I am afraid neither he nor anybody else can check the wanderings of individuals and peoples which have gone on ever since man discovered that he has two legs with which he can move about. And naturalization, after all, is an easy way of acquiring new and possibly useful citizens. The subjects come willingly, whilst the millions who are made subjects by war and subjugation are sometimes exceedingly troublesome. After all, the aim of all the great kingdoms has been to increase and strengthen the population, and differences of nationality have been treated as but trifling obstacles in the way. If the principle of free nationality which is now stirring the world and inspiring a war of liberation is to triumph, then the liberty won must include the individuals who prefer a chosen to a compulsory political allegiance.
Sometimes the forces of attraction and repulsion create strong ties of sympathy or lead to acts of repudiation which cross frontiers irrespectively of the indications on the barometer of foreign politics. A man may find his spiritual home in the most unexpected place. He may irresistibly be drawn by the currents of philosophy and art to a foreign country.
The customs in his own may drive him to bitter denunciation. No one has said harder things of Germany than Nietzsche. Schopenhauer wished it to be known that he despised the German nation on account of its infinite stupidity, and that he blushed to belong to it. Heine fled from Germany in intellectual despair. “If I were a German,” he wrote, “and I am no German....” His heart was captured by the French. Goethe and Frederick the Great were both profoundly influenced by the French spirit. Voltaire was most useful at the Prussian Court, for he corrected the voluminous literary and political output which his Prussian majesty penned—in French. But there was something more than mere utility in the tie between the philosopher and the monarch. Frederick was not only trying to handle heavy German artillery with light French esprit; his mind craved for the spices of Gallic wit, his thought was ever striving to clothe itself in the form of France. Another “great” German, Catherine II of Russia, also moved within the orbit of the French philosophers.
Admiration of Germany and German ways has found the strongest expression in foreigners,
and the megalomania from which her sons suffer to-day may be traced to such outbursts of adulation. Carlyle, the most representative of pro-German men of letters in the Victorian era, wrote in 1870:
Alone of nations, Prussia seems still to understand something of the art of governing, and of fighting enemies to said art. Germany from of old, has been the peaceablest, most pious, and in the end most valiant and terriblest of nations. Germany ought to be the President of Europe, and will again, it seems, be tried with that office for another five centuries or so.... This is her first lesson poor France is getting. It is probable she will require many such.
This is blasphemy indeed at the present time. Charles Kingsley was no less emphatic in his admiration of Germany. Writing on the Franco-Prussian War to Professor Max Müller, he said:
Accept my loving congratulations, my dear Max, to you and your people. The day which dear Bunsen used to pray, with tears in his eyes, might not come till the German people were ready, has come, and the German people are ready. Verily God is just and rules too; whatever the Press may think to the contrary. My only fear is lest the Germans should think of Paris, which cannot concern them, and turn
their eyes away from that which does concern them, the retaking of Alsace (which is their own), and leaving the Frenchman no foot of the Rhine-bank. To make the Rhine a word not to be mentioned by the French henceforth ought to be the one object of wise Germans, and that alone.... I am full of delight and hope for Germany.