We pass over the dark portraiture of “misery and crime” in Berlin, and also the information respecting the reptile agency of the official press, the political dye-house of the empire, whose business it is to color all communications with the hue required by the prime minister. Nor have we space to dwell on the state of education in Prussia, which is far behind the rest of Germany,[204] nor the falsification of history and even geography in its educational books. We cannot, however, forbear producing the lesson with which the studies of the day begin in the primary schools.
The master holds up before his pupils the Emperor’s portrait, asking, “Who is this?”
Making a reverential bow, they answer, “His majesty the Emperor.”
“What do we owe to him?” resumes the teacher, in a grave and impressive tone.
“We owe him obedience, fidelity, and respect; we owe him all that we have and all that we possess.”
Would any child, unless a German or a Russian, find its loyalty increased after two or three weeks of this daily exercise? We doubt it.
The Catholic clergy proving a hindrance to the government in the application of its new catechism, the law on secular instruction
was passed to force them out of the schools: the state, henceforth sole master, can form at the will of Cæsar, not Christians, but soldiers or slaves, which are more in accordance with its taste—all that is taught being made to converge to the one end of blind and absolute submission to secular power.
God being set aside to make way for the Emperor and his Church trampled under foot for the good pleasure of the prime minister, we or our children may see the fulfilment of the prediction written thirty or forty years ago by Heinrich Heine, in which, after announcing the reconstitution of the Germanic Empire, he says: “The Empire will hasten to its fall; and this catastrophe will be the result of a political and social revolution, brought about by German philosophers and thinkers. The Kantists have already torn up the last fibres of the past, the Fichteans will come in turn, whose fanaticism will be mastered neither by fear nor instinct. The most of all to be dreaded will be the philosophers of nature, the communists, who will place themselves in communication with the primitive forces of the earth, and evoke the traditions of the Germanic pantheism. Then will these three choirs intone a revolutionary chant at which the land will tremble, and there will be enacted in Germany a drama in comparison to which the French Revolution shall have been but an idyl.”
[199] Voyage au Pays des Milliards. V. Tissot. Paris: Dentu.