Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

The reader will perhaps look back through these pages to discover a contradiction. He will seem to find evidence that Germany’s position in the world called for just this present Germany, which is a factory town with a garden attached, surrounded by an armed camp. I deny the contradiction. I have tried to analyze and to give the reasons for Germany’s development along these meretricious and disappointing lines, but I am the last to admit that the outcome is satisfactory, or that the rest of the world should look to Germany to point out the way of salvation. A steaming orchid-house is not the place to go to learn to grow the fruits of the earth in their due season for the nourishment of a free people. You will find some brilliantly colored flowers there, in the gay uniforms of the artificial tropics, but they shrink and shrivel in the open air. They have been trained to grow luxuriantly in this stifling atmosphere, but they feed no one, please no one, who will not consent to live in a glass house with them.

Because a people is blindfolded, its preachers and pedagogues gagged, its officials subservient, is all the more reason why they should be easily led, but no reason at all for supposing that they will lead anybody else.

I have said here and there that I have learned much, and that we all have much to learn from Germany. I permit myself to repeat it. She has shown us that the short-cut to the governing of a people by suppression and strangulation results in a dreary development of mediocrity. She has proved again that the only safety in the world for either an individual or a nation is to be loved and respected, and in these days no one respects slavery or loves threats.

From an American point of view, any sacrifice, any war, were better than the domination of the Prussian methods of nation-making. No nation should be by its traditions and its ideals more ready to arm itself, and to keep itself armed if necessary for years, against the possibility of the transference of such methods to the American continent than the United States of North America.

“Theuer ist mir der Freund, doch auch den Feind kann ich nützen,”
Zeigt mir der Freund, was ich kann, lehrt mir der Feind was ich soll,”

writes Schiller.

We Americans have much to learn from both our friends and our enemies. We have both in Germany, and we should cultivate the temper of mind which profits by the encouragement of our friends and the criticism of our foes.