Yet they have developed certain characteristic qualities in their social and political life, which distinguish them sharply from their western neighbours. History, which has deprived them, until recently, of a wider citizenship, has left them timid, docile, dreamy and unpractical in just that sphere of action where Englishmen have learnt for centuries to think and to act for themselves. Patriotism with Englishmen is an instinct. We do not much care to wave flags or make speeches or sing songs about it: we assume it as the permanent background of our national life and our national consciousness. With the Germans this is not so. In Germany, partly owing to German history, partly owing to the constitution of the German mind, patriotism is not an instinct but an idea. Now ideas do not grow up in men's minds by a natural process. They have to be implanted. The Germans have needed to be taught to be patriotic. The makers of German patriotism a century ago were teachers and philosophers. They did not simply appeal to their patriotic instincts, as Englishmen would have done: they argued the point and proved that Germany was worth fighting for: they founded a school of patriotic German philosophy. There are few more curious documents in history, or more instructive for the light they shed on future events, than the famous Speeches to the German Nation addressed to his fellow-countrymen by the philosopher Fichte in 1808, when his country was under the heel of Napoleon. They are not speeches at all, but philosophical lucubrations, discussing in abstract terms the whole subject of the nature of patriotism and of Germany's right to exist as a nation. One argument, for instance, on which he lays great stress, is that Germany is marked out to be a great political power because of the peculiar excellence of the German language, which he shows to his satisfaction to be superior to French, Italian, and other Latin languages. Again, he points out that there is no word in the German language for "character" (Karakter), a word borrowed from the Greek; the reason is, he explains, that there is no need for one, because to have character and to be German are the same thing—a curious foretaste of the German arrogance of to-day. Yet these speeches, which, issued in England at such a crisis, would have found no readers, reverberated through Germany and helped to create the self-confident spirit which freed her from the invader. Then, as now, under the inspiration of ideas which they had accepted from professors and philosophers, Germans fought for the German language and for German culture. But whereas in 1814 they fought to preserve them, in 1914 they are fighting to impose them.
Just as patriotism in Germany is wholly different from what it is in England, so also is democracy, and all those elements in the national life which feed and sustain it. British democracy does not depend upon our popular franchise or on any legal rights or enactments. It depends upon the free spirit and self-respect of the British people. We have been accustomed for centuries to the unrestrained discussion of public affairs; and we treat our governors as being in fact, as they are in name, our "ministers" or servants. There is a force called public opinion which, slow though it may be to assert itself, British statesmen have been taught by experience to respect. It is as true of British as it is of American democracy that "you can fool half the people all the time; and you can fool all the people half the time; but you cannot fool all the people all the time." But the German people, as a people, lacks this irreplaceable heritage of political self-respect. It has never yet dared to tread the path of democracy without leading strings. It has not yet learned to think for itself in politics, or formed the habit of free discussion and practical criticism of public affairs. This is the vital fact which must be borne in mind in all comparisons between German and British democracy. The Germans have a Parliament, elected by Universal Male Suffrage. But this Parliament is powerless to control policy, because the nation behind it does not give it sufficient support. It is because of the absence of the driving force of a public opinion in Germany that the German people submit complacently to the infringements on political liberty which form part of the normal régime of German life—the domineering arrogance of officers and officials, the restraints upon the Press and the shameless manufacture of news and inspiration of opinion from official sources, the control of the Universities, the schools, and the public services by the State in the interest of "orthodox" political opinions, and the ridiculous laws which have sent editors and cartoonists to prison in scores for criticising the behaviour and utterances of the Emperor or the Crown Prince. In England and in America underground attempts are sometimes made to injure the careers of men whose opinions are considered "dangerous" by those who employ them. In Germany such interference with freedom of political thought is not the exception: it has become the rule. No man can make a successful career in the public service (and education is a public service) unless he is considered politically "orthodox" (gesinnungstüchtig); and orthodoxy does not simply mean abstention from damaging criticism or dangerous opinions: it means, in practice, deference to the opinions of those who "know better," that is, to the clique of Prussian generals and bureaucrats who, together with the Kaiser, control the policy of the country.
British readers who do not know Germany may think the foregoing indictment of German political incapacity severe. It is not so severe as Prince Büllow's. The portion of the late Imperial Chancellor's book which deals with domestic policy opens with these crushing sentences: "The history of our home policy, with the exception of a few bright spots, is a history of political mistakes. Despite the abundance of merits and great qualities with which the German nation is endowed, political talent has been denied it…. We are not a political people." A page or two later he goes even further and quotes with approval a dictum that the Germans are "political donkeys." That a modern statesman should think this of his fellow-countrymen is remarkable enough; that he should say it outright is a still more remarkable proof of his unshakeable belief in their submissiveness. Therein lies the whole tragedy of the present situation. The German people, so kindly and, alas! so docile, is suffering, not for its sins, but for its deficiencies; not for its own characteristic acts or natural ambitions, but for what it has too tamely allowed others, Prussian statesmen and soldiers, with alien ideals and an alien temper, to foist upon it, until it has become an integral part of its natural life and consciousness. Germany has been indoctrinated and Prussianised not only into acquiescence, but into sympathy with the policy of its rulers.
§3. Prussia.—This brings us to the consideration of the second and more powerful of the two Germanies—namely, Prussia. In order to understand Prussia and the Prussian spirit we must plunge ourselves into an atmosphere wholly different from that of the Germany that has just been described. The very names of the two countries mark the measure of the difference. Germany means the country of the Germans, as England means the country of the English. But the name Prussia commemorates the subjugation and extinction by German conquerors and crusaders from the west of the Prussians or Bo-Russians, a tribe akin to the Letts and Lithuanians. The old Duchy of Prussia, which now forms the provinces of East and West Prussia at the extreme North-East of the present German Empire, consisted of heathen lands colonised or conquered, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, by a great religious and military organisation known as the "Knights of the Teutonic Order." While Southern and Western Germany was passing, with the rest of Western Europe, through the transition between mediaeval and modern Europe, what is now North-Eastern Germany was still in a wholly primitive stage of development, and the Knights of the Teutonic Order, with crusading fervour, were spreading Christianity and German "culture" by force of arms, converting or repelling the Slavonic population and settling German colonists in the territory thus reclaimed for civilisation. The great British admirer of Prussia, Thomas Carlyle, in the first volume of his Frederick the Great, gives a vivid account of their activities in their forts or "burgs" of wood and stone, and helps us to realise what memories lie behind the struggle between German and Slav to-day, and why the word "Petersburg" has become so odious to the Russians as the name of their capital. "The Teutsch Ritters build a Burg for headquarters, spread themselves this way and that, and begin their great task. The Prussians were a fierce fighting people, fanatically anti-Christian: the Teutsch Ritters had a perilous never-resting time of it…. They built and burnt innumerable stockades for and against: built wooden Forts which are now stone Towns. They fought much and prevalently, galloped desperately to and fro, ever on the alert. How many Burgs of wood and stone they built in different parts, what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in woody, boggy places they had, no man counted; their life, read in Dryasdust's newest chaotic Books (which are of endless length, among other ill qualities) is like a dim nightmare of unintelligible marching and fighting: one feels as if the mere amount of galloping they had would have carried the Order several times round the Globe…. But always some preaching, by zealous monks, accompanies the chivalrous fighting. And colonists come in from Germany; trickling in, or at times streaming. Victorious Ritterdom offers terms to the beaten Heathen; terms not of tolerant nature, but which will be punctually kept by Ritterdom." Here we see the strange stern, medieval, crusading atmosphere which lies behind the unpleasant combinations, so familiar to us to-day in France and Belgium, of Uhlans and religion, of culture and violence, of "Germanisation" and devastation. When we hear the German professors of to-day preaching of the spread of German culture by the German arms, and when we feel disgust at the exaggerated religious phraseology which pervades the Kaiser's oratory and seems to accord so ill with his policy and ambitions, we must remember the peculiar origins of the Prussian State and how comparatively recent those origins are. "I have once before had occasion," said the Kaiser at Marienburg in East Prussia on June 5, 1902, "to say in this place how Marienburg, this unique Eastern bulwark, the point of departure for the culture of the lands east of the Vistula, will always be a symbol for our German mission. There is work for us again to-day. Polish arrogance wishes to lay hands on Germanism, and I am constrained to call my people to the defence of its national possessions. Here in Marienburg I proclaim that I expect all the brothers of the Order of St. John to be at my service when I call upon them to protect German ways and German customs." The Kaiser's crusading appeals are not hypocritical or consciously insincere: they are simply many centuries out of date—a grotesque medley of medieval romanticism and royal megalomania. What was possible for the warrior knights in North-East Germany five or six centuries ago is a tragic absurdity and an outrageous crime to-day among a spirited and sensitive people like the Poles—still more so in a highly civilised national State such as Belgium or France. It is an absurdity that only a theatrical monarch could conceive and a crime that only a military autocracy could attempt to enforce.
In the sixteenth century the Reformation, spreading throughout the North of Europe, undermined the basis of the Teutonic Order. The Grand Master of the time transformed himself into a Lutheran Prince holding the hereditary Duchy of Prussia as a vassal of the King of the neighbouring Slavonic State of Poland. In 1611 the Duchy was amalgamated with the territory of Brandenburg farther west, and in 1647 the enlarged Prussian territories won their emancipation from Poland. Prussia now became a distinct State, essentially German in character (as opposed to the Poles and Lithuanians on its Eastern border), but still remaining for a time outside the community of the other German States.
The union between Prussia and Brandenburg had brought Prussia under the rule of the House of Hohenzollern, which, although originally a South German family, had borne rule in Brandenburg since 1415. Under the Hohenzollerns Prussia rapidly increased in territory and influence until in 1701 the ruler of the day, the grandfather of Frederick the Great, took on himself the title of King. Under Frederick the Great, Prussia's career of conquest and aggrandisement continued. Seizing a convenient opportunity, he invaded and annexed the Austrian province of Silesia, and later joined with Austria and Russia in promoting the shameful Partition of Poland. The old conquering and "civilising" policy of the Teutonic Knights was continued, but under new conditions and in a brutal and cynical spirit which rendered it impossible of success. "The surest means of giving this oppressed nation better ideas and morals," wrote Frederick the Great, in words quoted with approval by Prince Bülow, "will always be gradually to get them to intermarry with Germans, even if at first it is only two or three of them in every village." This spirit in Prussian policy may have extinguished the ancient Prussians, but it has not yet begun to Germanise the Poles, and has gone far to de-Germanise the Alsatians. But it explains the utterances and justifies the sincerity of those who believe that to-day, as in the early days of her history, Prussia is fighting on behalf of "culture."
Prussia remains to-day, what she has been for the last two centuries, an aggressive military monarchy. "Prussia attained her greatness," says Prince Bülow, "as a country of soldiers and officials, and as such she was able to accomplish the work of German union; to this day she is still, in all essentials, a State of soldiers and officials." Power rests in the hands of the monarch and of a bureaucracy of military and civil officials, responsible to him alone, and traditionally and fanatically loyal to the monarch who is, before all things, their War Lord.
The Prussian outlook is so foreign to Western habits of thought that it is well that we should try to understand it at its best. Prussia proper has not been rich, like the rest of Germany, in poets and imaginative writers; but she is fortunate to-day in possessing in the greatest living Greek scholar, Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a man who by birth and breeding is able to put the highest interpretation upon the aims and spirit of the Prussian State. To Wilamowitz Prussia is not only nearer and dearer than Athens. She is better, and more advanced. At the close of a wonderful address on "the glory of the Athenian Empire," in which he has employed all the resources of his wide learning to paint a picture of Ancient Greece at her best, Wilamowitz breaks into this impassioned peroration: "But one element in life, the best of all, ye lacked, noble burghers of Athens. Your sages tell us of that highest love which, freed from all bodily entanglements, spends itself on institutions, on laws, on ideas. We Prussians, a rough, much-enduring tribe of Northerners, may be compacted of harder stuff; but we believe that love is on a higher level when the fullest devotion to an institution and an idea is inseparably linked with an entirely personal devotion to a human being; and at least we know how warm such a love can make a loyal heart. When our children have scarce learned to fold their hands before God, we set a picture before them, we teach them to recognise the noble features; we tell them, 'This is our good King.' Our young men, when they are of age to bear arms, look with joy and pride on the trim garb of war, and say, 'I go in the King's coat.' And when the nation assembles to a common political celebration, the occasion is no Feast of the Constitution, no Day of the Bastille, no Panathenaic Festival. It is then that we bow in reverence and loyalty before him who has allowed us to see with our own eyes that for which our Fathers dreamed and yearned, before him who ever extends the bounds of the Kingdom in Freedom, Prosperity, and Righteousness, before his Majesty the Emperor and King."[1]
[Footnote 1: Speeches and Lectures, 3rd edition, Berlin, 1913, p. 65. The "good King" referred to is the old Emperor William, as the address dates from 1877.]
Here, far better expressed than in the Kaiser's speeches, we see the spirit of the Prussian Junker at its best. It is narrow, old-fashioned, and, to democratic ears, almost grotesque. Yet, if it survives uncorrupted by the dangers to which progress always exposes a military caste, it will not be easy either to crush by defeat or to transform by humiliation.