It is among the old Prussian nobility and the large landed proprietors in the original Prussian provinces, who have come to be known as the "Junkers," that this spirit prevails. They stand for the old stern repressive military discipline and unchanging Conservatism in its extremest form, regarding with well-founded suspicion and misgiving symptoms of development in any direction whatsoever. No party in Germany acquiesced more unwillingly in the changes necessitated by her commercial and industrial development. Even their militarism stopped short at the Army, and it required a substantial increase in the protective tariff safeguarding their agricultural interests to purchase their reluctant adhesion to the Kaiser's policy of naval expansion. Even now the German Navy, the pride of the commercial and industrial classes throughout the German Empire, is regarded by them with uneasy suspicion as a parvenu service, in which the old Prussian influences count for less in promotion than technical skill and practical efficiency.
The institutions of the Prussian State represent the spirit of its ruling caste. If the German Empire is not democratic, Prussia lags far behind it. The electoral system in use for the Prussian Lower House is too complicated to explain here. Its injustice may be gauged from the fact that in 1900 the Social Democrats, who actually polled a majority of the votes, secured seven seats out of nearly 400. The whole spirit and practice of the Government is inimical to inborn British conceptions of civil liberty and personal rights. There is one law and code of conduct for officers and another for civilians, and woe betide the civilian who resists the military pretensions. The incidents at Zabern in Alsace in 1913 are still fresh in public memory, reinforced by evidence of a similar spirit in German military proclamations in France and Belgium. But it is important to realise that these incidents are not exceptional outbursts but common Prussian practice, upheld, as the sequel to the Zabern events proved, by the highest authority.
Prussia, and through Prussia Germany, is in effect ruled in accordance with the wishes of the official caste: and short of a popular rising nothing but defeat can dethrone it. "Any one who has any familiarity at all with our officers and generals," says an authoritative German writer, in words that we may hope will be prophetic, "knows that it would take another Sedan, inflicted on us instead of by us, before they would acquiesce in the control of the Army by the German Parliament."[1] No clearer statement could be given as to where the real power lies in Germany, and how stern will be the task of displacing it.
[Footnote 1: Professor Delbrück (who succeeded to the chair of history in Berlin held so long by Treitschke), in a book published early in 1914 (Government and the Popular Will, p. 136).]
The foreign policy of Prussia has reflected the same domineering spirit. Its object has been the increase of its power and territory by conquest or cunning: and by the successful prosecution of this policy it has extended Prussian authority and Prussian influence over a large part of Western Germany. The best way of illustrating this will be to quote a passage from the Recollections of Prince Bismarck, who directed Prussian policy from 1862 to 1890. In 1864 trouble arose as to the succession to the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein on the Danish border. Prussia had no claim whatever to the Duchies; but she coveted Holstein because it would give her a Western sea-board, with the results that we all know. Bismarck describes the arguments which he used to persuade his Royal Master to assert his claim. "I reminded him," he writes, "that each of his immediate predecessors had won an addition to the Monarchy": he then went through the history of the six previous reigns, and ended by encouraging King William to be worthy of his ancestors. His advice, as we have seen, was successfully adopted.
[Illustration: PRUSSIA SINCE THE ACCESSION OF FREDERICK THE GREAT]
The conquest of France in 1870, by means of the military power of Germany under Prussian leadership, made Prussia supreme in Germany, and the German army supreme in Central Europe. The Treaty of Frankfurt in May 1871, by which the new French Republic ceded to the German Empire the two French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, marked the opening of a new epoch in European history, the period of the Armed Peace, which ended in 1914. It marked also the opening of a new epoch in Germany, some features of which we must now examine.
§4. Germany since 1870.—German history from 1871 to 1914 falls into two well-defined periods. During the first period, from 1871 to 1888, Germany was ruled by her Imperial Chancellor, Prince Bismarck. But the accession of the present Kaiser led to a change, not in the letter, but in the spirit of the new constitution, and since 1890, when William II. "dropped the pilot" and selected a more amenable successor, the real control of policy has lain with the Emperor.
The relations between Prince Bismarck and the old Emperor, who was over ninety when he died in 1888, form a touching passage in modern history. Although his grandson has publicly claimed for him a peculiar measure of divine inspiration, his strength lay in his implicit confidence in his great minister. Bismarck's attitude to him, as described in his Memoirs, is rather like that of an old family retainer who has earned by long and faithful service the right to assert his views and to pit his judgment against his master's. His one formidable antagonist was the Empress; and long experience, he tells us, enabled him to judge whether difficulties in persuading the old Kaiser to adopt a given line of policy were due to his own judgment or conceived "in the interests of domestic peace." The faithful servant had his own appropriate methods of winning his way in either case.
But with the new Kaiser the old minister's astuteness availed nothing, and the story of Bismarck's curt dismissal, after thirty-eight years of continuous service, from the post which he had created for himself, illustrates the danger of framing a constitution to meet a particular temporary situation. Bismarck, put out of action by his own machinery, retired growling to his country seat, and lived to see the reversal of his foreign policy and the exposure of Germany, through the Franco-Russian Alliance, to the one danger he always dreaded, an attack on both flanks.