The great majority of people who write or speak of Germany applaud this situation; let me frankly say, what everybody will be saying in twenty-five years, I deplore it. It is a purely artificial, incompetent, and dreary solution. Even Hamlet were better than Shylock.
Fortunately there is also a large and increasing class in Germany who distrust the situation. They point to the fact that technical education is producing an army of dingy artisans, who turn out the cheap and nasty by the million, an education which chokes idealism and increases the growing flippancy in matters of faith and morals; they sneer, and well they may, at the manufactured art, the carpenter’s Gothic architecture, the sickly literature, the decaying interest in scholarship; they find fewer and fewer candidates for exploration and colonization; they rankle under the series of diplomatic ineptitudes since Bismarck; they see France, Russia, and England antagonized and leagued against them, and their own allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy, in a confused state of squabble with their neighbors; they are nervous and disquieted by the financial and industrial conditions; they condemn whole-heartedly the political caste system by which much of the best material in Germany is barred from the councils and the diplomatic and executive activities of the nation; there are not a few who would welcome an inconclusive war that would, they think, put an end to this system, and make the ruler and the officials responsible to the people; they wish to open the doors of this governmental, legislative, educational, industrial hot-house, and give the nation a chance to grow naturally in the open air.
The policy of making other people afraid of you must have an end, the policy of making others respect and like you can have no end. There is no question which is the natural law of national development. Neither for the individual nor for a nation is it wholesome to increase antagonisms and to lessen the conciliatory points of contact with the world.
Many of the weaknesses, much of the strength of Germany are artificial. They have not grown, they have been forced. The very barrenness of the soil, the ring of enemies, the soft moral and social texture of the population, have, so their little knot of rulers think, made necessary these harsh, artificial forcing methods.
The outstanding proof of the artificiality of this civilization is its powerlessness to propagate. Germans transplanted from their hothouse civilization to other countries cease to be Germans; and nowhere in the world outside Germany is German civilization imitated, liked, or adopted. The German is nonplussed to find the Pole in the East, the Frenchman in the West, the Dane in the North, scoffing at his alte Kultur, as he calls it, and he is irritated beyond measure by the German from America, who returns to the Vaterland to criticise, to sneer, and to thank God that he is an American, not a German citizen. Germans become English citizens, no Englishmen become Germans; millions of Germans have become Americans, no Americans become Germans. No other population would be amenable to the Prussian methods that have made Germany, nor is there anywhere in the world a people demanding Prussian methods, while there are millions under the Prussian yoke who hate it.
The German rhetoric to the effect that Germany is to save the world by Teutonizing the world, is laughable. Prussia is the ventriloquist behind this half-hearted boast.
Werther, and Faust, and Lohengrin, are far more real than those scarecrows autocracy, bureaucracy, and militarism, triplets of straw, premature births, not destined to live, of which Germany boasts to-day as the most precocious children in the world. They are just that, precocious children, teaching the pallid religion of dependence upon the state and enforcing the anarchical morality of man’s despair of himself. Our descendants will have Werther and Faust and Lohengrin, as the companions of their dreams at least, when that autocracy shall have been blown to the winds, when that bureaucracy shall have dried up and wasted away, when that exaggerated militarism shall be but bleaching bones and dust.
Who has not lived in Germany as a house of dreams, seen the Valkyrie race by, heard the swan song, wept with Werther and with Marguerite, smiled cynically with Mephistopheles, languished with the Palm Tree and the Pine of Heine; who has not sat at the feet of Germany as a philosopher, and traced the very fissures of his own brain in following thinking into thought; but who in all the world longs for this new Germany of the barracks, the corporal and the pedler? Germania as a malicious vestal clad in horrid armor and making mischief in the world is a very present danger; Germania with a torch lighting the world to salvation is a phantom, a ghost, seen by hasty and nervous observers, who rush out to proclaim an adventure that may excite a passing interest in themselves. Her methods to-day are solution by suffocation; no wonder those of us who loved her in our youth see in her a ghost to-day. I am thankful that I was her pupil when she had other things to teach, when she wore other robes, when she was modest, and not snatching at the trident of Neptune, nor clutching at the casque of Mars.
“Wir wissen zu viel, wir wollen zu wenig,” became the national complaint, and Germany has attempted to transform herself. She has succeeded in the transformation, but the transformation is not a success. Even that learned English friend of Germany, Lord Haldane, does not see, or will not see, that a people thinking themselves into action, instead of developing into action naturally, through action, must suffer from the artificiality of the process. Lord Haldane applauds their thought-out organization in industrial, commercial, and military matters, but he fails to mention the squandering of individual capacity and energy that has resulted in Germany’s growing dependence upon a wooden bureaucracy. Organization is only good as a means; it is stupefying as an end. Germany has organized herself into an organization, and is the most over-governed country in the world. What every democracy of free men wants is not as much, but as little, organization as possible compatible with economical administration of industry, the army, the navy, and the affairs of the state. You can think out a game of chess, but you cannot think out life ahead of the living of it without cramping it and finally killing it. Life is to live, not to think, after all. Neither a nation nor an individual has ever thought out the way to power. This is where the metaphysician invariably fails when he mistakes thinking for living, when he mistakes organization, which can never be more than a mould for life, for life itself. To plan an army is not to produce one, however good the plan; even to plan a campaign, once you have an army, is to court disaster unless there is a living man to thrust the plan aside when the emergencies arise that make up the whole of life, but have nothing to do with organization.
If all men were tailors, or lawyers, or farmers, or miners, then we could think out an organization into which they would fit, but unfortunately for the metaphysician, all men are not categories; all men are men! In like manner, if all men were cases, then government by lawyers would be successful, but men and women are neither categories nor cases. It is purely fantastic, the mere reasoned confusion of the philosopher, to point to Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel and their successors as the originators of Germany’s progress. If Germany had developed along those lines, she would be something quite different from what she is. The Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and Bismarck made Germany, and her philosophers and pedants are only responsible for the softness that made it possible. Metaphysicians and lawyers have their place, but they will inevitably ruin any people whom they are permitted to govern.