The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

It was not so much what was done for him and for other Americans in Berlin that impressed Otto. It was the country itself—the brightness and neatness of things captivated him. He liked its little gardens with every inch under immaculate cultivation—its tidy forests where the very twigs were saved—its people fitted into their particular niches like so many well-arranged books on a shelf. He liked the sense of men and women being looked after, kept in health, kept in employment, the utmost made out of them—no more letting a bit of human material go to waste than a bit of iron.

Their ways of doing things in business pleased him. There was always somebody that knew everything to be known about a particular thing. There were experts for every feature of the banking business. It was not an inherited rule-of-thumb way of carrying on things, such as he was familiar with at home; it was a thoroughly considered, scientific practice. To be sure, it seemed ponderous to him, but he felt as if it were sure. It had been thought out. Science—science in everything—nothing left to chance—no reliance on luck. He began to take the banking business very seriously indeed, to feel that he could carry home something important and serve not only Sabinsport but the country at large, which at that moment was wallowing in a terrible banking muddle over which his German friends held up their hands in shocked amazement.

As time went on, Otto began to take other things more seriously, and gradually there crept over him a sense of something stupendous going on in men’s thoughts and souls. People were not living for the present in Germany as at home; they were not accepting their place in the world as something fixed; they seemed always to have before them the future, and that future on which their eyes were fixed was something of magnificent if dim proportions. It was something that he finally discovered stirred them to the depths of their being.

“What ails them?” he asked himself, at first. “It is as if they saw things. It isn’t natural.” Slowly he began to understand what they saw, what they felt. It wasn’t a dream; it was a faith that absorbed them—a faith in their own greatness and a conviction that they were soon to be called to prove it to the world, to take their proper place at the head of nations. “They’re crazy,” he told himself at first, “or I am.” But later he began to see with them. Was it not the truth? What nation on earth equaled them—in effective action, in restraint, in fidelity, in valor, in bigness of vision? What other nation was worthy to rule the earth? Certainly not England—she was soft, vain, selfish—her lands in the hands of a few, her people neglected, her government rent by dissensions, her colonies self-governing or ready for revolt. England certainly had lost her sense and her genius for empire.

Not France. France had no dream of empire, no genius for empire; she was content to stay at home. She preferred making things with her hands to making them with machines. She let her people think what they would, say what they would. France had every fault of that futile, impossible thing men called democracy. Certainly not France.

He saw it clearly, finally, as a thing writ on the walls of heaven. The destiny of Germany was to rule the earth. It was right and inevitable that she should do it because she was superior. It was part of her greatness that she saw her destiny, did not shrink from it, dared openly to prepare for it, to educate her people for it.

Her daring thrilled Otto to the very soul. He read Treitschke finally. Her text book. He saw in it a notice to the earth that her master was here, to prepare to receive him. It was an open notice to England, to France, to make way. The conqueror was coming. He did not come in the night. He taught in the open of his approach—marshaled his armies in the open—built his ships in the open.

Otto began to feel an overwhelming contempt for the rest of Europe—that it should not understand what was writ so large before its eyes, that it should touch shoulders with a nation that for years had carried in its heart so wondrous and magnificent an ambition, that had so consistently and frankly prepared to make it real. Time they were put in their place—particularly the two, France and England, that called themselves the best the world has done so far. They were at the end of their string.

His conversion was no half-hearted affair. Like alien converts the world over, he outdid the Germans in the ardor of his faith, in his contempt of opposition, and he felt all this without an instant of waning in loyalty to his own country. As a matter of fact the relations of the United States never entered his mind. The United States had nothing to do with this. Germany had no thought of her. Germany admitted our claim to the Western Hemisphere so far as Otto’s experience went. Germany in South America, Germany in Mexico—of that he saw and knew nothing. His whole mind was aflame with the discovery he had made. It seemed to him like a return to the age of heroes, when men walked grandly and rose to place by great deeds of valor alone.

He had come back to the United States in 1912, but two years were not long enough even to dim the great conception he had caught. Indeed, everything in the country threw into higher relief the superiority of German methods and justified her faith in her destiny.