One very real power was vested in the Reichstag. It had full control of the empire's purse strings. Bills for raising revenue and all measures making appropriations had to originate in this chamber, and its assent was required to their enactment. The reason for its failure to exercise this control resolutely must be sought in the history of the German people, in their inertia where active participation in governmental matters is concerned, and in those psychological characteristics which Bismarck so well comprehended and upon which he so confidently counted.
No people on earth had had a more terrible or continuous struggle for existence than the various tribes that later amalgamated to form the nucleus for the German Empire. Their history is a record of almost continuous warfare, going back to the days of Julius Cæsar. In the first years of the Christian era the Germans under Arminius (Hermann) crushed the Romans of Varus's legions in the Teutoburg Forest, and the land was racked by war up to most modern times. Most of its able-bodied men were exterminated during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). [4] This almost constant preoccupation in war had a twofold result: it intensified the struggle for existence of the common man and kept him from devoting either his thoughts or energies to problems of government, and it strengthened the powers of a comparatively small ruling-class, who alone possessed any culture and education and whose efforts were naturally directed to keeping their serfs in the subjection of ignorance. These conditions prevailed until well into the last century.
[ [4] The population of Germany dropped from twenty to less than seven millions during this war.
The conditions can best be appreciated by a comparison with the conditions existing in England at the same time. England, too, had had her wars, but her soil was but rarely ravaged by foreign invaders, and never to the extent in which Germany repeatedly suffered. Parliamentary government of a sort had existed more than three centuries in England before it reached Germany. A milder climate than that of North Germany made the struggle for the bare necessaries of life less strenuous, and gave opportunity to a greater proportion of the people to consider other things than the mere securing of enough to eat and drink. They began to think politically centuries before political affairs ceased to rest entirely in the hands of the nobility of Germany.
The Germans of the lower and middle classes—in other words, the vast majority of the whole people—were thus both without political training and without even the inclination to think independently along political lines. Some advance had, it is true, been made along these lines since the Napoleonic wars, but the events of 1871 nevertheless found the great mass of the people without political tutelage or experience. People even more politically inclined would have found themselves handicapped by this lack of training, and the German—particularly the Southern German—is not politically inclined. This will be discussed more fully in the chapters dealing with the course of events following the revolution of 1918. It will be sufficient to point out here the German's inclination to abstract reasoning, to philosophizing and to a certain mysticism; his love of music and fine arts generally, his undeniable devotion to the grosser creature-comforts, eating and drinking, and his tendency not to worry greatly about governmental or other impersonal affairs provided he be kept well fed and amused. It is, in brief, the spirit to which the Roman emperors catered with the panem et circenses, and which manifests itself strikingly in the German character. The result of all this was a marked inertia which characterized German political life up to recent years. Even when a limited political awakening came it was chiefly the work of German-Jews, not of Germans of the old stock.
These, then, were the conditions that prevented the democratic features of the Imperial Constitution from acquiring that prominence and importance which they would have acquired among a different people. The Kaiser could dissolve the Reichstag at will. Why, then, bother oneself about opposing the things desired by the Kaiser and his brother princes? It merely meant going to the trouble of a new election, and if that Reichstag should prove recalcitrant also, it could in its turn be dissolved. Apparently it never occurred to the mass of the Germans that the Kaiser could not go on indefinitely dissolving a representative body which insisted upon carrying out the people's will. The Reichstag, being on the whole neither much wiser nor more determined than the people that elected it, accepted this view of the situation. Occasionally it showed a bit of spirit, notably when it adopted a vote of censure against the government in the matter of the Zabern affair in 1913. On the whole, however, it accepted meekly the rôle that caused it to be termed, and justly, a "debating club." And this was precisely the rôle that had been planned for it by the drafters of the constitution.
In justice to the Reichstag, however, one thing should be pointed out. When the German Empire was formed the country was still predominantly an agricultural land. The election districts were on the whole justly erected, and no one section of the country had a markedly disproportionate number of representatives. It was not long, however, before the flight to the cities began in Germany as in other countries, and at the beginning of the present century the greater part of Germany's population lived in the cities. The result was speedily seen in the constitution of the Reichstag, since no redistricting was ever made since the original districting of 1871. Greater Berlin, with a population around four million, elected but six representatives to the Reichstag. In other words, there were some 660,000 inhabitants for every delegate. The agricultural districts, however, and especially those of Northern Germany—East Elbia, as it is termed—continued to elect the same number of representatives as at the beginning to represent a population which had increased but little or not at all. There were districts in East and West Prussia, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Posen where fewer than ten thousand voters were able to send a representative to the Reichstag.
The result was the natural one. Throughout the world conservatism has its headquarters on the farms. The farmers cling longest to the old order of things, they free themselves the most slowly from tradition, they are least susceptible to sociological and socialistic ideas and, in so far as they own their own land, they are among the strongest supporters of vested property-rights. In no other country was this more the case than in Germany, and especially in the districts mentioned, where large estates predominate and whence have come for two hundred years the most energetic, faithful and blindly loyal servants of their sovereign. The cities, on the other hand, and particularly the larger cities are the strongholds of new ideas. They are in particular the breeding-places of Socialism and Communism. Five of the six Reichstag members elected from Greater Berlin in 1912 were Social-Democrats, and the sixth was a Progressive with advanced democratic ideas.
With the shifting population and the consequent distortion of the election districts, a tremendous advantage accrued to the rural communities; in other words, the forces opposed to democratic reforms and in favor of maintaining and even increasing the powers of the King and Emperor steadily increased proportionately their representation in the Reichstag at the expense of the friends of democracy. At the Reichstag election of 1912 the Socialists cast roundly thirty-five per cent of the total popular vote. Handicapped by the unjust districting, however, they were able to elect only 110 delegates, whereas their proportion of the total vote entitled them to 139. The Progressives, most of whose strength also lay in the cities, likewise received fewer members than their total vote entitled them to have. Under a fair districting these two parties would together have had nearly a clear majority of the Reichstag. There is reason to believe that the whole course of history of the last years would have been altered had Germany honestly reformed her Reichstag election districts ten years ago. On such small things does the fate of nations often rest.
The Kaiser, as the president of the empire, was authorized to "represent the empire internationally." He named the diplomatic representatives to foreign courts and countries and to the Vatican. He was empowered to make treaties, and to declare defensive warfare provided the enemy had actually invaded German territory. He could not declare an offensive war without the consent of the Federal Council, nor a defensive war unless the invasion mentioned had taken place. He was commander-in-chief of the navy, and of the Prussian army and the armies of the other federal states except of Saxony and Bavaria, which maintained their own military establishments. He appointed—in theory—all federal officials and officers of the army and navy. On the whole, however, his powers as German Emperor were strictly limited and hardly went beyond the powers of the ruler of any constitutional monarchy.