Treitschke’s penetrating eloquence was heard throughout the land. Editors, preachers of religion, schoolmasters, authors, members of the legislative assemblies, high officials, and even ministers of state came to his class-room and went away to carry his ideas into other channels. He inspired the men who did the actual thinking for the nation. All his efforts were expended for what he considered the enhancement of Germany’s position among nations.
In giving him his due we must not overlook his faults. He was narrow in his ideas of international relations. His exaltation of Germany would have left other nations at her mercy. He seems to have had small respect for the principle of live-and-let-live among states. As much as any one in his country he was responsible for the idea that the British are a pack of hypocrites, offering inferior races the Bible with one hand and opium with the other. That they had not a good record with respect to the opium trade is true, but it was sheer narrowness to make it the chief characteristic of a people who have done a great work in behalf of the backward races.
Although Treitschke wrote many pamphlets on topics of current interest, all bearing upon what he considered the destiny of Germany, he was preëminently a historian. It was by telling the story of Germany since the revival of national feeling after the battle of Jena that he wished to serve best the generation in which he lived. For him it was the historian to whom was committed the task of making the citizen realize what place he had in the nation’s complex of duties and hopes.
He came upon the scene when history had become fixed upon the basis of accuracy and detached research. Men like Leopold von Ranke had insisted that history should deal with the cold exploitation of universal laws. For them Treitschke was a bad historian, and they used their influence to prevent his appointment at the University of Berlin. He was a Chauvinist, undoubtedly, and his History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century is a highly colored picture of what he conceived the reader should know about the history of his country. It is a work written to arouse the enthusiasm of the people for their country, rather than to instruct them in the universal laws of human development; and it would be a sad day for the world if all history were written as he wrote this. But it was a powerful appeal to national pride and energy. It played a great part in the formation of the Germany with which we are concerned in this chapter, the striving, self-confident, and aspiring empire that set for itself the task of dominating the European continent.
This chapter is not written to reconcile American readers to the German side of the controversy that now engages the attention of all men. I wish to enable the reader to have a clear view of the people with whom we fight. It is they with whom we must deal in building up the system out of which the future is to be constructed again; and we shall not know how to deal with them if we do not see their point of view and know what they are thinking about.
If in some of their ideals they are superior to other peoples, and if their organization of individuals into the state has some elements of strength not found in other systems, it is not for us to seek to destroy the advantage they have won. It would be better for us to adopt their good points, in order that we might the more surely defeat them on the field of battle. Having won the victory we desire, we should certainly not seek to destroy that which we cannot replace. Live and let live, a principle which Germans have ignored in some important respects, must be recognized after the military ambition of Germany is broken, if we are to have an enduring peace.
CHAPTER VIII
THE FAILURE OF THE OLD EUROPEAN SYSTEM
Much has been written to prove that one side or the other was responsible for the present war. Minute facts, as the words in a dispatch, or the time at which the troops were mobilized, or whether or not a preliminary summons of troops to the colors was in itself an act of mobilization, have become the subjects of bitter debate. Such questions will have to be settled by the historians of the future years: they cannot be discussed here with any profit, since this book is an appeal to the reason of men on each side of the controversy.