We were already politicians to a man in those days, and the Englishman Pitt was map-maker, by special warrant, to all Europe.
When the Prussians were serfs politically, our House of Representatives, in 1796, debated whether to insert in their reply to the President’s speech the remark that “this nation is the freest and most enlightened in the world.” It is true that this was at the time when Europe was producing Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Mozart, Haydn, Herschel, and about ready to introduce Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Heine, Balzac, Beethoven, and Cuvier; when Turner was painting, Watt building the steam-engine, Napoleon in command of the French armies, and Nelson of the British fleet; but this bombastic babble of ours harmed nobody then, and only serves to show what a number of intellectual serfs must have been members of that particular House of Representatives.
We have not overcome this habit of slapdash comparative criticism, for only the other day a distinguished American inventor left Berlin with these words as his final message: “We have nothing to learn from Germany.” But in the nineteenth century, where does the American of sober intelligence, if Lincoln be omitted, find a match for Bismarck as a statesman, Heine as a wit and song-writer, Wagner, Brahms, and Beethoven as musicians, Goethe as a man of letters and poet, the still living influence of Lessing and Winckelmann as critics, Fichte as a scholarly patriot, Hegel and Kant as philosophers, von Humboldt, Liebig, Helmholtz, Bunsen, and Haeckel as scientists, Moltke and Roon as soldiers, Ranke and Mommsen as historians, Auerbach, Spielhagen, Sudermann, Freytag, “Fritz” Reuter, and Hauptmann as novelists and dramatists, Krupp and Borsig as manufacturers, and the Rothschilds as bankers? Lincoln, Lee, Sherman, Jackson, and Grant may equal these men in their own departments, but aside from them our only superiority, and a very questionable superiority it is, lies in our trust-and-tariff-incubated millionaires. Let us try to see straight, if only that we may learn and profit by the superiority of others.
These explanations that I have given, historical, political, external, and internal, offer reasons worth pondering both why we do not understand Germany’s huge armament and why Germany looks upon it as a necessity.
However much the expenditure on fleet and army may be disguised, the burden is colossal. In the year 1878 the net expenditure, ordinary and extraordinary, for purposes of defence, for army and navy and all other military purposes whatsoever including pensions, amounted to 452,000,000 marks; in 1888, to 660,000,000 marks; in 1898, to 882,000,000 marks; and in 1908, to 1,481,000,000 marks.
The total expenses, net, of the empire in 1908 were 1,735,000,000 marks, showing that only 254,000,000 marks out of the grand total of 1,735,000,000 were spent for other than military purposes. As the army and navy now stand at a peace strength of some 700,000 men, and as these men are all in the prime of their working power, the loss in wages and in productive work may be put very conservatively at 600,000,000 marks, which brings the cost of the support of the military establishment of Germany up to 2,000,000,000 marks and more per annum, or $500,000,000.
Many Americans were dismayed when our total national expenditure reached the $1,000,000,000 point, and the Congress voting this expenditure was nicknamed the “Billion-dollar Congress.” What would we say of an expenditure of half a billion dollars for defence alone! With what admiration, too, must we regard 65,000,000 people, living in an area one quarter smaller than Texas, on a by-no-means rich or fertile soil, who can bear cheerfully the burden, each year, of half our total national expenditure, merely on the military and naval barricade which enables them to toil in peace and security.
Humanity has, indeed, made but a poor zigzag progress from the gorilla; Christianity, just now engaged in blessing the rival banners of warriors setting out for one another’s throats, has failed ignominiously to bring the wolf in man to baptism, when the central state of Christian Europe must arm to the teeth one in every eighteen of her adult male inhabitants, and spend half a billion dollars a year, to protect herself from assault and plunder.
If the hairy, skin-clad cave-dwellers, or the man who left us the Neanderthal skull, could have a look at us now, here in Berlin, in many ways the centre of the most enlightened people in the world, they would undoubtedly go mad trying to understand what we mean by the word “progress.” And yet we smile indulgently at the poor farmers in Afghanistan who till their fields with a rifle slung across their shoulders. What is Germany doing but that! And an enormously heavy rifle it is, costing just seven times as much as all other national expenditures together; in short, it costs seven marks of soldier to protect every one mark of plough. I admit frankly the horror and the absurdity of all this; but as an argument for disarmament, “it does not lie,” as the lawyers phrase it. It is a criticism, and an unanswerable one, of our failure as human beings to enthrone reason and to tame our passions; but it is a veritable call to arms to protect ourselves, not a reason for not doing so. Let the international gluttons overeat themselves till they are seriously ill; but it would be madness to starve ourselves in the meantime, and yet that is the grotesque logic of certain of our preachers of disarmament.
At the moment of writing there are 1,000,000 men at each other’s throats in the Balkans, there is a revolution in Mexico, and incipient anarchy in Central America; as an emollient to this, Great Britain is about to present a bust of the late King Edward to the Peace Palace at the Hague! I can imagine myself saying “Pretty pussy, nice pussy,” to the wild-cats I have shot in Nebraska and Dakota, but I should not be here if I had; and however small my value to the world I live in, I estimate it as worth at least a ton of wild-cats.