Such, in brief outline, was Germany—an empire built on the bayonets of the world's greatest and most efficient army and administered by tens of thousands of loyal and efficient civil servants. How was it possible that it could be overthrown?
In the last analysis it was not overthrown; it was destroyed from within by a cancer that had been eating at its vitals for eighty years. And the seeds of this cancer, by the strange irony of fate, were sown in Germany and cultivated by Germans.
The cancer was Socialism, or Social-Democracy, as it is termed in Germany.
CHAPTER III.
Internationalism and Vaterlandslose Gesellen.
The concluding statement in the previous chapter must by no means be taken as a general arraignment of Socialism, and it requires careful explanation. Indiscriminately to attack Socialism in all its economic aspects testifies rather to mental hardihood than to an understanding of these aspects. A school of political thought which has so powerfully affected the polity of all civilized nations in the last fifty years and has put its impress upon the statutes of those countries cannot be lightly dismissed nor condemned without qualification.
Citizens of the recently allied countries will be likely also to see merit in Socialism because of the very fact that, in one of its aspects, it played a large part in overthrowing an enemy government. Let this be clearly set down and understood at the very beginning: the aspects of Socialism that made the German governmental system ripe for fall were and are inimical not only to the governmental systems of all states, but to the very idea of the state itself.
More: The men responsible for the débâcle in Germany—and in Russia—regard the United States as the chief stronghold of capitalism and of the privilege of plutocracy, and the upsetting of this country's government would be hailed by them with as great rejoicing as were their victories on the continent.