The Kaiser's use of religion as an adjunct to the possession of absolute power began very early in his reign. Bismarck could teach him nothing, though Bismarck was as decided a Hegelian as he was a Prussian in his idea of the function of the ruler.
Hegel, the learned author of the Philosophy of Right, was Prussian to the core. He was on the side of the rulers, and he hated reforms, or rather, feared reformers, because they might disturb the divinely ordered authority. There must be a dot to the 'i' or it meant nothing in the alphabet. This dot was the King. He was the darling of the Prussian Government and the spokesman of Frederick William III. He loathed the movement in Germany towards democratic reforms, and watched England with distrustful eyes. The teaching of most Hegelians in the Universities of the United States—and the Hegelian idea of the State had made much progress here—was to minimise somewhat the arbitrary and despotic ideas of their favourite Prussian philosopher. No man living has yet understood the full meaning of all parts of his philosophical teachings, but one thing was clear to all men who, like myself, watched the application of Hegelianism to Prussia and to Germany. The State must be supreme.
The Catholics in Germany saw the errors of Hegelianism as applied to the State, but they were not sufficiently enlightened or clever, and they neglected to oppose its progress efficiently. There are various opinions about the activities of the Fathers of the Congregation of Jesus (founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola as a corps d'élite of the counter-reformation) in Germany and in the world in general. Bismarck heartily disapproved of them for the same reasons as Hegel disapproved of them. They taught that Cæsar is not omnipotent, that the human creature has rights which must be respected, and are above the claims of the State. In a word, in Germany, they stood for the one thing that the Prussian monarchs detested—dissent on the part of any subject to their growing assertion of the divine right of kings.
Windthorst formed the Centrum, and opposed Bismarck valiantly, but political considerations Prussianised the Centre, or Catholic party, as they moved 'the enemies of Prussianism,' the Socialists, when the crucial moment arrived, and burned incense to absolute Cæsar. It was not a question of Lutheranism against Catholicism in [Germany] in 1872, not a question of an enlightened philosophy, founded on modern research against obscurantism, as most of my compatriots have until lately thought, but a clean-cut issue between the doctrine of the entire supremacy of the State and the inherent rights of the citizen to the pursuit of happiness, provided he rendered what he owed to Cæsar legitimately. That the victims of the oppression were Jesuits blinded many of us to the motive of the attack. The educational system of the Jesuits had enemies among the Catholics of Germany, too, so that they lost sight of the principle underneath the Falk laws, so dear to Bismarck. Frederick the Great and Catherine of Russia protected the Jesuits, it is true, but they were too absolute to fear them. Besides, as Intellectuals, they were bound to approve of a society, which in the eighteenth century had not lost its reputation for being the most scientific of religious bodies.
The Falk laws were, in the opinion of Bismarck and the disciples of the Kulturkampf, the beginning of the moulding of the Catholic Church in Germany as a subordinate part of the autocratic scheme of government. They had nothing to fear from the Lutherans—they were already under control—and nothing to fear from the unbelieving Intellectuals, of the Universities, for they had already accepted Hegel and his corollaries. The main enemies of the ultra-Kaiserism [were] the Catholic Church and Socialism—Socialism gradually drawing within its circle those men who, under the name of Social Democrats, believed that the Hohenzollern rule meant obscurantist autocracy.
The Socialists, pure and simple, are as great an enemy to democracy as the Pan-Germans. The varying shades of opinion among the Social Democrats,—there are liberals among them of the school of Asquith, and even of the school of Lloyd George, constitutional monarchists with Jeffersonian leanings, Lutherans, Catholics, non-believers, men of various shades of religious opinion are all bent on one thing,—the destruction of the ideals of Government advocated by Hegel and put into practice by the Emperor and his coterie.
Both the Socialist and the Social Democrat came to Copenhagen. They talked; they argued. They were on neutral soil. It was impossible to believe, on their own evidence, that the Socialism of Marx, of Bebel, of the real Socialists in Germany, could remedy any of the evils which existed under imperialistic régime in that country.
The Socialist or the Social Democrat was feared in Germany, until he applied the razor to his throat, or, rather, attempted hari-kari when he voted for war. The Socialists can never explain this away. His prestige, as the apostle of peace and good-will, is gone; he is no longer international; he is out of count as an altruist. The Social Democrat is in a better position; he never claimed all the attributes of universal benignity; he was still feared in Germany, but in that harmless debating society, the Reichstag, with the flower of the German manhood made dumb in the trenches, he could only threaten in vain.
In our country, pure Socialism is misunderstood. It is either cursed with ignorant fury or looked on as merely democracy, a little advanced, and perhaps too individualistic. It ought to be better understood. Socialism means the negation of the individual will; the deprivations of the individual of all the rights our countrymen are fighting for. It is a false Christianity with Christian precepts of good-will, of love of the poor, of equality, fraternity, liberty,—phrases which have, on the lips of the pure Socialist, the value of the same phrases uttered by Robespierre and Marat.
'I find,' said a Berlin Socialist, whom I had invited to meet Ben Tillett, the English Labour Agitator, 'that Danish Socialism is merely Social Democracy. Given a fair amount of good food and comfort, schools, and cheap admittance to the theatres, the Copenhagen Socialists seem to be contented. You may call it "constructive Socialism," but I call it Social Degeneracy. We, following the sacred principles of Marx and Bakounine, different as they were, must destroy before we can construct. In the future, every honest man will drive in his own car, and the best hospitals will not be for those that pay, but for those who cannot pay. Cagliostro said we must crush the lily, meaning the Bourbons; we must crush all that stands in the way of the perfect rule which will make all men equal. We must destroy all governments as they are conducted at present; we have suffered; all restrictive laws must go!'