In one sense, Germany is rich in intellectual ability—the Germany to which Beethoven sang, and Goethe discoursed philosophy, for which Kant moralised, and at which Heine jested. It has a list of names great in poetry, philosophy, and scholarship. Germany, too, has done great things in science, though not so much in the realm of scientific discovery. It adapts rather than discovers; it excels in translating the scientific discoveries of other races into practical terms. Noticeable, also, is the fact that the great names in German literature, philosophy, and scholarship are not Prussian; and it is Prussia, and the Prussianised form of Germany, which is troubling the world. Luther came from Eisleben; Leibnitz was a Czech; Kant was of Scottish blood; Bismarck, it is amusing to remember, told Prince Napoleon, ‘I am not a German; I am a Prussian, a Wend’—that is, a Slav. Both Nietzsche and Treitschke came of a Slav stock; most of the great ‘German’ musicians came of a Jewish strain; Heine was, of course, a pure Jew.
Nearly all the public documents issued by the German Government during this war, and all the speeches of its statesmen, are thick-inlaid with statements which, if not blank lies, and known by the speaker or writer to be lies, are yet proofs of some disordered quality in the mind of the speaker or writer. Sometimes the speaker seems to be self-hypnotised, so that he really believes a lie as big as a mountain to be the truth; or he suffers from some eccentric paralysis of the memory which enables him to forget what he has said, or written, only a moment before.
The famous ‘scrap of paper’ incident, taken as a whole, has the office of a searchlight as showing the morbid condition both of German morals and of German intelligence. Anybody with a touch of literary imagination will look back upon that scene in a room in Berlin, when the German Chancellor complained to Sir Edward Goschen, ‘You are going to war with us over a scrap of paper,’ and recognise it as one of the most picturesque, as well as the great and critical, moments in history. The German represented the greatest military Power in the world, the Englishman the greatest naval Power. Had both agreed to dismiss as a mere ‘scrap of paper’ the treaty that guards the neutrality of Belgium, the sanctity of all treaties would have disappeared at a breath.
But that dismissal into space as a mere scrap of paper of the treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, which bore the name of Germany, was to Germany herself a worse disaster than the loss of a pitched battle. It was a form of suicide. It destroyed her public credit; it dismissed her from the realm of good faith. When, at the end of the war, the representatives of the nations now in conflict sit around some table in London or in Paris to draw up terms of peace, the ghost of this scrap of paper will cost Germany much, for she has stripped herself of all title to be trusted. Now, a blunder so unspeakably stupid on the part of men so able shows that at that moment, and in that act, the brains of the men who were the representatives of Germany were in some curious state of paralysis.
But this gigantic blunder is to this day being pursued by Germany with explanations and justifications which, as examples of unreason, suggest nothing so much as the logic employed in ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ The German Chancellor himself some time afterwards asked the world to believe that what he meant was that ‘a scrap of paper’ represented the British idea of the value of a treaty, while Germany ‘took her responsibility towards neutral States seriously.’ And Bethmann-Hollweg offered this explanation after Germany had actually violated Belgian neutrality, and Great Britain had gone to war to maintain it!
The German Chancellor offered, in the very same speech, yet another explanation in open quarrel with the explanation just given. At the time he described the treaty as ‘a scrap of paper,’ he had ‘reason to believe,’ he told the Reichstag, that the Belgians themselves had destroyed their own neutrality by a convention they had made with England for the introduction of British troops; but as he lacked formal proof of the circumstance, he did not mention it at the time. Since then they had captured Brussels, and found, in the archives there, the actual text of the convention with England, by which Belgium violated its own neutrality. As a matter of fact, the guilty document which the German Chancellor quoted was not a ‘convention’ at all, but notes of a ‘conversation’ betwixt the British military attaché and Major-General Ducalme, a Belgian officer. It was an academic discussion of what might be done ‘after Germany had entered Belgian territory’; and it was endorsed as ‘not binding’ on either of the two nations. And the German Chancellor quotes this discussion of what might be done to guard its neutrality against German attack as a surrender of its neutrality. This is very much as though a burglar, caught in the act of plundering a house, claimed that his burglary was justifiable, as he found—after he had broken into the house—that its owner had a revolver under his pillow.
The doctrine of the freedom of the sea which Germany has suddenly begun to preach at the top of its voice is yet another proof of either the entire absence of any sense of humour in the German mind, or of a morbid condition of the German conscience. For Great Britain, the geographical distribution of her Empire makes an overwhelming superiority in naval power a condition of its existence; but the seas of the planet, under her supremacy, have been free to every flag—except the black flag of the pirate. She has never abused her sea-power. It is Germany that has made the sea terrible by sowing it with drifting mines and making it a field for the performances of its submarines. Great Britain has supreme power on the sea, Germany has—or had—supreme military power on land; and what Germany means by ‘the freedom of the sea’ is that Great Britain’s advantage should be cancelled out of existence, while her own advantage should remain undiminished.
It is worth quoting the words in which, in his clear-cut, sword-edged prose, Mr. A. J. Balfour analyses and describes this new German doctrine. ‘The most simple-minded,’ he says, ‘must feel suspicious when they find that these missionaries of maritime freedom are the very same persons who preach and who practise upon the land the extremest doctrines of military absolutism.
‘She poses as a reformer of international law, though international law has never bound her for an hour. She objects to “economic pressure” when it is exercised by a fleet, though she sets no limit to the brutal completeness with which economic pressure may be imposed by an army. She sighs over the suffering which war imposes upon peaceful commerce, though her own methods of dealing with peaceful commerce would have wrung the conscience of Captain Kidd. She denounces the maritime methods of the Allies, though in her efforts to defeat them she is deterred neither by the rules of war, the appeal of humanity, nor the rights of neutrals.’