“Well, I’ll be damned—”
“Germany and the German idea are two separate things. You’ve got to beat her thoroughly if you want to get rid of the German conception of the State. Just a stand-off won’t do that. Quite frankly, to me the tragedy to-day is that the German idea of government, the finest modern conception, has got to be stamped out because it is harnessed to this inhuman, bestial, conscienceless Prussianism. It is economically sound and morally wrong.”
“Well, Alan, I don’t think I can follow you there,” I said, warmly. “Perhaps I hate them too much to see any good in them, but—”
“Good? Why, Davy, what are you going to put up against them? Your other civilizations, based on individualism, without responsibility, order, discipline, efficiency? Whatever you may think about it, Germany has a logical conception, worked out to the minutest detail. What have we? A government based on the theory of the consent of the governed. And who governs? Not the people—not the leaders we see—but something which remains in the shadows. We’re plundered, we’re wasteful, we’re inefficient; we don’t even know there is a science of government. Government annoys us. We conceive of the State as a big telephone central, a convenient policeman. It isn’t an ideal; it isn’t even a central idea to express all the future of a great democracy. Why talk of the State when we can’t govern even a single city! No other nation in the world could go on like that without being gobbled up. But we go on because we see no visible danger. David, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us if Germany did win,—just as it would bring us up short if we had the threat of a great civilization on our Mexican frontier.”
“I grant that; but what if Germany doesn’t win?”
“Then it won’t be a question of what we’ve got to do but one of natural evolution. Let’s go back to forces. Wherever you find the greatest force concentrating, there you’ll find the ultimate power. What is a revolution but the shifting of the balance of power from an artificial force to a natural force? When the old order falters, weakens, sickens, it becomes an artificial control; the leadership is imposed and not genuine, and, you can put it down as an axiom that an artificial force is a force whose days are numbered. Society is like an iceberg. Eight ninths of it are under the surface, but when that upper minority dwindles below the line of safety, the submerged mass rises to the sky. We have a new peak but the balance remains the same. That’s all.”
“I see what you’re driving at,” I admitted reluctantly, for his method recalled to me the haunting prophecies of Peter Magnus.
“We’ve had the king idea and the aristocratic idea, and both theoretically were good ideas so long as you had the intelligent despot and the class that had the right to lead; and those ideas were practical ideas, so long as they were concentrated, unified, and efficient. Decay, before revolution, destroyed them. Then you’ve had the rise of the middle class, and remember this in all fairness, Davy, each class has always ruled in its own interest. Now, in America what class or force is there that is unified, concentrated and efficient to carry out its decisions?”