And what the Times said then all England was saying, and not only all England, but all America.
And has Germany escaped a like condemnation? We commonly assume that the Dreyfus case could not be duplicated in Germany. But this is not the opinion of very many Germans themselves. Indeed, just before the Dreyfus case reached its crisis, the Kotze scandal—in its way just as grave as the Dreyfus affair, and revealing a moral condition just as serious—prompted the London Times to declare that "certain features of German civilization are such as to make it difficult for Englishmen to understand how the whole State does not collapse from sheer rottenness." If that could be said of the Kotze affair, what shall be said of the state of things which has been revealed by Maximilien Harden among others?
Need it be said that the writer of these lines does not desire to represent Germans as a whole as more corrupt than their neighbors? But impartial observers are not of opinion, and very many Germans are not of opinion, that there has been either economic, social, or moral advantage to the German people from the victories of 1870 and the state of regimentation which the sequel has imposed. This is surely evidenced by the actual position of affairs in the German Empire, the complex difficulty with which the German people are now struggling, the growing discontent, the growing influence of those elements which are nurtured in discontent, the growth on one side of radical intransigence and on the other of almost feudal autocracy, the failure to effect normally and easily those democratic developments which have been effected in almost every other European State, the danger for the future which such a situation represents, the precariousness of German finance, the relatively small profit which her population as a whole has received from the greatly increased foreign trade—all this, and much more, confirms that view. England has of late seemed to have been affected with the German superstition. With the curious perversity that marks "patriotic" judgments, the whole tendency of the English has been to make comparisons with Germany to the disadvantage of themselves and of other European countries. Yet if Germans themselves are to be believed, much of that superiority which the English see in Germany is as purely non-existent as the phantom German war-balloon to which the British Press devoted serious columns, to the phantom army corps in Epping Forest, to the phantom stories of arms in London cellars, and to the German spy which English patriots see in every Italian waiter.[82]
Despite the hypnotism which German "progress" seems to exercise on the minds of English Jingoes, the German people themselves, as distinct from the small group of Prussian Junkers, are not in the least enamored of it, as is proved by the unparalleled growth of the social-democratic element, which is the negation of military imperialism, and which, as the figures in Prussia prove, receives support not from one class of the population merely, but from the mercantile, industrial, and professional classes as well. The agitation for electoral reform in Prussia shows how acute the conflict has become; on the one side the increasing democratic element showing more and more of a revolutionary tendency, and on the other side the Prussian autocracy showing less and less disposition to yield. Does anyone really believe that the situation will remain there, that the Democratic parties will continue to grow in numbers and be content for ever to be ridden down by the "booted Prussian," and that German democracy will indefinitely accept a situation in which it will be always possible—in the words of the Junker, von Oldenburg, member of the Reichstag—for the German Emperor to say to a Lieutenant, "Take ten men and close the Reichstag"?
What must be the German's appreciation of the value of military victory and militarization when, mainly because of it, he finds himself engaged in a struggle which elsewhere less militarized nations settled a generation since? And what has the English defender of the militarist regimen, who holds the German system up for imitation, to say of it as a school of national discipline, when the Imperial Chancellor himself defends the refusal of democratic suffrage like that obtaining in England on the ground that the Prussian people have not yet acquired those qualities of public discipline which make it workable in England?[83]
Yet what Prussia, in the opinion of the Chancellor, is not yet fit for, Scandinavian nations, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, have fitted themselves for without the aid of military victory and subsequent regimentation. Did not someone once say that the war had made Germany great and Germans small?
When we ascribe so large a measure of Germany's social progress (which no one, so far as I know, is concerned to deny) to the victories and regimentation, why do we conveniently overlook the social progress of the small States which I have just mentioned, where such progress on the material side has certainly been as great as, and on the moral side greater than, in Germany? Why do we overlook the fact that, if Germany has done well in certain social organizations, Scandinavia and Switzerland have done better? And why do we overlook the fact that, if regimentation is of such social value, it has been so completely inoperative in States which are more highly militarized even than Germany—in Spain, Italy, Austria, Turkey, and Russia?
But even assuming—a very large assumption—that regimentation has played the rôle in German progress which English Germano-maniacs would have us believe, is there any justification for supposing that a like process would be in any way adaptable to English conditions social, moral, material, and historical?
The position of Germany since the war of 1870—what it has stood for in the generation since victory, and what it stood for in the generations that followed defeat—furnishes a much-needed lesson as to the outcome of the philosophy of force. Practically all impartial observers of Germany are in agreement with Mr. Harbutt Dawson when he writes as follows:
It is questionable whether unified Germany counts as much to-day as an intellectual and moral agent in the world as when it was little better than a geographical expression.... Germany has at command an apparently inexhaustible reserve of physical and material force, but the real influence and power which it exerts is disproportionately small. The history of civilization is full of proofs that the two things are not synonymous. A nation's mere force is, on ultimate analysis, its sum of brute strength. This force may, indeed, go with intrinsic power, yet such power can never depend permanently on force, and the test is easy to apply.... No one who genuinely admires the best in the German character, and who wishes well to the German people, will seek to minimize the extent of the loss which would appear to have befallen the old national ideals; hence the discontent of the enlightened classes with the political laws under which they live—a discontent often vague and indefinite, the discontent of men who do not know clearly what is wrong or what they want, but feel that a free play is denied them which belongs to the dignity and worth and essence of human personality.