer pressure of militarism, which, like the hoops of a barrel, press together the staves. Brutal force, in the form of jackboot tyranny, then, is the amended formula of social life which is to be forced upon Europe and the world. Such, in brief, is the new social gospel of the Hohenzollerns, the last word of Teutonic culture.

This revolutionary doctrine, applied thus simply and undisguisedly to what normal peoples deem the sacredness of treaties, has awakened dormant British emotion to self-consciousness and let loose a storm of indignation here. It startled the quietism of the masses and their self-complacent leaders, whose comforting practice was to refuse to think evil of the Germans, however overwhelming the evidence. The windy folly of these advocati diaboli, from whom the bulk of the British nation derived their misconceptions of the German Empire, worked evils of which we have as yet witnessed only the beginning. Those who, like myself, know the country, its institutions, its language, literature, social life, and national strivings, and who continually warned their countrymen of what was coming, were put out of court as croaking prophets of the evil which we ourselves were charged with stirring up.

It is now clear to the dullest apprehension that the most dismal of those forecasts, the most sinister of those predictions, were terribly real, while the comforting assurances of the ever-ready publicists and politicians, who knew Germany only from books of travel, holiday excursions, or the after-dinner eloquence of members of Anglo-German Leagues, were but dangerous mirages which lulled the nation’s misgivings to slumber. And now the masses have been ungently awakened. The simple declaration of a German statesman of repute, and a man, too, of the highest honesty as this term is understood in his own country, that the most solemn treaty, ratified and relied upon as stronger than fortresses bristling with cannon, is but a scrap of paper, unworthy the notice of an enterprising nation, suddenly drew into the light of Western civilization the new and subversive body of doctrine which the Teutons of Europe had for a generation been conspiring to establish, and would have succeeded in establishing were it not for a single hitch in the execution of their programme. If the combined efforts of peace-loving France, Russia, Great Britain, and Italy had moved the Tsar’s Government to stay its hand and allow Servia to be mutilated, and the Bucharest Treaty to be flung aside as a worthless scrap of paper, or if Austria had been permitted to listen to M. Sazonoff’s request and reduce her demands within the compass of the possible, the realization of the Teutonic plot against non-German Europe would have been begun later on, under much more favourable auspices, and probably worked out to a successful issue. That plot belongs to a category of crimes against the human race which can hardly be more effectively attacked than by plainly stating its objects and the means relied upon to attain them.

The objects of Prussia’s ambition—an ambition shared by every anæmic, bespectacled clerk and able-bodied tram-conductor in the Fatherland—are “cultural,” and the means of achieving them are heavy guns, quick-firers, and millions of ruthless warriors. Real German culture in all its manifestations—scientific, artistic, philosophical, musical, commercial, and military—accepts and champions the new principle and the fresh ideas which are to regenerate the effete social organisms of to-day. According to the theory underlying this grandiose national enterprise, the forces of Christianity are spent. New ichor for the dry veins of decrepit Europe is stored up in German philosophy and poetry. Mediæval art has exhausted the traditional forms, but Teutonism is ready to furnish it with new ones. Music is almost a creation of German genius. Commerce was stagnating in the ruts of old-world use and wont until German enterprise created new markets for it, and infused a new spirit into its trading community. Applied science owes more to German research and ingenuity than to the efforts of all the world besides. And the race thus highly gifted is deserving of a field worthy of its world-regenerating labours. At present it is cooped up in Central Europe with an absurdly small coast-line. Its surplus population has, for lack of colonies, to be dumped down on foreign shores, where it is lost for ever to the Fatherland. For this degrading position, which can no longer be tolerated, there is but one remedy: expansion. But to be effectual it must be expansion combined with Germanization. And the only means of accomplishing this end is for Germany to hack her way through the decrepit ethnic masses that obstruct her path and to impose her higher civilization on the natives. Poland was the first vile body on which this experiment was tried, and it has been found, and authoritatively announced, that the Slavs are but ethnic manure, useful to fertilize the seed-fields of Teutonic culture, but good for little else. The Latin races, too, are degenerates who live on memories and thrive on tolerance. Beef-eating Britons are the incarnation of base hypocrisy and crass self-indulgence, and their Empire, like a hollow tree, still stands only because no storm has yet assailed it. To set youthful, healthy, idealistic Germany in the high places now occupied by those inert masses that once were progressive nations is but to adjust obsolete conditions to the pressing requirements of the present time—to execute the wise decrees of a just God. And in order to bring this task to a satisfactory issue, militarism must reign as the paramount power before culture can ascend the throne. Militarism is a necessity, and unreasoning obedience the condition of its success.

It is easy to think scorn of these arrogant pretensions and to turn away from them to what may seem more urgent and more profitable occupations. And hitherto this has been the attitude towards them of the advanced wing of British progressists, who imitated the Germans in this—that they judged of others’ motives by their own. But the danger cannot be exorcized by contempt or indifference. The forces at the command of the Teuton are stupendous. His army is a numerous, homogeneous, and self-sacrificing nation. His weapons are the most deadly that applied science could invent and the most practised skill could fashion. And these weapons are handled not by amateur or unwilling soldiers, but by fanatics as frenzied as the Moslems, who behold paradise and its houris athwart the grey smoke of the battlefield. For Teutonism is not merely a political system, it is also a religious cult, and its symbol of faith is Deutschland über Alles. Germany above everything, including human and divine laws.

One of the dogmas of this cult resembles that of the invisible Church, and lays it down that the members of this chosen race are far more numerous in the present, as indeed they also were in the past, than the untutored mind is apt to imagine. The greatest artists of mediæval Italy, whom an ignorant world regards as Italian, nay Christ himself, were Germans whose nationality has only just been discovered. That the Dutch, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Swedes and Norwegians, and the recalcitrant British are all sheep strayed from the Teutonic flock, and destined to be brought back by the collies of militarism, is a self-evident axiom. This process of recovery had already begun and was making visible progress. Antwerp was already practically Germanized, and Professor Delbrück, in his reply to one of my articles on German expansion, described it as practically a German port. The elections to the municipality in that flourishing Belgian town were run by the German wealthy residents there. The lace manufactories of Belgium were wholly in German hands. So, too, was the trade in furs. A few years more of peaceful interpenetration would have seen Holland and Belgium linked by a postal and, perhaps, a Customs union with the German Empire.