This is the result of secular education everywhere. Freedom of thought, yes, but not freedom of thought any more than freedom of morals, or freedom of manners, or political freedom, in extreme youth; that only makes for anarchy political, mental, and moral.
There is much undigested, not to say indigestible, republicanism about just now in China and in Portugal, for example; just as there are materialism and agnosticism in Germany and in France, not due to super-intellectualism but to juvenile thinking. The Chinese are just as fit for a republic - an actual republic is still a long way off - as are callow German youths, and notoriety-loving French students, for freedom to disbelieve and to destroy. No country can long survive a majority of women teachers in the public schools, together with no Bible and no religious teaching there. I have no prejudices favoring orthodoxy, but I have a fairly wide experience which has given me one article of a creed that I would go to the stake for, and that is that it is of all crimes the worst to give freedom political, moral, or religious to those who are unprepared for it.
Germany’s taste in literature, once so natural and healthy, has become morbid, and Sudermann and Gorky and Oscar Wilde, and the rest of the unhealthy crew who swarm about the morgues, the dissecting-rooms, and the houses of assignation of life, the internuntiata libidinum, the leering conciliatrices of the dark streets, are her favorites now. There is no surer sign of mental ill-health than a taste for lowering literature, an appetite for this self-dissecting, this complacent, self-contemplating form of intellectual exercise.
This is no heated assault on German culture. It is a natural phase of development. Youthful candidates for worldliness all go through this pornocratic stage. “The impudence of the bawd is modesty, compared with that of the convert,” writes the Marquis of Halifax. The German professor and the German bourgeois in their Rake’s Progress are only a little more awkward, a little more heavy-handed, a little coarser in speech, than others, that is all. The period of twenty-five years during which I have known Germany has developed before my eyes the concomitants of vast and rapid industrial and commercial progress, and they are: a love of luxury, a great increase in gambling, a materialistic tone of mind, a wide-spread increase of immorality, and a tendency to send culture to the mint, and to the market-place to be stamped, so that it may be readily exchanged for the means of soft living. These internal changes account to some extent for her restless external policy. A man’s digestion has a good deal to do with the color of the world when he looks at it. There is more yellow in life from biliousness, than from the state of the atmosphere.
Aside from these domestic causes there is no reason why Germany should take a sentimental or pious view of these questions of international amity. Her own history is development by war. “Any war is a good war when it is undertaken to increase the power of the state,” said Frederick the Great. “Nur das Volk wird eine gesicherte Stellung in der Welt haben, das von kriegerischen Geiste erfüllt ist” (“Only that nation will hold a safe place in the world which is imbued with a warlike spirit”) writes Germany’s great military philosopher Clausewitz.
We took Cuba and the Philippines; England took India, Hong Kong, and Egypt; Japan took Korea and southern Manchuria; Italy took Tripoli; France took Fez; Russia took Finland and northern Manchuria; Austria-Hungary took Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Prussia and Germany have a long list, including Silesia, Poland, Hanover, and Alsace-Lorraine. Austria-Hungary tears up the Berlin treaty; France, Germany, and Spain tear up the Algeciras treaty; Italy tears up the treaty of Paris; and it is part of the game that we should all hold up our hands, avert our faces, and thank God that we are not as other men are, when these things are done. The justifications of these actions are all of the most pious and penitent description. We were forced to do so, we say, in order to hasten the bringing in of our own specially patented and exclusive style of the kingdom of heaven, but outside of perhaps India and Egypt, and the Philippines, it would be hard to find to-day any trace of the promised kingdom. Germany, for example, had nine per cent. of Moroccan trade, the total of Moroccan trade with all countries only amounted to $27,500,000 a year, and she was compelled to interfere for the protection of her traders, forsooth! The outcome of the business, after an exciting situation lasting for months, was that Germany got a slice of territory from France, mostly swamps, which reaches from the Congo to the Atlantic Ocean, and reported to be, by her own engineers, uninhabitable.
It is the pleasant formula of polite statesmen and politicians to say, that it is a pity that Germany came into the world competition a hundred years too late, when the best colonies had been parcelled out among the other powers. This is a superficial view of the case, and misses the real point of the present envy, hatred, malice, and uncharitableness. Germany does not want colonies, and has no ability of the proper kind, and no willing and adventurous population to settle them, if she had. Prussia’s dealing with aborigines is a subject for comic opera.
Germany came into the modern world as a dreamer, as a maker of melodies, as a singer of songs, as a sort of post-graduate student in philosophy and in theoretical, and later applied science. She introduced us to classical philology, to modern methods of historical research, to the comparative study of ethnic religions, to daring and scholarly exegesis, to the study of the science of language. She discovered Shakespeare to the English; Eduard Mätzner and Eduard Müller, and German scholars in the study of phonetics, have written our English grammars and etymological dictionaries for us, and helped to lay the foundations for knowledge of our own language. Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, one need not mention more, attempted to pass beyond the bounds of human experience and to formulate laws for the process; Schleiermacher, maintaining that Christian faith is a condition of devout feeling, a fact of inward experience, an object which may be observed and described, had an unbounded influence in America, and many are the ethical discourses I have listened to which owed more to Schleiermacher than to their authors. Humboldt, Liebig, Bunsen, Helmholtz, Johannes Müller, Von Baer, Virchow, Koch, Diesel, even the British and American man in the street, with little interest in such matters, knows some of these names; while Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are symbols of revolt, whose names are flung into an argument by many who only know their names, but who fondly suppose that the one stands for despair and suicide, and the other for the joy and unbridled license of the strong man.
Reckoning by epochs, it was only yesterday that Germany said to the world: “No more of this!”
“Hang up philosophy!
Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,
Displant a town, reverse a prince’s doom,
It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more!”