Nothing can efface this memory, nothing can efface the whole impression of Germany; in retrospect this picture rises clear—the fair aspect and order of the country and the cities, the well-being of the people, their contented faces, their grave adequacy, their kindliness; and, crowning all material prosperity, the feeling for beauty as shown by their gardens, and, better and more important still, the reverent value for their great native poets and musicians, so attentive, so cherishing, seeing to it that the young generation began early its acquaintance with the masterpieces that are Germany's heritage of inspiration.
Such was the splendor of this empire as it unrolled before me through May and June, 1914, that by contrast the state of its two great neighbors, France and England, seemed distressing and unenviable. Paris was shabby and incoherent, London full of unrest. Instead of Germany's order, confusion prevailed in France; instead of Germany's placidity, disturbance prevailed in England; and in both France and England incompetence seemed the chief note. The French face, alike in city or country, was too often a face of worried sadness or revolt; men spoke of political scandals and dissensions petty and unpatriotic in spirit, and a political trial, revealing depths of every sort of baseness and dishonor, filled the newspapers; while in England, besides discord of suffrage and discord of labor, civil war seemed so imminent that no one would have been surprised to hear of it any day.
So that I thought: Suppose a soul, arrived on earth from another world, wholly ignorant of earth, without any mortal ties whatever, were given its choice after a survey of the nations, which it should be born in and belong to? In May, June and July, 1914, my choice would have been, not France, not England, not America, but Germany.
It was on the seventh day of June, 1914, that Frankfurt assembled her school children in the opera house, to further their taste and understanding of Germany's supreme national art. Exactly eleven months later, on May 7, 1915, a German torpedo sank the Lusitania; and the cities of the Rhine celebrated this also for their school children.
VI
The world is in agony. We witness the most terrible catastrophe known to mankind—most terrible, not from its huge size, but because it is a moral catastrophe. Through centuries of suffering and cruelty, guided by religion, we thought we had attained to knowledge of and belief in a public right between nations, and an honorable warfare, if warfare must be. This has been shattered to pieces. No need to investigate further the atrocities at Liège or Louvain. These and more have indeed been amply proved, but what need of proof after the Lusitania school festival? In that holiday we see the feast of Kultur, the Teutonic climax. How came it to pass? Is it the same Germany who gave those two holidays to her school children? The opera in Frankfurt, and this orgy of barbaric blood-lust, guttural with the deep basses of the fathers and shrill with the trebles of their young? Their young, to whom they teach one day the gentle melodies of Lortzing, and to exult in world-assassination on another?
Goethe said—and the words glow with new prophetic light: "Germans are of yesterday; ... a few centuries must still elapse before ... it will be said of them, 'It is long since they were barbarians.'" And again: "National hatred is a peculiar thing. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of Kultur." But how came it to pass? Do the two holidays proceed from the same Kultur, the same Fatherland?
They do; and nothing in the whole story of mankind is more strange than the case of Germany—how Germany through generations has been carefully trained for this wild spring at the throat of Europe that she has made. The Servian assassination has nothing to do with it, save that it accidentally struck the hour. Months and years before that, Germany was crouching for her spring. In one respect the war she has incubated is the old assault of Xerxes, of Alexander, of Napoleon, of every one who has been visited by the dangerous dream of world conquest. Only, never before has the dream been taught to a people on such a scale, not merely because of the vast modern apparatus, but much more because no subjects of any despot have ever been so politically docile and credulous as the Germans.