"My friend, do you know that nearly a quarter of the inhabitants of Belgium are illiterates, as you would put it in English—Unalphabets, as we Germans say? Well, that is true—a quarter of them can neither read nor write. In Germany only a fractional part of one per cent of our people are illiterate to that extent. We have taken Belgium by force of arms and we are never going to give it up. Already it is a province of the German Empire.
"When our lawgivers have followed our soldiers across the expanded frontiers of our Empire; when we have made the German language the language of annexed Belgium; when we have introduced our incomparably superior methods into all departments of Belgian life; when we have taught all the Belgians to speak the German tongue, and have required of them that they do speak it—then these Belgians, as Germans, will be better off than ever they could have been as Belgians. Never fear; we shall know how to handle them.
"With Alsace and Lorraine we were too mild for their own good. With Belgium we shall be stern; but we shall be just. It is the predestined fate of Belgium that she should become a German possession and a German territory. Geography and destiny both point the way for us, and we Germans never turn from the duties intrusted to us by our God and our Kaiser! We mean to teach these lesser peoples before we are through that the individual exists for the good of the State, not, as some of them profess to believe, that the State exists for the good of the individual."
XIII
It never seemed to occur to him that Belgians or Frenchmen or Dutchmen might personally prefer to keep on being Belgians or Frenchmen or Dutchmen, and might have some rights in the matter; indeed might prefer to die rather than live under a system intolerable to human beings reared outside the scope of Prussian influence. So far as I might judge, this never occurred to any of the less eloquent but equally ardent defenders of this peculiar brand of Kultur with whom I talked during that fall in the Rhineland country.
We must have been blind then, my companion and I—yes, and deaf too; for we diagnosed this bigotry as evidences of an egomania, probably confined to a few hundreds or a few thousands among the German-speaking peoples. In the light of what has happened since we all know that the disease affected a whole nation, and was a disease of which, as yet, the frequent upsettings of their original programme and the absolute certainty that the programme itself can never be carried out until Europe and America both are graveyards have not to any very noticeable extent served to operate as a cure.
In those early, optimistic days these paranoiacs conceived of a world that should sometime be altogether Prussianised. Their vision was not bounded by the seas about their own Continent; it extended to other Continents, our own included. That dream is over and done with. What they have yet to learn—and they will only be taught it at the muzzle of guns—is that a civilisation cannot endure when it is half Prussian and half free. It is my understanding that this country, along with ten or twelve others, is now committed to the task of enforcing this lesson upon the consciousness of the only confederation of enemies to a representative form of government now left upon either hemisphere.