“You mean undisciplined?”
Yes, it was perhaps undisciplined he meant.
Oswald said that as a foreigner he was most struck by the tremendous air of order in north Germany. The Germans were orderly by nature. The admission proved an attractive gambit.
The young German questioned Oswald’s view that the Germans were naturally orderly. Hard necessity had made them so. They had had to discipline themselves, they had been obliged to develop a Kultur—encircled by enemies. Now their Kultur was becoming a second nature. Every nation, he supposed, brought its present to mankind. Germany’s was Order, System, the lesson of Obedience that would constantly make her more powerful. The Germans were perforce a thorough people. Thorough in all they did. Although they had come late into modern industrialism they had already developed social and economic organization far beyond that of any other people. Nicht wahr? Their work was becoming necessary to the rest of mankind. In Russia, for example, in Turkey, in Italy, in South America, it was more and more the German who organized, developed, led. “Though we are fenced round,” he said, “still—we break out.”
There was something familiar and yet novel in all this to Oswald. It was like his first sensation upon reading Shakespeare in German. It was something very familiar—in an unfamiliar idiom. Then he recognized it. This was exactly his own Imperialism—Teutonized. The same assertion of an educational mission....
“Everywhere we go,” said the young German, “our superior science, our higher education, our better method prevails. Even in your India——”
He smiled and left that sentence unfinished.
“But your militarism, your sabre rule here at home; this Zabern business; isn’t that a little incompatible with this idea of Germany as a great civilizing influence permeating the world?”
“Not at all,” said the young German, with the readiness of a word-perfect actor. “Behind our missionaries of order we must have ready the good German sword.”
“But isn’t the argument of force apt to be a little—decivilizing?”