Prior to the historic event known as the Reformation, Germany had as much peace as her neighbors—which wasn’t much—and all she had she owed to her intercourse with the Latin South, to her touch with the civilization and religion of Rome. After that event Germany was torn into factions, military chiefs sprang up, petty military states were made, violence and corruption were the rule, civilization retrogressed, the people were degraded and the land devastated. Germany was without unity; her mercenaries were for sale to the highest bidder; she was terrible only to her children, the prey of foreign forces, with civil war a permanent status. The advent of Napoleon was a blessing; he hammered a lot of petty principalities out of existence and formed two or three monarchies out of the bewildering many. The fall of Napoleon saw Germany a confederation, much after the fashion of pre-Reformation days, with Austria on top. Again came wars and dissensions, and finally the strong conqueror who united Germany against a common foe and made her what she is to-day. Germany, I take it, is the highest political expression of the Teutonic race, according to the dictum of Professor Burgess. What is it?
A military despotism of the most mediæval type, governed by an autocrat of doubtful sanity, whose person is more sacred apparently than that of the Deity; a land whence the people fly to seek safety, peace, liberty; a government that is a constant threat to the peace and civilization of the earth and that embodies all the reactionary principles a free people hate.
One does not expect the German professor, his disciple, or the mole in the earth to see what is going on in the sunlight.
If we turn to Ireland we see nothing but violence, corruption, and plunder in the methods of the Teutonic race ruling there; and we observe improvement in Irish affairs only with the decrease of English influences and the increase of Irishmen in Irish affairs.
It is a favorite axiom of the Teutonic writer of the Burgess type, wherever English and German rule is a failure, that the people ruled are unfit for government. Did it ever occur to them that the shoe is on the other foot—they are unfit to govern?
The unfitness of the English to govern Ireland is historic; it was exhibited in America, as some may recall; it is notorious in India and round the earth. The best-governed possessions of England are the lands where Englishmen are least in evidence. Germany in Africa is producing the usual harvest of Teutonic “genius”—depopulation and devastation.
But Mr. Burgess has a theory, and he does not propose to hamper it with facts. He asserts that the government—the political organization—of Spain, Italy, and Portugal are the results of Teutonic genius. This will probably be news to the world; but if the debility, decay, and general rottenness of those kingdoms are the result of Teutonic genius, the sooner they try the genius of the negro and the Chinaman the better for them. He covers whatever political good may exist in Greece, Bulgaria, and Roumania by attributing it to the impecunious German princes now adorning the rickety thrones in those lands. The idea is original, but not impressive. Why not attribute the political condition of Scandinavia to the presence on its throne for ninety years of Bernadotte, the French (Celtic) military adventurer, and his wife, the daughter of the Irish merchant Cleary, and their children? The logic is as good, or as bad, in one case as the other.
But why go on with this tissue of professional rubbish?
Nations are made what they are by climate, environment, peace, war, and economic and industrial conditions. Groups of men learn as does the individual, in the school of experience. Nations have no genius for anything; the botch work we call government to-day at its best is hardly a manifestation of genius. Nations may have temperaments, the product of experience, but only the individual has character.
Professor Burgess is merely a mental invalid, an hysterical Celtophobe. He either forgets the existence of Rome and Greece, or he fails to understand the value of civilization and human experience; he is a kind of literary phonograph, repeating the slanders and absurdities which a school of race egotists have raised to a cult. He is a decidedly unsafe man to educate a coming generation of Americans, for the writer of solemn and dogmatic nonsense is unfit to train the American youth. Certainly no self-respecting man of Irish-Celtic blood should permit his children to attend a university where they are taught that the perpetrators of ages of outrage and wrong are divinely selected beings, chosen “to assume leadership in the establishment and administration of States.”