Bismarck was the target for vehement opposition when he inclined toward the party of the traders and the industrials in his colonial and tariff policy. This evolution came about 1879. For a while the great Chancellor was looked upon almost as a traitor.
Nevertheless, his view was just. Balancing the forces on the one hand by those on the other, ceding protective duties first to one side and then to the other, offsetting the advantages which he offered to one side by the prerogatives which he accorded to the other, he finally succeeded in reconciling them.
From this reconciliation of the two dominant classes has resulted the extraordinary power of Germany. The bourgeois parties have from time to time grumbled over the military appropriations, but they have always voted them. And militarism, which is the support of the aristocracy, has been placed at the service of capitalistic ambition. By the prestige of force, awakening hopes here and inspiring fears there, more than once by the help of manoeuvres of intimidation, it has become an instrument of economic conquest.
Other combinations, other reciprocal interlacings, have taken place which have given an exceptional and unique character to contemporary Germany. It is a case of social psychology of extreme interest. To describe it would require long detail. The combination of the aristocratic and military tendency with the industrial and plutocratic tendency, the tendency of the police spirit, the regularizing spirit of the Kulturstaat with the individual initiative of the capitalist entrepreneur, methodical habits of administration with the love of risk characteristic of the speculator, all this constitutes imperialism, German imperialism, distinct from every other, because to a definite object, economic conquest, it adds another, less precise, in which the moral satisfaction dear to aristocracy, the pleasure of dominating, the love of displaying force, the tendency to prove one's own superiority to one's self, play a large part.
Economic conquest has become a necessity for Germany. Transformed into an industrial State, it no longer produces its own food. Since 1885 its imports have exceeded its exports by 1,353,000,000 marks. Whence did Germany derive these 1,300,000,000 marks which were needed, good year and bad, to meet its balance of trade? It owes them to its maritime commerce and the revenue of its capital invested abroad. Its maritime commerce then must augment and must triumph over all competition. At every cost it must open for itself outlets for its industrial products in order to buy foodstuffs which it does not produce sufficiently. If not, famine.
Let us see now how the complicated play of all these social forces and the effect of this economic situation have been embodied in formulas, what has been its intellectual expression.
This is no idle question, for men have always claimed to be guided by ideas, and generally they are, but they rarely know where their ideas come from or in what they consist. Without intellectual expression imperialism would not have extended to all the classes of society. The passion of economic conquest did not prevail throughout the whole of Germany. The bourgeois in the Liberal provinces, the corps of officers, the corps of teachers, the clergy were refractory to it. This direct form of imperialism does not seduce them. Not everybody can see his country and the universe through the eyes of an oligarch of high finance. A doctrine works with power when it appeals to instincts, when it awakens collective emotions, diverse enough in themselves, and joins them to each other with an appearance of logical deduction. It is not indispensable, but it is useful that it should borrow the language of the day. In the mediaeval epoch this language was religious. Beginning with the seventeenth century it was metaphysical. In our own time it is a scientific language set off by Greek words.
If the German philosophies of the second half of the nineteenth century are considered, there are not many of them that pass beyond the limit of the school. They are honest, scholarly productions elaborated by men who have read much, of whom some, like Wundt, are eminent specialists, but who have not conquered either their subjects or their readers. One feels that they are not of their century.
It is not from them, it is not from Eucken, the pleasant popularizer, it is not from Windelbund or Ostwald that the cultivated public sought the direction for its thought. To satisfy the need of general ideas which was everywhere felt, associations were formed, churches with or without God, of which a very important one was the "Monistenbund," in which Haeckel exploited his materialism transformed into a sort of biological pantheism.
But it was outside of the associations and outside of the school that the flame of creative genius burned brightly. The man of the last generation was Nietzsche. That his thought has been perverted by his interpreters there is no doubt. They have taken this eagle who gazed unblinded at the sun and exhibited him to the young people in all sorts of philosophic rôles for the benefit of the industrial and military coalition. Nietzsche depicted in lines of fire the resurrection of heroism, his vision of the superman was that of an ardent soul, steeled by sufferings, meditating a tragic conception of life with serenity, and in his solitary individualism surmounting the infirmity of man and his own by the insistent will to eternal ascension.