I know that experts of the United States Government believe at least three millions of Slovaks, Greeks, etc., will leave America after the war, taking with them the money they have earned, for investment in new opportunities in the Old Country.
With this view I cannot agree. The soil of the European continent is too poor, wages too small, hours too long, and distaste for the military and caste systems too great, to tempt those who have tasted the equality and the freedom of America. Why to-day an ordinary coal miner in Pennsylvania can earn $5,000 a year—a sum greater than the pay of a Prussian or Austrian general! Why should this miner go back to insult and slavery?
The greatest problem of Germany comes after the war—when these millions of men, trained for four years or more to murder, shall return. It will be hard for them to settle down to regular work, impossible for them to submit again to the iron discipline of German civil life. Will they not, as Bloch predicts, possibly, re-enact the horrors of the French Commune, or even those of the French Revolution?
It is hard to understand why Prussian autocracy does not freely offer what it will be compelled to give after the war—equal suffrage in Prussia, fair representation in the Reichstag—a government responsible to the Reichstag. Is it not better for the Emperor to offer this—following Bismarck's saying that "in Prussia the revolutions are made by the rulers."
And who of all rulers in history seemed to sit more securely on his throne than Nicholas who is now learning from his keepers what a Czar really is?
The Emperor said to me once, "Is it not wonderful how the German people bear their sufferings in this war?" I said I thought it was wonderful. It is that and more,—it is almost a miracle—that a whole nation can so nearly approach this delirium.
The autocratic idea survives in Germany—on November 22, 1917, the Conservative Union of the Province of Brandenburg unanimously adopted the following resolution.
"The Prussian State, fundamentally a people of its Princes, is the foundation on which the German Empire rests.
"Not sovereignty of the people but Kingship by Divine Right is its corner stone.
"We implore our deputies to do their best to prevent the Kingship being debased into a sham Kingship and being replaced by that sovereignty of the people by means of the alteration of the Prussian franchise."