England had in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton a population little larger than that of Bulgaria today. The United States in the days of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Marshall counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece. In the most brilliant generations of German literature and thought, the age of Kant and Lessing and Goethe, of Hegel and Schiller and Fichte, there was no real German State at all, but a congeries of principalities and free cities—independent centres of intellectual life in which letters and science produced a richer crop than the two succeeding generations have raised, just as Great Britain also, with eight times the population of the year 1600, has had no more Shakespeares or Miltons.
Culture Decayed in Imperial Rome.
No fiction is more palpably contradicted by history than that relied on by the school to which von Bernhardi belongs—that culture, literary, scientific, and artistic, flourishes best in great military States. The decay of art and literature in the Roman world began just when Rome's military power had made that world one great and ordered State. The opposite view would be much nearer the truth, though one must admit that no general theory regarding the relations of art and letters to Governments and political conditions has ever yet been proved to be sound.
[Note—Gen. von Bernhardi's knowledge of current history may be estimated by the fact that he assumes (1) that trade rivalry makes war probable between Great Britain and the United States; (2) that he believes that the Indian princes and peoples are likely to revolt against Great Britain should she be involved in war, and(3) that he expects her self-governing colonies to take such an opportunity of severing their connection with her.]
The world is already too uniform and is becoming more uniform every day. A few leading languages, a few forms of civilization, a few types of character, are spreading out from the seven or eight greatest States and extinguishing weaker languages, forms, and types. Although great States are stronger and more populous, their peoples are not necessarily more gifted, and the extinction of the minor languages and types would be a misfortune for the world's future development.
We may not be able to arrest the forces which seem to be making for that extinction, but we certainly ought not strengthen them. Rather we ought to maintain and defend the smaller States and to favor the rise and growth of new peoples. Not merely because they were delivered from the tyranny of Sultans like Abdul Hamid did the intellect of Europe welcome the successively won liberations of Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro; it was also in the hope that those countries would in time develop out of their present crude conditions new types of culture, new centres of productive intellectual life.
Gen. von Bernhardi invokes history as the ultimate court of appeal. He appeals to Caesar; to Caesar let him go. "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht", ("World history is world tribunal.") History declares that no nation, however great, is entitled to try to impose its type of civilization on others. No race, not even the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, is entitled to claim the leadership of humanity. Each people has in its time contributed something that was distinctively its own, and the world is far richer thereby than if any one race, however gifted, had established its permanent ascendency.
We of the Anglo-Saxon race do not claim for ourselves, any more than we admit in others, any right to dominate by force or to impose our own type of civilization on less powerful races. Perhaps we have not that assured conviction of its superiority which the school of von Bernhardi expressed for the Teutons of North Germany. We know how much we owe, even within our own islands, to the Celtic race; and, though we must admit that peoples of Anglo-Saxon stock have, like others, made some mistakes and sometimes abused their strength, let it be remembered what have been the latest acts they have done abroad.
Praises American Altruism.
The United States have twice withdrawn their troops from Cuba, which they could easily have retained; they have resisted all temptations to annex any part of the territories of Mexico, in which the lives and property of their citizens were for three years in constant danger. So Great Britain also six years ago restored the amplest self-government to two South African republics, having already agreed to the maintenance on equal terms of the Dutch language; and the citizens of those republics, which were in arms against her thirteen years ago, have now spontaneously come forward to support her by arms under the gallant leader who then commanded the Boers; and I may add that one reason why the Princes of India have rallied so promptly and heartily to Great Britain in this war is because for many years past we have avoided annexing the territories of those Princes, allowing them to adopt heirs when the successors of their own families failed, and leaving to them as much as possible of the ordinary functions of government.