To a certain class of German statesmen and philosophers this Court of Public Opinion is a visionary abstraction. A group of distinguished German soldiers, professors, statesmen, and even doctors of divinity, pretending to speak in behalf of the German nation, have consciously or unconsciously attempted to revive in the twentieth century the cynical political morality of the sixteenth.
As Symonds, the historian of the Renaissance, says in his Age of the Despots, Machiavelli was the first in modern times to formulate a theory of government in which the interests of the ruler are alone regarded, which assumes
a separation between statecraft and morality, which recognizes force and fraud among the legitimate means of attaining high political ends, which makes success alone the test of conduct and which presupposes the corruption, baseness, and venality of mankind at large.
Even the age of Cesare Borgia revolted against this philosophy and the name of Machiavelli became a byword. “Am I a Machiavel?” says the host in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the implication of this question indirectly manifests the revolt of the seventeenth century against the sinister philosophy of the great Florentine.
Nothing can be more amazing than that not only leading militarists of Germany but many of its foremost philosophers and teachers have become so intoxicated with the dream of Pan-Germanism that in the utmost sincerity they have espoused and with a certain pride proclaimed the vicious principles of Machiavelli in all their moral nudity. There is an emotional and mystical element in the advanced German thinker, which makes him capable of accepting in full sincerity intellectual and moral absurdities of which the more robust common sense of other nations would be incapable. The advanced German doctrinaire is the “wisest fool in Christendom.” The depth of his learning is generally in the inverse ratio to the shallowness of his common sense.
Nothing better demonstrates this than the present negation by advanced and doubtless sincere German thinkers of the very foundations of public morality and indeed of civilization. They have been led with Nietzsche to revile the Beatitudes and exalt the supremacy of cruelty over mercy. Indeed Treitschke in his lectures on Politik, which have become the gospel of Junkerdom, avowedly based his gospel of force upon the teaching of Machiavelli, for he points out that it was Machiavelli who first clearly saw that the State is power (der Staat ist Macht). Therefore “to care for this power is the highest moral duty of the State” and “of all political weaknesses that of feebleness is the most abominable and despicable; it is the sin against the holy spirit of politics.” He therefore holds that the State as the ultimate good “cannot bind its will for the future over against other States,” and that international treaties are therefore only obligatory “for such time as the State may find to be convenient.”
To enforce the will of the nation contrary to its own solemn promises and to increase its might, war is the appointed means. Both Treitschke and Moltke conceived it as “an ordinance set by God” and “one of the two highest functions” of the State. The doctrine is carried to the blasphemous conclusion that war is an ordinance of a just and merciful God; that, to quote Bernhardi, “it is a biological necessity” and that “the living God will see to it that war shall always recur as a terrible medicine for humanity.” Therefore “might is at once the supreme right and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war,” which gives a “biologically just decision.”
This means that the 42 centimeter howitzer is more moral than a gun of smaller caliber and that the justice of God depends upon the superiority of Krupp to other ordnance manufacturers.
Treitschke tells us, and the statement is quoted by Bernhardi with approval, that “the end all and be all of a state is power, and he who is not man enough to look this truth in the face should not meddle with politics.” To this Bernhardi adds that the State’s highest moral duty is to increase its power and in so doing “the State is the sole judge of the morality of its own action. It is in fact above morality or, in other words whatever is necessary is moral.”