Ten Years Near the German Frontier: A Retrospect and a Warning

by Maurice Francis Egan

It was my business to find out what various Foreign Offices meant, not what they said they meant. 'Of open diplomacy in the full sun, there are few modern examples. Secrecy in diplomacy has become gradually greater than it was a quarter of a century ago, not from mere reticence on the part of ministers, but to a large extent from the decline of interest in foreign affairs.'

The writer of this sentence in the Contemporary Review alluded to England. This lack of interest existed even more in the United States. And then as militarism grew in Europe, one's business was to discover what the Admiralty thought, for in Germany and Austria, even in France, after the Dreyfus scandal, one must be able to know what the military dictators were about. The newspapers had a way of discovering certain facts that Foreign Offices preferred to hide. But the most astute newspaper owing to the necessity of having a fixed political policy and the difficulty of finding men foolish enough or courageous enough to risk life for money, could rarely predict with certainty what Foreign Offices really intended to do. Besides Foreign Offices, outside of Germany, were generally 'opportunists.'

Few diplomatists of my acquaintance were deceived by the Kaiser's professions of peace. That he wanted war seemed incredible, for he had the reputation of counting the cost. He was indiscreet at times, but his 'indiscretions' never led him to the extent of giving away the intentions of the General Staff. That he wanted to turn the Baltic into a German sea was evident. The Swedish 'activist' would calmly inform you that, if this were true, Germany would treat Sweden, and perhaps the other Scandinavian countries, as [Great] Britain treated the United States—the Atlantic, as everybody knew, being a 'British lake' and yet free to the United States!

There was no missing link in the German propaganda in Sweden. Prussia used the Lutheran Church as she had tried to use the German Jesuits and failed. The good commonsense of the Swedish common people alone saved them from making German Kultur an integral part of their religion. When it filtered out that, notwithstanding the close relationship of the Tsaritza of Russia with the German Emperor, the Prussian Camorra had determined to control Russia, to humiliate her, to control her, there were those among the leaders who saw what this meant. They saw Finland and the Aaland Islands Germanised, and their resources, the product of their mines and of their factories, as much Germany's as Krupp's output. The bourgeoisie and the common people saw no future glory or profit in this.

The knowledge of it filtered through; the Lutheran pastor, with his dislike of democracy, his love for the autocratic monarchy, 'all power comes from God,' I heard him quote, without adding that St. Paul did not say that 'All rulers come from God,'—could not convince the hard-thinking, hard-working Swede that religion meant subjugation to a foreign power. The Lutheran Church, which, like all national churches, was hampered by the State, could give no intelligent answer to his doubts, so he turned to the Social Democrats. The governing class in Sweden seemed to take no cognisance of the growth of democracy in the hearts of the people. Germany was alive to it and feared it; but, in Sweden, rather than admit it and its practical effects, the rulers ignored it, were shocked by the great tide of emigration to the United States, yet careless of its effects on Swedish popular opinion.

On one occasion in Copenhagen, King Gustav asked me why so many of his people emigrated to my country. The King of Sweden is a very serious man, not easily influenced or distracted from any subject that interests him, and the good of his people interested him very much. It was a difficult question to answer, for comparisons were always odious.

'I can better tell you, sir, why your subjects prefer to remain at home:—when they get good land cheap, and when they see the chance of rising beyond their fathers' position in the social scale.'

He began to speak, but etiquette demanded a move. When I met him again he returned to the subject. It was better that he should talk, and he talked well. It became evident to me that there was little good agricultural land in Sweden to give away, and the division between the classes was not so impassable as I had believed. He made that clear.

The [Social] Democrat in Sweden wants an equal opportunity, no wars to be declared by the governing classes, and the abolition of the monarchy. He is not concerned greatly with the Central Powers or the Entente. He was glad to see the Hohenzollerns displaced, but he is German in the sense that he is affiliated with the German Social Democrats who, he believes, were forced to deny their principles temporarily or they would have been thrown to the lions; and as, above all things, he prizes a moderate amount of material comfort for himself and his family, he will not go out of his way to be martyred; but even he was the victim of modified German propaganda; he was too patriotic to accept it all.

Of late, as we know, the Liberal Party has gained strength, and the designs of a small activist military coterie were frustrated by a series of circumstances, of which the Luxburg revelations were not the least; but the main reason was the coquetting of the Government with Germany, one of the signs of which was that the Allied blockade was not treated as a fact, while the mythical blockade by Germany was accepted as really existing.