In the nine years ending 1910, our Fourth of July celebrations cost America in killed, 18,000; in wounded, 35,000; but even that is better than the civic throttling of the German method. It seems to be forgotten that the men who keep the world fresh with their saline vigor, love risks as they love fresh air. They should be curbed, but not strangled!
You read their history, you watch closely their manners, you prowl about among them, in their streets, their shops, their houses, their theatres; you accompany the crowds on a holiday in the trains, in the forests, in the summer resorts, at their concerts or their picnics, in their beer-gardens and restaurants, and you soon see that the orderliness is all forced upon them from without, and not due to their own knowledge of how to take care of themselves.
In a recent volume by a distinguished German prison official he writes that, after a careful study of the figures from 1882 to 1910, he has discovered that one person now living in every twelve in Germany has been convicted of some offence. Doctor Finkelnburg shows that the number of “criminals” in Germany is 3,869,000, of whom 3,060,000 are males, and 809,000 females. Every 43d boy and every 213th girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen has been punished by fine or imprisonment. This does not mean that the Germans are criminal or disorderly, but, on the contrary, it shows how absurdly petty are the violations of the law punished by fine or imprisonment.
Their whole history, from Charlemagne down until the last fifty years, is a series of going to pieces the moment the strong hand of authority is taken away from them. The German, and especially the Prussian policeman, has become the greatest official busybody in the world. No German’s house is his castle. The policeman enters at will and, backed by the authorities, questions the householder about his religion, his servants, the attendance of his children at school, the status of the guests staying in his house, and about many other matters besides. If one of his children by reason of ill health is taught at home, the authorities demand the right to send an inspector every six months to examine him or her, to be sure that the child is properly taught. The policeman is in attendance on the platform at every public meeting, armed with authority to close the meeting if either speeches or discussion seem to him unpatriotic, unlawful, or strife-breeding. Professors, pastors, teachers are all muzzled by the state, and must preach and teach the state orthodoxy or go! A young professor of political economy in Berlin only lately was warned, and has become strangely silent since.
The de-Germanizing of the German abroad is in line with this, and a constant source of annoyance to the powers that be. Buda-Pesth was founded by Germans in 1241, and now not one-tenth of the population is German. As the Franks became French, as the Long Beards became Italians, so the Germans become Americans in America, English in England, Austrian and Bohemian in Austria and Bohemia. It has been a problem to prevent their becoming Poles where the state has settled Germans for the distinct purpose of ousting the Poles.
In China, in South America, and even in Sumatra I have heard German officials tell with indignation of how their compatriots rapidly take the local color, and lose their German habits and customs and point of view.
One of the half dozen best-known bankers in Berlin has lamented to me that he must change his people in South America every few years, as they soon go to pieces there. Army officers came home from China indignant to find their compatriots there speaking English and unwilling even to speak German. Even as long ago as the time of the Thirty Years’ War a forgotten chronicler, Adam Junghaus von der Ohritz, writes: “Further, it is a misfortune to the Germans that they take to imitating like monkeys and fools. As soon as they come among other soldiers, they must have Spanish or other outlandish clothes. If they could babble foreign languages a little, they would associate themselves with Spaniards and Italians.” Wilhelm von Polentz, in his “das Land der Zukunft,” writes: “die Deutsch-Amerikaner sind für die alte Heimat dauernd verloren, politisch ganz und kulturell beinahe vollständig.”
Bismarck knew these people and the present Emperor knows these people, better than do you and I! Bismarck even insisted upon using the German text, and once returned a letter of congratulation from an official body because it was written in the Latin text. Even the Great Elector must have recognized this weakness when he said: “Gedenke dass du bist em Deutscher!” The present Kaiser lends his whole social influence to keep the Germans German. He will have the bill of fare in German, he prefers the dreadful word Mundtuch to napkin. His officers very often demand that the bill of fare in a German hotel shall be presented to them in German and not in French. And they are quite right to do so, and quite right to hang the German world with the sign “Verboten”; quite right to distribute titles and medals and orders, for the more they are uniformed and decorated and ticketed and drilled, and taken care of, the better they like it, and the more contented these people are. Overorganization has brought this about. Their theories have hardened into a veritable imprisonment of the will. They have drifted away from Goethe’s wise saying: “That man alone attains to life and freedom who daily has to conquer them anew.”
Let me refer again just here to the socialist propaganda, which seems to the outsider so strong here in Germany. Even this is far flabbier than it looks, as I have attempted to explain elsewhere. In such strong and out-and-out industrial centres as Essen, Duisburg-Mühlheim, Saarbrücken, and Bochum, where a vigorous fight has been made against socialism, the following are the figures of the last election in 1912 when the socialists largely increased their vote throughout other parts of Germany:
| NATIONALLIBERAL | ZENTRUM | SOCIALDEMOKRAT | |
| Essen | 25,937 | 42,832 | 40,503 |
| Duisburg-Mühlheim | 33,934 | 31,559 | 34,187 |
| Saarbrücken | 25,108 | 24,228 | 4,157 |
| Bochum | 42,257 | 37,650 | 64,833 |