Impressive as Nippold’s list seems at first, and dangerous to the peace of the world, after all one’s final thought is this: How few they are, and how scant their influence, as compared with the wise, sane, commonsense of sixty millions of German people. The two great papers that [pg 203]stand for peace and sanity, the Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter Zeitung, with the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, are read daily by more Germans than all the reactionary sheets combined. The Socialist organ Vorwaerts, avowedly opposed to monarchy as well as to militarism, carries farther than all the organs of Pangermanism of whatever kind.
We may justly conclude that the war spirit is not the spirit of Germany, a nation perforce military because the people cannot help themselves. So far as it goes, it is the spirit of a narrow clique of “sleepless watchdogs” whose influence is waning, and would be non-existent were it not for the military organization which holds Germany by the throat, but which has pushed the German people just as far as it dares.
A second lesson is that while forms of government, and social traditions, may differ, the relation of public opinion towards war is practically the same in all the countries of Western Europe. It is in its way the test of European civilization. Each nation has its “sleepless watchdogs,” and those of one nation fire the others, when the proper war scares are set in motion by the great unscrupulous group of those who profit by them. The war promoters, the apostles of hate, form a brotherhood among themselves, and their success in frightening one nation reacts to make it easier to scare another.
This the reader may remember, as a final lesson. There is no civilized nation which longs for war. There is nowhere a reckless populace clamoring for blood. The schools have done away with all that. The spread of commerce has brought a new Earth with new sympathies and new relations, in which international war has no place.
If you are sure that your own nation has no design to use violence on any other, you may be equally sure that no other has evil designs on you. The German fleet is not built as a menace to England; whether it be large or small should concern England very little. Just as little does the [pg 204]size of the British fleet bear any concern to Germany. The German fleet is built against the German people. The growth of the British army and navy has in part the same motive. Armies and navies hold back the waves of populism and democracy. They seem a bulwark against Socialism. But in the great manufacturing and commercial nations, they will not be used for war, because they cannot be. The sacrifice appalls: the wreck of society would be beyond computation.
But still the sleepless watchdogs bark. It is all that they can do, and we should get used to them. In our own country, whatever country it may be, we have our own share of them, and some of them bear distinguished names. No other nation has any more, and no nation takes them really seriously, any more than we do. And one and all, their bark is worse than their bite, and the cost of feeding them is doubtless worse than either.