It is a common hypothesis with those who speculate on the probable effects of these disillusionments that Germany may break up again into its component parts. It is pointed out that Germany is, so to speak, a palimpsest, that the broad design of the great black eagle and the imperial crown are but newly painted over a great number of particularisms, and that these particularisms may return. The empire of the Germans may break up again. That I do not believe. The forces that unified Germany lie deeper than the Hohenzollern adventure; print, paper and the spoken word have bound Germany now into one people for all time. None the less those previous crowns and symbols that still show through the paint of the new design may help greatly, as that weakens under the coming stresses, to disillusion men about its necessity. There was, they will be reminded, a Germany before Prussia, before Austria for the matter of that. The empire has been little more than the first German experiment in unity. It is a new-fangled thing that came and may go again--leaving Germany still a nation, still with the sense of a common Fatherland.
Let us consider a little more particularly the nature of the mass of population whose collective action in the years immediately ahead of us we are now attempting to forecast. Its social strata are only very inexactly equivalent to those in the countries of the Pledged Allies. First there are the masses of the people. In England for purposes of edification we keep up the legend of the extreme efficiency of Germany, the high level of German education, and so forth. The truth is that the average elementary education of the common people in Britain is superior to that of Germany, that the domestic efficiency of the British common people is greater, their moral training better, and their personal quality higher. This is shown by a number of quite conclusive facts of which I will instance merely the higher German general death-rate, the higher German infantile death-rate, the altogether disproportionate percentage of crimes of violence in Germany, and the indisputable personal superiority of the British common soldier over his German antagonist. It is only when we get above the level of the masses that the position is reversed. The ratio of public expenditure upon secondary and higher education in Germany as compared with the expenditure upon elementary education is out of all proportion to the British ratio.
Directly we come to the commercial, directive, official, technical and professional classes in Germany, we come to classes far more highly trained, more alert intellectually, more capable of collective action, and more accessible to general ideas, than the less numerous and less important corresponding classes in Britain. This great German middle class is the strength and substance of the new Germany; it has increased proportionally to the classes above and below it, it has developed almost all its characteristics during the last half-century. At its lower fringe it comprehends the skilled and scientifically trained artisans, it supplies the brains of social democracy, and it reaches up to the world of finance and quasi-state enterprise. And it is the "dark horse" in all these speculations.
Hitherto this middle class has been growing almost unawares. It has been so busy coming into existence and growing, there has been so much to do since 1871, that it has had scarcely a moment to think round the general problem of politics at all. It has taken the new empire for granted as a child takes its home for granted, and its state of mind to-day must be rather like that of an intelligent boy who suddenly discovers that his father's picturesque and wonderful speculations have led to his arrest and brought the brokers into the house, and that there is nothing for it but to turn to and take control of the family affairs.
In Germany, the most antiquated and the most modern of European states, the old dynastic Germany of the princes and junkers has lasted on by virtue of exceptional successes and prestige into the world of steel and electricity. But their prestige has paled before the engineering of Krupp; their success evaporates. A new nation awakens to self-consciousness only to find itself betrayed into apparently irreconcilable hostility against the rest of mankind....
What will be the quality of the monarch and court and junkerdom that will face this awaking new Germany?
The monarch will be before very long the present Crown Prince. The Hohenzollerns have at least the merit of living quickly, and the present Emperor draws near his allotted term. He will break a record in his family if he lives another dozen years. So that quite soon after the war this new disillusioned Germany will be contemplating the imperial graces of the present Crown Prince. In every way he is an unattractive and uninspiring figure; he has identified himself completely with that militarism that has brought about the European catastrophe; in repudiating him Germany will repudiate her essential offence against civilisation, and his appears to be the sort of personality that it is a pleasure to repudiate. He or some kindred regent will be the symbol of royalty in Germany through all those years of maximum stress and hardship ahead. Through-out the greater part of Germany the tradition of loyalty to his house is not a century old. And the real German loyalty is racial and national far more than dynastic. It is not the Hohenzollern over all that they sing about; it is Deutschland. (And--as in the case of all imperfectly civilised people--songs of hate for foreigners.) But it needed a decadent young American to sing:
"Thou Prince of Peace,
Thou God of War,"
to the dismal rhetorician of Potsdam. Real emperors reconcile and consolidate peoples, for an empire is not a nation; but the Hohenzollerns have never dared to be anything but sedulously national, "echt Deutsch" and advocates of black-letter. They know the people they have to deal with.
This new substantial middle mass of Germany has never been on friendly terms with the Germany of the court and the landowner. It has inherited a burgerlich tradition and resented even while it tolerated the swagger of the aristocratic officer. It tolerated it because that sort of thing was supposed to be necessary to the national success. But Munich, the comic papers, Herr Harden, Vorwaerts, speak, I think, for the central masses of German life far more truly than any official utterances do. They speak in a voice a little gross, very sensible, blunt, with a kind of heavy humour. That German voice one may not like, but one must needs respect it. It is, at any rate, not bombastic. It is essentially honest. When the imperial eagle comes home with half its feathers out like a crow that has met a bear; when the surviving aristocratic officers reappear with a vastly diminished swagger in the biergartens, I believe that the hitherto acquiescent middle classes and skilled artisan class of German will entirely disappoint those people who expect them to behave either with servility or sentimental loyalty. The great revolutionary impulse of the French was passionate and generous. The revolutionary impulse of Germany may be even more deadly; it may be contemptuous. It may be they will not even drag emperor and nobles down; they will shove them aside....