There is every prospect that this number will be out unusually late, on account of the choke-up in transportation. At this writing the printer ought to be at work on the paper, which has already been on the way to him—from Philadelphia to Massachusetts—twenty-six days.
We hope our readers will not blame the delay to us, and that their patriotism will cheerfully endure it.
The Kindly and Modest German
Here are some commonplaces that should be iterated in some shape every time an American organ of opinion goes to press.
There once was such a man as the kindly and modest German, and through his virtues he had nearly obtained the industrial and commercial leadership of the world, when sudden wealth and power aroused in him the brute instincts that are latent in the best of us, and started him after more than can be had from industry, and can be had only by force. The brute instincts were nearer the surface in him than in those who have a recorded civilization of some seven or eight thousand years: for the poor Germans, at least the ruling branch of them, have barely as many hundred. Even Russia was Christianized four centuries before Prussia.
Now it is a rare parvenu who is not conceited. Germany has camouflaged the old idea of conquest by that of spreading her Kultur to the inferior portion of mankind—to the peoples that produced Homer, Dante, Shakespear, Newton, Darwin and Spencer—as if those peoples were savages whose territory could be brought under civilization only by conquest, and as if Germany alone had civilization. And this absurd idea she backs up by a crude conception of the Law of Evolution—a conception that stops with the competition of brute forces. Coöperation, mutual help, emulation in well doing do not enter into her idea of evolution. She has thrown away her splendid success in the higher competition, and reverted to the competition of brute force,—camouflaged again by science and cunning.
When a conceited parvenu goes mad, his conceit is as mad as the rest of him. When he is at the same time bellicose and bloodthirsty, he will not stop fighting as long as the conceit is in his system, and the only way to get it out is to whip it out.
It looks as if in Germany’s case we had seriously underestimated one important feature of that job. For a long time we thought that we had got to beat only the military class—that they had merely fooled the kindly and modest Germans we used to know. As lately as this Spring, a British general told the present writer that his people did not expect the war to be ended by a military victory—that without an overwhelming superiority on either side, modern warfare has at last reached the degree of perfection long ago attained by the Kilkenny cats (only the general did not put it in that way), and that before, so to speak, the tails get through fighting, the kindly and modest German people would take matters into their own hands and stop the war, give up the plunder they have got from their weaker neighbors (for after all, barring their sudden occupation of a little of France, they have with all their boasting whipped only little or undeveloped peoples), and pay damages—as far as they can be paid. But it has come to look mightily as if the general and his people were mistaken—as if the kindly and modest German no longer exists, as if the madness has seized the whole nation, and as if there will be no way out before we give one side the overwhelming superiority which was the general’s alternative. Plainly we can’t be too quick about it.
Before the conceit is whipped out of the Germans, they are not going to submit to any peace short of holding on to their plunder, and as long as they have enough of that to be visible, they are victors, and with all their conceit in them. It would drive them into another war as soon as they could get ready, and even meanwhile the conditions would be intolerable—intolerable not only for the small peoples they have conquered, but for the rest of us.
But things are very respectably intolerable as they are. We have barely entered the war, and yet you are exceptionally fortunate if your income has not been pinched, your affairs generally disturbed, heavy anxieties thrown upon you, and perhaps, even thus early, mourning. Possibly you have found a grim consolation in realizing that most of the time since the beginning of human records, our present lot has been the lot of the greater portion of mankind. Perhaps you have found a consolation less grim in realizing that this state of affairs has been diminishing—very notably diminishing during the century preceding this war; and it is to be hoped that you have found a consolation almost triumphant in the realization that a large portion of the world at last realizes that such conditions can be put an end to, and are grimly determined to do it. But unless it is done thoroughly, unless the Kaiser and his gang are as safely disposed of as Napoleon and his gang were after Waterloo, these conditions are going to recur indefinitely.