Ben Tillett could not come to luncheon that day, so we missed a tilt and much instruction. The European Socialist's only excuse for existence is that he has suffered, and he has suffered so much that his sufferings must cry to God for justice. As to his methods, they are not detestable. They are so reasonable, so Christian, that some of us lose sight of his principles in admiring them. The Kaiser has borrowed some of the best of the Socialistic methods in the organisation of his superbly organised Empire, and that makes Germany strong. But sympathy with the Socialists anywhere is misplaced. Their principles are as destructive as their methods are admirable. Their essential article of faith is that the State, named the Socialistic aggregation, shall be supreme and absolute.
As to the other enemies of despotism in Germany, the Jesuits, they were downed simply because Bismarck and the Hegelian Ideal would not tolerate them. They exalted, as Hegel said, the virtue of resignation, of continency, of obedience, above the great old Pagan virtues, which ought to distinguish a Teuton. The Jesuits, German citizens, few in number, apparently having no powerful friends in Europe or the world, were cast out, as the War Lord would have cast out the Socialist if he had dared. But the Socialists were a growing power; they had shown that they, like the unjust steward in the parable, know how to make friends of the Mammon of unrighteousness.
The Jesuits went; the Catholic party, the Centre was placated by the request of Germany to have the Pope arbitrate the affair of the Caroline Islands and by the colonial policy of Bismarck in 1888 in supporting the work of Cardinal Lavigerie in Africa. The Catholic population of Germany, more than one-third of the whole, accepted the dictum that the State had the right to exile German citizens because they disagreed with the Government as to the freedom of the human conscience. However, as the Catholic Germans were divided in sentiment as to the value of the Jesuit system of education, which in this country seems to be very plastic, they were at last fooled by the Centrum, their party, into the acceptance of a compromise.
To Copenhagen, there came, after the opening of the war, an old priest, who had been caught in the net in Belgium; 'That Christians should forgive such horrors as the Germans commit! Why do not the Christian Germans protest? I confessed a German Colonel, a Catholic, who had lain a day and a night in a field outside a Belgian town. He was dying when some of your Americans found him, and brought him to me. "I suffered horrors during the night," he said, "horrors almost unbearable. I groaned many times; I heard the voices of men passing; these men heard me." "There is a wounded man," one said, and they came to me. "He's a German," the other said, "qu'il crève" (let him die). And they passed on. "This," I thought, in my agony, "this, in a Christian land where the story of the Good Samaritan is read from the pulpits; yet they leave me to die. But when I remembered, Father, the atrocities for which I had been obliged to shoot ten of my own soldiers, I understood why they had passed me by."' The good priest, who had many friends in Germany, repeated over and over again: 'Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad; the Catholics in Germany must be mad!'
Bismarck had used Falk and the Liberals to divide and control. He later found it necessary to placate Windthorst and the Centrum, then a 'confessional,' or religious party. It has changed since that time; it is now, like the Social Democratic block, made up of persons of various shades of religious opinion, but having similar political ideas. It represents a determination not to allow the State to be absolute, and, no doubt, if the United States had realised its position, it might have been strengthened by intelligent propaganda to be of use in breaking the Prussian autocracy. But hitherto even travelled Americans have regarded it as a remnant of the Middle Ages, and hopelessly reactionary. It was part of the Kaiser's policy to make the rest of the world think so, for he had adopted and adapted this Bismarckian chart while throwing the pilot of many stormy seas overboard. Bismarck lived to see the heritage of despotism, which he had destined for his oldest son, seized by a young monarch, whose capabilities he had underrated. Then, the Danes say, he uttered the sneer, 'I will freshen the Hohenzollern blood with that of Struense!'
The German propaganda for controlling the Church in the United States had been well thought out in 1866. The emigrants from Germany, just after 1848, were not open to the influence of Prussian ideas; they had had more than sufficient of them, but when the great crowd of Germans came in later, it was time to inject the proper spirit of Prussianism into their veins.
It is well known that the Emperor William had his eyes on the Vatican. He was wise enough to see that if the Catholic Church lost in one place, she was certain to gain in another; it was not necessary for him to read Macaulay's eloquent passage on the Papacy, as most statesmen who speak English do. But his indiscretions in speech and writing, whether premeditated or not, for the Zeitgeist and the orthodox Lutherans must be propitiated—were constantly nullifying his plans.
As to the spiritual essence of the Catholic Church, the emperor did not recognise it. Papal Rome was dangerous to him as long as it remained independent; he coquetted with Harnack and with the most advanced of the higher critics who whittled the Bible into a pipestem. How he squared himself with the orthodox Lutherans, apparently nearly two-thirds of the population, can only be shown by his constant allusions to the Prussian God. As a State Church, yielding obedience almost entirely to the governing power of the country, he had little fear of Lutheranism in its varying shades of opinion. The Jews he evidently always distrusted. He regarded them as Internationalists and not to be recognised until they became of the State Church; then they might aspire, for certain considerations, to be rath and even to wear the precious von.
The emperor wanted control of the Vatican. He knows history (at least we thought so in Copenhagen), and he was sympathetic with his ancestors in all their quarrels with the Holy See on the subject of the investitures; the emperor had wisely foreseen that difficulties of the same kind between the Vatican and himself might easily break out, were not the Vatican modernised or controlled. He knew that the claims of the Popes to dethrone rulers could never be revived since they were not inherent in the Papacy, but only admitted by the consent of Christendom, which had ceased to exist as a political entity; but the question of the right of a lay emperor to control the policy of the Holy Father in matters of the religious education, marriage, church discipline of Catholics might at any time arise. He knew the non possumus of Rome too well to believe that in a spiritual crisis she could be moved by the threats of any ruler. If His Imperial Majesty could have forced the principle of some of his ancestors that the religion of a sovereign must be that of his subjects, the question might be settled. If he could have arranged the religion of his subjects as easily as he settled the question as to the authenticity of the Flora of Lucas in Berlin in favour of Director Bode, how clear the way would have been! As it was, he knew too well what he might expect from Rome in a crisis where he, following the Prussian Zeitgeist, might wish to infringe on the spiritual prerogatives. To understand the world every European diplomatist of experience knows the Vatican must not be ignored, and, while the War Lord, the future emperor of the world, hated to acknowledge this, he was compelled to do it. The Vatican, that had nullified the May laws and defeated Falk, their sponsor, might give the emperor trouble at any time. Catholics of the higher classes all over Europe were ceasing to be Royalists. The Pope, Leo XIII., had even accepted the French Republic, and for the part of Cardinal Rampolla and of Archbishop Ireland in this the Kaiser hid his rancour. He must be absolute as far as the right of his family and those of the hereditary succession went, and quite as absolute in his control over such laws as were for the increase of the Kultur of his people.
At one time, since the present war opened, it was rumoured at Copenhagen that plural marriages were to be allowed, to increase the population of a nation so rapidly being depleted. I was astonished to hear a German Lutheran pastor—he was speaking personally, and not for his church—say that there was nothing against this in the teachings of Luther or Melanchthon. He quoted the affair of a Landgraf of Hesse in the sixteenth century.