Wagner as I Knew Him

by Ferdinand Praeger

And when all who draw breath in our dear German land are united into one great free people, when class prejudices shall have ceased to exist, then do you suppose we have reached our goal? Oh, no; we are just equipped for the beginning. Then will it be our duty to investigate boldly, with all our reasoning power, the cause of misery of our present social status, and determine whether man, the crown of creation, with his high mental abilities and his wonderful physical development, can have been destined by God to be the servile slave of inert base metal. We must decide whether money shall exert such degrading power over the image of God—man—as to render him the despicable slave of the passions of usury and avarice. The war against this existing evil will cause neither tears nor blood. The result of the foregone victory will be a universal conviction that the highest attainable happiness is commonwealth, a state in which as many active men as Mother Earth can supply with food will join in the well-ordered republic, supporting it by a fair exchange of labor, mutually supplying each other’s wants, and contributing to the universal happiness. Society must be in a diseased state when the activity of individuals is restrained and the existing laws imperfectly administered. In the coming contest we shall find that society will be maintained by the physical activity of individuals, and we shall destroy the nebulous notion that money possesses any inherent power. And heaven will help us to discover the true law by which this shall be proved, and dispel the false halo with which the unthinking mind invests this demon money. Then shall we root out the miseries engendered and nourished by public and secret usury, deceptive paper money and fraudulent speculations. This will tend to promote the emancipation of the human race (whilst fulfilling the teachings of Christ, a simple and clear truism which it is ever sought to hide behind the glamour of dogma, once invented to appeal to the feeble understanding of simple-minded barbarians), and to prepare it for a state towards the highest development of which we are now tending with clear vision and reason.

Do you think that you scent in this the teachings of communism?

Are you then so stupid or wicked as to confound a theory so senseless as that of communism with that which is absolutely necessary to the salvation of the human race from its degraded servitude? Are you not capable of perceiving that the very attempt, even though it were allowed, of dividing mathematically the goods of this world, would be a senseless solution of a burning question, but which attempt, fortunately however, in its complete impossibility, carries its own death-warrant. But though communism fails to supply the remedy, will you on that account deny the disease? Have a care! Notwithstanding that we have enjoyed peace for thirty-three years now, what do you see around you? Dejection and pitiful poverty; everywhere the horrid pallor of hunger and want. Look to it while there is yet time and before it becomes too late to act!

Think not to solve the question by the giving of alms; acknowledge at once the inalienable rights of humanity, rights vouchsafed by the Omnipotent, or else you may live to see the day that cruel scorn will be met by vengeance and brute force. Then the wild cry of victory might be that of communism, and although the impossibility of any lengthened duration of its principles as a ruling power can be boldly predicted, yet even the briefest reign of such a thraldom might be sufficient to expunge for a long time to come all the advantages of a civilization of two thousand years old.

Do you believe I threaten? No; I warn! When by our republican efforts we shall have solved this most important problem for the weal of society, and have established the dignity of the freed man, and established his claim to what we consider his rights, shall we then rest satisfied? No; then only are we reinvigorated for our great effort. For when we have succeeded in solving the emancipation question, thereby assisting in the regeneration of society, then will arise a new, free, and active race, then shall we have gained a new mean to aid us towards the attainments of the highest benefits, and then shall we actively disseminate our republican principles.

Then shall we traverse the ocean in our ships, and found here and there a new young Germany, enriching it with the fruits of our achievements, and educating our children in our principles of human rights, so that they may be propagated everywhere. We shall do otherwise than the Spaniards, who made the new world into a papistic slaughter-house; we shall do otherwise than the English, who convert their colonies into huge shops for their own individual profit. Our colonies shall be truly German, and from sunrise to sunset we shall contemplate a beautiful, free Germany, inhabited, as in the mother country, by a free people. The sun of German freedom and German gentleness shall alike warm and elevate Cossack, Frenchmen, Bushmen, and Chinese. You see our republican zeal in this respect has no termination; it pushes on further and further from century to century, to confer happiness on the whole of the human race! Do you call this a Utopian dream? When we once set to work with a good will, and act courageously, then every year shall throw its light on a good deed of progress.

But you ask, will all this be achieved under a monarchy? My answer is that throughout I have persistently kept it in view, but if you have any doubts of such a possibility, then it is you who pronounce the monarchical death-warrant. But if you agree with me, and consider it possible as I realize it, then a republic is the exact and right thing, and we should but have to petition the king to become the first and most genuine republican.

THE QUESTION TO BE SOLVED.

And who is more called upon to be the most genuine republican than the king? Res-publica means the affairs of the people. What individual can be destined more than the king to belong with his whole soul and mind to the people’s affairs? When he has been convinced of this undeniable truth, what is there possible that could induce him to lower himself from his exalted position to become the head of a special and small section only of his people.

However deeply any republican may feel for the general good, he never can emulate the feelings of the king, nor become so genuine a republican, for the king’s anxiety is for his people as a whole, whilst every one of us is, in the nature of things, compelled to divide his attention between private and public affairs. And in what would consist a sacrifice, which it might be supposed the king would have to make in order to effect so grand and noble a change? Can it be considered a sacrifice for a king to see his free citizens no longer subjects? This right has been acknowledged and granted by the new constitution, and he who confirms its justice and adopts it with fidelity, cannot see a sacrifice in the abolition of subjects, and the substitution of “free men.” Would it be possible that a monarch could view the loss of the idle, vapid court attendance, with its surfeit of extinct titles and obsolete offices, as a sacrifice? What a contemptuous notion we should have of one of the most gentle-minded, true-hearted princes of our period, were we to assume that the fulfilment of our wishes entailed a sacrifice on his part, when we feel convinced that even a real sacrifice might with safety be expected from him, and the more so, when it is proved to him that the love of his people depended on the removal of an obstacle. What gives us the right to suppose this? that by our interpretation of the feelings of so exceptional a prince, we are able to infer that he would grant our request when we could not dare act thus with one of our body? It is the spirit of our time, the new state of things, that has grown up, which seems to give to the simplest among us the power of prophecy. There is a decided pressure for a decision. There are two camps amongst the civilized nations of Europe; from one we hear the cry of monarchy; republic, is the cry of the other.