And this campaign of extermination—worthy of a savage Indian chief—was planned for the most pacific and unaggressive race, the Chinese, for it is sadly true that the one nation which has more than any other been inspired for two thousand years by the spirit of “peace on earth” is the hermit nation, into which until the nineteenth century the light of Christianity never shone.
In a recent article, George Bernard Shaw, the Voltaire of the twentieth century, with the intellectual brilliancy and moral shallowness of the great cynic, attempts to justify Bernhardiism by resort to the unconvincing “et tu quoque” argument. He contends that England also has had its “Bernhardis,” and refers to a few books which he affects to think bear out his argument. That these books show that there have been advocates of militarism in England is undoubtedly true. The present war illustrates that there was need of such literature, for a nation which faced so great a trial as the present, with a standing army that was pitiful in comparison with that of Germany and without any involuntary service law, certainly had need of some literary stimulus to self-preparation. No one quarrels with Bernhardi in his discussions of the problems of war as such. It is only when the soldier ceases to be a strategist and becomes a moralist that the average man with conventional ideas of morality revolts against Bernhardiism. The books to which Mr. Shaw refers can be searched in vain for any passages parallel to those which have been quoted from Treitschke, Bernhardi, and other German writers. The brilliant but erratic George Bernard Shaw cannot find in all English literature any such Machiavelliisms as those of Treitschke and Bernhardi.
Shaw’s whole defense of Germany, betrays his characteristic desire to be clever and audacious without regard to nice considerations of truth. Much as we may admire his intellectual badinage under other circumstances, it may be questioned whether in this supreme tragedy of the world it was fitting for Shaw to daub himself anew with his familiar vermilion and play the intellectual clown.
It was either courage of an extraordinary but unenviable character or else crass stupidity that led Bernhardi to submit to the civilization of the present day such a debasing gospel, for if his brain had not been hopelessly obfuscated by his Pan-Germanic imperialism, he would have seen that not only would this philosophy do his country infinitely more harm than a whole park of artillery but would inevitably carry his memory down to a wondering posterity, like Machiavelli, detestable but, unlike Machiavelli, ridiculous.
Machiavelli gave to his Prince a literary finish that placed his treatise among the classics, while Bernhardi has gained recognition chiefly because his book is a moral anachronism.
One concrete illustration from Bernhardi clearly shows that the sentences above quoted are truly representative of his philosophy, and not unfair excerpts. In explaining that it is the duty of every nation to increase its power and territory without regard for the rights of others, he alludes to the fact that England committed the “unpardonable blunder from her point of view of not supporting the Southern States in the American War of Secession,” and thus forever severing in twain the American Republic. In this striking illustration of applied Bernhardiism, there is no suggestion as to the moral side of such intervention. Nothing is said with respect to the moral question of slavery, or of the obligations of England to a friendly Power. Nothing as to how the best hopes of humanity would have been shattered if the American Republic—that “pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night” to struggling humanity—had been brought to cureless ruin. All these considerations are completely disregarded, and all Bernhardi can see in the situation, as it presented itself to England in 1861, was its opportunity, by a cowardly stab in the back, to remove forever from its path a great and growing nation.
Poor Bernhardi! He thought to serve his royal master. He has simply damned him. As Machiavelli, as the eulogist of the Medicis, simply emphasized their moral nudity, so Bernhardi has shown the world the inner significance of this crude revival of Cæsarism.