Then there is another advantage if this bill is passed. The very strength at which we are aiming necessarily renders us pacific. This sounds like a paradox, but it is not.
With the powerful engine into which we are transforming the German army one does not make an attack. If I were to come before you today, on the assumption that conditions were different from what I believe they are, and said, "We are considerably menaced by France and Russia; it is to be expected that we shall be attacked, and as a diplomat, believing my military information in these matters to be correct, I am convinced that it is better for us to have our defense consist of a bold attack, and to strike the first blow now;" and if I added: "We can more easily wage an aggressive war, and I, therefore, am asking the Reichstag for an appropriation of a milliard, or half a milliard, marks to engage in a war against our two neighbors,"—then I do not know, gentlemen, whether you would have enough confidence in me to grant my request, but I hope you would not have it.
But, if you had, it would not satisfy me. If we Germans wish to wage a war with the full effect of our national strength, it must be a war which satisfies all who take part in it, all who sacrifice anything for it, in short the whole nation. It must be a national war, a war carried on with the enthusiasm of 1870, when we were foully attacked. I still remember the ear splitting, joyful shouts in the station at Köln. It was the same all the way from Berlin to Köln, in Berlin itself. The waves of popular approval bore us into the war, whether or no we wished it. That is the way it must be, if a popular force like ours is to show what it can do. It will, however, be very difficult to prove to the provinces and the imperial states and their inhabitants that the war is unavoidable, and has to be. People will ask: "Are you so sure? Who can tell?" In short, when we make an attack, the whole weight of all imponderables, which weigh far heavier than material weights, will be on the side of our opponents whom we have attacked. France will be bristling with arms way down to the Pyrenees. The same will take place everywhere. A war into which we are not borne by the will of the people will be waged, to be sure, if it has been declared by the constituted authorities who deemed it necessary; it will even be waged pluckily, and possibly victoriously, after we have once smelled fire and tasted blood, but it will lack from the beginning the nerve and enthusiasm of a war in which we are attacked. In such a one the whole of Germany from Memel to the Alpine Lakes will flare up like a powder mine; it will be bristling with guns, and no enemy will dare to engage this furor teutonicus which develops when we are attacked.
[Illustration: ANTON VON WERNER WILLIAM I ON HIS DEATHBED]
We cannot afford to lose this factor of preëminence even if many military men—not only ours but others as well—believe that today we are superior to our future opponents. Our own officers believe this to a man, naturally. Every soldier believes this. He would almost cease to be a useful soldier if he did not wish for war, and did not believe that we would be victorious in it. If our opponents by any chance are thinking that we are pacific because we are afraid of how the war may end, they are mightily mistaken. We believe as firmly in our victory in a just cause as any foreign lieutenant in his garrison, after his third glass of champagne, can believe in his, and we probably do so with greater certainty. It is not fear, therefore, which makes us pacific, but the consciousness of our strength. We are strong enough to protect ourselves, even if we should be attacked at a less favorable moment, and we are in a position to let divine providence determine whether a war in the meanwhile may not become unnecessary after all.
I am, therefore, not in favor of any kind of an aggressive war, and if war could result only from our attack—somebody must kindle a fire, we shall not kindle it. Neither the consciousness of our strength, which I have described, nor our confidence in our treaties, will prevent us from continuing our former endeavors to preserve peace. In this we do not permit ourselves to be influenced by annoyances or dislikes. The threats and insults, and the challenges, which have been made have, no doubt, excited also with us a feeling of irritation, which does not easily happen with Germans, for they are less prone to national hatred than any other nation. We are, however, trying to calm our countrymen, and we shall work for peace with our neighbors, especially with Russia, in the future as well as in the past. When I say especially with Russia, I express the opinion that France is offering us no assurances of success in our endeavors. I will, however, not say that these endeavors are of no use. We shall never pick a quarrel, nor ever attack France; and in the many little incidents which the liking of our neighbors for spying and bribing has occasioned we have always brought about a very courteous and amicable settlement. I should consider it criminal if we were to enflame a great national war for such bagatelles. These are instances when one should say: "The cleverer of the two will yield."
I am referring, therefore, especially to Russia, and here I have the same confidence of success which I expressed a year ago, and which this liberal sheet printed in such large type, without any "running after," or as a German paper very vulgarly called it, "Kow-towing" to Russia. That time has passed. We no longer sue for love, either in France or in Russia! The Russian press and the Russian public opinion have shown the door to an old powerful and reliable friend, which we were. We do not force ourselves on anybody. We have tried to reestablish the old intimate relations, but we are running after nobody. This does not prevent us, however, from observing the treaty-rights which Russia has with us; on the contrary, it is an incentive to us to do so.
These treaty rights comprise some which not all our friends recognize as such. I mean the rights concerning Bulgaria which we won for Russia in the Congress of Berlin, and which were not contested until 1885. There is no question for me, who was instrumental in preparing the congressional decisions, and who joined in signing them, that all of us were of the opinion at that time that Russia should have a predominating influence in Bulgaria, after the latter had renounced East Roumelia, and she herself had given the modest satisfaction of reducing by 800,000 souls the extent of the territory under her influence until it included only about three million people.
Following this interpretation of the Congress, Russia until 1885 appointed the prince, a close relative of the imperial house, of whom at that time nobody believed, or could believe, that he would wish to be anything but a faithful adherent of the Russian policy. Russia nominated the minister of war and a great many officers; in short it was governing in Bulgaria. There was no doubt of this. The Bulgarians, or some of them, or the prince—I do not know which—were not satisfied with it. A coup d'état took place—a defection from Russia. Thus an actual condition has ensued which we are not called upon to remedy by a recourse to arms, but which cannot in theory alter the rights which Russia took home from the Congress of Berlin. Whether there will be difficulties, if Russia should wish to procure her rights by force, I do not know. We shall neither support nor counsel violent means, nor do I believe that they are being contemplated—I am quite sure they are not. If, however, Russia should try her luck along diplomatic lines, possibly by suggesting the intercession of the Sultan, the suzerain of Bulgaria, I deem it the duty of a loyal German policy to cling to the decisions of the Congress of Berlin, and to interpret them as all of us, without an exception, interpreted them at that time. The public feeling of the Bulgarians can alter nothing in this, so far as I am concerned. Bulgaria, the tiny little country between the Danube and the Balkans is not an object of sufficient size, I assure you, to attach to it any importance, or to push Europe for its sake into a war, from Moscow to the Pyrenees, from the North Sea to Palermo, when no one can foresee its end. After the war we would conceivably not even know for what we had been fighting.
I may, therefore, declare that the hostility against us shown in the Russian public opinion, and especially in the Russian press, will not deter us from supporting, at Russia's request, any diplomatic steps she may take to regain her influence in Bulgaria. I intentionally say, at her request. Formerly we have, at times, endeavored to fulfil her wishes when they had been only confidentially suggested, but we have seen that some Russian papers immediately tried to prove that these very steps of the German diplomacy had been the most inimical to Russia. They actually attacked us for having fulfilled the wishes of Russia even before they had been expressed. We did this also in the Congress of Berlin; but it will not happen again. If Russia will officially request us to support with the Sultan, as suzerain of Bulgaria, the steps which she may take in her desire to reëstablish in Bulgaria conditions according to the decisions of the Congress, I shall not hesitate to advise His Majesty the Emperor to do so. Our sense of loyalty to our neighbor demands this, for we should cherish neighborly relations with him, let the present feelings be what they may. Together we should protect the monarchical institutions which are common to both of us, and set our faces, in the interest of order, against all the opponents of it in Europe. Russia's monarch, moreover, fully understands that these are the duties of the allied monarchs. If the Emperor of Russia should find that the interests of his great empire of one hundred million people demand war, he will wage it, I do not doubt. But I do not believe that these interests can possibly demand a war against us, nor do I believe that these interests demand war at the present time at all.